by Adam Roberts
And I realised, at that very moment, that he was looking for the soldier Jon Cavala who had breached a signed agreement to subsist peacefully in captivity, causing the deaths of such-and-such number of men. Of course that was why he was questioning me. And of course he would punish this Jon Cavala. Even the Congregation of the Humane Faithful must punish such wrong-doing.
Now, the thought uppermost in my mind - as of course you will understand - was one of shame. It is shameful to lie, and very shameful to preserve oneself from rightful justice by lying. But, I reasoned, I had filled myself so fully with shame that an additional quantity would settle easily into that mass and barely even be noticed. If by pretending to be Syrophoenician I could escape the punishment allotted to Jon Cavala, then why should I not do so? And so I resolved to impersonate Syrophoenician. My thought was this: that this would confer some meaning upon my friend’s death, for by freeing up his identity he had made it possible for me to live. It was, in other words, as if he died to save me. Perhaps this thought was mere rags to hide my shame, but it was my thought for all that.
‘Is that your name?’ repeated the officer.
‘Syrophoenician,’ I said, gravely, and then, almost too late - with the sudden, thundering understanding of what the enemy database would include - I added, ‘was my commander.’
Three words, there, a mere three words that preserved my life, and enabled the composition of this narrative (for a dead man cannot write his memoirs). There they are. They were added as a frantic afterthought. It is by such mutterings that the thread of this or that story is severed, or allowed to continue.
‘He’s listed here as dead,’ said the enemy captain, tapping his data tablet with its stylus.
‘Just so. I took command of the remaining troops upon his death.’
‘And your name?’
‘Steelhand,’ I said.
He consulted his tablet. The data upon it had evidently been assembled from the data stolen from our processors at a certain time. When I had logged my weapon, after witnessing the death of Syrophoenician with my gun’s eye, this information had been loaded into the machine; such that when the machine was corrupted, and made accessible to the enemy, this information was part of what they seized. But I hoped that the things that had happened subsequent to that data meltdown were unknown to them.
He seemed to spend a long time looking at his screen.
‘Very well, Soldier Steelhand,’ he said eventually. ‘Your people, the people of the Book, are renowned for truth-telling. Is that so?’
‘The Bibliqu’rân tells us that the All’God hates a lie, and a liar,’ I said. ‘As you know.’
‘You won’t lie to me?’
‘I cannot lie to you.’
‘Very well. I don’t wish to create a division of loyalty here, Soldier Steelhand,’ said the captain. ‘But we wish to apprehend one soldier, a man called Jon Cavala.’
‘You wish to apprehend him?’ I asked levelly.
‘He has committed certain crimes, beyond the actions legally sanctioned for a soldier in wartime. He must be tried, I am afraid. I shall not press you, if you choose not to answer, for you have rights as a prisoner under our code. But I will ask you nevertheless: do you know this man?’
‘He is dead,’ I said. ‘I know him well - he served under me. I was with him when he died. You will,’ I extemporised, ‘probably find his corpse a league or so north of here.’
‘It would be fruitless for us to look,’ said the captain, drawing symbols in the face of his data tablet. ‘You headless devils all look alike to me.’
I have, of course, thought a great deal about this lie of mine in the years since. One question that recurs, in such a way that it is impossible to avoid it, is the why of dying. For what purpose did Syrophoenician die? Or Steelhand ? There have been times when I have almost convinced myself that Steelhand did indeed perish in order to save my life, leaving his name free for me to take. And thinking so, of course, gives shape to what might otherwise be a chaos of meaningless grief. But on the other hand: is it not an act of egoism to declare that one life - mine - is valuable enough to deserve the death of another? This seems to me hard to justify.
Fortunately, perhaps, it is not given to me to justify this thing.
PART FOUR
Faces
One
I was a prisoner of war for a year. The enemy did not put us to work, the imposition of slave labour (as they considered it) being contrary to their ethics. This was, if anything, a cause for regret; as a bondsman I would have been more comfortable working than sitting in a cell with four other headless with nothing to do but talk and fall silent; nothing to do but sleep or wait to sleep.
My ribs healed.
They provided us with pharmocopy, although via mist-injections through the skin rather than in purses to be ingested. This they did, I am sure, out of a rigid sense of the strict application of humanitarian codes, for that was the sort of people they were.
We five, in that large but low-ceilinged cell, had nothing much in common beyond our headlessness and the fact that we had all served as soldiers. We none of us talked much about ourselves, but only of what we fancied was the on-going news of the war. This was a subject that fascinated us mightily, perhaps because we were given by our captors no information at all about the war’s progress. Naturally we speculated. We could not assume that our enemy had suffered utter defeat, for in that case we would surely have been freed by our own people. But neither could we attribute utter defeat to our side, for our minds revolted at such a thought. So, perhaps, the fighting was still going on, perhaps it would always be going on, army clashing against army with the endless reverberations of a repeatedly struck gong.
