by Adam Roberts
‘Naturally not, since yours is a closed society.’
‘It is hardly that,’ I said.
‘You are loyal to your culture, which of course reflects credit upon you. But they have stifled your work, stifled it. And yours is work of genius!’
‘You seek to flatter me, Sieur Dunber,’ I said. ‘Whereas flattery is ignoble.’
‘It is, or it is not.’ He seemed unconcerned.
‘I remain ignorant how I can usefully betray my own world. Usefully, that is to say, for your purposes. Truly I know nothing at all; I am privy to no military secrets, I can give you access to nothing of any good.’
‘Really?’
I took another drink of wine. An image came to my mind. I saw myself touring Levitt Dunber’s homeworld. I saw large and admiring crowds. I saw my handsome brazen face on many datascreens and projectors. I saw myself reading my poetry, and also making speeches denouncing the barbarity of the system of justice practised on Pluse. I saw crowds rising to their feet and applauding, fields of wheat through-stirred by the wind, at my words. All this came to me in one moment: the propaganda value of a famous writer, recruiting the opinion of the many against the world that had nurtured me.
It was a powerful vision, made more beguiling by the seeping warmth of wine in my belly. Was this the betrayal that was being offered me?
‘As for the Sugar,’ Levitt Dunber was saying (as if I cared for the Sugar!), ‘there is no desire on our part to deny Pluse the Sugar. Nor do we wish to interfere with the consciences of your people, in respect of their religious observation, or freedom to interpret scripture howsoever they choose. The only change we would like is that the Planets of the Book agree to - eh - to certain basic - protocols - on human rights.’
Once again, I must report how flattering it was to hear this man negotiate with me as if I were a great politician or leader. Pride, washing through me, mixed dangerously with alcohol.
‘You care so greatly for the fate of the headless?’ I asked.
‘The headless? I beg your pardon but no - even as you and I talk, Sieur Cavala, we are striving to invent new ways of killing the headless. They are swarming over our battlefields this very minute, they are posing a variety of dangers. It is not individual headless that concern us; no, not even one so notable as yourself. It is the principle.’
‘Principle?’
‘It outrages our sense of civilised existence that men and women are treated so. It degrades the dignity of humanity.’ He made a little circling gesture with his right hand, as if he could spool forth many similar examples of this manner of speaking.
I pondered. I was conflicted. I cannot deny that I was very strongly tempted by what he offered. But I could not forget what I had vowed to myself.
‘Let us say,’ I suggested, ‘that I do not wish to spend the rest of my life upon your worlds, speaking - perhaps - to crowds about the inhumanity of beheading as a punishment. Let us say that there is something else that I must do. That I must return to Pluse to . . . perform some action. We might even say,’ I continued, finding a near-theatrical pleasure in my speechifying (this was the wine, perhaps), ‘that, if you could guarantee this for me - that if you could arrange for me to return to my world, so that I could seek out one particular person and perform one particular act . . . that for this, for that one thing alone, I would be prepared to betray my world.’
Levitt Dunber was grinning very broadly. ‘You are bargaining!’ he declared. ‘I knew you would. But, as you say, what possible use would your betrayal be to us?’
My brazen eyebrows arched.
‘I do not understand,’ I said cautiously. ‘You have been intimating . . .’
‘Oh, the fame of the poet, yes, yes,’ he said. ‘Alive you might be of some use.’
‘I would be happy to devote myself to whatever you desire,’ I said, ‘after I have performed this one act. It has been the guiding star of my life for half a year now. Facilitate it, and I am yours.’
‘Alive is one thing,’ Dunber was saying. ‘Dead quite another.’
‘But why threaten me with death?’ I asked, genuinely puzzled. ‘I have all but agreed to do as you wish, to betray my world. All I am doing is debating the precise terms on which I shall act for you.’
‘Threaten? You misunderstand. Ah!’ he said, looking about him ‘The dawn! This is my favourite time of day here.’
It was as he said: the dark was thinning behind the hills on the far side of the lake, diluting with turquoise and paler shades. As if resolving out of chaos and coming into being for the first time, the lineaments of landscape, lake and town were starting to become visible, paler grey against darker. Many birds in the trees below the house were spirrilling and chirruping their dawn chorus with great vigour.
‘How can it be the dawn?’ I demanded. ‘The night cannot have passed so quickly.’
‘The night, with its stars, is my favourite time. The day also.’ He looked at me. ‘Time moves differently here.’
‘Where am I?’ I asked.
I should, obviously, have asked that question much earlier in our exchange.
‘Isn’t it clear to you? I have always felt that the issue is not whether heaven will reject the soul, as some stricter religions claim; it is whether the soul will reject heaven. What of you?’
‘This is not heaven,’ I said. I got to my feet. The light was strong enough to illuminate the half-full bottle in my hand, its sloshing black and purple contents. The lights around the pool seemed paler now, challenged by the quickly brightening sky. ‘I am not dead.’
‘No?’
