Land Of The Headless (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  ‘I only ask, Superior,’ I said, ‘because there are some small matters, some personal matters, to which I must attend before I can properly devote myself to my new life as a soldier.’ Neither of them said anything, which emboldened me to continue speaking. ‘Perhaps if I reported for duty tomorrow? The very first thing in the morning. I am quite used to rising early. This would enable me to tie up certain loose ends, and—’

  ‘Quiet!’ said the female office. ‘Your old life is dead to you now.’

  ‘But with respect, Superior—’ I said.

  ‘Nothing more,’ the male officer said. ‘No more words from you.’

  I was silent. The truck rolled on. ‘Superiors,’ I tried again. ‘Pardon me, but my mind is full of questions . . . who is the commanding officer at camp? To whom should I report?’ My thought was that I might be able to persuade this person that it was imperative I be given a space of time - perhaps no more than a day - to arrange my affairs. But neither soldier spoke to me.

  The truck stopped, rolled forward for a while, stopped again. Without windows it was not possible to know what was happening, except that I could see my two escorts readying themselves to disembark and in this way I knew that we had arrived.

  I climbed out of the truck, and was taken to a waiting room in which four other headless sat silently. I did not attempt to talk to any of these.

  My escorts left me there, unattended.

  After a quarter of an hour or so of silent sitting, I decided to try slipping away. I got to my feet and walked about the room, as if inspecting the walls (they were tiled: a motif of blue tiles in a knight’s-move pattern repeated and rotated upon a white ground ). I looked at the posters attached to the wall: one was an animated scene of an apparently endless stream of glum-looking cartoon headed people stepping smartly into a recruitment office and emerging from the far side of the building in cartoon pale uniforms looking happy. Then I made my way to the door. It was unlocked, and opened to my hand.

  Outside the sun was shining. My software blanched, and then adjusted for the change in levels of light. I could make out a wide space - a parade ground - at the far end of which, very distant, was a wall. It looked like a low wall at this distance, but there were some people walking in front of it, and it was twice the height of a man. There were some buildings, blocky halls with sharply white walls and slanting orange tile roofs, to the left and to the right was a very tall hanger constructed, it seemed, of sheets of metal crinkled like gigantic corduroy. Behind and to the right of this an enormous stone platform was just visible, and parked upon it three spacecraft: the real thing, vessels for travelling through space. Sculptures in silver of giant creatures from an impossible mythology, half bat and half bird.

  Beyond the wall the mountains stood very tall, as if pulling themselves up to their full height. They wore sharp-creased white cowls covering their heads, perhaps so as to intimidate this encampment of men at their feet. There was a powdery precision to the details on the flanks of these mountains: pale cream and darker brown stretches etched with scraps and chinks of black for two thirds of the height, and the upper third looking as if the artist has not yet coloured them in.

  And above the overwhelming mountains - so high up that, as I angled my torso to see properly, I tripped and had to stumble backwards to regain my footing - was the sky. It registered as a single shade of bright blue on my vision software. Half a dozen sheaf-shaped clouds stood to the right, as if parcelled neatly away. The rest of the view was bright blue.

  I could not see a main entrance to the camp, and walked around the building from which I had recently emerged to check out the other side of the compound. Here I was met by a man in the pale blue uniform. ‘You!’ he barked. ‘Headless - you.’

  ‘Superior,’ I said, coming to a halt and standing up straight.

  ‘What are you doing wandering about out here?’

  ‘I was looking, Superior,’ I said, truthfully enough, ‘for the main gate.’

  ‘You don’t need the main gate,’ said this man. ‘You’re a recruit.’ This was not a question. ‘Go back inside.’

  ‘There are certain matters,’ I said, ‘to which I have to attend - one loose end, in particular, from my civilian life, which must be tied before I can devote myself properly to the military calling.’ Then, as he gawped at me, added, ‘Superior,’ and angled my torso down in a bowing gesture.

  ‘You headless all look alike to me,’ he said.

  ‘My name—’

  ‘I am not interested.’

  He stepped up close to me, stepped smartly all the way around me. ‘Your ordinator,’ he said, ‘has been modified by our Medical Officer?’

  ‘By no means.’

  He peered closely at me. Then: ‘you are not authorised,’ he barked. And, grasping my shoulder, he hurried me through the door and sat me down.

  I was back inside.

  The wait stretched. I attempted to quell my anxiety by reviewing my options. If possible I would slip away later that day - perhaps at night, when most of the camp, presumably, slept. Alternatively I would try simply to bluff my way past the guards, telling them that I had been ordered to go into the town. But if this proved impossible, and if I could not on any terms escape from the camp (or if I did get away but was unable to find Mark Pol) then one ultimate possibility remained. I could let Mark Pol go, and trust to providence that he would be apprehended in the commission of some later transgression. I would simply present myself to the camp Magister, and confess to him that I had assaulted Siuzan. He would turn me over to the police, who would release Siuzan Delage from her legal confinement. I would take the shame from her, take it clean away, and instead drape myself in it. My death would be a small price for a great gain. It would be a bargain.

