by Adam Roberts
The man looked up at me, and stared. I have noticed that people with faces feel uninhibited at staring at those without. Presumably their unembarassment is a function of the fact that, lacking a face on which to register our humanity, we headless seem to the subconscious of these people a kind of furniture.
‘Excuse me,’ I prompted him.
‘Name?’
‘Jon Cavala.’
‘Is that your name? Or the name of the poet in whom you are interested ?’
‘It is.’ I said, cautious after breaking my bond, ‘a poet’s name.’
He scratched his nose and put his book down. ‘Spell it,’ he said, picking a datascreen off the floor. I told off the letters, forgetting the Ellaish names of several of them, but giving good enough approximations for him to type it in.
‘We do not have him. He is not published here.’
This was a shock. ‘I beg your pardon one final time,’ I said. ‘But could you clarify? Has he ever been published here?’
‘No.’
‘Never been published in Ellaish translation?’
‘Never been published at all. I have never heard of him.’
The thing that first confused me about this, as I walked away from the shop, was the intensity of my disappointment. On reflection it seemed logical to me that the Levitt Dunber individual, during my sojourn within the virtual house on the virtual hill - it seemed logical that he had lied to me about my eminence as a poet. Perhaps this had been a misdirection designed to keep me, unsuspecting, in the virtual reality long enough for the enemy to upload whatever virus it was uploading. Perhaps there had been no Levitt Dunber, and he had been nothing more than a figment of my own imagination conjured by the peculiar circumstances in which I had been located. In that case my fame had been a projection of my own vainglorious and lamentable pride. This question bothered me for a long time.
And since I do not think I shall return to this question in what remains of my narrative, I shall record my conclusion, namely that I consider the latter explanation the more likely. My first thought had been that I had been captured and rendered unconscious and then my ordinator had been connected to some Ellaish mainframe, into which the virtual avatar of the real Levitt Dunber had entered. But this fact omits the observation that many headless were hacked in this fashion, and that I do not believe that the enemy mainframe would have been able to identify each of them with so much personal and specific information. Rather, I believe, a holding virus, reactive to my interaction after the fashion of computer algorithms, appeared to me as ‘Levitt Dunber’. Most of what this individual said was taken from my own mind, including the recitation of the poem about the inevitability of decay, and was an echo chamber, as it were, of my own obsessions, my anxieties and vainglories. The object of the exercise was merely to distract me long enough for the virus itself (I remembered how vivid had been the light that emerged from Levitt Dunber’s gullet) to establish itself in my subroutines. And the most worrying feature of the whole episode is that this virus, whatever it is, must still exist within my mind. It has not manifested itself, so far as I am aware; but I suppose it might at any time.
Two
I eventually accrued enough money to buy passage upon a ship called Thumbscrew. The ticket officer would not sell me a ticket to Pluse - which world contained only ramhammer ports, the Thumbscrew itself being a balanced-momentum craft - but he assured me that once we were upon a world that pledged direct allegiance to the Book it would be easy to purchase extra travel. This was not a very satisfactory arrangement for me, since the price of the Thumbscrew ticket was more than forty totales, a sum I had hoped would get me all the way home. But it was my best option, and I told myself that I could earn some more money upon whichever planet I ended up. There were other spacecraft that flew direct from Athena to Pluse, but they were more expensive than I could afford at that time.
My berth was in the general hold, and since transit was no more than a day I was content with no finer surroundings. I shared my particular square mattress with another headless - we two the only headless in all the craft. His name was Latour, and his experiences of war had jarred his sanity.
Within moments of me introducing myself to him, he made great play of confiding in me. He told me all manner of incriminating details. At this point the Thumbscrew had not even lifted off. ‘I beg of you,’ I told him dispassionately, ‘control your confessional urges. You do not know that I am to be trusted.’
‘Headless, like I,’ he pointed out. ‘We are members of an exclusive brotherhood. Adultery, this was the cause of - the cause of my - and you? You? You?’
I angled my torso away from him; but he was insistent.