‘This is not heaven,’ I said again, looking about me. ‘I have not come to heaven to discover it already in the possession of my enemy. Heaven does not’ - I grasped my own metal chin - ‘fit souls with brazen prostheses. Heaven makes the soul entire and complete again. Heaven is not’ - I slapped my chest - ‘bodily—’
‘Be calm, my friend,’ said Levitt Dunber. He did not get up. ‘Sit down. Heaven, if it is anything, is a place to be calm. Don’t you think? Why mightn’t your enemy have a house in heaven, after all? Surely that will depend upon how virtuous he was during his life.’
‘Tell me what is happening,’ I demanded. ‘Where - am I?’
‘You are in my house,’ he replied. ‘And what is happening is the dawn. Here it comes now.’
He was smiling at me. The smile widened and became a grin. Levitt Dunber made a circle of his mouth, stretched his lips as high and wide as they would go.
He was gaping at me, and there was a light inside his throat, a tonsil of illumination so bright I could not look at it, it scorched my brazen eyes.
The light grew. Light was pouring from his open mouth, and the torrent dissolved everything.
There was nothing but light.
Light was vomiting from his open mouth, and there was.
Only light.
The complete whiteness washed around me, outlining my hand as I held it in front of my eyes; and then it washed through me. My hand disappeared. My arm. The whole world. My anxiety was scrubbed away. Even my surprise at this surreal turn of events drained out of me.
And then the light seemed to gather, somehow strengthen and tighten, whilst still all about me. And then it burst, into a million neon crumbs that fell through the sky as a firework.
There was a very faint, very high-pitched noise, like a distant flute playing a single, high, quavering note. The note rose in pitch a tone, then a semitone, and then it broke into a violent collision of a dozen loud noises all contending at once.
I tried to focus my eyes. A headless man was above me, leaning forward. ‘Sieur Cavala,’ he was shouting, ‘Sieur Cavala, you must get up.’ He was shouting so as to be heard over the cacophony of noises, the explosions and clatterings, the stale thrum of the boomshell in its quiescent mode. ‘We’re retreating,’ he bellowed, ‘come now.’
Belatedly I recognised Steelhand’s form. I tried to suck in a deep breath, but my lungs were still clog
ged with wadding. ‘I had a vision,’ I screeched. ‘I had a vision.’
‘Increase the volume of your speakers,’ bellowed Steelhand, grasping me by my hand and hauling me upright. ‘I cannot hear.’
‘A vision,’ I shouted. ‘I had a vision, of—’
But my flesh jittered into a standing wave and all sound vanished. The quasi-sonic footprint of the boomshell fell upon us. I could hear nothing now. My guts collapsed and clenched within me, and my bones ached. I could feel each lung, distinctly, pressing inward, trying to implode; and I could feel the branched tree-shape the wadding had taken inside my chest. Everything around me was dusky.
It was, as before, hard to think. But Steelhand was stumbling back over the scrub, and I shook my legs and ran after him. The boomshell was present inside me, hideously invasive, making every cell in my body vibrate. My marrow was clenching in on itself inside my bone as if trying to compact itself to chalk. My blood was spurting through constricting vessels. My heart spasmed. It was intensely uncomfortable; not merely painful (although it was that), but wrong-feeling, internally disjointed.
I ran. My mind was instructing my speakers such that I was still in effect shouting ‘I hada - a vision, a vision’, but of course no sounds of any kind emerged, or would have been audible even if they had done.
The footprint of the boomshell began to shift away from us, and I was aware of my heart dilating and squeezing again, and of the pain passing off from my limbs. Steelhand, ahead of me, skidded to a halt, turned towards me as he dropped to one knee, and brought up his needlegun. I reacted, turning and dropping into a firing position alongside him. I was carrying the club-gun. It seemed odd to me that this was still the case, after a day and a night and a new dawn - except, of course, that I had not really experienced any such passage of time.
Coming up the low rise, visible through the murk by its cluster of red lights near the centre of its frame, was an automate. It rolled forward, and then deformed its wheels to ovals to walk over a patch of rubble. This gave us a moment, for the extra processing involved would slow its computing time. I hoisted my gun and opened the gun’s eye. It all became more vivid. I could even see the particulate grain of the fog, and the blocky layering of the automate’s superstructure, the faint white iris-lines in each red headlight. I called up a sighting graphic and willed the trigger in.
The first club hurtled towards the target and cracked it into fizzing sparkles. As I fired, Steelhand’s needles were fleeting through the dark, snicking into the target. The device rocked back and tumbled over.
The boomshell had passed away completely. I shut the gun’s eye and got back to my feet. Now I was running ahead, with Steelhand a little behind me, although he overtook me as I laboured to the top of the hill. We crested the rise, and then were running down the murky far side of the hill, towards the breakland walls, Steelhand waving his left arm over his head.
I felt a peculiar, near-numinous elation inside me. ‘I had a vision,’ I was yelling, ‘a vision,’ and I was still yelling it as we jumped through the slot in the breakland and were bundled out through the far side of the defile by welcoming hands.
