The Physiognomy

"A miracle," he said.

I was led to a sorry looking four-story dwelling in the center of town called the Hotel de Skree. "I have reserved the entire fourth floor for you," said the mayor.

I held my tongue.

"The service is magnificent," he said. "The stewed cremat is splendid and all drinks are complimentary."

"Cremat," I said through tight lips, but it went no further, because coming toward us on the left side of the street was an old blue man. Bataldo saw me notice the staggering wretch and waved to him. The old man lifted his hand but never looked up. His skin was the color of a cloudless sky. "What ma

"The old miners have lived so long in the spire dust that it becomes them. Finally they harden all the way through. If the family of the man is poor, they sell him as spire rock to the realm for half what a pure sample of his weight would bring. If the family is well-off, they register him as a 'hardened hero,' and he stands in perpetuity somewhere in town as a monument to personal courage and a lesson to the young."

"Barbaric," I said.

"Most of them never get that old," said the mayor, "cave-ins, natural poison gasses, falling in the dark, madness. . . . Mr. Beaton, there," he said, pointing after the blue man, "he'll be found next week somewhere, heavy as a gravestone and set in his ways."

The mayor showed me into the lobby of the hotel and informed the management that I had arrived. The usual amenities followed. The old couple who presided over the shabby elegance of the de Skree, a Mr. and Mrs. Mantakis, were, each in his own way, textbook examples of physiognomical blunders. Nature had gone awry in the development of the old man's skull, leaving it too thin to house real intelligence and nearly as long as my forearm. I realized, as he kissed my ring, that I could not expect much from him. Not in the habit of beating dogs, so to speak, I showed him a smile and gave an approving nod. The missus, on the other hand, exhibited ferretlike tendencies in her pointed face and sharp teeth, and I knew I would have to check my change after every monetary transaction that passed between us. The hotel itself, with its tattered carpets and fractured chandelier, spelled out a gray, languorous rage.

"Any special requests, your honor?" said Mr. Mantakis.

"An ice-cold bath at dawn," I told him. "And I must have complete silence in which to meditate upon my findings."

"We hope your stay will be—" the old woman began, but I cut her off with a wave of my hand and demanded to be taken to my rooms. As Mr. Mantakis took my valise and led me toward the stairway, the mayor a

"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."