by Adam Roberts
She sat back on her heels, and her shirt dropped to conceal her flesh again. She looked around, fresh-faced and beaming. ‘Shall I lead the prayers?’ she asked.
We prayed, but all the time that I grated out those words in my electronic voice, my thoughts were very far from pure. I was thinking of the glimpse of Siuzan’s skin. Eventually I fell asleep, but in the night a revolting thing happened, almost too revolting to repeat in this narrative except that I have promised myself to be wholly truthful and spare none of the degradations that I have brought on myself. What happened was this: there was emission of fluid from my male organ, and I awoke to discover this seminal phlegm cold and crusted to my belly and thigh. I apologise for reporting this, but I have vowed that this account be as truthful as possible and omit nothing, though it shames me, all of it, shames me.
That morning we walked through Lacon, along the main street. We passed shops and factories, and eventually came into the northern suburbs. Within the hour we were in the scrublands again.
There was one more notable thing I remember from this town. In a farm on the outskirts of it I saw a headless horse. It stood like an unfinished statue in a straw-yellow field under the massive blue bar of the sky and the perfect circle of the sun. Why would its master have decapitated it? It was impossible to say. As we came closer we could see the pommel-like protuberance of its ordinator, just to the front of that place where a saddle would be placed were the horse ever to be ridden. Its neck resembled a fat tentacle stretching out at nothing. I could not see whether it had been fitted with any sensory devices. What sort of consciousness had been downloaded into that metal block on its back? Perhaps its master had loved the horse and had responded to some fatal sickness or head injury in this manner. Perhaps it had been an act of kindness. Or perhaps merely an experiment - the first human ordinators had been tested on animals after all, although that had been a century before. Surely nobody needed repeat the experiment. But perhaps this was a new design of ordinator being developed. Perhaps - and I could not help thinking this - perhaps the horse had killed somebody, or pressed its amorous desires upon some neighbour’s mare, and a religiously over-literal farmer had punished him in this manner. Such an explanation seemed bizarre, but it was at least possible. The horse did not move as we walked by its field. Further along the road I looked back, and it was still there, motionless.
We walked all day, pausing only to drink water as we needed it, and stopping once to eat. Siuzan had bought a pack of breads and vat-meats, and we ate this. ‘Chère Siuzan,’ Mark Pol chattered. ‘There is no need to be so generous! Pap will suffice us. We cannot taste the malt in this bread, the savour in these meats.’
‘But there are also your stomachs to consider,’ she said cheerily. ‘Is it good to place in them nothing but pap? Surely variety, and good food, will keep you stronger.’
She said a short prayer, and passed round a little wine. This we did not refuse.
‘We cannot taste your wine, my lady,’ said Mark Pol. ‘I regret.’
‘And yet wine is a holy drink, whether you can taste it or not. I beg you: think of the All’God when you drink, of his blood and spirit.’
I angled my torso forward, and tried to think of this. But instead my thoughts were distracted by the shapes made by Siuzan’s face; the smoothness of her skin; the curves and planes of her cheeks. Her brow. Her nose and lips. The dance of her features when she laughed, harmonious and delightful.
That night we slept in the desert, with nothing but foilweave blankets to keep us warm. Siuzan wrapped a stone in her coat to make a pillow. ‘We have no need for such ingenuity!’ declared Mark Pol. ‘Not us. Lacking a head has advantages as well as disadvantages, I think. No need of pillows! No expensive hats! No costly sunglasses!’
‘Be quiet,’ I hissed. ‘Go to sleep. Or if you do not, then at least let us go to sleep.’
‘I shall be silent as the night sky,’ he promised. But even when he was himself asleep he muttered and chattered to himself, scraps and orts of words, symptoms of a restless soul.
I woke, pinched by cold, in the nothing hours. My blanket had slid from my legs and they were cramping in the frost, but even after replacing the covering and feeling the flesh warm, I could not sleep. I lay looking at the stars, at their broadcast scatter of bleaching dots, distinct and isolated, or flowing into one another where the galaxy’s arm reaches round in its spectral embrace of us. My vision software gave the stars a precision that was quite unlike my former vision, as if each focus of light were defined and picked out exactly. This made the larger spread of dark purple almost prickly with brightness. For long minutes my thoughts were wholly occupied by the immensity of this dappled blackness. I fancied myself looking into the pupil of the eye of the Creator. I imagined my sight falling through impossible depths, almost to the point where I quite forgot myself, hovering on the edge of that place where there is no self at all.
Siuzan Delage called out. She was still asleep, and the word she uttered was simply the fin of some great fish breaking the water’s surface only for a moment before sinking to the depths of her unconscious once more. But the sound of her voice sent a smack and a recoil through my nerves. The universe fled away, to an impossible infinite distance. The only thing of which I was aware was her: her proximity. Her flesh. I desired her with a completeness for which the very word desire seems inadequate. I lay and I trembled like a fever victim. My male organ was hard as metal, as planed and carved wood, and was striving to become even harder.
