by Adam Roberts
‘I have a reading,’ said the policeman, looking down at his device. ‘This isn’t him.’
‘Hose the others off,’ demanded the first policeman.
Again I stood perfectly still as the supervisor fetched a hose and sprayed the remaining workers, myself included. Once the animal soil was washed from our disposable overalls, processing the DNA was much more quickly achieved. The man to my left was processed. Then the dart snagged in my skin and was withdrawn.
‘This is him,’ said the policeman.
‘Steelhand?’ asked the supervisor, startled. ‘But he can have committed no crime. He is a dependable worker . . .’
‘Come with me,’ the first policeman said to me. His words acted as the command that provoked movement in me. I came, clankily, to life, like a rusty old automate or remote. I walked from the workfloor and out through the changing rooms, with one policeman ahead of me and one behind. I paused only to pull off my disposables and toss them in the chute. Otherwise I walked with a perfect and unflawed meekness out of the factory, and into the police car waiting outside.
Eight
What was going through my mind? Nothing at all. I was a clod of earth being moved by a spade. I was so forceless that they did not even bother handcuffing me.
They drove me to the police station, a journey that took perhaps a single minute. They drove into the area before the station reserved for police cars and pulled up. They got out and opened the door for me. I got out.
‘You might as well take a look at the city,’ one of the policemen advised. ‘It’ll be your last.’
I did not reply. But his words stirred a distant reaction inside me, something approaching regret. This was not a painful emotion, exactly. I think that, on that day, everything had been too thoroughly overthrown and cast down for pain. But, as I walked between these two men up the ramp, I did indeed take one last glance at the city. I stared at the four-towered marble box of the police station. One wall of this structure was gleaming pink with the light of the setting sun. It looked as if lit from within. Beyond it was the interrupted tessellation of rectangles and squares and diagonals of the Cainon itself.
A thought nagged me: I had not collected my month’s wages. I supposed I would not need it now, but the thought upset me anyway. It was an incompleteness, a ragged edge that it would not have taken a moment to smooth.
Again there was that sensation of regret, very far away and deep inside. But what purpose would I have for the money now?
I stepped in through the main entrance. Here was the entrance hall, where I had waited, meekly enough, to be inducted into the military. The policeman behind the desk was a different individual to the one who had been on duty that day.
We walked through a heavy metal door and down a long corridor. At the far end of this corridor we turned left into a small interrogation room. There was no desk; but three chairs were set out facing one another at the vertices of a regular triangle. I was told to sit in one of the chairs. I did so. The policemen left.
I sat there for a long time. I am not certain for how long I sat there.
I contemplated the sensations of regret, such as they were, that needled in my heart. I considered this: that I had lived for the last few weeks in a state of happiness unprecedented in my life, and that over the last eight days that happiness had risen to an intensity I had never before known. This perfect globe had been struck away in a single day with a soundless, swift blow. Was that not reason for regret? But this, I thought, was not the core of it.
It was not the loss of my joy that gave me this twinge. It was the loss of my unhappiness. Or, to be more precise, it was the fact that so large a lump of anger and misery could have been transmuted into air, into, Assaulted! The very idea! But here comes my bus, so instantly, so effortlessly. It had been my whole life, a force more pervasive than gravity, for three years! And now I discovered I had been focused all that time on a nothingness, a deception or an illusion. That was the loss that desolated me. The severity of any suffering is made tolerable by the thought that it is at least significant, but that significance was precisely what had been taken from me. To live for years under the illusion of weight when in fact I had been the most weightless individual in the history of humankind! It amazed me that I had not floated away entirely. It is, I discovered, much harder to cope with the sudden loss of unhappiness than happiness. Very much harder.
The door trembled and flew open. Of course it was Chevaler Bonnard.
‘Sieur Jon Cavala,’ he said warmly. ‘I hoped, and indeed expected, never to see you again. I had hoped you would go off and die in the wars, like a decent sort. But here we are again. Here we are again.’
He stepped in and sat down in one of the chairs. He was followed by one of the two arresting policemen, a thick-necked, tyre-muscled man in blue top and matching meadhres, who sat in the remaining chair. This second policeman unhooked his chiller from his belt and laid it across his lap, but the gesture was almost a disdainful one, as if to say, See! Do you really think I would need this to restrain you? Can’t you see how large and strong I am?
Bonnard looked just as he had done before: his long face, his sharp facial bones, his retreated eyes, the cheerful ferocity of their expression.
‘You look thinner,’ he said to me. ‘Altogether weaker. When last we met I remember being struck by how impressive was your musculature. That’s all gone now, clearly. I suppose a diet of pap and menial work is not conducive with a well-developed musculature.’
The other policeman chuckled at this, as if to imply that he did not subsist upon a diet of pap.
‘Very well, Sieur Cavala. You do not object to me addressing you as Sieur Cavala?’
I did not reply.
