by Adam Roberts
‘What have you done?’ I asked. The noises were coming from my mouth, rather than my chest. Belatedly I realised, consciously, what my body had realised as soon as I woke: that I had a head. I put my hands up and fumbled my fingers-ends over nose, chin, cheek. The skin of the head felt warm but hard, unfleshy.
‘It’s bronze,’ said Levitt Dunber admiringly. ‘Oh, I daresay its interior is all plastic connections and neurons and whatnot and who-knows-what. That is not my field. But I do know about canons of aesthetic taste, and I’ll say that the external bronze laminate has been very stylishly shaped. Do you want to see?’
He fished out a palm-sized circular mirror and held it up before me as best he could, and in that wobbly disc I saw myself. An expressionless, sherry-coloured face lurched up and down, propelled by the miniature tremors of Levitt Dunber’s hand. ‘May I?’ I asked, taking the glass from him. I examined myself more steadily. The nose and mouth seemed carved from solid metal, but an act of miniature will on my part opened the lips and flared the nostrils. The eyelids closed and opened with a distant, dry fluttery sound. I could smile and frown, the metal deforming as the face moved. I let my expression become neutral and looked at the face. They had not reproduced my original face, or even an approximation of it (but of course, how could they have known what my original face looked like?). Instead I had been given a regular and innocuously handsome set of features. The eyebrows were crisscross notches curving over the sockets. The eyes were, strangely, the same colour - whites, irises and pupils all carved from the same bronze. My head-hair was rendered in the rippled solidity of a stone-carved statue’s.
I handed the mirror back to Levitt Dunber. Then, feeling an unexpected panic, I put my hands behind me and groped at the small of my back.
‘Your ordinator is still there, my friend,’ said Dunber. ‘We could hardly remove that - that is where you are, after all. If you see what I mean.’
‘The head?’
‘A superior prosthesis? A work of art?’ He shrugged. ‘And why can’t it be both?’
I sat back.
There was a boat on the lake. It was moving slowly, pulling its wake through the water behind it like a heavy robe trailing along a blue marble floor. The sun laid a spearhead-shaped area of bristling shine over the middle of the body of water. The boat inched into this area of lit lake, becoming more silhouetty as it slid through it. Evidently this new prosthesis was visually superior to my previous one.
The far hills, beyond the water, seemed swollen, puffed with their own beauty, beguilingly tall yet gentle in their slopes. Houses, like the one I found myself in, were visible in a slanting zigzag up the side. A single narrow road, taut like a sinew, ran diagonally from base to summit.
I let my eye fall on the town at the foot of this hill. The buildings of it congregated with an intricate precision and clarity; the tessellation of roofs and walls fitting snugly together. In a field just on the far side of the lake I could see a tractor moving across ploughed earth: I saw the oO of its wheels, its square metal parasol roof, the brute mechanic snout of its bonnet. I could, even at this distance, see the driver; the peak of his cap overhanging a bearded face, attention focused on the field. I possessed an extraordinary visual definition.
My hearing was also improved. It felt more like the sense of hearing I had known as a headed man. And what’s more I could smell: an act of will sucked air into my nostrils, and I became aware of the savour of dry grass, the faint incense of rosemary and lavender, the smell of warm air itself.
‘Can it not be constructed,’ I asked, tapping my metal head with my fleshly finger, ‘so as to appear more lifelike?’
‘You are bargaining already?’ replied Levitt Dunber, amused.
‘By no means,’ I said, a little confused.
‘There is no need to apologise,’ Dunber said. ‘It would, of course, be possible to fit you with an ersatz head if you preferred it - pink-yellow plastic to mimic skin, milk-coloured glass eyes with blue irises, a little redness at the flexible lips, that sort of thing. If that is truly what you would prefer.’
I looked intently at him. ‘Yes . . .’
‘But this would look not more but less lifelike,’ he said. ‘You will of course understand why. You’ll have recognised the way that, for instance, a fine sculpture in blue stone looks more lifelike than a shop front automaton. Why is this?’
‘This is simply a question of respective craftsmanship.’
‘I disagree. The automaton, in pink plastic, appears to be trying to fool our eyes, and our eyes - which are very acute at detecting the minute verisimilitude of real faces - revolt against the deception. But the blue stone makes no pretence to being real, and so we take it as it is and merely admire the artistry.’
‘This talk of blue stone,’ I said, ‘and plastic. It all seems very strange to me.’
‘Because you have been plucked from the black fog of battle,’ said Levitt Dunber, nodding. ‘I understand.’ He put his head back. ‘Sunset!’ he said. ‘Sunset, sunset - my favourite time of the day!’
I followed his gaze. The sky over the hill behind us turning orange and pinken. Shrimp-coloured clouds lay overhead in a line that trailed down behind the lip of the summit. Even as I watched the sky seemed to darken with unnatural rapidity; perhaps a function of my new senses, or perhaps simply the way this planet turned.
All about the pool electric lights lit up. Some were mounted on staffs, stubby lamp-poles, some were inset into the wall. Behind me, all the windows of the house were illuminated.
