The Fifth Head of Cerberus

by Gene Wolfe

  This leads us to the third question: what is meant (in terms of the exempted classes already outlined) by the designation “child”. Clearly we must rule out in the beginning any question of mere age. Nothing could be more absurd than to suppose a defendant innocent though he committed some abominable act on Tuesday, but guilty were he to have committed it Wednesday. No, no, Your Honor, though I myself am only a few years past twenty, I confess that to think in that way is to invite a carnival of death just prior to each young man’s or woman’s reaching whatever age you determine shall be deciding. Nor can childhood be based on internal and subjective evidence, since it would be impractical to determine whether such interior disposition existed or not. No, the fact of childhood must be established by the way society itself has treated the individual. In my own case:

  I own no real property, and have never owned such property.

  I have never taken part in, or even witnessed, a legally binding contract.

  I have never been called upon to give evidence in a court of law.

  I have never entered into marriage or adopted another child.

  I have never held a remunerative position on the basis of work performed. (You object, Your Honor? You cite my own testimony with regard to my connection with Columbia against me? The prosecution cites it? No, Your Honor, it is a clever sophistry, but invalid; my tutorial position at Columbia was a manifest sinecure given me to enable me to complete my graduate work, and for my expedition to Sainte Anne I received my expenses only. You see? And who would know better than I?)

  Then surely, Your Honor, it is clear from all these points—and I could make a thousand more—that at the time of the crime, if in fact I am charged with any crime, which I doubt, I was a child; and by these proofs I am a child still, for I have still not done any of these things.

  As for my being an animal—I mean an animal as opposed to being a human being, an animal as a mere beast—the proof is so simple that you may laugh at me for troubling to present it. Are those who are permitted to run free in our society the animals? Or are they human beings? Who are confined in stalls, sties, kennels, and hutches? Which of the two great divisions sleeps upon bedding thrown upon the floor? Which upon a bed standing above the floor? Which is given bathing facilities and a heated sleeping compartment, and which is expected to warm itself with its own breath and clean itself by licking?

  I beg your pardon, Your Honor; I did not intend to offend the court.

  * * *

  Forty-seven has been knocking on the pipe—shall I tell you what he said? Very well.

  ONE FORTY-THREE, ONE FORTY-THREE, IS THAT YOU? ARE YOU LISTENING? WHO IS THE NEW MAN ON YOUR FLOOR?

  I have filled in the punctuation myself. Forty-seven does not use punctuation, and if I have misrepresented his intention, I hope he will forgive me.

  I sent: WHAT NEW? It would be very useful to have a stone—or a metal object as Forty-seven does (he says he uses the frames of his glasses) with which to tap the pipe. It hurts my knuckles.

  I SAW HIM THIS MORNING THROUGH MY DOOR. OLD, LONG WHITE HAIR. DOWNSTAIRS TO YOU. WHICH CELL?

  DON“T KNOW.

  If I had a stone I could rap on the walls of my cell loudly enough for those on either side to hear. As it is, the prisoner to my left raps to me—I do not know with what, but it makes every sort of strange noise, not just a rapping or ticking—but does not know the code. The wall on my right is silent; possibly there is no one there, or, like me, he may have nothing with which to speak.

  Shall I tell you how I was arrested? I was very tired. I had been to the Cave Canem, and as a result was up very late—it was nearly four. At noon I had an appointment with the president, and I felt quite certain I would be officially placed at the head of a department, and on very favorable terms. I intended to go to bed, and left a note for Madame Duclose, the woman at whose house I was lodging, to wake me at ten.

  Forty-seven sends: ONE FORTY-THREE, ARE YOU CRIMINAL OR POLITICAL?

  POLITICAL. (I wish to hear what he will say.)

  WHICH SIDE?

  YOU?

  POLITICAL.

  WHICH SIDE?

  ONE FORTY-THREE, THIS IS RIDICULOUS. ARE YOU AFRAID TO ANSWER MY QUESTION? WHAT MORE CAN THEY DO TO YOU? YOU ARE ALREADY HERE.

