The Physiognomy (27 page)

“It's a scalpel, Cley,” he said.

“Yes, but it's a Pierpoint. The old-timers used to use these,” I said.

“It's not the type you use?” he asked.

“I use a Janus, double head,” I said. “The cut is cleaner and it is easier to slice cartilage with. But, I'll tell you, in the hands of someone like Flock or Muldabar Reiling, these were very effective.”

“I want you to find out whose it is,” he said, looking skeptically at me.

I put the scalpel back down on the desk. “I'm just waiting for another group of subjects,” I told him. “The list is slowly growing. I've unearthed a nice selection of miscreants so far.”

He nodded wearily.

“Cley, the headaches—I can't shake them,” he said. “They come more frequently now with weird results.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“My physicians have told me that they think certain foods I eat might set them off or make them worse. They have told me not to drink shudder, but, Harrow's hindquarters, how can a man with my busy schedule get by without a few jolts every day?” he asked.

“Perhaps it might be good to lie down for a day or two,” I said.

“You have no idea what is happening. Last night, at a certain bar in the manufacturing district, my soldiers went in to check for a runaway gladiator and had a gun battle with the patrons. How can these workers have guns? My men finally just bombed the place, killing ten citizens. Then they rushed into the rubble and shot the rest of them. But this is bad business. There is a malaise of ingratitude among the people that even I was unaware of.” He fell silent for a moment and shook his head. His eyes had dark crescents beneath them. “Things are falling apart,” he said.

“Perhaps you should not drink this shudder you have brought,” I said, trying to sound sympathetic. He did look rather pitiful and weak sitting there, but I could only gloat at the news he had brought.

“No,” he said, “I've brought it to drink in front of you so that I can show you the effect these headaches have on me. I need your help, Cley. I don't trust anyone.”

“I'll do everything within my abilities to serve you,” I said.

He gave a weak smile and then reached out and took one of the cups in his hands and removed the lid. Bringing it to his lips, he dashed it off in a few seconds.

“It's the white fruit. I need something to reverse its change in me,” he said as he put the cup down on my desk.

“What is this change?” I asked.

“Just wait,” he told me, “you can't miss it.”

“You said there was a runaway gladiator?” I asked.

“One of those wretches I use in the battle matches,” he said. “I can't imagine that he will present much of a problem, but when you put it all together, there's just too much random possibility out there now.”

“It must be difficult for you,” I said.

“It's a lonely thing, being the Master,” he said, looking over to stare out the window. “At the same time, I cannot give up. I don't care if I have to kill every last citizen—they will not take my City from me. My life has been the Well-Built City. I am this City beyond mere rhetoric. Every inch of coral, every pane of crystal is a memory, a theory, an idea. My mentor, Scarfinati, taught me how to turn ghosts of abstraction into specific imagery, but I did him one better, turning imagery into concrete actuality. These streets, these buildings are the history of my heart and mind.”

I nodded.

He winced but the unseen pain did not prevent him from continuing. “My trouble began when I tried to turn the people into a magnificent equation whose sum would be perfection. Instead, they have become a virus that beclouds my vision. Their ignorant simplicity corrodes my complexity. Order is needed to return viability to the mechanism of my genius in the same way I employed the Physiognomy to neutralize the chaos of abstract religion, the illness of faith.” When he finished, he looked at me as if it should now all be perfectly clear.

“I will help you,” was all I could say, my head swimming in the attempt to follow his meaning.

“I know,” he told me. “It is the reason I brought you back. I realized when you were gone that you were really the only person here who could grasp the immensity of my vision.”

“Your genius is beyond me,” I told him.

“Somewhere along the line, someone has gotten the foolish notion that a city is its people instead of its magnificent structures,” he said.

“Inane,” I conceded.

He leaned over in the chair and grasped his head with both hands. His face became a closed fist of anguish. “Watch,” he said as he rocked. Then, as if an invisible assailant had struck him in the face, he flew back in the chair. There was a moment in which the air in the room became heavy and a low crackling sound could be heard. The next thing I knew, the window glass shattered outward with a terrific explosion.

I leaped out of my seat and backed against the wall. The Master took his hands from his head and peered up at me, his pallid face forming a smile.

“It's over, Cley. You can sit down,” he said.

I did as he told me.

“I had such a severe episode in my office the other day, the power, or whatever it is, blew apart one of the heads of those blue statues from the territory out in the hallway. It's growing in intensity,” he said.

“Rest, Master. You've got to rest. Get off your feet. Let the ministers run the city for a few days,” I said.

“Cley, I appreciate your concern, but those asses couldn't run a cart into a brick wall. That would be like turning my life over to a retarded child,” he said. “I'd be better off putting the demon in charge.”

“What can I do?” I asked.

“Find out which one of your illustrious colleagues uses a scalpel like that and be available for me to confer with you,” he said. “What I need is your confidence. I can bring things under control if I just have someone to rebound my ideas off.”

I had to help him to his feet when he was ready to leave. As I moved him in the direction of the door, he placed his hand over mine, which supported his elbow. “Thank you,” he said. The words almost had the same effect on me as did his headache upon the window.

“I'll send someone by to repair your glass, there,” he said with a laugh. Once outside in the hallway, he straightened to his full height. “Let's go, you laggards,” he said to the soldiers. They surrounded him as he took the stairs to the street.

I rushed through my appointments late that afternoon in order to get back to my apartment and go to sleep. I felt the way the Master had looked. As I walked along the night streets of the city, I thought about Below and actually felt bad for him. All around me were the incredible designs of his creation—the lights, the spires, the incessant commerce. He had built a kind of crystal sphere around himself and was now vaguely realizing it was a trap. For me, my exalted position of Physiognomist, First Class had been the sphere. It had protected me for quite some time, but it had also blinded me to the rest of life. I could sense that things were going to change, and this was remarkable; but in an odd way, there was a certain sadness to it. Still, I knew that if I had to, I would take Below's life in order to save Arla and Ea and the child. Like Moissac, the foliate, I would leave behind a seed, and it would be this family.

