The Physiognomy

'As you wish,' I said and mounted the rickety stairs.

My lodgings were fairly spacious—two large rooms, one to serve as my sleeping quarters and one as an office with a writing desk, a lab table, and a divan. The floors creaked, the autumn breeze of the northern territory leaked through the poorly caulked windows, and the wallpaper of vertical green stripes and an indefinite species of pink flower gave rise to thoughts of carnival.

In my bedroom I was startled to find one of the hardened heroes the mayor had told me about. An old man dressed in miner's overalls stood slightly bent in the corner, supporting a long oval mirror.

'My brother, Arden,' said Mantakis as he put my valise down next to the bed. 'I didn't have the heart to send him to the city as fuel.'

As the old man was about to leave, I asked him, 'What do you know of this fruit of the Earthly Paradise?'

'Arden was there when they found it about ten years ago,' he said in his slow-witted drawl. 'It was pure white and looked like a ripe pear you want to sink your teeth into.' As he said this, he showed me his crooked yellow teeth. 'Father Garland said it should not be eaten. It would make you immortal, and that flows against the will of God.'

'And you subscribe to this twaddle?' I asked.

'Sir?' he said, unsure of my question.

'You believe in it?'

'I believe whatever you believe, your honor,' he said and then backed out of the room.

I studied my own image in the mirror held by the petrified Arden and considered my approach to the case. It was true that the Master had banished me to the territory as a punishment, but that was not an invitation to perform shoddily. If I were to shirk my duties, he would immediately know and have me either executed or sent to a work camp.

Not every fool and his brother could achieve the status of Physiognomist, First Class in less than fifteen years. Time and again I had conducted hairsplitting physiognomical investigations. Who was it who had discovered the identity of the Latrobian werewolf in a six-year-old girl when that beast had wrought havoc among the towns just beyond the circular wall? Who had fingered Colonel Rasuka as a potential revolutionary and headed off a coup against the Master years before the would-be perpetrator even knew himself what he was capable of? Many, including Drachton Below, had said I was the best, and I wasn't going to damage that estimation, no matter how trivial the case, no matter how remote the location of the crime.

Obviously, this was a job for one of those first year graduates who can't help wounding himself with his own instruments. The religious ramifications of the affair elicited a distinct aching in my hindquarters. I remembered the time I had pleaded with the Master to do away with all religion. Its practice had died out in the City, replaced by a devotion to Below that seemed born of the people's desire to participate in his own unique form of omniscience. Out in the territories, though, lifeless icons still held sway. His answer was 'Let them have their hogwash.'

'It is a corruption of nature,' I countered.

'I don't give a fig,' he said. 'I'm a corruption of nature. Religion is about fear, and miracles are monsters.' He reached over and, with graceful sleight of hand, pulled a goose egg from behind my ear. When he cracked it on the edge of his desk, a cricket jumped forth. 'Do you understand?' he asked. That was when I noticed his continuous eyebrow and the small tufts of primate hair adorning each of his knuckles.

The sheer beauty was coursing through me, transforming the ineffable into images, susurrations, aromas. In the mirror, behind my reflection, I saw a garden of white roses, hedgerow and morning glory vine, that drop by drop melted into a view of the Weil-Built City. The chrome spires, the crystal domes, the towers, the battlements all shone in the sunlight of a more hospitable region of the mind. This also began to swirl and eventually settled out again into the drab surroundings of my room at the Hotel de Skree.

I thought for a moment that the drug had played one of its time tricks on me, compressing the usual two hour hallucination into mere minutes, but that was not the case, for standing behind me, looking over my shoulder into the mirror, was Professor Flock, my old mentor from the Academy of Physiognomy.

The professor was looking rather spry, considering he had passed away ten years earlier, and he wore an affable expression, considering it was my own prosecution that had sent him to the most severe work camp—the sulphur mines at the southern extremity of the realm.

'Professor,' I said, not turning around but addressing him through the glass in front of me, 'a pleasure, as always.'

Dressed in white, as was his habit back at the academy, he moved closer to me and put his hand on my shoulder. I felt its weight as if it were real. 'Cley,' he said, 'you sent me to my death, and now you call me back?'

'I am sorry,' I said, 'but the Master could not tolerate your teaching of tolerance.'

He nodded and smiled. 'It was foolishness. I have come to thank you for eradicating my crackpot notions from the great society.'

'You hold no grudge?' I asked.

'Of course not,' he said. 'I deserved to be baked like a slab of ham and strangled on fumes of sulphur.'

'Very well then,' I said. 'How should I proceed with this case?'

'The Twelfth Maneuver,' was his reply. 'Anamasobia is a closed system. Merely read every subject in town, review your findings, and look for the one whose features reveal an inclination toward larceny and a religiopsychotic reliance on the miraculous.'

'How will the latter be revealed?' I inquired.

'As a blemish, a birthmark, a wart, a mole with an inordinately long black hair growing from it.'

'As I suspected,' I said.

'And Cley,' he said as he began to vanish, 'full body exams. Leave no stone unturned, no dark crevice unexamined.'

