The Fifth Head of Cerberus

“Wait a moment,” I said. “I don’t even know this young lady.”

“But you are not married?”

“No.”

“So your dossier informed me. In cases where the prisoner is unmarried it is the rule to give the card to the closest resident single woman of suitable age. It is, you will understand, based upon statistical probabities. The young woman may transfer the card to whomever you wish, who may then use it in her name. That will be something for you to discuss—” (he paused a moment in thought) “—ten days from now. Not now. Write down her name.”

I was forced to ask Mlle Etienne’s first name, which proved to be Celestine.

“Give her the card,” the man in black said.

I did so, and he laid one hand heavily on my shoulder and said, “I hereby place you under arrest.”

* * *

I have been moved. I continue this record of my thoughts—if that is what it may be said to be—in a new cell. I am no longer my old self, one forty-three, but some new, unknown 143; this because that old number was chalked upon the door of this new cell. The transition must seem very abrupt to you, reading this; but I was not actually interrupted in the task of writing, as it must seem. The truth is that I grew tired of detailing my arrest. I scratched. I slept. I ate some bread and soup the warder brought me and found a small bone—the rib bone, I suspect, of a goat—in my soup and with this held long conversations with my neighbor upstairs, forty-seven. I listened to the madman on my left until it almost seemed to me that among his idiot scratching and scrapings I could discern my own name.

Then there was a rattling of keys at the door of my cell, and I thought that perhaps Mlle Etienne was to be permitted to see me after all. I tried insofar as I could to make myself clean, smoothing my hair and beard with my fingers. Alas, it was only the guard, and with him a powerfully built man wearing a black hood which concealed his face. Naturally I thought I was going to be killed, and though I tried to be courageous—and really felt that I was not especially fearful—I found that my knees had become so weak that I could only stand with great difficulty. I thought of escape (as I always do when they take me to be questioned; it’s the only chance, because there’s no escaping from these cells), but there was only the narrow corridor to run in, as always, without windows and with a guard posted at every stair. The hooded man took my arm and, without speaking, led me through passageways and up and down steps until I was completely confused; we must have walked for hours. I saw any number of miserable dirty faces like my own staring at me through the tiny glassed Judas windows in the doors of the cells. Several times we passed through courtyards, and I thought I was to be shot in each; it was about noon, and the bright sunlight made me blink and my eyes water. Then in a corridor much like all the others we halted before a door marked 143, and the hooded man raised a concrete slab from the center of the floor, showing me a narrow hole from which a steep iron stair descended. I went down and he followed me; the distance must have been fifty meters or more, and at the bottom it was only with a flashlight that we were able to grope our way down a corridor stinking of stale urine, until we reached the door of this cell into which a push from him sent me sprawling.

At the time I was happy enough to sprawl, for I thought, as I have said, that I was about to be executed. I still do not know that it is not true; the man was certainly dressed as an executioner though that may have been merely to frighten me, and perhaps he has other duties.

The officer groped among the materials on his desk for the next page, but before he could locate it the brother officer entered the room a second time. “Hello,” the officer said, “I thought you were turning in.”

“I was,” said the brother officer. “I have; I did. I slept for a while, then woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. It’s the heat.”

The officer shrugged.

“How are you coming with your case?”

“Still trying to catalogue the facts.”

“Didn’t they send a summary? They’re supposed to.”

“Probably, but I haven’t found it in this mess yet. There’s a letter, and a fuller summary may be on one of these tapes.”

“What’s this?” The brother officer had picked up the canvas-bound notebook.

“A notebook.”

“The accused’s?”

“I think so.”

The brother officer raised his eyebrows. “You don’t know?”

“I’m not sure. Sometimes I think that notebook…”

The brother officer waited for him to continue, but he did not. After a moment the brother officer said, “ Well, I see you’re busy. Think I’ll wake up the surgeon and see if he won’t give me something that will let me sleep.”

“Try a bottle,” the officer said as the brother officer went out. When he had gone he picked up the canvas-bound notebook again and opened it at random.

“No, he is a man like you and me. He is married to a poor wretched woman one hardly ever sees, and they have a son of fifteen or so.”

Self: “But he claims to be Annese?”

M. d’F: “He is a fraud, you understand. Much of what he says of the abos is from his own head—oh, he will tell you wonderful tales, Monsieur.”

(End of Interview)

Dr Hagsmith had also mentioned this beggar, and I have decided to find him. Even though his claim to be Annese is false—as I have no doubt it is—he may have picked up some real information in the course of his impersonations. Besides, the idea of finding even a counterfeit Annese appeals to me.

* * *

March 21. I have had a talk with the beggar, who calls himself Twelvewalker and claims to be a direct descendant of the last Annese shaman, and thus rightfully a king—or whatever distinction he may happen to covet at the moment. In my opinion his actual descent is Irish, very probably through one of those Irish adventurers who left their island for France at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. At any rate, his culture seems clearly French, his face certainly Irish—the red hair, blue eyes, and long upper lip are unmistakable.

Apparently even counterfeit Annese are elusive, and turning him up was more of a problem than I had anticipated; everyone seemed to know him and told me I could rind him in such and such a tavern, but no one seemed to know where he lived—and, naturally, he was not to be found in any of the taverns where he “always” was. When I discovered his hut at last (I cannot call it a house), I realized that I had passed it several times without realizing it was a human dwelling.

Frenchman’s Landing, as perhaps I should mention here, is built on the banks of the Tempus about ten miles upstream of the sea itself. The waterfront is thus the muddy shore of the river, looking across the yellowish, salt- tinged flood toward a huddle of even less presentable buildings—La Fange—on the bank opposite. Sainte Anne’s twin world of Sainte Croix creates fifteen-foot tides all over the planet, and these affect the river far upstream of Frenchman’s Landing. At high tide the water is completely undrmkable and marine fish—so I am told—may be caught from the ends of the docks. Then the decking of these docks is only a few feet above the water, the air is fresh and pure, and the meadowmeres surrounding the somewhat higher ground on which the town stands have the appearance of an endless lacework of clear pools fringed with the brilliant green salt rushes. But in a few hours the tide is gone, and all vitality seems drained from the river and the country around it. The docks stand twelve-feet high on stilts of rotting timbers; the river shows a thousand islands of muck, and the meadowmeres are desolate salt flats of stinking mud over which, at night, wisps of luminous gas hover like the ghosts of the dead Annese.

The waterfront itself is not too different, I suppose, from the waterfront of a similar rivertown on Earth,