‘Regret, regret, that’s the tone of my life now,’ he said. As he spoke to me he rolled up his sleeve and began picking at the flesh of his left arm with his fingernails. Old scabs marked that flesh, like a map of black volcanic islands in a pale sea. ‘I hoped the All’God had written my death into the war on—but, no. So I have a plan, a plan. I shall make up for my past crimes.’
‘It is good to atone,’ I said. ‘And it is good to have a plan.’
‘Indeed, indeed, but this is better than that. I have been trained, a soldier, to take life.’
‘That,’ I said, as to a child, ‘is not good.’
‘Listen to me, brother headless,’ he said. There were blotches of blood upon his arm now. The blood was sliding down his arm and dripping to the floor. ‘Listen to me, I shall seize the ship.’
At this I concentrated my attention, to determine whether this was merely the braggadocio of a deranged man or a genuine threat to all of us.
‘Now, friend,’ I said, speaking carefully. ‘Why would you wish to do such a thing?’
‘There is a time machine,’ he said.
‘How so?’
‘It is part of the functioning of any ship. A time machine.’
‘In,’ I conceded, ‘a manner of speaking only.’
‘I shall seize it. Then I shall force the ticketman to take me back in time, until before my attack upon Marthe, poor Marthe. Then I shall prevent the attack, and my head will not be taken, and I will not have to see Brownjean and Gunn and Alain killed.’
‘The ticket officer will be unable to oblige you,’ I said.
‘Why so? If he tries to resist,’ said the fellow, leaping up, ‘then I’ll force him. Do you think I’ve never killed? You think I lack will? Why do you doubt it?’
‘I don’t doubt it,’ I said, also getting to my feet. ‘But you misunderstand the nature of the time machine. It cannot take you back to the time of which you are talking. This is contrary to the rules of physics.’
He sat down and began again picking at the skin of his arm. ‘Do you say so?’
‘Such time travel as happens,’ I said, seating myself, ‘is a function of the very high velocities at which the craft moves. The effect of the particles which . . .’ But it is hard enough to explain the nature of faster-than-light travel even to the most intelligent listener, let alone to a crack-brain. ‘Time dilates as we move faster than light, but the God particles ejected from the nose have, amongst other things, the effect of inverting this dilation.’
‘God!’ he said, as if in derision. ‘God particles!’
‘Such time travel as there is,’ I said, ‘amounts only to the effect that the ship which leaves this star at noon arrives at its destination at, precisely, noon, and not many millions of years in the future. But in order to arrive at its destination at a time before noon, as you desire, it would have to travel faster than an infinite speed, which, naturally, is impossible.’
‘Nothing is impossible for the All’God,’ he said slyly.
I tried again. ‘You misunderstand the situation if you believe that there exists a time machine upon this craft,’ I said. ‘It is, instead, that one of the properties of the stream of drive particles that—’
‘I know all this,’ he snapped. ‘Do you think I didn’t go to kindergarten? Do yo
u think I don’t know physics?’
‘Well, then,’ I said in a placatory voice, ‘you know that the derelativist effects of our drive is no time machine.’
‘Time machine!’ he scoffed. And then, ‘The ticketman will know how to operate it.’
‘Remember what we have just discussed,’ I suggested.
‘You think I won’t be able to persuade him,’ growled Latour. ‘But he’s only a ticketman. He has not seen fighting, such as I have seen, upon Black Athena.’
I made my excuses, went forward in the Thumbscrew where I reported him as a dangerous party to the RO officer. It took less effort to persuade this officer than I had thought it might. ‘I remember telling the ticket-officer, ’ the fellow said in accented Ellaish, ‘that he was too eccentric a fellow to take with us. I have seen war do this to many people. But he was stubborn. The ticket officer was stubborn. He has a quota of sales to meet, and if he does not meet it his commission is reduced. This makes him reluctant to turn away custom.’ He was not a native Ellaish speaker, and his accent gave his fluent sentences a wah-wah cadence. I could not guess what his original tongue had been.
‘What will you do?’ I asked.