I could hear birdsong, very distant, melodious, like the playing of piccolos. It was a nightingale.
The lake, below me, had assumed a dark blue hue, intermixed in patches with a darker purple. A little later it became perfectly black, something which gave it the appearance of solidity, like a black resin poured into the space between the hills. The boat I had been observing had reached the far side, and was parked alongside its pier. The lights of the little town glinted in strings and clusters along the harbourfront and up the hill. Above me, stars were everywhere, very many tiny droplets of luminous white condensation upon the black-matt dome of sky. Crickets chuckled to themselves in the darkness.
‘What do you know about the Sugar?’ asked Levitt Dunber.
‘The Sugar War,’ I said. ‘I am a soldier.’
‘I’m being tentative,’ said Dunber. ‘I don’t wish to provoke your anger - for as I said before, I am wholly unarmed. And broaching the subject of treachery is a delicate matter. It might tip a less self-controlled man into a violent attack.’
‘Treachery?’
‘Best to call a crime a crime, don’t you think? Better to call murder murder, to call rape rape.’ He looked closely at me.
‘Do you insinuate—’ I began.
‘I’m not making any insinuation,’ he said firmly. His foreign accent, difficult to place, gave the word insinuation a weird off-kilter emphasis, like a shake. ‘It is nothing to me. My view is that the practice of beheading individuals is barbaric, and that the barbarism is barely mitigated by resurrecting the beheaded with technological prostheses to wander the countryside like ghouls. It seems to me,’ he continued, ‘a hypocritical practice - supposedly done in the name of compassion, when in fact it is performed to establish walking deterrence to anybody else who might challenge the political authorities from making any fuss. Much like placing the heads of traitors on poles in archaic cities.’
‘Crimes must be punished,’ I observed.
‘Do you say so? Perhaps they must. But should consensual sexual congress be punished? Should justifiable homicide, or the free expression of one’s opinion about religion - should they be punished in this extreme manner?’
‘They order things differently on your home world perhaps?’
He looked about himself. The air was still warm. Lights under the water, set inside the wall of the swimming pool, made the whole juddery rectangle bright.
‘They do.’
‘Do y
ou wish me to betray my own people?’ I asked. ‘My comrades?’
He looked quizzically at me.
‘I am,’ I said, ‘only a foot soldier. There is nothing I can tell you that will help your case. It is, I regret, a waste of your time to hold me here. You should have obtained a senior officer, a magister or a president. His betrayal would have served you better.’
Levitt Dunber put his thumb to his unshaven chin. ‘So what do you know about the Sugar?’ he asked again.
It occurred to me, at that moment, whom Levitt Dunber reminded me of: it was Bonnard, the Cainon policeman. There was little physical resemblance between the lean, age-creased man in front of me and the corpulent policeman I had once known, but they both took perverse pleasure in roundabout locution, in game-playing, asserting their own power over their interlocutor. ‘Am I being interrogated?’ I asked.
‘Do you believe that we fly all captured soldiers to this location to interrogate them?’ he asked, an amused incredulity on his face.
‘But I must repeat that I do not know anything that might be useful to you. Believe me when I say that I am not resisting your questions. I will answer anything you ask me. My answers will not be treason, for I know nothing that could help your war effort.’
‘It is a sugar,’ said Levitt Dunber. ‘It is a form of sugar. Or - I am no scientist - at least a polysaccharide. Or more precisely still, a deoxyribose saccharide base. But a base for what? For some form of life? For something more bacterial, or even viral; not an inert sugar but a living one?’ He shook his head, as if unknowing. ‘It is somewhat confusing that it has become known as “Sugar”, or as it is called by some “The Sugar”. For this means that other sugars must be referred to with circumlocutions, such as “conventional sugars”, or “culinary sugars”. The Sugar is no culinary addition. Believe me when I say you would not wish to place any upon your tongue!’
‘Sieur Dunber,’ I said. ‘Humbly and without disrespect I must say: this is meaningless to me.’
‘Meaningless?’
‘The object of the war is not my concern. I am merely a soldier.’
‘The reason I say that you would not wish to place any on your tongue,’ said Dunber, ‘is that I have seen it done. A small spatula of the Sugar will kill a man, and in an extremely unpleasant way. The tongue - the mouth - all the mucus membranes of the head - dissolve away like melting wax. The body collapses. There is - screaming.’
I tipped my head to one side, thinking that at last I understood the nature of Dunber’s game playing. ‘Has all this been only a preliminary to torture?’ I asked.
At this Levitt Dunber laughed, loud and genuinely. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You misunderstand. What would it benefit us in transporting you here in order to torture you? To this . . . perfect place.’
‘Perfection?’ I queried.