Two
The assault had claimed the lives of a great many people, including Geza and Syrophoenician. My elation from the vision lasted an hour or more and then withdrew, like a tide withdrawing from a shoreline. I stowed my weapon, I ate, I babbled to other headless - to new recruits, whose names I did not even know - I attempted to give Steelhand a minutely detailed account of the vision. But these others were weary and grieving and my mania was alien and bizarre to them.
It fell away from me, and revealed a barren landscape beneath it. On the occasions when other comrades had been killed in battle, I had found it sorrowful to reflect upon, but their ceasing to be had not cut into my own ego. But Geza and Syrophoenician’s deaths seemed deeply wrong, a dislocation like a joint out of true. Their loss afflicted me very greatly. I was as filled with grief as a sandbag is with sand. For the first time in the campaign I asked myself questions such as why? and to what end? I could, at that time, think of no suitable answer. Why had Syrophoenician died? Why had Geza? There was no reason for their lives to have been snuffed out so completely.
The foam in my lungs began to disintegrate and break up, and the coughing and spewing that ensued was a form of weeping for me; physically racking and uncomfortable, all-consuming. Afterwards I took many sips of water, and sat with my back to the wall of the barrack.
But the war did not stop. Superiors visited us, briefly, in their absurd helmets. They went away again.
Steelhand came over. ‘I have been given battlefield authority,’ he said.
‘In place of Syrophoenician,’ I said dully.
‘Precisely. The irony of it - coward Steelhand given battlefield authority. ’
‘There’s no cowardice in you,’ I said.
He sat down beside me. ‘We headless need more direction in our attacks, Sieur Cavala.’
For a while I was silent, as the iceberg inside me ground soundlessly against my bones. But he did not depart, and eventually I said: ‘Why do you ask me?’
‘I value your opinion. You have a rapid mind.’
‘My mind is in nowise military,’ I said bleakly. ‘It is a mind for mournful poetry, not for killing and watching friends killed.’
‘It is a shame,’ said Steelhand, ‘that Syrophoenician has died. We must try and limit such fatalities, or soon the whole of the Thirtieth will be extinct.’
‘I don’t care,’ I said.
‘Come now. Why cannot we focus our attacks? We scurry up and down the hill like ants, but we come no closer to our objective.’
‘Because we encounter resistance.’
‘With forethought, and a coordinated attack, we could push past the remotes and automates. Human beings are quicker, are more reactive than automates, and even than remotes. Human beings are better soldiers. This is why they deploy us.’
‘Send the new recruits in formation,’ I said. ‘I do not know their names, and care not if they are killed.’
He left me alone. This was, of course, a cruel thing for me to say, and there is no justification for it, except that my grief had made me uncaring and angry. But this was hardly the fault of the new recruits.
I slept, and my sleep brought a vivid dream in which I revisited the strange place of my vision: the blond grass rustling at the touch of occasional breezes, the bright blue lake, the rapid succession of day and night. When I awoke it was because Steelhand was shaking me.
I cannot have been dreaming. The headless do not dream. I must have been suffering some vivid after-flash or memory of my former vision.
‘I do not understand,’ I said. I was not really addressing him.
‘Come,’ said Steelhand. ‘We must suit up, and take a weapon from the rack. Needleguns this time, my friend.’
We went over to the rack together.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said again.
‘What is it,’ he asked, ‘that you don’t understand?’
‘I had a strange vision, an hallucination, upon the battlefield.’
‘So you told us all when you returned,’ said Steelhand as he folded his torso-armour onto his body like a sandwich board. ‘You spoke very rapidly, and rather confusingly. A mansion on a hillside, a swimming pool, and dawn following night following day within minutes.’
‘There was a man there, who claimed to have knowledge of the Sugar, and the true nature of the war.’
‘If this was truly a vision,’ said Steelhand, ‘then perhaps he was an angel. Or a djinn.’
‘He told me that he was my enemy.’
‘Djinn, then.’
‘He said his name was Levitt Dunber.’
‘A strange name for a spirit.’
‘He reminded me of somebody I once knew, upon Pluse.’
‘This sounds more like a waking dream, my friend,’ said Steelhand, slapping my back. ‘I would suggest that one or other enemy weapon,
maybe the boomshell itself, interfered with the working of your ordinator and squeezed a rapid jumble of strange thoughts through your consciousness. ’
‘This is a possible explanation,’ I agreed.
We lined up to have wadding inserted in our lungs. The reinforcement headless were so new that they quailed and thrashed as the pipe was fitted.
On the jog to the breakland my thoughts were on what awaited me. We were told that the enemy had mounted some sort of counterattack, with a great many remotes, and although we had beaten this back - at the cost of many lives - it would surely be renewed. But the prospect of my own death seemed, in fact, appealing. In the manner of the petty thoughts that run through one’s mind, I thought: when I die I will be able to disprove the absurd contention of Levitt Dunber that his dream house on that dream hill was heaven! This seemed, somehow, important to me. In retrospect I believe the truth is that I was weary of fighting and lacking in the vital spirit needed for carrying on with enthusiasm.