‘I shall arrest him, on suspicion, as the terms of the AHF provisions for the portage of enemy aliens permit me to do.’ Then, smiling, he said something complicated-sounding in his native language, of which, of course, I understood nothing at all.
‘I speak only Homish and Ellaish,’ I said apologetically.
‘There is no need for an apology,’ the RO officer told me. ‘Take me to this fellow, identify him for me, and I shall arrest him.’
‘There is not need for me to identify him for you,’ I said. ‘He is, apart from myself, the only headless man aboard.’
‘Nonetheless the law requires that the complainant identify the person complained of.’
‘Very well.’
When I went back to the general hold, with the RO officer a few paces behind me, Latour saw us coming. He leapt up, and began complaining loudly that he was being persecuted, that he had done nothing wrong and so on.
‘Be quiet now, Latour,’ I advised him.
‘You have betrayed me,’ he cried. ‘You are a traitor. What price the solidarity of the headless? What price the unity of the congregation of the Book?’
‘Be calm,’ I said. I could see the other portage-class passengers watching in alarm, or, some, in amusement at this scene.
‘I have come to arrest you.’ the RO officer told Latour, ‘under the terms of the AHF provisions for the portage of enemy aliens. I may, since we have yet to depart, eject you from the craft; or I may confine you in a cell for the duration of the journey. Which do you prefer?’
‘I must return to Pluse!’ Latour cried. ‘Do not put me off the ship! I shall choke in the vacuum!’
‘We are not in space,’ said the RO officer. ‘We have not yet left the planet. But, since you request it, I shall confine you aboard for the duration.’ He stepped forward. Latour brought out a knife. All weapons were supposed to have been stowed before coming aboard. It later transpired that this knife had been laser-cut from a bone to avoid the metal-detection devices. But, though made of bone, it certainly appeared sharp enough. The RO officer brought out a chiller from a hip holster and spoke harshly, and, in an instant, the man’s resistance vanished. He dropped his knife and wailed. The chiller was returned to its holster. ‘I am ineffectual!’ Latour cried. ‘I am weak!’ But the RO officer paid no mind to this, and strapped his elbows together behind his back.
‘I’m glad at least,’ he told me, as he dragged the fellow away, ‘that he indicated a desire to stay on board. Had I ejected him we would have been legally obliged to refund him the cost of his ticket, and then the ticket officer would have been furious with me.’
As I said earlier, this is not my story; it is the story of Siuzan Delage who lost her head to save my life. The minutiae of my voyage home are not relevant to that story. The same is true of the six weeks I spent upon Forward, the first planet upon which the Thumbscrew stopped from which it was possible to buy passage to Pluse. It is enough that I worked there, and ate little, and slept out of doors regardless of weather - slept outside in the cold, dark-coloured rain showers and the mauve snowfalls and the bright cloudless nights that were the coldest of all, wrapped in scraps of fur like a caveman from the dawn of time. I worked first in an animal skinnery, and then in a sewage facility catching rats. I earned more totales, and eventually I was able to buy a ticket to my home.
I can add, now, that this detour - though infuriating to me at the time - was a ‘fortunate inconvenience’, the felix incommoditas of which theologians sometimes speak. For I later discovered that all travellers from Athena direct to Pluse were taken aside, questioned, and tested for DNA by the authorities. I would have been logged as Jon Cavala, returning to my home. Once entered as such on the police database, Chevaler Bonnard would certainly have continued his persecution of me - reporting me to the army as a deserter, perhaps, or arresting me and trumping me up for false trial. Had this happened, I would never have met Siuzan Delage again, and my story would have had no point to it. This very story, the one you are reading now, would have had no conclusion. As it was, though, arriving from Forward I was not DNA-CHECKED, and accordingly I could come back to my own world under the assumed name of ‘Steelhand’.
I set down on Pluse far from my destination, on the island-nation of Man Pasio, at the port of Nize. Having travelled trillions of leagues in days it took me months to travel the last few thousand back to Doué. This, of course, is one of the ironies of travel in this, our modern world. But I got to Doué eventually. There, still bearing Steelhand’s name, I stayed for a month, working in the docks with a gang of seasoned headless. We packed and unpacked containers, and slept on bales in the main warehouse.
