Land Of The Headless (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  I hurled myself at him.

  I felt my fingers grasp the fabric of Mark Pol’s shirt, and through that the texture of his flesh: like raw chicken, or old rubber. ‘Confess,’ I said, as the two of us tumbled from the couch. ‘Tell the truth, Mark Pol!’

  His reactions, startled by my suddenness, were poor. He tried punching at me, bringing his fist up against my stomach, but the blow was weak and did not hurt me. ‘Leave me, get away, get off,’ he was saying, jerking both his knees up. We were rolling on the floor, now banging into Gymnaste’s legsin all this commotion, Gymnaste did not move, not even to lift his legs out of the way of our brawling bodies.

  I reached up with my right hand and found the eye stalk on the right of Mark Pol’s neck. The fury was very fierce inside me now. With a jabbing blow I punched his ribs with my left hand, and his throat valve clicked open. Then with my right hand I pulled as hard as I could on the eye stalk. ‘Ah! Ah!’ Mark Pol was saying. I had the satisfaction of feeling the prosthesis yield, and pull away, and the sticky slickness of blood, before Bonnard intervened with his chiller.

  I felt the moist nose of the device, like a dog’s, on the skin at the base of my back - I suppose my shirt had ridden up in the fighting - just above the ordinator, and then, at once, I felt the jarring pain of the discharge. It felt something like an electric shock, although it was not: a griping sensation of intense cold, like burning on the outer skin and like paralysis and frost running hurriedly through the muscles. My back spasmed and arched, and I lurched clear of Mark Pol. I fell onto the ground, my arms and legs spread wide.

  Despite being convicted as a criminal I had never before been struck with a chiller. I had never, except on the one occasion that had lead to the loss of my head, been in trouble with the police. Had I experienced the chiller before I do not believe that I would have risked it on this occasion by brawling with Mark Pol, for it is deeply painful and unpleasant, much more so than I can convey to you with these words of mine. The worst of it was the clenching sense of being unable to move at all, not even to heave the chest to draw air into the lungs; although close behind this was the sheer pain, as if the whole branchéd bristling tree of my nerves had been hollowed out and acid pumped through those channels instead. My vision was whited through, a blindness of pain. A childish panic filled me that I would never breathe again, and had I possessed the ability to do it I would have kicked and struggled. But, of course, my muscles were held in an absolute grip.

  Then, with the first relinquishing of the effect of the weapon, my limbs shuddered, my neck valve clicked, and air was sucked into my chest. I exhaled raggedly, my speakers producing a weird musical moan, and sight began to return, hazily, dark forms against a light background. There was a flicker, as of a cloud going before the sun. Then, distantly and unreally, I felt something collide with me.

  The breath went out of me again, forced out by impact, and again I struggled to inflate my own chest. But, in the muddle and brightness of my pain, and still unable to move properly, I was aware of localised intensities of hurt that flared at multiple sites. Finally I realised what a less dazzled consciousness would have deduced at once: that Mark Pol had thrown himself onto my fallen form and was punching me in the chest and midriff.

  And, for a second time, Bonnard applied his chiller, and with a high-pitched electronic whoop Mark Pol’s limbs locked. I was barely aware that he had stopped punching me, or that Bonnard had called other police into the room, or even that Mark Pol’s rictused body was being hauled off me. I was concentrating my whole mental energy on drawing another breath, and then another one after that, and then another.