‘Very well. The last time we met, I seem to recall, you had some fiddling moral objection to the honorific. But then again, the last time we met you were not hiding under a lie-name . . . Steelhand, is it? Is that your current alias?’
He waited for a while, but I said nothing.
‘You cut a pitiable figure,’ he said eventually. ‘I am sorry to say it. I have a great deal of experience of headless, and have become expert at recognising their body language. The last time you were here you were not so broken-down - you had spirit then. Do you remember attacking that other headless fellow? What was his name? The whole time in custody you were tense, full of your fury. Now look at you. Your arms hang limp!’
I did not reply.
‘I see,’ said Bonnard, with a little laugh, ‘that you refuse to rise to my baiting. Good for you! And I am glad to see you patient. You’ll need patience, where you are going. Charges? We must move on to the subject of charges. But you must not blame Siuzan Delage—’
I could not help stiffening slightly at this name.
‘Aha!’ said the second policeman, as if I had given myself away.
‘Yes, you still have one button that may be pressed,’ said Bonnard, smiling. ‘That is good to see. It’s good to see that the stuffing has not wholly been knocked from you. Well, I happened to have a meeting with Siuzan today. We often work together. She mentioned meeting you outside your workplace. She meant it kindly, of course. She was only gossiping, which is her manner. A pleasant woman, though not possessed of the most incisive of intellects.’
I should, perhaps, have stayed quiet. ‘The All’God hates a lie, and a liar,’ I said.
‘A liar?’ repeated Bonnard in mock surprise. ‘A liar, such as the man who though named Jon Cavala would tell the world his name is Steelhand? A liar such as that?’ The second policeman grunted at the justice of this observation.
I did not reply.
‘But that is the least of it,’ Bonnard said. ‘False identity is a prison sentence of up to seven years, and we must observe the law in every particular. But after the seven years are up you will not be released, Sieur Cavala; on the contrary, we will then pass you over to the army. Your file, it seems, lists you as never having been properly demobilised. Legally you are a de
serter. Moreover, there are certain other charges, pertaining to breaking the duty of a bondsman upon another world. One of the terms of the Cessation Agreement has to do with either passing such criminals over to Ellaist authorities, unless we are prepared to punish them ourselves to the same standard as Ellaist law.’ He shook his head. ‘Death, I’m afraid. Unfortunate for you. But in the circumstances you should thank me that you will not face that fate for seven years. I am, I can tell you, a stickler for the letter of the law. You will be imprisoned for precisely that time. It will give you time to commune with your conscience. You could write your memoirs! You could meditate in writing upon on the fate that the All’God passes out to us!’
‘You hate us,’ I said.
‘Indeed,’ he agreed, matter-of-fact. ‘Do you wonder at it? I see what your type has done, the crimes you commit that lead to your beheading. And I see what you continue doing even after decapitation. And you particularly, Sieur Cavala. I hate you in particular. Only last week I had dinner with my friend Georgis Benet. Bernardise was there.’
This was news from a very distant part of my consciousness. ‘Bernadise, ’ I said.
‘Years later and she is still marked by the shame of what you did to her.’
‘I didn’t rape her.’
Bonnard scowled at me. ‘And you said yourself that the All’God hates a lie, and a liar! Oh, you mean you did not force yourself upon her. You mean you did not bruise or cut her, or bully her with your gym-built muscles. But you pressured her, Sieur Jon Cavala. Did you not? You applied emotional force. Do you deny it? You focused your expertise with language, the discourse of love and romance and all your mournful little poems, onto the malleable material of her soul. She agreed to have sexual relations with you? But how could she agree? She was a child; a twenty-year-old child. Afterwards she felt the shame and agony of what you had done to her. She still feels it. A girl of such purity, and her life now is bent out of shape. For that you deserved much worse than a mere beheading. But the law is the law.’ He sat back, and the storm had passed away from his face. He beamed.
I said weakly: ‘You told me Siuzan Delage had been raped. You insisted she was facing an inevitable decapitation.’
‘Did I cause your sensitivities to suffer emotional pain?’ he said absently. ‘How can I express the height and depth and breadth of my sorrow for that falsehood? I assumed you would confess to save her, of course. I am a professional judger of character, and I judged that such would be your reaction to the situation in which I had placed you. With your confession it would have been easy to arrange an execution. I could have told the courts how necessary it was not to prolong Siuzan Delage’s suffering by forcing her to testify and so forth. Your death, and justice! Justice for Bernadise. But you did not oblige. It still puzzles me. You refused to confess. Why was that? I wonder.’
I assumed the question was rhetorical, but he paused to give me space to answer. In a low voice I repeated: ‘The All’God hates a lie, and a liar.’
