Jack Glass by Adam Roberts

Author:Adam Roberts [Roberts, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9780575127654
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published: 2012-07-25T23:00:00+00:00

10

Gravity or Guilt?

Diana was anxious to go; but she accepted that she had to wait until her sister was well away. So she went outside and sat in a recliner on the main lawn, whilst Berthezene took up a discrete position twenty metres away, with his gun out. She felt impatient, but she didn’t feel afraid. Had being under constant guard blunted her capacity for feeling fear? She regarded the future blithely enough, certainly.

She saw Eva’s plane zip away, skimming low over the tops of the olive trees with a muffled whiffling sound, leaving the orchard threshing behind it in its turbulence.

Gone.

It was late in the afternoon. Iago brought Diana a glass of iced water and a selection of fruit pieces. ‘I saw Eva go.’

‘Your parents do not want both of you in the air at the same time. It’s only a precaution. When Miss Eva is on the ground at Tobruk and we have confirmation that the plasmaser car is ready, we will leave.’

‘How long?’ she asked.

‘Not long,’ he replied. ‘Twenty minutes.’

‘Can we be sure who has betrayed us?’

‘We cannot be sure,’ he said.

She sipped the water, and ate a piece of apple. Its texture was firmly spongy, wet, flavoursome. She had another piece. ‘I know you think it was me,’ she said, shortly, not looking him in the face. ‘Contacting Anna, I mean. I know you think that’s what has . . . brought this about. But you ought at least to entertain the possibility that somebody else is responsible. Quite apart from the servants we brought down here with us, there must be thirty people on this island who know we are here. Any of them could have betrayed us.’

‘They are all dosed heavily with CRF. This makes them rather dopey, robs them of initiative, makes them rather emotional, all of which isn’t ideal in terms of actually – you know: running the place. But it means they could never consciously betray you.’

‘Unconsciously, perhaps? By accident?’

‘We have the place locked down, as far as all forms of communication go. Nobody could accidentally betray the location. It would have had to be done deliberately.’

She thought about this for a while, and ate a particularly sweet piece of pear. How beautiful that taste! The piece was the colour, and shape and (for all she knew) the true flavour of the moon. She stared westward, over the sea. Clouds were starting to gather near the western horizon as the effortfully reddening sun bogged further and further down in the sky.

‘What about those two policepersons? The ones who came in, after Leron was found murdered? Of course we had to follow the letter of the Ulanov law, and of course we could not deny access to properly constituted policeperson authority. But they weren’t handservants, were they? They could easily have got a message to the others.’

Iago shook his head. ‘They are also both dosed on CRF, perfectly loyal to the Clan.’

‘Really?’ Thinking back, they had seemed rather slow, initiativeless individuals. CRF would explain that.

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