Breath pulled into the lungs, and breath pushed out again, and this bodily momentum marked always by the tick-tock clicking of five neck valves. There was something insect-like in the interlocking mark of these sounds, but of course after a while we ceased to register it.
A great deal happened during those months, as will inevitably be the case between five people over a long stretch of time, even if those people be confined to a small room. But this is not the place to detail all those happenings, the berries and the thorns of that time that inevitably intruded as our personalities grew wild into one another’s, like brambles. It is not that I consider the narrative of that time irrelevant, or beneath notice; on the contrary, I consider it a more worthwhile story than many others that eagerly foist on the public their drab exotica. I do not pass over this time because it was monotonous, although it was. I pass over it because it is about me, and I am not the point of this story.
As you will have gathered now, my reader, this is the story of Siuzan Delage, who lost her head to save my life. Steelhand lost his name to save my life, but his was a lesser sacrifice since, being dead, his name was something for which he had no use. Siuzan, on the other hand, gave up everything. I had come to love her more completely than I had ever loved any other person, and moreover - perhaps which is more important (for this realisation came to me during my captivity with great force) - more even than I loved myself. I had stolen Steelhand’s name, and poured shame down my throat and into my belly, but I had not done this to preserve my life for its own sake, the mere relentless accumulation of breath upon breath. I had done this thing for her. I lived now for one purpose: to return to my home world and try, in whatever way I could, to make amends to her.
Our speculation about the progress of the war outside our cell was answered when we were moved to a much larger and less secure prison. Here we mixed with, and received cuffs and abusive words from, headed troops. But we did not stay there long, for one day we were told to assemble in the main hall where the tannoy announced that we were to be released. The war, we were told, was over now.
Rather than simply release a large mob of ex-enemy soldiers in one great group - and since they made no provision for repatriation, careless as to how we made our way - they let us go in small batches over a num
ber of weeks. We emerged from the gate and were pointed in the direction of a tram. This (it was the only free ride I enjoyed in the whole of my time upon Athena) rolled, automatically driven, along the tracks from the woodland in which the camp was located. We boarded and it rolled on. It passed through fields and suburbs and finally into the central station at Gryke-Ashland, a major town in Dunmore, itself a major country in D’Or, one of the six continents of Athena. It was strange to see the fields, the tractors and people, and stranger still to see tall buildings of the city braving the sky itself: strange after months of fighting in the fog, followed by months of staring at the walls of our cell. The polarising fog had been dispersed, or else had never settled in this place. There were few signs of war-damage, for I suppose a year is enough time for a properly technological world to restore its farmlands and cities - except in the woodlands, where I did see many gaps and split, wrecked trunks of trees lying prone like dead men.
The tram stopped at every stop: small villages first, or (once) in the middle of damp fields with not one building visible. Later we rolled into the fringes of the conurbation, stopping at a number of suburban stations: deserted platforms under slate-concrete roofs. Some few of our number, prompted by whim, or perhaps by something they saw that appealed to them, got up and walked off the tram at these points. Some went singly, others in pairs or knots of three. One place, I suppose, seemed as good as another.
The sky was the colour of faded denim.
When the tram came to a complete halt there were eight ex-soldiers remaining in the compartment, I the only headless amongst them. I was sitting at the far end of the tram away from the other seven. I walked out last, and strode into the spring sunshine in an alien city whose language I did not speak, and where I knew nobody. I was not downhearted. I had, I told myself, survived the war. Many had not, better men than I. But I was alive. That was something.
The general style of building in this city was blocky and grey, with wide gaps at the joints of most of the outer walls and inner walls visible through these in blue and red. It was very unlike the architecture of my homeworld. The railway terminus appeared to have been built from colossal grey biscuits leant together, the constitutive stone a type of crumbly looking concrete. I walked onto the concourse outside the station and gazed at the buildings, and they looked to me like a child’s drawing of buildings. But perhaps this had been the deliberate intention of the architects. The people were almost all dressed in black and blue, and they were mostly hurrying, dropping into subway entrances that sat starkly into the ground like grave mouths, or rising up from them; zipping on pedplatforms or striding along. Some of them looked at me, but their glance tended not to linger, monstrous though I must have appeared to them.
I walked on. I walked the city that first day and slept that first night under a blue-mauve sky littered with a glorious broadcast of unfamiliar stars. Night-butterflies twisted and floated and rose in the darkness all about my head as I lay there. In the morning I rose contented. I felt, almost, holy; as if removed from the material pressures of ordinary living. I found food discarded in waste tubs and left out for the dogs and cats of the city - perfectly good food, which I took and ate very happily. There were public water fountains whenever I was thirsty.
I approached people in buildings, shops and workshops, randomly at first but later, as I learned, more purposefully, to ask for work. I was rebuffed, or ignored. Sometimes I was offered charity, which of course I accepted. More often I was told to go on my way.