  I rap: WHY SHOULD I TRUST YOU IF YOU DO NOT TRUST ME? YOU BEGAN. (Hurting my knuckles.)

  OF THE FIFTH OF SEPTEMBER.

  WHEN I GET ROCK. HAND HURTS.

  COWARD! (So sends Forty-seven, very loudly. He will break his glasses.)

  Where was I? Yes, my arrest. The whole house was quiet—I thought this was only because of the lateness of the hour, but I now realize that most of them must have been awake, knowing that they were waiting in my room for me, lying in their beds hardly daring to breathe while they waited for the shots or screams, Madame Duclose, particularly, must have been concerned for the large, gilt-framed mirror in my room, which she had cautioned me about repeatedly. (Mirrors, I have found—I mean good ones of silvered glass, not polished bits of metal—are quite expensive in Port-Mimizon.) And thus there was no snoring, no one stumbling down the corridor to the lavatory, no muffled sighs of passion from Mlle Etienne’s room while she entertained herself with the fruits of imagination and a tallow candle.

  I did not notice. I scrawled my note (others think my hand very bad, but I do not think so; when I receive my appointment I will—if I have to teach classes at all—have my students write on the chalkboard for me, or distribute notes for my classes already printed in purple ink on yellow paper) for Mme Duclose and went up, as I thought, to bed.

  They were quite confident. They had a light burning in my room, and I saw the stripe of radiance at the bottom of my door. Surely if I had in fact committed some crime I would have turned and fled on tiptoe when I saw that light. As it was, I thought only that there had been some letter or message for me—perhaps from the president of the university, or possibly from the brothelkeeper at the Cave Canem who had earlier that evening asked my help in dealing with his “son”; and I decided that if it were he, I would not answer until the evening following; I was very tired and had drunk enough brandy to feel let down now when it was flickering out, and I was conscious of the inefficiency of my motions as I got out my key and then discovered that my door was not locked.

  There were three of them, all seated, all waiting for me. Two were uniformed; the third wore a dark suit which had once been good but was now worn and stained with food grease and the oil from lamps and, moreover, was a little too small for him, so that he had the appearance of the valet of a miser. He sat in my best chair, the chair with the needlepoint seat, with one arm hanging quite carelessly over the back of it, and the lamp with the globe painted with roses and the fringed shade at his elbow as though he had been reading. Mme Duclose’s mirror was behind him, and I could see that his hair was cut short and that he had a scarred head, as though he had been tortured or had had an operation on his brain or had fought with someone armed with some tearing weapon. Over his shoulder I could see myself in the tall hat I had bought here in Port-Mimizon after landing, and my second best cape and my stupid, surprised face.

  One of the uniformed men got up and shut the door behind me, throwing the night bolt. He wore a gray jacket and gray trousers and a peaked cap, and around his waist a broad brown pistol belt with a very large, old-fashioned looking revolver in a holster. When he sat again, I noticed that his shoes were ordinary workmen’s shoes, not of much quality and already quite worn. The second uniformed man said, “You may hang up your hat and coat, if you like.”

  I said, “Of course,” hanging them, as I usually did, on the hooks on the back of the door.

  “It will be necessary for us to search your person.” (This was still the second uniformed man, who wore a short-sleeved green jacket with many pockets and loose green trousers with straps about the ankles, as though he were intended to ride a bicycle as part of his duties.) “We will do this in either of two ways, depending on your own pref
erence. You may, if you like, disrobe; we will then search your clothing and allow you to dress yourself again—however, you must disrobe before us so that you have no opportunity to secrete anything you may have on your person. Or we will search you here and now, as you are. Which do you prefer?”

  I asked if I were under arrest and if they were the police. The man in the needlepoint chair answered, “No, Professor, certainly not.”

  “I am not a professor, at least, not at present as far as I know. If I am not under arrest, why am I being searched? What am I supposed to have done?”

