The Fifth Head of Cerberus

by Gene Wolfe

  “Wait a moment,” I said. “I don’t even know this young lady.”

  “But you are not married?”

  “No.”

  “So your dossier informed me. In cases where the prisoner is unmarried it is the rule to give the card to the closest resident single woman of suitable age. It is, you will understand, based upon statistical probabities. The young woman may transfer the card to whomever you wish, who may then use it in her name. That will be something for you to discuss—” (he paused a moment in thought) “—ten days from now. Not now. Write down her name.”

  I was forced to ask Mlle Etienne’s first name, which proved to be Celestine.

  “Give her the card,” the man in black said.

  I did so, and he laid one hand heavily on my shoulder and said, “I hereby place you under arrest.”

  * * *

  I have been moved. I continue this record of my thoughts—if that is what it may be said to be—in a new cell. I am no longer my old self, one forty-three, but some new, unknown 143; this because that old number was chalked upon the door of this new cell. The transition must seem very abrupt to you, reading this; but I was not actually interrupted in the task of writing, as it must seem. The truth is that I grew tired of detailing my arrest. I scratched. I slept. I ate some bread and soup the warder brought me and found a small bone—the rib bone, I suspect, of a goat—in my soup and with this held long conversations with my neighbor upstairs, forty-seven. I listened to the madman on my left until it almost seemed to me that among his idiot scratching and scrapings I could discern my own name.

  Then there was a rattling of keys at the door of my cell, and I thought that perhaps Mlle Etienne was to be permitted to see me after all. I tried insofar as I could to make myself clean, smoothing my hair and beard with my fingers. Alas, it was only the guard, and with him a powerfully built man wearing a black hood which concealed his face. Naturally I thought I was going to be killed, and though I tried to be courageous—and really felt that I was not especially fearful—I found that my knees had become so weak that I could only stand with great difficulty. I thought of escape (as I always do when they take me to be questioned; it’s the only chance, because there’s no escaping from these cells), but there was only the narrow corridor to run in, as always, without windows and with a guard posted at every stair. The hooded man took my arm and, without speaking, led me through passageways and up and down steps until I was completely confused; we must have walked for hours. I saw any number of miserable dirty faces like my own staring at me through the tiny glassed Judas windows in the doors of the cells. Several times we passed through courtyards, and I thought I was to be shot in each; it was about noon, and the bright sunlight made me blink and my eyes water. Then in a corridor much like all the others we halted before a door marked 143, and the hooded man raised a concrete slab from the center of the floor, showing me a narrow hole from which a steep iron stair descended. I went down and he followed me; the distance must have been fifty meters or more, and at the bottom it was only with a flashlight that we were able to grope our way down a corridor stinking of stale urine, until we reached the door of this cell into which a push from him sent me sprawling.

  At the time I was happy enough to sprawl, for I thought, as I have said, that I was about to be executed. I still do not know that it is not true; the man was certainly dressed as an executioner though that may have been merely to frighten me, and perhaps he has other duties.

  The officer groped among the materials on his desk for the next page, but before he could locate it the brother officer entered the room a second time. “Hello,” the officer said, “I thought you were turning in.”

  “I was,” said the brother officer. “I have; I did. I slept for a while, then woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. It’s the heat.”

  The officer shrugged.

  “How are you coming with your case?”

  “Still trying to catalogue the facts.”

  “Didn’t they send a summary? They’re supposed to.”

  “Probably, but I haven’t found it in this mess yet. There’s a letter, and a fuller summary may be on one of these tapes.”

  “What’s this?” The brother officer had picked up the canvas-bound notebook.

  “A notebook.”

  “The accused’s?”

  “I think so.”

  The brother officer raised his eyebrows. “You don’t know?”

  “I’m not sure. Sometimes I think that notebook…”

  The brother officer waited for him to continue, but he did not. After a moment the brother officer said, “ Well, I see you’re busy. Think I’ll wake up the surgeon and see if he won’t give me something that will let me sleep.”

  “Try a bottle,” the officer said as the brother officer went out. When he had gone he picked up the canvas-bound notebook again and opened it at random.