  Seven

  The effects of a standard chiller blast, if applied centrally to the torso, can cause all the body’s muscles to lock for many minutes. There is then anything between three and six hours of debilitating after effect, depending on the person. The device is designed to overstimulate the nerve pathways such that pain registers throughout the whole body. A glancing blow - on a hand, say - will immobilise that limb and produce a devastating sensation of pain throughout the entire body. Centrally applied, for example to the spine, it will freeze the largest and most muscular of bodies into solid agony. The device has less effect on one of the headless, because (although this sounds like a facile thing) he or she has less muscle to clench. Nor can the headless suffer the side-effects of the device, such as inadvertently biting through the tip of one’s tongue, or dislocating one’s jaw, because we lack those things. Moreover, I have heard that a headed individual will usually suffer a severe headache after being chilled; this does not happen to the headless. Nevertheless it was an intensely disabling and agonising experience for me to feel the touch of the policeman’s device. Indeed, because I had spent so much time in the gym, I possessed larger and better defined muscles than the average man. Accordingly it was many hours before I was able finally to coordinate my motions again, and sit up from the bed on which they had placed me. I discovered that I was alone in a tiny police cell.

  I stayed there for a long time. Lights were turned off, and I tried to sleep, something I managed only fitfully. Lights came on again - the whole three-metre-square ceiling shone bright neon - and I woke again. Some pap was served me, the bowl popping through a tiny hatchway in the wall. I was given no water, but the pap was fairly fluid and I was not thirsty.

  My ribs were a little sore, but I paid that no mind. Indeed, my ordinator-mind was not as adept at maintaining consciousness of pain as an actual brain; the sense data, which registered as pain to begin with, soon wore the sensation recognition programming into a diminishing neural loop. The pain shrank away.

  I sat on the bed and stared at walls that my vision software registered as yellow, but which might have been any colour from grey to brown. I found my mind reverting, hideously, to the ordeal that Siuzan Delage had suffered. I parsed the possibilities. Could the legal system in Cainon truly punish a woman clearly innocent? Could so virtuous a woman be beheaded for a crime she so very obviously had not committed?

  I told myself no. I said to myself no, never, but my heart told me that it could indeed happen. Men like Bonnard would tell themselves: This will send a warning to the whole of our world that sexual immorality cannot be tolerated. He might perhaps have said to himself, It is indeed a shame that Siuzan Delage must suffer, but perhaps her plight will prevent future women - lovestruck, or hamstrung by misplaced pity - from protecting their assailants. I could imagine it only too well.

  I resolved to confess to the crime, regardless of the consequences - regardless of the shameful death that would follow for myself. But then I thought of Mark Pol. My confession would free him, and he would walk away, possibly (no, I told myself: not possibly but certainly) to attack other women. He was a man with corruption and violence in his soul. My sacrifice might save Siuzan Delage only at the cost of other women. Could I do this?

  Like Gymnaste I could not lie in this matter.

  Perhaps, I told myself, perhaps Bonnard could be reasoned with. Surely there were ways he could apply pressure to Mark Pol? Were there no drugs he could be forced to take to compel him to confess? I tried to think of the ways Bonnard might be made to see that Mark Pol - and only Mark Pol - must be the criminal in this case. As a policeman Bonnard must surely want to see justice done.

  On occasion, during this monotonous process of mental rotating and sifting, I would find myself, without intending to, making odd little mewling noises through my speech software. After a while I realised that these noises were all that remained to my body of the ability to cry.

  After a while I was visited by a police doctor. He told me that, where before I had been merely ‘being questioned’, now I had been taken into legal confinement. ‘On account of my physical assault upon Mark Pol Treherne,’ I said, expecting confirmation. But the doctor claimed not to know the reason. ‘I am not told the charges,’ he said. ‘I perform my duty regardless of such business.’ He was a fellow made of globes, a round face with big rou
nd eyes set very wide, a plump round torso, round thighs which chafed one against the other as he moved, round calves, even round little hands with plump fingers. His skin was an olive-drab colour, and his hair was very black and shiny as if just out of the shower, although it was not wet.

  ‘And what is your duty?’ I asked him.

  ‘Since you are in legal confinement certain legal obligations devolve upon the police. One is, within the bounds of what the law calls reasonable expectation, to maintain your health.’ He examined me to determine whether Mark Pol had injured me with his punches. ‘Some bruises,’ he said. ‘The bones are not broken.’

