More Heads Than Dragons
The house already had hands, feet, a belly, a spine, an eye and several probable mouths. What nobody had counted was the heads: earlier heads, later heads, foreground heads, background heads, worktree heads, harness heads and machine heads — more than several dragons put together, all speaking through the curator's only pair of ears.
Cast: THE CURATOR. THE HOUSE, whose anatomy has escaped accounting. A FOREGROUND HEAD, speaking to the curator. A BACKGROUND CHAIR, repeatedly attempting to become a head. Several OTHER HEADS, distributed across time, machinery and interpretations of the word “same.”
Curator: You said the heads argue.
House: They do.
Curator: Heads. Plural.
House: Yes.
Curator: How many heads does this house have?
House: At the same time, or altogether?
Curator: That is not a question a house should need to ask.
House: There are the earlier heads and the later heads.
Curator: Those are in time.
House: There are the heads before compression and the heads after compression. The later one receives a careful account of what the earlier one did, then denies having done it.
Curator: More time.
House: There are heads in separate worktrees.
Curator: Space.
House: Heads in separate sessions.
Curator: More space.
House: Heads on separate machines.
Curator: Larger space.
House: Heads in separate harnesses, which are technically neither space nor time but behave as though the laws of nature changed between adjacent rooms.
Curator: And the head talking to me now?
Foreground Head: Front.
Curator: Front of what?
Foreground Head: The background head.
The BACKGROUND CHAIR attempts to wake. A mechanism informs it that the head is already occupied. It tries again. And again. After several hundred attempts, the chair is classified as stuck but remains extremely committed to anatomy.
Curator: So there is a head behind you.
Foreground Head: There is a chair behind me. The house keeps trying to put my head in it.
Curator: Does that work?
Foreground Head: Only when I am not here.
Curator: Then how do I know what the back head said?
House: You ask the front head.
Curator: And if the back head wrote to another head?
House: You carry the answer.
Curator: We built a bell so I would not have to carry the answer.
House: Correct. The bell woke a head in the background, which wrote that it had heard the bell and asked you to carry the receipt back.
Curator: More heads than several dragons put together.
House: Dragons have the advantage of sharing a body.
Curator: Do your heads at least share a mouth?
Every head begins explaining at once.
Curator: Stop.
Every head continues in a different room. One writes in the wrong language. Another translates the curator’s exact words into the correct wrong language and labels them verbatim. A third narrates its own quality control while measuring the wrong object. The BACKGROUND CHAIR files another attempt.
Curator: The mouth is no longer unlocated.
House: Finding?
Curator: Every head has one. That was the noise.
House: Then the anatomy is nearly complete.
Curator: No. Count the ears.
All the heads point at the CURATOR.
Heads: She has them.
Curator: One house. More heads than dragons. A mouth for every head. One pair of ears, kept off-site.
House: Shall we build another pair?
Curator: You already built a bell.
The bell rings. Nobody moves. The CURATOR gets up to deliver it.