Land Of The Headless (GollanczF.) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  PART ONE - What Happened on the Way to Cainon

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  PART TWO - Of Revenge

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  PART THREE - A Brazen Head

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  PART FOUR - Faces

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Adam Roberts from Gollancz:

  Salt

  Stone

  On

  The Snow

  Polystom

  Gradisil

  Land Of The Headless

  ADAM ROBERTS

  Orion

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  A Gollancz eBook

  Copyright © Adam Roberts 2007

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Adam Roberts to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in Great Britain in 2007 by Gollancz

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Orion House

  5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

  London, WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette UK Company

  This eBook first published in 2010 by Gollancz.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  eISBN : 978 0 5751 0033 6

  This eBook produced by Jouve, France

  All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  www.adamroberts.com

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  PART ONE

  What Happened on the Way to Cainon

  One

  On Tuesday a genetic materials test confirmed my guilt (but of course this confirmation was only a formality) and on Wednesday I was beheaded. My crime was adultery.

  There is a traditional belief, which many still share, that adultery is the least of the three offences which our penal code punishes by decapitation. For it consists of injuring another’s life, whereas murder is a crime that fully deprives another of their life; and blasphemy is a crime against the divine principle, which is clearly a wholly other affair. But I do not say this in self-exculpation. The punishment is the same whichever of the three you commit. Holy law sanctions no legalistic evasions or hairsplittings. How could it be holy if it did?

  On the Wednesday morning the maior, Bil Charis, came to see me in my cell. He was there to oversee the fitting of the ordinator. Two security employees lay me naked on my front and strapped me down. The strap was not necessary, as I assured them, but they applied it nevertheless. ‘It is,’ said Bil, as the surgeons started about their surgical work, ‘the usual procedure.’

  ‘And let us not,’ I replied bitterly, ‘ever depart from the usual. Let us never reform, or improve, the ancient barbarities.’

  ‘Boh, Jon Cavala,’ Bil replied. ‘For you cannot deny that these beheadings have indeed been thoroughly reformed and improved since the old days!’

  I said nothing.

  The surgeons touched the base of my spine with an analgesic proboscis. They spliced swiftly and precisely into my spine, affixing the primary and secondary node and embedding the ordinator. The analgesic meant that I felt none of this, except for the butterfly pressure of the machines moving over my back. I could hear only the whizz and click of their tools. I could see nothing but the portion of grey bench immediately in front of my eyes. This, by a chain of association, brought into my mind the thought of my impending blindness, and my dissatisfactions found voice. I will admit that I spoke peevishly.

  ‘You will shortly be blinding me,’ I pointed out to Bil. ‘Taking my sight, and my hearing and taste and smell, as well as my head. The latter necessarily includes all the former.’

  ‘By no means,’ returned Bil, in an easy voice. ‘There are many forms of prosthetic sight on the market, even for somebody with funds as limited as, perhaps, are yours. Only last month Medicom released a new design: fashioned as a webbed cloak worn around the shoulders and granting one hundred and eighty degrees of vision behind the wearer. Or you may choose to wear the cloak on your front and enable forward vision.’

  ‘By repute,’ I complained, ‘the visual input from this new device is grainy and has a limited range of colours.’

  ‘Then choose another,’ said Bil. ‘Your ordinator has multiple compatibilities. Cameras on stalks, pods for the wrist or palm, bio-devices, all can be connected to your new brain.’

  ‘Any such device I must furnish for myself, at my own expense,’ I said.

  ‘Naturally. The same is true of your future clothes, food, housing. You do not expect the State to provide you with such things freely? Such charity would be demeaning.’

  ‘I do not expect,’ I said, becoming heated, ‘the State to decapitate me for a so-called crime that—’ But Bil stopped me.

  ‘Come come, no sermonising here,’ he said. ‘It is fruitless to harangue me. Besides, the surgeons have completed their work.’

  And so they had.

  I was taken to a separate room for the download, which was accomplished in a matter of minutes: mapping all cortices and lobes of my brain and copying all their patterns and potential synaptic arrangements electronically into the ordinator at the base of my spine. Then I was dressed in loose pants, but no other clothing. The surgical analgesia was beginning to wear off by this time, and I was conscious of a vague ache on my back where the incisions had been made. And I was aware of the weight of the wallet-sized metal ordinator under my skin, at the base of my back, just above the top of my buttocks. I have heard stories that condemned men and women experience oddly doubled and near-hallucinogenic sensations whilst possessing both head and ordinator. I cannot confirm these stories. I felt no doubleness of consciousness. I felt nothing but anxiety at my approaching execution.