‘The ketone ring of this Sugar, or rather the complex of ketones, is very hungry for salts and for certain other minerals. Once it locks enough salt it changes its form. Let me speculate as to what Pluse wants with the stuff. Permit me to speculate about your world. Let us, together, imagine a large enough quantity of Sugar. Let us imagine this quantity dumped into your ironically named Mild Sea. The Sugar would react aggressively with the salts in the water. It would consume any carbohydrate or protein it encountered - the fish, for instance. It would consume them utterly, depopulate the sea. But this would be no occasion for grief, because once the whole sea is desalinated then saltwater fish could not live there any more anyway.’
‘Desalination?’
‘Oh, indeed. Proteins allow the salt-reacting Sugar to breed, and therefore to lock away more salt. Eventually the protein is all used up, and the Sugar simply accumulates more and more salt. Denser than the pure water it sinks, and beds down as a layer. But it leaves the water above as clean as if it had been filtered.’
‘Drinking water.’
‘And also for irrigation. Sieur Cavala, I think we can see the benefit for your world. Those parched stretches of land, millions of hectares all about the Mild Sea, turned to oases of growth. The greening of the whole land. And this is merely one world. There are planets even more desolate than yours. I know of one world that is covered in deserts of salt; colonisation has proved impossible there because it is so forbidding. But with sufficient supplies of Sugar . . .’
‘It is for this substance that the war is being fought?’
‘Pluse is in dispute with Athena over the trade stipulations. We - by which I mean, the Alliance of the Humane Faithful - appended human-rights protocols to the trade agreements. We urged Pluse, and the other Planets of the Book, to abandon this barbaric practice of beheading. They refused. Attempts were made to enforce trading quotas. Sugar has proved uncultivatable in the necessary bulk outside Athena. And so the war has progressed. Your people insist that they are merely enforcing the terms of a trade agreement upon which we have reneged. We counter that the agreement was never finalised, because of the lamentable abuses against human dignity that your worlds practise.’
‘I know nothing of this,’ I said.
‘But then again’ - he shook his head, he looked - momentarily - almost angry - ‘is war ever fought for such reasons? The leaders persuade themselves that the proximate causes are necessary causes, but they never are. It is a clash of civilisations. Isn’t it? That and nothing more. Perhaps this is always the way of war. One part of the corpus humanitas is always separated from another, and the separation itself is reason enough for resentment.’
He stopped speaking, and was silent for a while. Then, brightly, he said: ‘Would you like to test the taste prosthesis in your new head?’
I was, almost against my better judgement, excited. ‘Might I?’
He leapt to his feet and hurried over to a square metal door inset into the wall. Opening this revealed a safe-like cooler, from which he brought out two bottles. ‘Beer,’ he offered.
I had also stood up. ‘But I am not permitted to drink beer,’ I said.
‘No? I thought you were.’
Was this some sort of test? ‘The Bibliqu’rân forbids beer, spirits, and all fruit liquor save only wine. Surely you know this?’
‘My congregation,’ he said evenly, ‘evidently follows a laxer interpretation of scripture than yours.’ He replaced the beer bottles in the safe and closed the door. Then, opening it again, he reached in and brought out two very narrow bottles of wine. A flick of his thumb uncorked them both.
I put the bottle to my mobile brazen lips and tipped it back. The fluid gushed into my mouth. It swirled around my tongue. The tang of alcohol, and the rich, darkly violet flavour of red wine, was intensely there, inside my mouth. Taste and odour and the physical tang of it. I swallowed. I imagined brazen hoops of an artificial gullet contracting in turn, and speeding the juice into my stomach. ‘Will it make me drunk?’
‘Naturally it will. It may take longer than it used to. The alcohol cannot transfer into the bloodstream through the roof of your mouth, of course. But into your bloodstream it will go, eventually, and a mildly pleasant intoxication will be the result.’
‘Why not,’ I suggested, ‘tell me why you have brought me to this place?’
‘It is beautiful, is it not?’
‘If you wish me to betray my world,’ I pressed, ‘then at least tell me how I can do so. What inducements are you offering me?’
He smiled knowingly at this, as if the answer to my own question was obvious.
‘Is it this prosthesis?’ I asked, tapping the tip of my bottle against my metallic forehead.
‘A fine toy, I think you must agree.’
‘You think I would betray my people for a toy?’
‘I think your people have betrayed you.’ He shook his head. ‘What can you do for us, Jon Cavala? The most famous poet of Pluse?’
This wrong-footed me. ‘I am hardly that,’ I said.
‘Jon Cavala? The Jon Cavala? Psh.’ He closed his eyes, as if consulting the scroll of his memory, and recited:Fle
sh slackens when grown,
Plums purple to fall;
Grass lengthens to be mown,
And that is all.
Maturity eradicates
And gives to the air
All known
And death uncreates
The strong, the fit, the tall,
Bodies gross or fair,
Houses of bone.
‘Am I, then, so famous on your world?’ I asked, startled, but also (I regret to recall) pridefully pleased.
‘To behead a poet - a poet of your stature - for mere sexual goings-on? Shameful. It was shameful indeed.’
‘Do you say a poet of my stature?’
‘Oh relatively unacknowledged upon your own world, I concede. But widely read, and widely admired, on other worlds.’
‘I had no idea.’