‘Oh I have no doubt the All’God hates all of us almost as much as He loves us all,’ said Bonnard. ‘That’s of no consequence. The best I can say of you, Sieur Cavala, is that your moral cowardice surprised me. I suppose I had expected better of you. Which I suppose means that I thought there was some good in you. Still, I had ample reason to believe that a term in the army would be the death of you. You really should have died in the Sugar War. That was what should have happened. You were lucky.’
This word chimed with me, for some reason. I pondered. Then I recalled to myself that I had spent the previous night in an agony of uncertainty as to whether I had repressed the terrible memory of raping Siuzan Delage. My encounter with the real Siuzan had upended my certainties, certainly, but it had also - instantly, effortlessly, without intent - purged my soul of this worst of crimes. It had dissolved the sin wholly. Mark Pol, though annoying, was equally innocent of that crime. I was innocent myself. There was no crime for me to be guilty of.
This, I reflected, was something.
I felt another pang, but this time it was for the happiness I had known over the last few weeks and which now had passed away. It seemed to me, somehow, unfair that Providence had dangled the prospect of a new life and joy in front of me, only to withdraw it on the very day the happiness was calendared to begin. But fairness is a child’s criterion for judging the cosmos.
I remembered that I had agreed to meet Siuzan, or the woman I had thought was Siuzan, outside the house after my work. We had been planning to walk away together. She was probably there now, waiting for me, wondering what had happened to me. She would wait until darkness. She would probably wait all night. In the morning she would be deeply saddened to think that I had abandoned her on the very threshold of starting a new life together. What would she think? She would be so disappointed in me! She would think I had run out on her, that I lacked even the courage to tell her directly that I could not go with her. She would think me a liar and a dissembler.
This was intolerable. It clicked something inside me. The woman I had thought was Siuzan Delage - what about her? Think of her. Had I, or had I not, fallen in love with her? Was she, or was she not, a good person, fair of soul? Had the happiness we experienced been real or unreal? Real. Yes, and good. Loved and loving. I had a responsibility for her happiness, too, even if she had lied to me. I could not leave her sitting on a doorstep all through the night without explanation of any kind. This, I think, was the first actual, active decision I came to since encountering the real Siuzan by the bus-stop.
‘I must go,’ I said. ‘You must let me go. Not for my sake for the sake of another. A woman.’
‘Indeed,’ said Bonnard, managing to convey in that single word an eloquent combination of uninterest in my desires and certainty that I would never be released from prison.
‘I must go,’ I said again, more urgently.
The second policeman chuckled at this. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I forget the precise legal phrasing - what is it? Go from this place to another place there to be confined—’
‘—There to be held. . .’ corrected Bonnard.
‘Held,’ mused the second policeman. ‘It is a caring word.’
‘Adequate care is one of our responsibilities,’ agreed Bonnard.
But I had no time for this banter.
‘I am sorry,’ I said once more. ‘I really must go.’
I stood up.
It was not desperation, exactly, that prompted me to this; neither a pressing desire to escape, nor even a strong belief that I deserved freedom. Rather it seemed to me simply that it was unacceptable that Siuzan, or the woman I still thought of as Siuzan, should be made to wait without any explanation of why I did not come. That could not be allowed. My certainty that this must not be allowed overwhelmed my rational or calculating mind, the part of the mind that thought of consequences. I could not help myself. I must impress this fact upon my captors. It may be that I believed I could convince them of this necessity by sheer force of will.
The second policeman stood up. His chiller was in his left hand.
‘Sit down,’ he said. He did not speak in an unkindly way.
I did not sit down.
‘I do believe he feels unable to assist us with our enquiries,’ Bonnard said, in a jovial voice with a chuckle running underneath it.
The second policeman flicked his chiller on. I saw the motion of his thumb.
I remember thinking: this is a situation that needs to be handled cautiously. There was going to be pain, I knew that; and there was a very real possibility of death. I was reconciled to the necessity of the pain. But the death was a different matter.
I straightened all the fingers of my left hand, and flopped the arm out, chopping the tips of the hand against the second policeman’s Adam’s apple. The organ seemed to pop inwards, inverting itself, under the pressure I applied. The man’s eyes widened, his mouth snapped open. He made a curiously subdued noise, a sort of scraping or croaking sound. With a quick
movement I put the four curled fingers of my right hand into his mouth, gripping him by the inside of his cheek, with my thumb on the outside. The fingernail of my ring-finger was slightly pointed, no more than a }, as it had been ever since my army days; I kept it this way, a habit of personal grooming. Between the point of this on the inside of the cheek and the pressure of my thumb on the outside I was able to pierce the skin of the cheek, and so get a grip on the slippery dermis, all in a single smooth moment. I pulled with all the force that was in my right arm and the man came tumbling forward. His skin tore through, separating the cheek into two flaps, but not before I had imparted a sufficient momentum for him to come tumbling down. I dodged to the right, and he fell forward. The charged chiller in his flailing left hand connected with his own right shoulder. He made a clumping sound as he hit the floor.