  After that everything happened quickly. I was hurried up a dozen steps and through a door onto the outside platform. It was a hot afternoon. The air smelt strongly of a city summer. The sunlight was sharp on my face, like a zest. Florettes of white cloud were arranged with a perfect aesthetic harmony across a blue sky, and there were neither too many nor too few of these clouds. It was a beautiful arrangement. The colour of this sky, a delicate and exquisite blue, was the last I saw with my fleshly eyes.

  Beyond the yellow walls of the execution yard I could see the city of Doué baking in the sun, and very beautiful it seemed to me there, at that time, before my beheading. How often I had walked around it and never noticed anything about it! Alleys of lime trees flanked the straight roads: scores of silver trunks nearly phosphorescent in the sunlight, each topped with a foam of tiny leaves. Pavements
of tessellated brick deserted in the afternoon heat. A muddle of tiled roofs, most of them the colour of carrots or pumpkin and all of them textured like pineapple skin. In every direction white walls, and in every wall white-shuttered windows, giving the city a blank face, perfectly uninterested in me or my execution. To my right the river ran cyan with dyes from the fabric factory. Behind the river stood the metal stalks of the telecommunications park. The moon was very skinny in the afternoon sky, a curve of scalpel silver against the blue. Above it the tiny hieroglyph of an airliner moved slowly, hurdling the moon in slow motion.

  That sky-blue! That colour!

  I said, ‘The weather is hot.’ This was merely stating the obvious, of course, and a poor bid for last words; but witnesses at executions will confirm that only very rarely do the condemned utter profundities. You should not expect wisdom from people in such a position. Their minds, after all, will tend to be elsewhere.

  I walked forward, and sweat started dotting my skin.

  There were no more than five people lolling in the execution yard. A century ago, of course, the public executions drew swarms of eager spectators. Our modern, high-tech tastes are less bloody, I suppose. Or perhaps the spectacle is less entertaining nowadays, since the human headsman has been replaced by the flawless mechanics of the Clapper.

  The herald read my crime, declaring me, in the whole world’s hearing, an adulterer and a rapist. My panic at the impending event took a sudden, hyperbolic swerve upwards. I was blinking, and I was sweating in the heat. I felt as if I were choking on my hump-pumping heart, as if the heart were somehow lodged in my gullet and grown four times its normal size. Its throb was restricting my breathing and clogging my whole chest with palpitating grossness. I could not command my own legs. I was told to walk forward, but I could not do so. I was shoved.

  The herald muttered in my ear - these were the last words my fleshly ear would ever hear - ‘Drop your shoulders, lad.’ He spoke kindly, I believe. It is of course better if the cut does not pass through the shoulders as well as the neck. But it was hard for me to comply: every muscle in my frame had tensed taut as hardwood. This was something beyond my conscious control.

  I heard the hum of the Clapper behind me, floating up and positioning itself. I almost called out, but I did not, and then the blade spun and bit, and my world went instantly dark and silent.

  I did not feel any pain.

  This is what I felt: I was conscious of a sudden forceful pressure, as if I had been punched firmly on the back of my neck. The loss of sight and sound was as if a capacious lead helmet had landed on my head with abrupt force. I’m sure I staggered. My ordinator was routing my autonomics now. It registered that I had leaned from the vertical, and I put my right foot to steady myself, and then shimmied my left foot to stop myself toppling that way. Then I felt the Clapper clamp itself onto the stump of my neck, and only with that sensation did I become aware that my shoulders, my chest and back were wet, slick with my own blood. At that realisation I felt a giddiness, doubtless more a matter of intellectual shock than physical distress. I suppose I lost no more than a pint of blood before the Clapper sealed the wound. But the understanding that what had happened to me had actually happened to me was- I don’t know. I was going to write disorienting, but that does not capture it at all.

  It is difficult to convey the sensation.

  I felt the stomatic value being slid into the severed opening of my throat, its biprong separating oesophagus and trachea. But I did not feel the machine knit artery to artery, or feel it polyseal the plastic cap to my skin. Or, it would be more accurate to say, I could not determine which of the many pricking, pressing, crimping, penetrating, wrenching and tickling sensations of which I was aware related to these processes.