  The man who had shut the door said, “We’re going to search you to see if there’s any reason to arrest you,” and looked at the man in the black suit for confirmation. The other uniformed man said: “You must choose. How will you be searched?”

  “And if I will not submit to being searched?”

  The man in black said: “Then we will have to take you to the citadel. They will search you there.”

  “You mean that you will arrest me?”

  “Monsieur…”

  “I am not French. I am from North America, on Earth.”

  “Professor, I urge you—as a friend—not to force us to arrest you. It is a serious matter here, to have been arrested; but it is possible to be searched to be questioned, to be—as it may be—even held for a time—”

  “Perhaps even to be tried and executed,” the man in the green jacket finished for him.

  “—without having been arrested. Do not, I beg you, force us to arrest you.”

  “But I must be searched.”

  “Yes,” said both the uniformed men.

  “Then I prefer to be searched as I am, without undressing.”

  The two uniformed men looked at one another as though this were significant. The man in black looked bored and picked up the book he had been reading, which I saw was one of my own—A Field Guide to the Animals of Sainte Anne.

  The man with the pistol belt came over, half-apologetically, to search me, and I noticed for the first time that his uniform was that of the City Transit Authority. I said: “You’re a horsecar driver, aren’t you? Why are you carrying that gun?”

  The man in black said: “Because it is his duty to carry it. I might ask why you yourself are armed.”

  “I’m not.”

  “On the contrary, I have just been examining this book of yours—there are tables of figures penciled on the flyleaves in the back, you see? Can you tell me what they are?”

  “They were left there by some former owner,” I told him, “and I have no idea what they are. Are you accusing me of being some sort of spy? If you’ll look at them you’ll see they’re nearly as old as the book and badly faded.”

  “They are interesting figures; pairs of numbers of which the first is given in yards and the second in inches.”

  “I’ve seen them,” I said. The man in the City Transit uniform was patting my pocjcets; whenever he found anything—my watch, my money, my pocket notebook—he handed it with an obsequious little gesture to the man in black.

  “I am of the mathematical turn of mind.”

  “How fortunate for you.”

  “I have analyzed these figures—they approximate quite well the conic section called a parabola.”

  “That means nothing to me. As an anthropologist I am more often concerned with the normal distribution curve.”

  “How fortunate for you,” the man in black said, repaying me for my sarcasm of a moment before. He motioned to the two uniformed men, who came to him. For a moment the three whispered together, and I noticed how similar their faces were, all three with pointed chins, black brows and narrow eyes, so that they might have been brothers, the man in black the eldest and probably the cleverest as well, the City Transit man the least imaginative, but all three of a family.

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  “We were speaking of your case,” the man in black said. The City Transit man left the room, shutting the door behind him.

  “And what were you saying?”

  “That you are ignorant of the law here. That you should have an attorney.”

  “That’s probably true, but I don’t believe you were saying that.”

  “You see? An attorney would advise you against contradicting us in that tone.”

  “Listen, are you from the police? Or the prosecutor’s office?”

  The man in black laughed. “No, not at all. I am a civil engineer from the department of public works. My friend here,” he indicated the man in green, “is an army signalman. My other friend as you divined, is a horsecar driver.”

  “Then why have you come to arrest me as though you were police?”

  “You see how ignorant you are of our ways here. On Earth, as I understand, it is different; but here all public employees are of one fraternity, if you follow me. Tomorrow my friend the horse-car driver may be picking up garbage—”

  The man in green interrupted to snicker, “You may say he’s doing that tonight.”

  “—my friend here may be a crewman on one of the patrol boats and I may be an inspector of cats. Tonight we have been sent to get you.”

  “With a warrant for my arrest?”

  “I must tell you again that it is best for you if you are not arrested. I say to you frankly that if you are arrested it is very improbable that you will ever be released.”