Part of the next two mornings, I spent wading through official documents in the basement of the Ministry of Information. I was intent on finding some design of a crystal sphere in the literature of the Master's early writings. Although all of his inventions had been committed to his strange memory system, he had written quite a few of them out as shorthand blueprints for his engineers to follow. I could not believe that such an ingenious creation as the false paradise could have been the work of a moment's free thought. There was nothing there in the collection that resembled what I had seen that night beneath the sewage treatment plant, but there were notes for all manner of exotic inventions, some of which had come to pass and some that were probably still in the works over in the manufacturing district. Seeing written evidence of all the Master's brilliant theories and musings was daunting, but it gave me the sense that it was, in a way, somewhat less than human. It was as if he could not help himself tinkering with nature.

I don't think anyone had bothered with these papers for the longest time. They were yellowed and poorly filed, and the dust did not shower from them but rolled in tumbleweeds onto the floor. I also noticed, while down in the musty chamber, that some sort of winged insect had taken up residence amid the moldering dreams of the great Drachton Below. After the early morning rush out on the street had abated and there were no longer the sounds of footsteps and coach wheels, these six-legged interlopers sent up a chorus of chirping that often drove me to distraction. In all, my time there had been wasted.

I was loath to think that I had basically sat through two whole days. Of course, I kept up with my official duties and went on coach rides through the entire city every night searching for any signs of Calloo. I wanted more than anything to return to Arla and Ea with news of their deliverance, but it was too risky to go for a visit without some definite plan for escape. I had made a vow that when next I returned to them, I would take them away with me. I wished I had more time, a commodity I was quickly running short of. It was now less than a week until the executions were to take place.

My next brainstorm was a gift from the beauty. I was riding through the city the evening after I had given up on the Ministry of Information, looking out the coach window into all the shadowy doorways and as far down the alleys as I could. The driver had been instructed to drive slowly and to keep a lookout himself for a big hulking man, moving slowly.

I had not had time that day to catch a fix of the beauty and the symptoms of withdrawal were plaguing me worse than usual. Right there in the coach, I took a vial full and sat back for a few minutes to think. I saw the crystal bubble of the false paradise in my eye's-mind as if at a distance. Then I began to wonder how it had been put together. Arla had said that they had built it around the two of them.

If it was not blown, like a glass bowl, than it must have been constructed in pieces and fitted together, which meant that there had to be a seam somewhere. I kept drawing a blank when it came to envisioning the plans for it, but I did see in my daydream, from a great distance, men at work on it, like a colony of ants swarming over an egg.

I banged on the ceiling of the coach and the driver answered me. “Your honor?” he said.

“Drive me around to the south side of the park, to Engineer Deemer's residence,” I said. “Do you know the location?”

“Very good, sir,” he said.

Pierce Deemer had been the Master's head engineer throughout the years of the construction of the Well-Built City. Some said he was every bit as brilliant as Below. He was an old man now, but still very active in working on municipal projects for the city. I knew he had children and that his children had children, and I was counting on the fact that he cared for them.

Engineer Deemer was a wiry, severe-looking man with short white hair. He allowed me into his house but was not pleased by my presence. We went into his study, a small comfortable room with a drawing board and books lining the walls. He was a powerful figure in the city, but even his influence, I knew, could not supersede my authority to detain and read him or any member of his family. I did not play coy but went straight to the heart of the matter.

“I need some information,” I told him as I sat down in one of the plush chairs attending his desk.

“Everyone needs information,” he said snidely.

I took out a handful of appointment cards and threw them on the desk. “Give one of these to each of your grandchildren,” I told him. “I hope for their sakes they are all excellent physiognomical specimens. Have you heard about what the Master has planned for the park in a few days?” I asked.

He stared at the cards and then eventually nodded. “Are you threatening me, Cley?” he asked.

“Their heads will pop like grapes,” I said. “All of those tow-headed little minchs of yours, exploding for the glory of the realm. It will certainly be a spectacle,” I said.

“The Master will hear of this,” he said.

“Very well,” I said, and got up to leave.

“Wait,” he called just as I was going out the door.

I turned and walked back to the desk. “The crystal sphere that houses the false paradise, how was it constructed?” I asked.

“You know of it?” he asked. “It's supposed to be a secret.”

I pulled out another appointment card and threw it on his desk. “Have your wife come by my office also,” I said.

“It was not constructed,” he told me. “Crystal grows. The Master grew it in an elliptical mold that was made of a substance of his invention that eventually, over time, turns to pure oxygen. The solution was poured into the mold, the crystal grew, and the mold then disintegrated. A very rapid process,” he said.

“Are there entrances or exits?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“Can it be cracked?” I asked.

“We tested it with flamethrowers, bullets, hand grenades. They didn't make a scratch. But why do you need to know?” he asked.

“It's a secret,” I said.

“Has this been sanctioned by the Master?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “If he hears of my visit to you, you can plan on your family line being snipped short.”

“You're one of us, aren't you?” he said, and then held up his hand and made the sign of the O.

I nodded and gave him an O in return.

He smiled and showed me to the door. “If I can think of anything, I'll let you know,” he said.

As I rode away from the park, I felt uneasy about having exposed my position to Deemer. I could only hope that he really was part of what appeared to be a city-wide conspiracy. “These unknown allies might be my last and only salvation at the end,” I thought. But things were rarely what they seemed in the realm. On my way back to my apartment, I continued to search the streets for the only person I could definitively trust—a gear-work giant with a pinprick of paradise in his head.