Free Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer by Adam Roberts Page A

to death!’ he wailed. ‘I mean it – I’ll die of the cold!’
    ‘All that seal fat?’ said Marit, pinning the tunic to the wall near the lightpole with stone chips. ‘You’d be warmer naked than any of us fully clothed.’
    ‘You’re god, ain’t you?’ said Mo. ‘Miracle up some heat for yourself.’
    Mo and Davide helped Marit rub beads and pearls of water over the fabric, and then they applied some of the black spores. When they were finished, Marit looked well satisfied with what he had
done.
    More digging. E-d-C found a prize, buried in the core of the rock: a piece of metal. It was black as space, and palpably denser than the rock around it. ‘Meteorite
iron,’ said E-d-C proudly. ‘Actual metal! All that anxious talk about how we were going to smelt metal – there’s no need! Here’s an actual piece of the early solar
system, embedded in this stroid!’
    ‘We still need to think of a way of working it,’ said Lwon. ‘It’s harder than the rock.’
    So they all gave up tunnel-digging for a while, and instead clustered around, proposing various strategies for working the iron. Davide tried grinding it with the business end of a drill, in the
hope that friction might heat it and make it malleable; but it only shattered the lump into two. Everybody screeched, as if the chunk were a complex machine that had been broken irreparably. Then,
at Mo’s suggestion, they tied it to the fusion cell’s heated plate. It warmed, a little, but become no more workable. Then they started a lengthy debate about whether it could be beaten
into malleability. Davide’s idea was: put it to the wall, and use the scrubber as a blacksmith’s hammer; but everybody else thought this a terrible idea. ‘If we damage the
scrubber we will all die in hours,’ Lwon said. There were similar objections to using the fusion cell. They took turns with the densest chunk of rock they could find, smashing first one then
the other piece against the wall; but it made no difference whatsoever to the material.
    Still, the iron was a prize. E-d-C took the larger of the two pieces, and Lwon took the other.
    Another day, when Mo, Marit and Lwon were on the diggers, and E-d-C and Davide sleeping, Gordius shuffled over to Jac. ‘I was thinking about what your plan might be,’ he whispered,
excitedly. As Jac started to say something he added, ‘I know! I know! But I won’t tell them . I know it has something to do with the window you’re making.’ He pointed
at the spot under Jac’s own tunic where he had the piece of glass tucked. ‘I think I have it figured. You make your glass transparent , and fit it in the side of the stroid. I
thought: it can’t be that; it won’t be big enough to look out of. But then I thought: ok, logically then, you’re not doing it in order to see outside. So I thought about
it, and I figured it out.’ Gordius chafed his own arms, and rubbed his palms over his ample, loose-skinned front, to warm himself a little. ‘See, I thought: if it’s not for you to
see out, it must be for others to see in . Am I right? I don’t mean, putting their eyes to the keyhole, of course. But I mean . . . I mean, if I were piloting a spaceship, checking
stroids for my compadre Jac the Legless. I know he’s inside one of them, but there are tens of millions of steroids! How can I know which one Jac is in ? Well – maybe the one with
a little light shining out of it?’
    The grin on his face made Jac’s heart wince with pity.
    ‘Doesn’t sound entirely plausible to me, Gordius,’ he replied, as gently as he could. ‘You’d have to be pretty close to exactly the right stroid even to see a light so feeble as our lightpole shining through a piece of glass no bigger than a hand. And there are plenty of random lights on inhabited stroids, some of them no bigger than this one. Also
– how am I supposed to fit a window to this place without decompressing all our air into space?’
    ‘Oh I haven’t got