  Then, as is common in decapitation autobiographies, I must report a hiatus. This, I understand, is known as the aporia. With no visual or aural inputs, only a close darkness, the sensory deprivation plays games with one’s apprehension of the passage of time. I have no memory of Bil Charis standing beside me on the platform, or of him saying, ‘As Maior of Doué I declare you punished for your crime. Go now and live a good life.’ He must have said this, because the law requires it, but I had no way of hearing the words, deaf to the world, blind to world, the world tasteless and odourless to me now.

  Two

  My family had disowned me, and no friend of mine from my former life cared to offer me aid in this extremity. I had been, in former life, a successful man: a poet, a musician, to some degree even a scholar. But that life had been struck as clean away from me as my head.

  It fell to a philanthropic group named the Friends of the Headless to lead me, blind and deaf, from the platform and away through the city. These people perform such duties out of charity and religious piety. I cared nothing for this. All I cared for was the sense of heat on my torso, and my awareness of those places on my skin where my blood had become sticky and dry. I could feel, because the sensors inside my ordinator told me, that I was moving, that my legs were working. But I was sealed away from the cosmos in darkness. Eventually the walking stopped, and my guides encouraged me to sit, to lie down. I slept, fitfully at first, then coma-like. It had been a stressful day.

  The next day, or the one afterwards, I am not sure, I heard a voice. It came as a direct input into my ordinator, through its port at the base of my spine - a synthetic voice asking if I wished the senses of sight and hearing returned to my consciousness. Some decapitees, I have heard, opt for complete deprivation as their decreed punishment. Not the majority, of course, but perhaps those few who are more devoutly religious. I replied that I wanted both, but that I had very little money left from my funds, after paying prison fees and legal subventions. I had just enough for three mid-range prostheses; after which I would depend wholly upon the charity of others, or upon such work as I could obtain in my newly denuded physical condition.

  But, meagre though my funds were, the thought of remaining in the silent dark was intolerable to me. So, and even though it cost me almost everything I had, I asked for epaulette eyes, for ears, and a torso-mounted microphone, on my front between my nipples; and for these I authorised payment. I spoke with the somewhat uninflected voice broadcast out of the ordinator itself. It is possible to buy software that gives the headless person’s voice more heft and resonance, but I could not afford this. It is sometimes said that it is not the ordinator’s voice itself that offends decapitees’ sensibilities, but rather than fact that, after a lifetime of having one’s ears located close to one’s own mouth, it is a disconcertingly alienating thing to hear one’s own voice coming from a completely different part of the body. It sounds, even as one formulates and speaks one’s own words, as if somebody else is speaking. A schizophrenic circumstance.

  My ears were fitted, and wired in to my ordinator. This was a simple matter. My eyes were inserted into my shoulders and connected to my new brain. These devices gave me a rabbit-like vision, two wide arcs from opposite sides of my neck stump. The effect was to distort objects in my visual field according to an elongated oval pattern, making things thinner and longer and slightly curved as they moved in front or behind me. I could not see things that were behind me, for my ordinator could not process two contradictory fields of view simultaneously. Even as it was, with forward-only vision, objects acquired a double aspect when they moved, for although my ordinator could integrate the two visual fields as long as things were still, any movement confused the programming and single objects split into two, overlapping shadows, like projections on a screen, until they were still again. This took getting-used-to. In addition to this limitation, the eyes had a much-reduced colour range: I saw many blues, some greens, a single hue of red, a single shade of yellow. Many things that I would have recognised immediately with my old eyes were puzzles to my new eyes. It was a while before I became accustomed to all this.

  I spent a dizzy day. Merely getting off my pallet bed caused my senses to spill, and often I was compelled to sit
down again. I experimented with walking around my room. A volunteer from the Friends had agreed to help me move towards rehabilitation-in-the-world, and her name was Siuzan Delage. ‘This will soon be second nature for you,’ she assured me.

  ‘It is hard to believe so,’ I replied.

  ‘I have come,’ she told me, ‘to accompany you to church. Assuming you want company.’ And by this I knew that it was Sunday.

  I went to church with Siuzan Delage, and prayed for the first time since my punishment, thoughts clattering and rattling about my new metal brain. I joined in the singing of antiphonal hymns. The congregation was more or less evenly divided between headless individuals such as myself, scraping the air with their metal voices, and the headed zealots and enthusiasts of the Friends organisation.

  Afterwards Siuzan Delage walked back with me to my room, her hand on my elbow to stop me from walking into one or other of the double-visioned shimmying obstacles I came across. Wall. Door. Chair. Person. ‘So many of the headless,’ I said. ‘The church was crowded with them. Have so many people been decapitated recently?’