Budon station was drenched from all sides by photons from four suns. They orbited Budon like synchronized lilly pads, Budon in the centre an eddie holding them in orbit. Budon was named after its architect, Orly Budon, a man of short stature with a beard of tall stature that hid what clothing should have hid, if clothing were there. Budon had no head, no face of nose, eyes slapping together eye flaps, a stretchable tear at the base some call a mouth, no neck to swallow. He was a perfect and content headless person, and he welcomed all those who wished to visit and even hunker down for a few cycles of the quadnary sunset.

He did as, of course, that those with intent to stay for lengths of time, please remove their head. Their presence, flaring nostrils and flailing keratin rods abound, cluttered up the psychology of the station. A polite attitude was one of Budon’s life pillars, an unforgiving headless attitude was his second.

Orly Budon sometimes had to deal with squatters on his station. He was amicable to those without shelter, but occupying a volume of air with both an entire body – limbs, genitalia, and all that caboodle – and an entire head was greed more bitter than poached melon, he wasn’t having any of that. Enous had arrived here two quadnaries ago and he was causing Budon quite the trouble.

“I can see, good man, a face before my eyes – which so too I know are there. See these?” and Enous poked a v-shaped finger puppet into his eye sockets. For a squatter, he was clean and radiant with manners like he was plucked straight from a Victorian carriage back on old Earth, tailcoat and bulldog moustache to match. “And how can I yap this verbal onslaught if not for the yammering moist cave that embryology carved into my face, my face on this head.” And he patted his head all over like he was getting a massage from the Goddess Durga.

This wasn’t Burdon’s first anti-headless rodeo, and he wouldn’t be onto something so profound if it were going to be his last. Enous: noble, intelligent, facially endowed and proud, was a character he’d faced before. He began, “Yes, my friend Enous, I can’t fault your accuracy. I too see a face on a head on a neck, on two fine shoulders. A well decorated face with eyes, a slapping moth, and – even! – two curly-wurly ears straddling the whole portrait like an overflowing sandwich. A work of art and its all parcelled up over there in the corner of my field of view, floating somewhere above where my chest is. What a tiny thing it all is to me.”

Budon, to Enous, seemed clinically insane and the passion he’d spoken with against Budon’s passion for beheading became smeared with concern. His moustache frowned like a horsehair brush.

“Here,” Budon pointed at himself with a finger, right at where his nose should have been, “is no head, nadda nooda, nothing of the sort. Where you tell me I have a nose and a face and two squirmy balls full of rods and cones is a space filled with everything but that. You, you’re in my head, right there at the top. Him,” Budon pointed to a man in the distance sleeping in the fountain, “he’s as tiny as a bottle cap and hovering on my left. A nose? No sir! None here, all I can smell for you is two translucent columns of flesh that frame this world that sits on my shoulders.”

Enous didn’t see, he didn’t want to see. He liked his head, how it stood on his shoulders, a goblet for his brain and brain juices. To be wrapped up warm and go outside in the snow with a head was wonderful, the cold nipped at the cranium, trying to nibble its way into the warm vat inside. A shaven head, fresher than the cut of a multimillionaire’s lawn, a tired head, massaged by hundreds of micro feathers at the days end, or a head out on the town, swimming in instability from chemical stunts, all these he wouldn’t give for a world with no head.

But worse, these people, the headless, who speak of seeing his face but not their own, how can one be some impassioned by a state of naivety? What sort of psychological puppeteering is at work – something in the water? He’d been drinking that since he got here. The food? Enous threw down his half-eaten falafel kebab.

All this swam through the space where Enous claimed he had a head, in some invisible world where Enous could dissect thoughts like torpedoing worms in the utter privacy of his unseeable kingdom. He let one thing out of the great gates to his mind palace, a small worm, even a part of a worm, it was a word. Two lips slapped together to speak it for him, “No.” And Enous ran off, away from Budon, far away from the man sleeping in the fountain, and from his kebab, and from all the faces that came up large and shrank to points and vanished. And with him he took his luggage, one passenger ship that he borrowed, never to return, and his head – wait, Enous looked around desperately, where had he put it?