  “No, he is a man like you and me. He is married to a poor wretched woman one hardly ever sees, and they have a son of fifteen or so.”

  Self: “But he claims to be Annese?”

  M. d’F: “He is a fraud, you understand. Much of what he says of the abos is from his own head—oh, he will tell you wonderful tales, Monsieur.”

  (End of Interview)

  Dr Hagsmith had also mentioned this beggar, and I have decided to find him. Even though his claim to be Annese is false—as I have no doubt it is—he may have picked up some real information in the course of his impersonations. Besides, the idea of finding even a counterfeit Annese appeals to me.

  * * *

  March 21. I have had a talk with the beggar, who calls himself Twelvewalker and claims to be a direct descendant of the last Annese shaman, and thus rightfully a king—or whatever distinction he may happen to covet at the moment. In my opinion his actual descent is Irish, very probably through one of those Irish adventurers who left their island for France at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. At any rate, his culture seems clearly French, his face certainly Irish—the red hair, blue eyes, and long upper lip are unmistakable.

  Apparently even counterfeit Annese are elusive, and turning him up was more of a problem than I had anticipated; everyone seemed to know him and told me I could rind him in such and such a tavern, but no one seemed to know where he lived—and, naturally, he was not to be found in any of the taverns where he “always” was. When I discovered his hut at last (I cannot call it a house), I realized that I had passed it several times without realizing it was a human dwelling.

  Frenchman’s Landing, as perhaps I should mention here, is built on the banks of the Tempus about ten miles upstream of the sea itself. The waterfront is thus the muddy shore of the river, looking across the yellowish, salt-tinged flood toward a huddle of even less presentable buildings—La Fange—on the bank opposite. Sainte Anne’s twin world of Sainte Croix creates fifteen-foot tides all over the planet, and these affect the river far upstream of Frenchman’s Landing. At high tide the water is completely undrmkable and marine fish—so I am told—may be caught from the ends of the docks. Then the decking of these docks is only a few feet above the water, the air is fresh and pure, and the meadowmeres surrounding the somewhat higher ground on which the town stands have the appearance of an endless lacework of clear pools fringed with the brilliant green salt rushes. But in a few hours the tide is gone, and all vitality seems drained from the river and the country around it. The docks stand twelve-feet high on stilts of rotting timbers; the river shows a thousand islands of muck, and the meadowmeres are desolate salt flats of stinking mud over which, at night, wisps of luminous gas hover like the ghosts of the dead Annese.

  The waterfront itself is not too different, I suppose, from the waterfront of a similar rivertown on Earth, except perhaps for the absence of the robot cranes one expects to see and the use of native building materials in place of Earth’s all-pervasive compressed waste walls. Twelve years ago, I understand, old-fashioned thermonuclear ships were commonplace at the piers here, but now that the
planet has been ringed with an adequate network of weather satellites, safe, modern sailing vessels are in use here as on Earth.

  The beggar’s hut, when I located it at last, was an old boat turned upside down and propped above the ground with every sort of rubbish. Still doubting that anyone could actually live there, I rapped on the hull with the handle of my pocketknife, and a dark-haired boy of fifteen or sixteen thrust his head out almost at once. When he saw me he ducked under the edge of the boat, but then, instead of standing, remained on his knees with both hands outstretched and began a sort of beggar’s whine in which I could make out only occasional words. I assumed that he was mentally retarded, and it seemed possible that he could not even walk, since when I stepped away from him he followed me, still on his knees, with a sort of agile shuffle that seemed to imply that this was his normal gait. After half a minute of this I gave him a few coins in the hope of quieting him enough to ask him some questions, but the coins were no sooner out of my hand than the head of an older man, the red-haired beggar, as it turned out, appeared from under the boat (from where, I feel sure, he had been observing his son’s technique).

  “Bless you, Monsieur!” he said. “I am not, you comprehend, a Christian, but may your generosity to my poor boy be blessed by Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, or in the eventuality that you are Protestant, Monsieur, by Jesus only and by God the Father and the Holy Ghost. As my own ten-times decimated people would say, may the Mountains bless you and the River and the Trees and the Oceansea and all the stars of Heaven and the gods. I speak as their religious leader.”

