Land Of The Headless (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  A policeman approached, and told us to move away from the doorway of the shop. We complied at once, of course; and sat, the three of us, on a bench on the other side of the road. We sat in silence whilst awaiting Siuzan’s return.

  She did not come out of the chemist’s shop.

  After twenty minutes or so we were becoming increasingly agitated, although it was Mark Pol who was the most agitated of all. ‘What’s the delay?’ he cried. ‘Why does she loiter in this shop? What can be taking her so long? There! There!’ He was pointing at the shop’s main entrance, through which the policeman was now stepping. ‘People come and go! Where is she? I’m going in to see if she is all right.’

  ‘I would not advise that,’ I said. ‘The owner of the establishment will, I assure you, be very unwelcoming.’

  ‘Nonsense. I will go and fetch her from the store, nothing else. What can be taking her so long?’

  He jumped to his feet and trotted through the slow-moving traffic. Gymnaste and I watched as he made his way to the door, and the two panes (from the angle at which we saw them, both mirrored with the reflection of our side of the street) slid aside to reveal the policeman standing in the threshold. We could not hear what words passed between them, but it was clear that Mark Pol had been forbidden from going inside.

  He trotted back to us in a state of fury. ‘Extraordinary!’ he said. ‘I was given no explanation - I was merely repulsed!’

  ‘Did you see Siuzan?’ I asked. ‘Did you see what she was doing?’

  ‘I did not. I was burlied away from the door. This treatment is extraordinary and outrageous!’

  There was nothing to do but settle down to wait. The traffic passed and repassed on the street. Of course my prostheses could detect no smell; but I was hypnotised by the distinct quality of the light, a pollen-like yellow smoke, or dust, that moved languidly in the air, sometimes clearing to bring this building, or that person, into a slightly sharper focus. This dust brought odour to my memory if not to my actual senses: memories of spices and petrol, of lemon and sugar and grit. I cannot of course say whether the actual dust, thrown into the air of Cainon by its traffic, smelt of any of these things.

  Late afternoon passed and the light thickened into evening. People came and went, none giving us more than a brief and disapproving glance. A caterpillar, long as my forefinger and bristling with hairs thick as eyelashes, crawled over my lap. I did not remove it. I seemed to have entered some manner of fugue state, unwilling, or unable, to move so much as a finger. There was, I recall, a great dread inside me. It required a certain proportion of my energy and my will to prevent me from focusing my thoughts inwardly on that dread. I did not want to know of what I was afraid. I tried to distract myself with the comings and goings of the street.

  Lights came on in the shopfronts and bars up and down this minor Cainon thoroughfare. Streetlights lit up on top of their poles like tree trunks, and threw out impalpable spheres of brightness as foliage. The passing cars became pimpled with glowing dots of red and white.

  The sun set entirely, and it was dark. We were sitting there in the cone of light cast from a lamp-pole a little way behind us.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Mark Pol in a state of increasing anxiety. ‘What is happening? I’ll try entering again . . .’ and he bustled off, his eye stalks quivering. But once again he was repelled at the door.

  ‘This is—’ he said, in his metal-tinged voice, ‘a-most-provoking- thing—’ His distress, and his anger, were comically intense. What, I wondered, was making him so furious? ‘Why doesn’t she come? Has she abandoned us?’

  ‘If she has,’ said Gymnaste, ‘then we have no reason to complain, or rebuke her. She accompanied us through the desert. Perhaps that was enough. Certainly she owes us no obligation - she did not before, and she does not now. We should be grateful that she spent any time with us, and leave it at that. Perhaps she has simply walked out of the back door—’

  ‘Without,’ fumed Mark Pol, waving his right hand in the air although his left lay in his lap, ‘without saying farewell ? Without so much as an—?’

  For once Gymnaste raised his voice, and squashed Mark Pol’s complaints into silence. ‘Perhaps she has slipped through the back door, and if she has then that is that. Maybe she felt awkward wishing us farewell, and preferred to slip away quietly. We should be grateful she was with us at all, grateful that she attended to us after our decapitations - recall that no one compelled her to do this. Grateful that she kept company with us for as long as she did.’

  Mark Pol was silenced. But I could feel, within me, the edges of a terrible anguish. ‘But,’ I said, fumbling the words through my speech machine, ‘what shall we do?’

  ‘We are three adult men, though we are headless,’ said Gymnaste. ‘Do we need Siuzan Delage to lead us around like children?’

  ‘I suppose not,’ said Mark Pol, in a deadened voice.

  ‘We must find work, I suppose,’ said Gymnaste after reflection. ‘We need food and drink. Also, we should find a chemist prepared to serve us, for we need now, or soon will, as Jon here has discovered, pharmocopies of certain hormonal chemicals. Perhaps we can find a hostel for people such as us. I, for one, am disinclined to carry on sleeping under the open sky. It is cold enough now, but in a few months it will be winter.’