This is the basic question of our lives. Why must the spiritual be tethered to the gross with this rope? Is it a second and brute consciousness that fights with the wisdom of the head? It has rightly been said that the male organ is a serpent, a rat nosing out of a bed of hair. How much better the judges of Doué had severed that part of my body and left me with my head! I urged it down, I tried to focus my will on subduing it. That my lust was provoked by so pure and perfect a woman seemed to me doubly shameful, and almost impossible hideousness of my own soul.
She had given me no cause for my repulsive reaction. She had neither flirted with me, nor acted in any way inappropriate. And yet the urge was almost overwhelming in me to touch her - hold her, to cover her with my body.
I wrestled against this urge with all my force. Even though I lay motionless I struggled more fiercely than any athlete. Eventually, after an indeterminate length of time, I fell asleep again. I was worn out by my motionless struggle.
That sky, so darkly purple! Those stars, each so distinctly defined by its dimensionless intensity of light, and yet spread with such profusion over the sky they might have been grains of bright pollen!
I often think of that night.
When I awoke it was bright sky above me, although the chill had not yet left the ground. The others were up, and the headless body of Mark Pol Treherne was shaking me. The motion of his arm made his shoulder-mounted stalk eyes wobble slightly. ‘Up!’ he said. ‘Up sieur poet, for the day-sky has his head on again - you can see it resting its chin on the eastern horizon. Though I fear the day-sky has committed some crime, for the horizon is a blade that will sever it, mark my words, and set that head rolling into the bowl of day.’
I was too tired even to tell him to hold his tongue at all this foolishness.
We walked all day, and even Mark Pol’s incessant chatter dried in the migraine heat. Siuzan Delage seemed distracted, and stopped often to sip from her water bottle, or to replenish her sunblock. Of course we, lacking heads and otherwise clothed, needed none of this.
We stopped for lunch, and were refreshed with food and water, but the conversation between us was not refreshed. Mark Pol tried a few hopeless sallies, but soon gave up. After a brief rest we set off again, walking in a line.
The unrelenting boredom of it, the lack of sensory stimulation, played tricks with the sense of time. It was tedious, and uncomfortable, almost to the point of ascetic meditation. After a while the motion of the sun though the sky became disc
ernible, a relentless pressure of movement as the source of heat and light pivoted about the world. Eventually the horizon swallowed this bolus up and it was dark again. Gymnaste hastened over to me and laid a hand on my upper arm, and the spell was broken - for I would have trudged on mindlessly into the night if not stopped. I ate in silence, drank in silence, wrapped myself about and fell asleep almost at once. Rarely in my life have I been so tired.
I did not wake that night.
I had an insight, as I gathered myself in that morning, of the way lengthily prolonged and monotonous action - walking, working - redefines a person. If the wilderness had stretched on for weeks, I would have fallen without thought or regret into that blank routine. I would have walked, and stopped to eat; I would have walked on, and stopped to sleep. And with the new dawn I would have done it again. This might have gone on indefinitely.
But we did not have weeks of walking ahead of us. ‘We should reach Cainon today,’ croaked Siuzan Delage, in a voice unused to speaking. Her face looked almost sorrowful, as if over-weary. I even wondered if she was sorry that her trek was soon to end. Perhaps, I reasoned, she had achieved some spiritual state in the labour of it, something like physical prayer.
We kicked a shallow bowl out of the dust of the ground, and turned our backs (Mark Pol covered his eye stalks with his hands) whilst Siuzan Delage voided her bladder, only turning back when the sound of scuffing made it clear that she had filled in this makeshift latrine. She then walked on ahead as we performed similar functions, and we afterwards jogged to catch her up. Her manner towards us seemed to have changed. There was a hauteur in it, some disinclination to be part of our company.
As in the previous day we fell into a silent rhythm. The mountains ahead were imperceptibly taller. The whole range seemed to float on a scintillating mist of mirage, which made them more like angular clouds of white and tan and purple. They did not look real.
Five
We come to the most painful portion of my narrative. It is here that the need for an absolute truthfulness becomes most pressing, although the events I must relate are of a sort naturally revolting to civilised sensibilities. But I shall not flinch. I ask you to be similarly braced.
We approached Cainon. The first symptom of the city was industrial: a series of circular concrete mushrooms, large as ocean liners, marking the heads of groundsinks. It took us more than an hour to walk past these giant objects, looking over at them frequently, for after the days of monotonous landscape it was in some way marvellous to see anything new. Beyond them were several power substations, each with its roof-set loom of electrical cable. Finally we moved into a manufacturing zone, where such factories as could be staffed with robots were located, humming, and nobody went to or came from them. Enough moisture dripped from these places into the parched earth, by design or accident, that banks of blue and black thistles grew, crowding into heaps and piles and burst mattresses of shards, spikes, thorns.
Finally we were close enough to the city to see human habitation. On one wide building, perhaps a barracks, a large flag flowed constantly towards the west, its zigzag design impatient with the undulations of the cloth. It made an unmistakable clapping noise against its pole.
‘Like a tablecloth being shaken to lose its crumbs,’ said Mark Pol. ‘How I love to see a flag in a stiff breeze! How it cheers the heart inside me! I feel the urge to salute.’ Reaching the town, evidently, had lifted his spirits.