  Having access to this last resort calmed me a little. I found my thoughts wandering, returning to memories of Siuzan. I tried to picture her face with an absolute precision; her white skin, her blue eyes, the weight of her dark hair. But the memory was elusive in its detail. I could not be sure of the exact path taken by the swivelling line that defined the profile of her nose. I knew it was tightly plump. A pert nose. But, with an upsetting vagueness, the face I was remembering would not stay pinned and fixed, but would wobble as though it was under flowing water. The nose would swell snoutishly, or shrink to a spine. I tried to remember her lips, so richly coloured my visual software had sometimes interpreted as black. But thin? Or thick? Plump and curve-kinked in their smile, or thinner, straighter lines? I tried to fix my thoughts on her mouth, but I could only see it wide and open, as if she were screaming noiselessly. This upset me; I felt the sparkle and shiver go across my skin, a tremor in my fingers, which I was coming to associate with the tears I no longer had the capacity to shed. Love means a supersensitivity to the hurt of the other, and she had been so gravely hurt. I felt it, acutely, in my own self.

  ‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ said somebody.

  I brought my attention back to the present. The headless man sitting next to me had leant sideways on the bench a little way, and was talking to me.

  ‘That?’ I said. My vocal tone was not wholly under my control.

  ‘You weren’t been in the army before?’

  ‘Before?’

  ‘Before you lost your head?’

  ‘No,’ I said. I swivelled my shoulders, back, forth, to take in the view of the room. The other headless were all sat as motionless as corpses.

  ‘I was,’ said this other man. ‘I served three years as a headed soldier. On release I got into bad ways - hence,’ and to complete his sentence he slanted his right hand through the space where his head had once been. ‘Nothing for me to do now but re-enlist. I won’t be a soldier any more; I’ll be nothing more than a carcass, but better a carcass than a gasping labourer outside. Or a beggar. My name,’ he added, holding out his right hand, ‘is Syrophoenician.’

  ‘A curious name,’ I said, grasping his hand. ‘I am Jon Cavala.’

  ‘Yo
u shouldn’t have done what you did just then,’ he said again, in a more kindly voice. ‘Allow me to advise you, drawing on my previous experience of the army.’

  ‘What is it I shouldn’t have done?’

  ‘Got up and wandered out. You should wait until the Medical Officer has rummaged through your ordinator.’

  ‘Will I be permitted to walk about after he has done so?’ I asked, genuinely interested.

  ‘Oh Jon Cavala, no,’ said Syrophoenician, as if amused. ‘Quite the reverse. It will render such wanderings quite beyond you, I would say. We are all criminals, here, after all. I confess it to my shame. I was beheaded for murder.’

  ‘Murder,’ I repeated.

  ‘And you?’

  I turned a little away. ‘For adultery,’ I said.

  ‘Ah!’ he said. ‘Rape?’

  ‘The circumstances,’ I said, ‘were complicated.’

  ‘They often are. They were for me. I lost my head for killing a man. Yet in the army I had served in half a dozen wars and killed howsoever many men - I have not kept count. Some do, some do keep count, but I reason that the All’God will keep the account for me. So - is not this a strange circumstance? For killing this man in the prosecution of the Sugar War I am given a strand of gold braid for the breast of my uniform. For killing that man in the prosecution of a fight in the Willow Quarter of Cainon I am beheaded.’

  ‘As you describe it,’ I said, ‘it appears certainly - unbalanced.’

  ‘These complications,’ said Syrophoenician, as if dealing in profound wisdom, ‘are the entanglements of civilian human life. No, no. It is not good. But there are no complications in the military! Do as you’re told is the height and the breadth and the width of the law. Do as you’re told by those in authority over you. There are no complications in the service of the All’God either.’

  ‘You are clearly a devout man,’ I said.

  ‘It has always seemed to me,’ Syrophoenician said, becoming more garrulous, ‘that serving in the military and serving the All’God are—’ But then, suddenly, he stopped, and sat upright and still on his bench. I wondered only for a moment at his behaviour, until I saw what he had seen, a shadow on the floor at that place where the sun painted its door-shaped rectangle of light. A moment later an officer stepped through into the room.

  ‘You, carcasses all,’ he called. ‘To the Medical Office.’

  We were led through the sunlight and into another complex of buildings, and again told to sit down on benches. But from here we were, one by one, ordered through to an adjacent room. When my time came I was told to strip naked and lie face down on an examination couch. The Medical Officer, a hound-faced man with dark skin and a swirled, grained mass of hair on his head, was brusque. He spoke into a data machine, recording my details.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Jon Cavala. I was a—’

  ‘Nothing more, name alone. Reason for beheading?’

  ‘Adultery,’ I said, flinching despite myself.

  He seemed unconcerned. ‘A good musculature,’ he told the data machine. ‘A recent decapitation. Within the last month, I’d say. Type three eye and ear prostheses. Acceptable. Type three neck cap.’ Here he tapped at my neck valve and setting with some sort of small hammer. ‘Thyroid largely present, still functional, I’d say. A moment,’ he said, apparently to me, ‘and I’ll replace this cap. What sort of hormonal supplement are you taking? When did you last augment it?’

