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

all the details worked out yet,’ Gordius agreed eagerly. ‘But I’m on the right lines – aren’t I?’
    ‘Did you consider,’ suggested Jac, gently, ‘that I’m making the glass just to keep myself busy, to use up some of the four thousand days we’re stuck
here?’
    ‘Oh it’s more than a pastime,’ said Gordius, with a certainty born, Jac knew, of desperation. ‘It’s part of your plan. Are you a pirate? Do you have a
crew?’
    ‘No,’ said Jac, a little sadly. ‘And no. I’m alone.’
    This took a little of the wind from Gordius’s metaphorical sails. But he still said: ‘remember your promise. You’re going to take me with you.’
    ‘Rest assured, Gordius,’ said Jac. ‘I won’t be leaving you behind.’
    He was inside a box: the box was made of stone, and it was passing around the sun at a distance of many hundreds of millions of miles. Its path was a perverted circle. He was
inside the box, with no possibility of help, with men who would kill him soon enough – out of sheer boredom if nothing else.
    And as the digging part of their waking hours became more habitual, boredom became an increasing problem. ‘Almost,’ E-d-C said, one day, ‘I preferred the first few days of our
time here. Almost.’
    ‘Are you crazy?’ said Davide, working his way through his beard, pulling each strand of hair straight, one by one. After he had finished this he would go back through, braiding
strands together, and then platting the braids. ‘Don’t you remember how cold it was? I hope I never experience that level of cold again, long as I live.’
    ‘That’s true, Mr Arrested-by-the-famous-Bar-le-duc. But we were at least busy ,’ said E-d-C. ‘We were occupied. It was cold, sure. But I hardly noticed it –
because I was so busy just keeping alive.’
    ‘I’d rather be warm and bored,’ said Davide, ‘than busy and . . . and so cold .’
    It had grown noticeably warmer inside Lamy306. Not yet body temperature, of course; and the main space was notable chillier than the three new rooms occupied by the alphas. But even the main
chamber was much less severely frozen than before. Of course Gordius, naked from the waist up, complained continually that he was cold. And, truly, he shivered like a man with Parkinson’s
disease. From time to time, Marit would bellow ‘you’re cold ? I’ll soon warm you up, god-boy!’ and he’d launch himself at Gordius, slapping and hitting. When
this occurred, as it did frequently, the victim would shriek and curl himself, as best he could, into a ball. Usually Marit quickly grew bored, and floated away.
    Boredom was not a problem for Jac. He watched, and watched. He was inside the box. He was the box. What was inside him ? He knew, of course, and you know too. But even the little
voice of self-doubt has its moment of catastrophic certainty.
    He couldn’t get out of the box, that was a certainty. How could he get out of the box? Putting it like that constituted a practical reframing of the situation, but that only snapped open
all the possible trajectories of the future. If he got out of the box – the conditional mode. But the idiom of the conditional is possibility and possibility is just another name for
uncertainty, and there it was: doubt. His one point of certainty, his dubiety. The material out of which his personal box was built.
    ‘You really think they are coming back?’ asked Mo, one day. It happened to be a time when all three alphas were digging. The other four were floating idly in the main space
together.
    ‘Sure,’ said Jac. ‘Eleven years? It’s not so long. In the larger scheme of things.’
    ‘Why should they bother, though?’
    ‘Because,’ said Marit, evidently irritated by this question, ‘they need to recover their investment. That’s all this is, you understand? It’s not punishment.
They’re certainly not interested in rehabilitating us. Everything in space is expensive. Everyone’s margins are filament-thin.