  As he completed this sentence the door opened behind me, and I saw in the mirror Mme Duclose and Mlle Etienne, with the horsecar driver standing behind them. “Come in, ladies,” the man in black said, and the horsecar driver herded them into the room, where they stood side by side in front of the washstand, looking frightened and confused. Mme Duclose, an old, gray-haired woman with a fat stomach, wore a faded cotton dress with a long skirt (whether because the horsecar driver had allowed her to put it on before summoning her or because she had been using it for a night-gown, I do not know). Mlle Etienne—a very tall girl of twenty-seven or -eight—might have been not the sister, but possibly the half-sister or cousin of the three men. She had the sharply pointed face and the black eyebrows, but hers had been plucked thin to form arches over her eyes, which were, mercifully, not the dark, narrow eyes of the men but large and blue-purple like the dots of paint on the face of a doll. Her hair was a mop of brown curls, and she was, as I have said, exceedingly tall, her legs stiltlike in their elongation, rising on thin, straight bones to hips broader than seemed consonant with the remainder of her physique, after which her body contracted again abruptly to a small waist, small breasts, and narrow shoulders. She boasted tonight a negligee of some gossamer fabric like a very thin cheesecloth, but this was gathered in so many layers and foldings and wraps as to be quite opaque.

  “You are Mme Duclose?” the man in black asked that lady. “The owner of this house? You rent the room we presently occupy to this gentleman here?”

  She nodded.

  “It will be necessary for him to accompany us to the citadel, where he will converse with various officials. You will close this room and lock the door when we leave, do you understand? You will disturb nothing.”

  Mme Duclose nodded, wisps of gray hair bobbing.

  “In the event that the gentleman has not returned within one week, you will apply to the Department of Parks, which will dispatch a reputable man to this address. In his company you will be permitted to enter this room to inspect it for rodent damage and to open, the windows for the period of one hour, at the close of which you will be required to relock the room, and he will leave. Do you understand what I have just said?”

  Mme Duclose nodded again.

  “In the event that the gentleman has not returned by Christmas, you will apply to the Department of Parks as before. On the day following Christmas—or in the event that Christmas falls on a Saturday, on the following Monday—a reputable man will be dispatched as previously. In his company you will be permitted to change the bedding and, if you wish, air the mattress.”

  “On the d
ay after Christmas?” Mme Duclose asked in bewilderment.

  “Or in the event that Christmas falls on Saturday, on the Monday following. In the event that the gentleman has not returned by one year from this date—which you may compute, for your convenience, as being the first of the current month, should you so choose—you may again apply to the Department of Parks. You may at that time—if you wish—place the gentleman’s belongings in storage at your expense, or you may store them elsewhere in your home if you wish. They will be inventoried by the Department of Parks at that time. You may then use this room for other purposes. In the event that the gentleman has still not returned at a date fifty years distant from the date whose calculation I have just explained to you, you—or your heirs or assigns—may again apply to the Department of Parks. At that time the government will claim any article falling under the following categories: articles made wholly or in part of gold, silver, or any other precious metal; moneys in the currencies of Sainte Croix, Sainte Anne, or Earth, or other worlds; antiques; scientific appliances; blueprints, plans, and documents of all sorts; jewelry; body linen; clothing. Any article not falling under these categories shall become the property of you, your heirs, and assigns. If tomorrow you find you do not clearly recall what I have just told you, apply to me at the Department of Public Works, Subdepartment of Sewers and Drains, and I will explain to you again. Ask for the assistant to the General Inspector of Sewers and Drains. You understand?”

  Mme Duclose nodded.

  “And now you, Mademoiselle,” the man in black continued, turning his attention to Mlle Etienne. “Observe; I hand the gentleman a visiting pass.” He took a stiff card, perhaps six inches long and two wide, from the breast pocket of his greasy coat and handed it to me. “He will write your name thereupon and give it to you, and with it you will be admitted on your own recognizance to the citadel on the second and fourth Thursdays of each month between the hours of nine and eleven p.m.”