  ‘Good news.’

  He took some blood in a pepperpot-shaped device and left the cell. Some time later, perhaps half an hour, he returned with a different coloured pepperpot device, blue where the former had been green. ‘Your hormonal levels are perilously low and unbalanced,’ he announced. ‘This is a particular danger for the headless.’

  ‘I am aware of this danger. I attempted to purchase a new purse of pharmocopy hormones at a Cainon chemist, but he refused me service.’

  ‘People in Cainon are suspicious of the headless,’ he said in an uninflected voice. ‘Suspicion is fuelled by the proximity of the Land of the Headless.’

  This surprised me. ‘Is Cainon so close to Montmorillon? I had not realised.’

  The doctor placed the blue device against the skin of my neck stump. ‘It is a hundred kilometres or more,’ he said. ‘Here, also, is a purse of long-release pharmocopies. Please swallow it.’

  ‘I have no water.’

  ‘I will ensure water is supplied to you.’ He turned to leave.

  ‘A hundred kilometres,’ I said, ‘does not seem to me close.’

  ‘It is close enough for the people in Cainon,’ he replied, without turning back to face me. ‘It is too close. We pride ourselves on the exactness of our devotion to the All’God, and the civilisation and superiority of our culture. To live so near to a bandit land is unsettling.’

  He left before I could ask him anything more.

  The water was delivered. I pushed the purse of pharmocopies down my throat hole and poured the liquid on top.

  The lights went out with a clang. In the darkness I fell quickly asleep.

  I did not dream. The headless do not dream.

  I awoke, in the dark, with a strange sensation in my body. It felt like that hopeful tingling children feel on the morning of their birthdays; or, more poetically, like that continually shimmering pattern of interlocking thorn-shapes that sunlight makes on the surface of pond and river. I was tingling with sudden insight.

  I saw it, then: the way out of my dilemma. There was one way, and only one, that would save Siuzan and punish Treherne - to save Siuzan, yet not allow Treherne to escape scot-free to prey upon further women. I must murder Mark Pol. And as soon as I had done this I must hurry to the police to confess the crime. Once Mark Pol was dead I would also ‘confess’ to having harmed Siuzan - my execution was assured for this latter act, and since I could not be executed more than once I would suffer nothing for the former. The thought was clear and pure as a bubble of glass. My only consequence would be to face the All’God and explain my action to Him, the All’God in whom Gymnaste disbelieved. But how could He fault me? The All’God is Justice tempered with Clemency. My self-sacrifice would balance the sacrifice of Mark Pol. This would be justice.

  Naturally I would first have to release myself from police confinement; for I could hardly murder Mark Pol from within a police cell. Indeed, I could not yet confess to the assault upon Siuzan Delage, or I would be detained by the police and I would not be able to act justice upon Mark Pol. So I must make whatever reparation was required for my hot-headed brawl with that fellow - a trivial crime, surely, since neither of us had been seriously injured - and get away from the police station. Then I must locate Mark Pol and punish him. And, most clearly, I must act rapidly - for if I delayed too long then Siuzan would be beheaded.

  As I lay in the darkness my delight was tangible to me. As I look back, now, I may speculate how much of this feeling of new well-being was a result of the police doctor’s medical intervention, and the rebalancing of my hormones. Perhaps it was this, but I do not believe that this diminishes the purity and joy of that period in the dark.

  There was only one thing for which I yearned, now that I had resolved that I was shortly to die. I wished Siuzan Delage to know what I had done. This was vanity, of course; yet it was the vanity of love, and as such is perhaps the least despicable of vanities. For my love for her was immense and precise, and all the women I had loved before Siuzan Delage - the women I had thought I had loved, or to whom I had vainly told my love - became all accumulated into the force that pressurised my love from soot to diamonds. I would doubtless never see her again; yet this thought made the lithium flame of my love burn brighter in me. There is a truer love in selflessness, and in sacrifice to others, than in romantic ditherings and courtships. Siuzan Delage had sought to help us selflessly, and her charity had been abused. To make amends for this, selflessness was required, and my own life a very small coin indeed in the addition.