Eventually I found a job. A grease collector called Hollis paid me a clutch of divizos a day to travel with him and haul tubs of used cooking fat and other organic grease from restaurants and schools, from hospital canteens and other places. Collecting the grease was easy. Processing it back at Hollis’s workshop was less pleasant, and the worst of it was that there were no washroom facilities, so I finished each shift sodden with oily running sop - and stinking, I have no doubt, although of course that was nothing to me. But I took to bathing in one of the city’s fountains, and sleeping underneath the parked buses at the bus station. The water in the fountain was as cold as vacuum under the blue-dark sky, and bristled goose-bumps onto my flesh. It made me feel alive. The drive shafts of the buses radiated heat for several hours after they were parked; I was not the only vagrant to sleep there.
My aim was to earn enough money to buy passage upon a spaceship to Pluse. I hoped to return to my homeworld and devote myself to searching for headless Siuzan, to apologise to her and make such amends as I could. Nor had I forgotten my vow to take revenge upon Mark Pol Treherne. But such passage is expensive and I had, at first, no money at all.
For a while my chief worry was obtaining pharmocopies of the necessary hormones. Lacking a population of headless, Athena’s shop owners did not carry preparations of these necessary chemicals, and when I asked, respectfully, that they be made up out of existing stock I was either ignored as a sight too freakish even to acknowledge, or else gruffly dismissed. My health suffered. Begging - an activity legal upon Athena, as it is not upon Pluse - enabled me to gather enough divizos together to buy some drugs. Necessity forced me to mix and swallow them in approximation of the pharmocopy purses upon which I had relied in the army. After a fortnight I fell in with a company of released war prisoners, all headed men and all Homish, who adopted me almost, as it might be, as a mascot. But they tired of me quickly when they discovered that the reputation of the headless for savagery was unsupported in my personality. After that I worked at minimum pay at a waste shop - a small business that sent devices into the sewers to collect deposits of congealed fat thrown down the drain (illegally) by restaurant and domestic kitchens. These deposits built up quickly, and needed to be dismantled, and I worked for a while in the confined spaces of the city’s waste channels. The machines that quarried the fat were stupid devices, and my job was to prevent them clogging up, or digging into the walls by mistake, it being cheaper to buy stupid automates and then pay me to service them than it would have been to buy more intelligent machines. Through this employer I discovered that there were a dozen or more similar or related enterprises in this city alone. I worked at several of them in due course.
I discovered many things, and one thing in particular that haunted me. Only rarely did I enter into conversation with the natives of Black Athena, and the most that any such folk would say to one such as myself were bald instructions to do such-and-such or go to such-and-such a place. But there were exceptions. One or two headed Athenians approached me, out of curiosity or pity, to discover more about my condition. After several such conversations it dawned on me that my name, Jon Cavala, poet, was wholly unknown to them. It surprised me then, and it still surprises me as I look back upon that time, that this discovery upset me as much as it did. But of course the reason is obvious enough: it was nothing but the wounding of a bad pride.
Two brief exchanges. The first with an employer, who was curious as to what I had done before the war, and whether losing my head would interfere with me resuming that former occupation (for I think he assumed I had lost my head in the fighting). I told him I had been a poet. He told me that he also read a great deal of poetry, ‘Television for the story, poetry for the shiver in the spine,’ he said. ‘My wife always says that, and she’s right.’ He was a tall, wide-built man and he ran a fat-recycling unit with his wife, who was small and forceful. His most characteristic posture was question-mark shaped, huddling over and angling his ear as if always fearful of missing something from below his line of sight.
‘But what did you do?’ he asked again.
I told him, again, that I had been a poet. It dawned on him that I did not mean that I had enjoyed reading poetry, but that I had been employed writing it. He looked confused. I attempted to clarify by saying, ‘My name is Jon Cavala. I have heard that my poetry is popular here on Athena . . .’ But the blankness of his face made it clear that he had never heard of me.
I don’t remember being concerned about this c
onversation at the time. But the capstone was a second conversation with a bookseller. The idea had got inside my mind that many copies of my poems were being sold on this world, but that I had received no royalty payments. I remembered my time as a headed man, and the small sums that accrued from my publishing, and I was certain that there had been no offworld monies. Working long hours for low wages to accumulate enough to buy passage home, the thought came to me that, perhaps, an approach to whichever house was publishing me on Athena might persuade them to pay me something. I assumed that my work, selling widely on several worlds, had made them a deal of money. I fantasised a bagload of totales; a rucksack filled with scrip.
The first task was to discover which were the publishers to whom I should make application. To this end I stepped inside a bookshop one morning before work. The shop was a single room, eighty yards high and lined on every wall with books. It smelt of wood dust and ink. In the middle was a man behind a desk, with a round cranium clear of hair and a flame-coloured face, and he was reading.
‘I beg your pardon,’ I said, in my accented but (by now) fluent enough Ellaish. ‘I have an enquiry concerning a poet.’