  But this stream of practical advice fell upon my mind as a series of monstrous irrelevancies. The dread that lurked subterraneously in my thoughts was becoming clearer to me now. It was that I should never see Siuzan again. It was that I was in love with her, as hopelessly and as bitterly and as demeaningly as ever I had been in love with any erson - or more so, much more, because my previous romantic infatuations had always been achievable things, whereas this was clearly fated never to be. She was so very far above me, and I was so patently unworthy. It was all so very evidently impossible that the ferocity of my emotion was almost a rebuke to my yearning self. Impossible! But the thought of never seeing her again was intolerable. It was worse than losing my head. The passion in me, it led, through its dignity-corroding twists, to my conviction and my punishment. I wanted to cry out.

  ‘Well then,’ said Mark Pol, who seemed, to my supersaturated sensitivity, to have grown calm with suspicious rapidity, ‘perhaps we should walk on.’

  ‘But,’ I objected, ‘what if Siuzan has been delayed for some trivial reason, and hopes to meet up with us again? What if she comes outside the chemist hoping to see us and we have gone? Should we not stay here, until we are sure she is not coming?’

  ‘And for how long would you have us wait?’ snapped Mark Pol. ‘We have waited here half a day. Is that not enough? Let us be going, as Sieur Gymnaste says, to make our new way in the world.’

  ‘At the least,’ I continued, clutching straws, ‘at the very least we should leave some message for her, some means whereby she can communicate with us in the future, should she wish to meet us again.’

  ‘Your suggestion is impracticable,’ said Mark Pol. ‘Should we graffitise the wall behind us? This would be merely criminal. And where would we tell her we have gone, since we do not yet know ourselves?’

  ‘We could ask the chemist to take a message,’ I said, leaping to my feet. Now it was I who was agitated with a furious nervous energy that overcame my former feelings of sickness. The prospect of losing Siuzan after so short a space, after barely having known her - it was too much. I was beyond reason now.

  ‘He would hardly accept a message from us,’ Gymnaste pointed out.

  And I concede: you may, reading this account, consider it beyond absurdity for a headless man to have daydreamed so far as even to contemplate, howsoever hazily, the prospect of marriage with a woman so young, beautiful, so widely adored, and virtuous. But this is to ignore the enormous force that Love applies to the coal of the everyday as it crushes out its unique diamonds. Moreover, as I told myself, it was not altogether unprecedented for a headless man and a headed woman to unite in marriage. Naturally it has never been a common occur
rence, but there is at the least nothing in law to prevent such a marriage. And (for now my desperate mind was contorting itself) Siuzan had shown herself much less prejudiced against the headless than most. Perhaps her devotion to such fallen individuals as ourselves was not merely motivated by religious piety. Perhaps there was (I could not be sure of this, but I hoped) some fascination, even some level of attraction, at work there. And with enough time was it not possible for her to come to know the person who still lived inside the truncated body? The fable of Beauty and the Beast is very ancient, and speaks to a very deep need in the human soul. Only the shallow fall in love with mere physical beauty - I felt confident in asserting this, because for my adult life I had been one of these shallow types. A preener, a vain fellow, hypercareful of my body, sparing no expense on toiletries and beauty enhancers. I had flitted on the surface of society. I had told myself that I was a romantic adrift in a rigorous world. But it was precisely as a romantic that I believed in people unlike me, who cared for the soul rather than the body, who judged by the content of character rather than beauty of appearance. This spectral romantic, lurking inside me still, insisted that Siuzan was such a person. And so it was imperative that I spend more time with her, in order to permit this inner knowledge, this fated-to-be love, to blossom.

  I do not seek to convince you of the truth of this absurd reasoning. I seek merely to explain to you the state of mind in which I struggled. Of course Siuzan could never marry me, or any other person marked by the shame of headlessness. Of course not.

  ‘Leave a message with the chemist?’ repeated Mark Pol disdainfully. ‘I invite you to try such a lunacy. You will be repelled, as I was, by the policeman at the door.’

  ‘The policeman,’ I said, uttering the word stupidly. ‘The policeman.’

  He was standing in front of us.

  Six

  He was not alone. There were two colleagues, also in uniform, standing beside him. Their transport was parked on the pavement a little way along the road.

  None of us knew what to say.

  ‘Under the powers of the Social Order Promulgation ...’ he said, without smiling. He did not bother uttering the remainder of this sentence. He held out what, in my agitated and illogical state, I took to be a handgun. This he aimed at my chest, perhaps because I was sitting on the far left of the three of us. I suppose one must start somewhere.

  He pulled the trigger.

  A threaded dart launched out, popped through my shirt, scratched my skin and was snapped back into the device. The policeman repeated this action on Gymnaste and Mark Pol. I was so startled it took me several moments to realise what the device was.

  After our DNA had been flagged up, the fellow addressed us each in turn. ‘Jon Cavala, Mark Pol Treherne, Gymnaste Peri. You will be surprised, or not, to learn that I am permitted in law to apprehend all three of you.’

  Mark Pol was immediately indignant. ‘On what charge?’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘Though headless we have nevertheless certain legal rights.’