'Naturally,' I said.

I lay down on my bed and stared across the room at the illusion of Arden slowly moving, the mirror becoming a waterfall in his hands. Off in the muffled distance, the Mantakises were emitting screams of either lust or violence, and I recalled my own last romantic encounter.

One night, a few months earlier, after working on the Grulig case, a ghastly homicide in which the Minister of Finance had had his head separated from his body, I decided to stop at the Top of the City for refreshment. I rode the crystal enclosed elevator up the sixty floors to the roof, where, beneath a crystal dome, there was a bar with tables and chairs, a woman playing a harp, a twilight view of what seemed like the entire world.

I walked up to a fetching young thing seated by herself at a window table and told her I would buy her a drink. I cannot remember her name or her features, but I recall a certain aroma, not perfume, more like a ripe melon. She told me about her parents and some problem they were having, about her childhood, and then, when I could no longer tolerate entertaining the inconsequential, I offered her fifty belows to take a coach with me to the park.

While riding along I mixed her a cocktail, and when she wasn't looking, poured in a good measure of sheer beauty. The general public was not permitted the drug, so I had an idea it might create an interesting effect. After finishing the drink, she soon began screaming at whatever it was she saw before her, so I put her on my lap to comfort her. Eventually it became clear that she was having a conversation with her dead brother while, all the time, I was busy soothing the flesh.

As she lay on the marble slab of an old war monument, beneath giant swaying oaks, her skirts pulled up, her legs pointing the way to the Dog Star, I inserted my instrument of pleasure into the index finger of my leather glove so as not to come in contact with her inferior chemistry. It was over in an instant, a technique I had worked diligently to perfect. 'I love you,' I said and left her there. In the following weeks I wondered how often she had thought of me. With a warm feeling of melancholy, I drifted off to sleep as the hideous wallpaper undulated and the cold wind of the territory rattled the panes.

I was awakened at four by the voice of Mrs. Mantakis. 'What is it?' I called. 'Mr. Beaton is here to escort you to the mayor's house.' I got quickly out of bed and began to freshen up. I changed my shirt, combed my hair, and licked my teeth. It was only as I was putting on my topcoat that I caught the name Beaton. By the time I reached the lobby, I remembered him, and there he was, hunched over, blue, threatening to fall. As he saw me approach, he shuffled forward and, slowly enough so that I might have drunk a cup of tea, handed me a letter from the mayor. When he mumbled, a few grains of blue dust fell from his open mouth and drifted to the carpet.

Your honor, read the letter, since you expressed such interest in Beaton's condition this morning, I thought you might like an opportunity to study him up close. Should he stiffen irreparably on your journey, simply continue on the road he takes you to and you will arrive at my house. Yours, Bataldo. But by the time I had finished reading, it appeared Beaton had already traded his human status for that of mineral. There had been no sound from him at all, no last grunt or cry, no whispered crackle of flesh giving way to stone. He stood staring up at me with a look of insipid expectation, his hand forward, the fingers parted only the width of the letter. I reached out and touched his face. It was as smooth as blue marble, even the wrinkles and the beard. When I drew my hand away, his eyes suddenly shifted to stare into mine and then froze solid. The unexpected movement momentarily frightened me. ' 'Perhaps you will heat my apartment this winter,' I said to him as an epitaph. Then I called for Mantakis.

The missus came in, and I asked her how to get to the mayor's house. In less than two minutes she told me five different ways to get there, none of which I truly committed to memory. But there was still plenty of light before sundown, and I had a general sense as to where I was going. 'Do something with Beaton, there,' I said. 'He seems to have taken a stand.'

She took one look at the blue miner, shook her head, and told me, 'It is said that when he was born, they dropped him on his head.' I hurried out the door of the de Skree as she rattled on.

The street was empty as I headed north to find a certain alley between the general store and the tavern that had been mentioned in all five sets of directions. The sun was on the decline and a strong wind blew down on me. As I walked along through the shadows of the buildings, I wondered if the mayor was playing a joke on me or if he was truly trying to satisfy my well-known scientific curiosity. I had seen nothing in his face that would lead me to believe he had the courage to make light of me, so I dismissed the idea of a slight and turned my attention to finding my way. The cold air was invigorating and it drove off the last few tentacles of the beauty.

I had not gone far when I heard someone approaching from behind. 'Your honor, your honor,' I heard over the wind.

Before turning I thought that they might have sent someone to lead me, but instead it was a young woman carrying a baby. She wore a shawl over her head, but from what I could see of her she appeared quite attractive. I greeted her.

'Your honor,' she said, 'I was hoping you would look at my son and tell me what to expect from him in the future.' She held the baby up in front of me so that I was eye to eye with a squashed little face. One glance told the story all too plainly. In the lout's features I read a brief novel of debauchery and dissolution unto death.

''Brilliant?' she asked as my eyes probed the child's form.

'Somewhat less,' I said, 'but not exactly an idiot.'

'Is there any hope, your honor?' she asked after I had told her full well my conclusion.