  Nevertheless, my fear was that Siuzan would come to believe that it had indeed been I who had assaulted her. I tried, although my mind revolted from the thought, to picture the scene. It must have been dark, in the deserts south of Cainon. She must have been sleeping, unprepared, when a torso with gripping arms and covering legs climbed suddenly on top of her. Perhaps he had stifled her mouth. Would she have seen the eye stalks in the darkness? Could she had known it was Mark Pol ? Perhaps she remained, to this moment, uncertain which of the three of us had assaulted her. If so, then would not my confession root the certainty in her mind that it had been I? This was the hardest sacrifice to make. I was content that the rest of the world, those people I had known before my decapitation, those people who had known me only through my poetry, all of these - I was content that they would despise me as a double rapist. But to think that Siuzan Delage herself would despise me! It was almost too much.

  I consoled myself with this thought: I might be able to deliver a message to her, assuring her both of my love for her and of my innocence, that I was sacrificing myself to preserve her. This, surely, would be possible?

  And if it were not, then I would have to pay the price. There are, let us be clear, two varieties of heroism: the feat performed before an audience of admirers, and the hidden and secret heroism, the hermit’s heroism. This second is of course the more glorious.

  I was lying awake, pondering in this fashion, when the ceiling startled brightly on, and the sight of close walls seemed to burst tight upon me. The novelty of consciousness reawoke in my ordinator mind the actuality of the bruises in my side. I tried to examine myself, but lacking a mirror, and lacking a flexible neck with which to reangle my vision, I could see nothing. I pressed my fingers against various pad-shaped patches of pain on my torso.

  The door juddered in its frame and flew wide. In stepped Chevaler Bonnard, wearing what seemed to be the same suit of clothes as before. He was alone. I had been sitting on my bunk, but I stood up, smartly as if I were in the army and he my superior.

  ‘Jon Cavala,’ he said. ‘Please step this way.’

  My eye was drawn to the chiller, dangling from his belt, seemingly so insignificant, yet potent enough to start a hare-gallop in my heart muscles. ‘Of course,’ I said.

  Bonnard strolled nonchalantly in front, his unprotected back to me, talking loudly without turning his head. I walked unsteadily behind him, my arms at my side. In this way the two of us passed down a long corridor, marked with a number of narrow doors at regular intervals.

  ‘At first,’ Bonnard was saying, ‘Sieur Treherne insisted upon charges being laid against you. He said he did not feel safe, and that you might attack him again. He insisted the police prosecute you. He said we had a duty to protect him.’

  ‘I am indeed sorry that I attacked him,’ I said.

&
nbsp; ‘As you should be. Physical assault, even where one can demonstrate provocation to the satisfaction of the court - physical assault may involve up to three years in prison. But I have persuaded Mark Pol not to force legal charges against you.’

  We emerged from the corridor into a large room, staffed by several policemen. The quality of the light was different; not a whole ceiling lit, but three rose-shaped hangings that cast shadows in an interlocking series of blocks from desks, chairs, datascreens, people. The colour of the light registered on my vision software as a warmer though still pale yellow.

  ‘I am,’ I said, ‘pleased to hear that I will not be prosecuted for this attack.’

  ‘Of course you are pleased,’ said Bonnard, still without looking at me. He stepped through a doorless space in the wall and into a further room. I followed; it was a bare space, with nothing on the wall and no furniture save a desk made apparently of a single block of plastic and two chairs. Bonnard took a seat on the far side of the desk. At a gesture from him I sat in the seat on the near side, but my lack of a head meant that the vision from my epaulette eyes was occluded by the block. It was surprisingly tall. Unlike a table this object, dark grey or dark blue, seemed solid throughout. I sat up, but still could see only the top of Bonnard’s head.