But I had no desire to stay in Doué. I believed that Siuzan was still in Cainon. It might have been possible, of course, that Siuzan had come back down to this town; but my instinct was that she would still be in the city where she had been punished. Of course I wanted to go to her.
It was strange to walk streets that were so familiar to me, to count the lime trees along Straight as I had done as a child; to pass the library and the State Temple, and yet to see all these things with artificial eyes as a stranger and alien, lacking even my true name. Sometimes I walked past people I had known very well in my youth - people who had clasped me and called me best friend - and, of course, they walked straight by without a glance. How could they recognise me? Quite apart from the lack of a head, I was a different person to the one I had been in almost every way.
I contemplated walking north to Cainon, as I had done before, but though the hardship would have been nothing to me as I now was, yet the memory of the last time I had walked that way was too painful. To think that I had walked with Mark Pol and Gymnaste and with Siuzan herself - to think that she had been assaulted in the foulest manner, only yards from me, whilst I slept - and that she had said nothing! It had the logic of nightmare.
To think of the woe that is in memory.
I could not walk across that ground again. Accordingly I worked in the dock until I had saved enough for an airbus. The price of the ticket was eight totales. It would have cost me more for a regular ticket - twelve totales and fifty divizos, more than I remembered from my younger days - but I was refused the sale of such a ticket. I could fly with the cargo or not fly at all, this is what I was told; and I took the cargo place without rancour. The hold was chilly and only partially pressurised; but I was not too uncomfortable, and the flight lasted only an hour.
And so, after my long detour, I returned to Cainon. I rode a bus from the airport to the centre of the city, where he hasn’t got a head. I dismounted and strolled the roads. I saw buildings I recognised, and buildings that I did not (but after all, I had not seen much of the city on my previous visit). It was all very unremarkable, as if I had been anaesthetised to it. I felt no twinge at
returning, although in a sort of emotional knight’s-move I did feel regret that I felt no regret - it seemed to me that walking the streets of the city in which the woman I loved had lost her head, and done so because of my moral cowardice, should have moved me more than it did. But my conscience had become, perhaps, callused like a workman’s hand by the war.
I walked the streets. I stood beside freeways where the slab-sided cars of Cainon burlied and dashed, and where the dust went up into the air from their wheels. I loitered outside shops, and cafés and galleries. It felt my way back inside the city.
The strangest thing was being amongst so many headless again without the military context. For there were a great many headless here. Before, when I had still had my head, or indeed shortly after it had been removed, I had simply not seen the many headless thronging the roads. Now, of course, I noticed them all the time.
I found lodgings in a dormitory - a former cinema, I believe, that had gone out of business and had fallen into disrepair and had been bought by a low businessman, a dealer in slums. He rented slum-space to headless and other undesirables, and I took lodgings in one such property. He was later accused and convicted of usury and sent to prison, as it happens; but this is not his story. It was a large, run-down building on the outskirts of the town. It faced the road with one tall windowless wall, slightly curved, made out of pebble-dashed sandstone and rather resembling peanut-brittle. Round at the side, the wide entrance door had been filled with bricks, excepting only the space in the middle for a galvanised metal door as slender as a postbox. Through this I slipped every morning, coming back from my night-time job, making my way to the room I shared with four other headless, for my day’s sleep. A large pan of pap warmed on a stove in the corner; four mattresses thin as velvet were arranged in the middle of the floor at right angles, as if marking out the Hindu swastika pattern. I would eat, and fall directly asleep. In the late afternoon I would wake, and perhaps talk to my fellow slum tenants, or else wander the streets of Cainon under the late sun. The slum was not far from one of the city’s many public squares, water misting up in billows from a fountain in the middle, cafés and bookshops hiding their faces under the cap peaks of their awnings on all sides. I often rested there for a while, by the pouring water, before strolling further in towards the centre of town, past the headed throngs in the late afternoon sun, the chalk-yellow and washed-crimson of the low skimming light, where lemon-coloured dust light as talcum was made thickly visible by the quality of the light.