  I thanked him, and for some reason I cannot quite explain, gave him one of my cards, which he accepted with such a flourish that I felt for a moment that he had accepted with it the duty to second me in a duel or assist me in my love affairs. After glancing at it he exclaimed, “Ah, you are a doctor! Look, Victor, our visitor is a doctor of philosophy!” and held the card for an instant in front of the boy’s eyes, which were as large and sea green as his own were tiny and blue.

  “Doctor, Doctor Marsch, I am not an educated man—you see that—but I yield to none in my respect for education, for scholarship. My house,” he waved toward the inverted boat as though it had been a palace and a quarter-mile distant, “is yours! My son and I are entirely at your service for the remainder of the day—or the remainder of the month, should you wish it. And should you be disposed to tender some small emolument for our services, let me assure you in advance of any possible embarrassment that we do not expect from the temple of learning the golden munificence of commerce triumphant; and we are well aware of that blessed natural law by which the townsman’s gilt buys more—more, haven’t I said, (giving the boy a push)”—than the merchant’s gold. How may we serve you?”

  I explained that I understood that he sometimes guided visitors to locations nearby that were supposed to have been important to the prediscovery Annese, and he immediately invited me into his home.

  There were no chairs under the inverted boat, there being insufficient headroom for them; but old flotation cushions and folded squares of sailcloth served for seats, and they had a tiny table (such as might have served a poor Japanese family) whose top was hardly more than a double-hand’s width above the tarpaulin that covered the ground. The older man lit a lamp—a mere wick floating in a shallow dish of oil—and ceremoniously poured me a small glass of what proved to be hundred-proof rum. When I had accepted it he said: “You wish to see the sacred places of my fathers, the lords of this planet! I can show them to you, Doctor—indeed no one but I can show them to you properly or explain their significations and enter you yourself into the very spirit of that departed age! But it is already too late today, Doctor; the tide is already past the flood. If you could come tomorrow, in the middle of the morning—not too late—then we will skim across the meadowmeres as cheerfully as a gondola. With no effort at all on your part, Doctor, for my son and I will paddle and pole you wherever you may wish to go and show you everything worth seeing. You may take photographs—or do whatever you please—my son and I will be glad to pose.”

  I asked him what the cost would be, and he named a sum which seemed reasonable enough, adding quickly, “Remember, Doctor, you will be receiving the labor of two men for five hours—and the use of our boat. For a unique experience!—no one but myself can properly show you what you wish to see.” I agreed to the price, and he said: “There is one other thing—the lunch. We must have food for three. If you wish to leave funds with me, I will procure it.” I frowned at him, and he added at once, “Or you may bring it yourself—but remember, it is to be a lunch for three. Perhaps a bottle of wine and a bird.

  “But now, Doctor, I have some very choice things to show you. Wait a moment.” He reached into a packing box which lay beside his seat and took out a tin tray, with its surface covered with red flock. On it were two dozen or so projectile points chipped and ground from every sort of stone, and several which I am fairly sure had been made from common colored glass, probably from pieces of broken whisky bottles. They were new, as was shown by their razor-sharp edges (genuinely old flint or volcanic glass implements have always lost their keenness by friction with soil grit); and from their fantastic shapes—extremely broad, doubly or triply barbed—as well as their general crudeness, it seemed certain they had been made for display rather than use.

  “Weapons of the abos, Doctor,” the beggar said. “My son and I go looking for them when there’s no one will hire us and our boat. Irreplaceable, and genuine souvenirs of the Frenchman’s Landing country, where as you know the abos was found more thickly than anywhere else on this world, as it was my forefathers’ sacred place like Rome or Boston would be to you, and a paradise of fish and animals and all sorts of things to eat, which you will hear me tell about tomorrow when we go out upon the meadowmeres, and if we have luck, the boy will even demonstrate the catching of fish or animals in the abo manner, without even using such delicate and now valuable implements as these I offer for sale to you here.”

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