  ‘I was in police confinement,’ I said. ‘The police doctor examined me and gave me a pharmocopy pouch - two days ago, I believe. It may have been three days.’

  The Medical Officer was clearly unhappy at having to listen to so lengthy an explanation. ‘I don’t have all the world’s time in my supply,’ he snapped. ‘You’ll receive fortnightly military pouches with the other members of your cohort. If you received a police pouch only a few days ago, I won’t bother with one now.’

  He pressed a cold metal tip against my shoulder blade and withdrew it. There was a wait, whilst he busied himself at something - presumably checking the DNA he had sampled.

  The next thing I knew he was tapping at my ordinator with two long needles, like metal chopsticks. ‘Type three ordinator,’ he told the data machine. ‘Standard procedure. Soldier, I’m going to switch off your pain receptors to remove your neck-stump cap and fit you with a military model. This won’t take long.’

  I felt a series of points of pressure inside my ordinator that related, slightly out-of-synch, to sensations of invasive pressure upon my body. Then there was a peculiar sense of hiatus. I was aware of a series of tensions and forces moving in my shoulders, not unlike as if I were being massaged; and I could see the lower body of the Medical Office moving about. There was a wrench, and my body juddered. I began to feel that something wrong. This feeling was not pain, exactly; but rather an apprehension of something out of place, like a dislocation in some bone so deeply inside the body that no nerve endings go there. I did not like this sensation at all. I began to breathe more deeply, but instead of the neat click and snap of my neck valve there was a slobbery spittish sound. My neck valve was gone, and my neck, a wetly red bundle of cut tubes and severed lines, was exposed. ‘Doctor,’ I querrelled, ‘Doctor, I must report, Doctor, I must say.’

  ‘Be quiet,’ the Medical Officer said.

  There was a sequence of pushes and pressings, heaves and needlepoints at my neck. Soon the operation was completed, and with a twist to the needle still inserted in my ordinator the Medical Officer told me I was finished.

  I stood up, and then (a delayed reaction of some kind, I assume) the sensation of pain washed through my consciousness again. I felt the ragged rim of my neck like a scalding ringlet. Later - several days later, in fact - I stood before a mirror and saw the military model of neck stump with which I had been fitted. The valve was more complex, goitered about now with a layer of filter and machinery, inset with ingenious curving reservoirs to enable me to breathe even should the air be poisoned, or even for a short time in the vacuum of black space. This is one of the ways the military prepare their headless soldiers for sundry malign eventualities.

  I was told to pick up the bundle of my clothes and pointed in the direction of a door in the far wall, and through this I wandered, naked as a new born calf and almost as unsteady on my legs.

  Here was another officer, standing behind a broad low plastic unit. He took my clothes, and riffled through my pockets with a practised hand. He found my purse and put it down on the unit. He also found Mark Pol Treherne’s eye stalk, the strange fingerbone of blue plastic. ‘What’s this?’

  I considered telling him, exactly, what it was; but I had come to the quick conclusion that the military were undelighted with lengthy explanations. ‘A talisman,’ I said.

  He shrugged his eyebrows. ‘Soldier,’ he said. ‘The regulations permit you one lucky charm. It must be worn about the neck on a cord. Do you have enough neck for that?’

  ‘I believe so,’ I said.

  ‘Address me as “Superior”.’

  ‘I believe so, Superior.’

  ‘So - if you hang it around the neck and lose it because you lack enough neck to retain the cord,’ he said, ‘you will not be permitted to obtain another lucky charm. Do you understand?’

  ‘I understand, Superior.’

  ‘The lucky charm may also be worn at the waist.’

  ‘That will not be necessary, Superior.’

  ‘Do you have a cord? Regulations require that it be a bonded plastic strand of no more than a millimetre in thickness and strong enough to support ten kilograms.’

  ‘I have no such cord,’ I said. ‘Superior.’

  He stepped back, and consulted his datascreen. Then he picked a laser from his pocket, a device no larger than a cigarette lighter. Holding the eye stalk at arm’s length he drilled a hole in the end of the object. He retrieved a length of plastic cord, of the sort he had just described, from a drawer and placed both cord and eyestalk on a pile of dark
blue cloth. This whole armful he placed on the unit. ‘This is your uniform. The cost of it, together with any prostheses fitted by the Medical Officer, will be deducted from your yearly pay at a rate not exceeding twenty per cent of said pay. You understand?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Dress quickly. Report outside to the parade ground. Your fellow headless are waiting.’

  The uniform fitted me perfectly. I reflected, as I pulled on the meadhres and the smooth cloth shirt, all very dark blue, that the Medical Officer had evidently loaded my measurements into a database, and a machine had immediately tooled these clothes for me. I tucked the talisman underneath the shirt, and pulled my jacket about me. Finally I pulled on buskin socks and plastic overshoes, and stood up. Another headless, naked, had come into the room. I left, stepping through a door into the outside.