Siuzan flinched at his words, or perhaps merely at the sound of his voice after the long silence. She seemed cowed, almost fearful, but of what I did not know.
Beyond this building we came to a suburb of the city proper. The central towers and domes were visible straight ahead. Now we were walking on pavement, and the road itself was busy with cars, driverless and driven. We were passing open restaurants, serving late lunches to the accompaniment of northern music, the trickling of a melody over a constant and erratic mesh of drumbeats. It is a style that has always sounded to me like somebody playing a flute beside a malfunctioning machine. People were coming and going. Some people looked blankly at us, or scowled with distrust and dislike. Others pointedly avoided looking at us at all.
This day I had my first taste of one of the various hormonal imbalances that tend to afflict the headless. With enough money it is possible to keep the necessary pharmocopies always to hand, and to dose oneself with whichever of the cranially-produced hormones are required. We had all of us purchased purses of the proper range of pharmocopies in Doué, yet in foolishness I had purchased too much of one sort and not enough of another. The loss of the head involves the loss of both the pineal and the pituitary glands. From the former the body receives its melatonin, which amongst other things regulates circadian rhythms. The latter produces many hormones. The headless also lose the hypothalamus. Without replacement pharmocopies, we would suffer a variety of debilitating and ultimately fatal illnesses, including Insipid Diabetes, a form of the disease which is, despite its name, far from insipid - for it entails fatigue; hypersensitivity to cold; weight gain; dry skin and a shrivelling of the sex organs which results in infertility. It is, fortunately for the many headless on our world, a simple matter to replace the missing hormones by swallowing a purse of medication.
I had done this before beginning the walk, but now I was beginning to feel unsteady. I felt the need to urinate frequently, and I was thirsty and sensitive to cold. ‘I fear,’ I said, ‘that my pharmocopy pouch has malfunctioned. I feel increasingly unwell.’
‘What do you suggest we do?’ asked Mark Pol. ‘Are you asking for our sympathy? You should have ensured you swallowed an appropriate dose before beginning this trek.’
‘I must purchase a replacement,’ I said. ‘Let us find a chemist.’
‘Can’t it wait?’
‘It is imperative,’ I snapped.
‘But can you spare the money?’ said Mark Pol, in a more insinuating tone of voice.
‘It is a necessity and not a luxury,’ I replied angrily.
‘Come along,’ said Siuzan, peacemaker as ever. ‘We shall find a chemist.’ And yet she spoke in a voice that was weary, and she avoided looking at us.
We walked the streets until we found a large chemist’s shop. The others waited outside whilst I stepped up to the door, shivering slightly. Inside was a long room with many shelves, and a bar at the back behind which stood the chemist. But as I walked towards him he demonstrated the symptoms of dismay. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘We do not serve your sort - go away.’
‘I beg your pardon,’ I said, ‘but I am in great need of . . .’
‘Go away!’
‘Please . . . I am ill, and I need medication for . . .’
‘We do not serve your sort!’ His voice was raised. I flinched, but I was propelled onward by physical necessity. ‘If you do not stock it,’ I said, ‘then it should be a simple matter to concoct the ...’
He lifted a small datablock. ‘Shall I contact the police? Will you leave? We serve only the headed.’
I left the shop.
Outside the others were impatient with me. ‘Let us get on,’ said Mark Pol.
‘I was unable to purchase any pharmocopy.’
‘Did they not stock it?’
‘They refused to serve me.’
‘On what grounds?’ asked Gymnaste.
‘On grounds of distrust and dislike of the headless,’ I said. ‘He refused any trade with our sort.’
‘Then we are no better than we were before!’ exclaimed Mark Pol in an exasperated voice. ‘After this goose-chase search for a chemist’s and all that time wasted!’
‘I cannot go on without pharmocopy,’ I said urgently.
‘Then perhaps we should leave you here,’ snapped Mark Pol.
‘No!’ I cried. ‘Do not abandon me!’
‘But none of us,’ Mark Pol sneered, with exaggerated relish for my predicament, ‘will be able to purchase your pharmocopies from that shop.’
I looked at Siuzan. She did n
ot return my gaze. She seemed, indeed, to be staring at the floor. Perhaps she was worn out. Or (the thought occurred to me again) in a state of fear for some reason.
‘I shall go in,’ she said shortly, gazing over the road at the chemist’s shop.
‘Thank you,’ I said earnestly. ‘Please, let me give you my money.’
But she did not take my money, and would not be persuaded to do so. As she crossed the road, with the three of us hunched followers dancing attendance, I tried to tell her that she must take money, or at the least that she must let me know the cost of the pharmocopy after she had purchased it and I would reimburse her, but she said nothing.
She stepped quickly up the ramp and passed through the whispery sliding doors. Mark Pol, Gymnaste and I loitered for a while outside. Through the glass we could see piled and filled rectangles of the shelving. The crown of Siuzan’s head was just about visible over the top of a shop display. She was talking to the serving man. This conversation went on for a long time.