  ‘Indeed you do,’ said the policeman. ‘There is no charge. I am permitted, by the law, to question you about certain matters. You are invited to attend questioning, but you will be compelled to attend questioning if you decline this invitation.’ He turned his back on us and addressed his companions, that they might recognise us. ‘Treherne,’ he said, ‘is the one with the neck-mounted stalk eyes. Peri is the fat one. Cavala the other. So now you know.’

  We were led to their police transport and locked into one of the compartments at the back. Here we stayed for several hours. Sometimes we were aware of movement, as the transport was driven; sometimes the van was motionless. It was difficult to be sure what was going on outside our windowless compartment. No amount of Jon Cavala hammering on the side and giving voice to his ourage with as much volume as his device permitted, no amount of his demands that he be heard, or released, or financially compensated for his inconvenience, produced any response from the police.

  Eventually the door was opened and we found ourselves outside the front of Cainon’s main police station. We were removed from the transport and led up the flagstone-laid ramp of the building. This imposing building, like a colossal upended desk-table of marble and concrete, was enough to silence even Mark Pol.

  Inside we passed into an entrance hall and down a corridor. We were taken to a room, and there we were left.

  It was a fairly comfortable room, as police rooms go, and not a cell: upholstered seats for us to seat ourselves if we wished, a screen in the corner of the ceiling relaying the News Channel to distract us, even water for us to drink - and being thirsty after our long wait we all of us drank freely of this. It was a pleasant room in many ways, although of course the door was locked. The News Channel was crowded with stories from the Sugar War on Egafredo and on Athena, which seemed very distant to most citizens on Pluse, and doubly distant to the concerns of the headless on Pluse. Mark Pol paced up and down. Gymnaste and myself sat very still.

  ‘This is something serious,’ said Gymnaste.

  ‘I have no doubt,’ Mark Pol pronounced as he strode, ‘that this is but a taste of the oppression and random harassment which we must come to expect as our daily chore, now that we are headless. Have we not paid for our crimes, paid a price higher than required of any bank fraud or common thief? Does society not owe us the chance to live as others do? It may be true that we have transgressed, but the guilt of that infraction has been cut away from us. It is outrageous! It is an outrage! I shall,’ he declared with sudden force, hurling himself down onto the seat, ‘I shall start a campaign to highlight the injustices which the headless must suffer. I shall write a manifesto. I shall recruit the young from three continents, those who care about justice and—’

  ‘There have been such campaigns before,’ I reminded him, somewhat crossly. ‘It was such a campaign that involved the technologies which now support our consciousnesses in the process. But no campaign has ever shifted the opinion of the people as to the fundamental justice of the beheadings.’

  ‘Boh,’ sneered Mark Pol, literally snapping his fingers at me. His fidgeting fingers crackled before my face like dry sticks in the fire. ‘I shall change things. Things are not like this on other worlds. Why must they be so on this world? You should pay attention to what I am saying, for you will see how I shall make the changes happen.’

  ‘This matter is something serious,’ Gymnaste repeated. ‘They have not gone to such lengths merely to harass a trio of newly arrived headless.’

  At this moment the doorlock snapped and slid free. A policeman entered. He had a chiller looped in at his belt, but was otherwise dressed as any worker or civilian, in a dark blue jacket and meadhres over a pale blue shirt. ‘Sieurs,’ he said.

  After the confinement in the transport, and our insolently lengthy wait in the room, this honorific seemed merely facetious.

  ‘My name is Mag Bonnard, and my preference would be that you address me as Chevaler Bonnard.’

  ‘My preference,’ I blurted, ‘is that you do not call me sieur, for I do not deserve the title.’

  Bonnard looked at me for a long moment in silence. His was a long face, a sharp chin bone visible perking at the skin of his face and pulling his cheeks into irregularly shaped ovals. His eyes were close-spaced and though not deep-set yet they were so forcefully hemmed in by thick black eyebrows above and bruise-coloured half-moons of tiredness below as to appear sunken. His smile had a sourly feline quality.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘You are Cavala? I find it difficult to tell one headless from another, even though I am very experienced in the doings of your kind. My only information is that Cavala was the one neither fat nor with expensive and gaudy prostheses.’

  ‘I am Cavala,’ I admitted.

  ‘And you Gymnaste? And you Treherne?’

  ‘Yes,’ quiet and ‘Yes,’ surly.

  ‘Very well. To be brief: Siuzan Delage, whom of course you know - Siuzan Delage has been taken into legal con
finement.’

  I listened to this sentence, and understood it. Then, in a distinct and subsequent moment, I reacted - ‘No! Impossible!’

  Bonnard ignored me. ‘Because of this act of arrest by the police, it has become necessary to question the three of you. But I will say at once that this is an unusual questioning.’

  ‘Siuzan in legal confinement?’ I cried. ‘How can this be? This is some mistake or error. It cannot be.’

  ‘Please, Jon Cavala, restrain yourself,’ said Bonnard. ‘Allow me to talk. This will be, as I was saying, an unusual questioning. I shall tell you my opinion, although it at the moment remains unsupported by proof. But it is the opinion of a senior chevaler of the police, and worth something for that reason. Though I say so myself!’

  We waited for the opinion.