Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [208]
Everyone has their keepsakes from the Well-Built City, and to be sure, I have mine. I never discovered gold or one of the strange mechanical devices that are so highly prized. What I discovered, few of my neighbors would consider worth a feather. In one of the hundred caverns created by the destruction of what must have been a towering building (from a mosaic circle inlaid in the marble floor of the place’s entrance, I learned it had once been known as the Ministry of Physiognomy), I salvaged a box of old papers. Time had seared the pages brown, rain had played havoc with the ink, and the box itself was mildewed, smelling like an open grave. Still, I carried the sodden load back to my home in Wenau. There, I removed the hundreds of damp pages from the box and set them out, twenty-five at a time, in the summer sun.
Once they were dry, I began to study them. They were all written by the hand of the same individual, a man by the name of Cley. He was a physiognomist, a sort of investigator, who read, in the physical features of men and women, their guilt or innocence, their immorality and their grace. Bonikem, who is writing a history of the Well-Built City based on all that has been discovered, has told me that this fellow, Cley, rose to a high position in the government under the rule of Drachton Below, becoming Physiognomist, First Class. “I’ve not been able to find certain connections I need to corroborate it,” Bonikem told me, “but I’m sure Cley had a hand in the city’s demise.”
What I had in my pile of papers was the record of all of those cases he’d investigated from when he was a student at the Ministry, to when he achieved the superior rank of First Class, at which point he either stopped writing or there is another box buried in the city somewhere. The interesting thing about them, though, is that they must be his personal record, for, as a student, he often disparages his professors and later, when he has become a professional, his superiors. They are by no means succinct reports but windy conflations full of opinion, outbursts, fractured narrative, and flights of a bleak fancy.
Although many of the cases have been completely obliterated by rain, words turned to black stains, many complete cases remain intact or at least readable. On the last night of the week, our club of archeologists gets together at someone’s home. We smoke a pipe, drink a glass of Rose Ear Sweet or that whiskey brought back from the city whose label names it Tears in the River. At some point in the evening I will read one of Physiognomist Cley’s cases for everyone. We have a hoot and a hallo over them, and later, beneath the moon, on the way home along the riverbank, we think about their implications. Here’s the one I’ll be reading this week:
The Summer Palace
Chibbins—I see the dolt now, sitting across from me in the carriage, his face as futile a bowl of porridge as has ever been whipped up through the grim processes of intercourse. His father is none other than the Master’s, Drachton Below’s, personal butler, known to the populace by the full title Chibbins, My Good Man. This pale bag of potatoes that sits before me in my memory, though, has succeeded through the academy and into the physiognomical service due only to his father’s exalted position. Everyone knew the son was an idiot—a cursory reading of his visage tells the dim tale—but no professor dared fail him, no administrator in the service would do more than grin and bear his buffoonery. It’s just this kind of nepotism that is blunting the scalpel edge