"Remarkable," I said to him, as he followed, hands clasped as if in prayer to his accumulations.
"What did your father think of this?" I asked.
" 'Abhorrent' was the term he used, but he never demanded that I dismantle it."
"What made you start?" I asked, turning to watch him.
"I had the feeling that there was a story in all of this," he said. "If I just put the right pieces together it should all become clear to me—the story of the Well-Built City."
"You've done a fine job here," I said. "But what do you make of this story?"
"A love story, I'm sure of that much, but after that I lose the thread in a small object I cannot make out the meaning of. It's down here," he said and walked past me, leading me deeper into the aisles of shelves.
He finally stopped in the last row, at the very corner of the far-flung room. "Here," he said as I caught up to him. He pointed at the shelf and stared.
There, in a display between an empty Schrimley's bottle and the blue hand of a hardened hero, sat a white fruit at the moment of ripeness.
I reached toward it, but was quick to bring my arm up short, landing my index finger on the paper card that held the message: unknown fruit—plucked from tree growing among the ruins.
"What is it?" he asked.
"This is the fruit of the Earthly Paradise," I said. "A kind of miracle engine. I've seen people poisoned by it, and I've seen it bring back the dead."
"Interesting," he said.
"What does this do to your story?" I asked.
"It's too early to tell. It's got to be important, though."
"Why?"
"Otherwise, I wouldn't have found it," he said.
He led me back to his living quarters, which included a writing desk, a lamp, a small shelf of books.
"Do you sleep?" I asked, not seeing a bed or couch.
"Sleep is my return to the Beyond, for I still dream like a demon. Occasionally I will dream human, and these are always nightmares. But here," he said, and his wings swept out. He gave a slight jump and lifted into the air, the papers on the desk flying off in all directions. I followed his course upward to where there was a metal bar affixed to the ceiling. He wrapped his fingers around this and then brought his feet up beneath him, bending his knees and resting the soles against the bar between his hands. Crouched upside down like this, he folded his wings closed and hung, motionless, like some prodigious fruit of the Beyond.
"…is where I sleep," he said, his voice muffled by the cocoon of his wings.
Without thought, I applauded.
"Rest now, Gey," he said. "There is only an hour or so till dawn."
A moment later he was snoring. After retrieving the green veil from my coat, I took it off, sat down against the wall by the door, and closed my eyes. I was exhausted, hungry, and completely confused. There was no sense in fighting the course of events. Like one of the artifacts in the Museum of the Ruins, I was a mere fragment of debris from a far-reaching story. I tried to think of what I should be looking for in the laboratory the next morning, but the words on the list in my mind began to drip off the page, and I nodded forward into a dream of Wenau. I found myself walking silently through my own darkened house. Outside, in the moonlit yard, a dog was barking.
I opened my eyes a few hours later and saw Misrix sitting at his writing desk, plunging, into the crook of his arm, a hypodermic of what I was sure was sheer beauty. When he finished, he grimaced and slid the needle out.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
He turned quickly and stared into my eyes. At first his look conveyed guilt, but I could sense the beauty wrapping around his mind, and guilt soon became innocence.
"The beauty," he said, smiling.
"Do you need to take it?" I asked.
"I need to take it when I am going out into the ruins without my father. It makes me lighter and gives me ideas where to hide if I have to."
"Don't we need to concentrate on getting to the lab?"
"Certainly, certainly …"he said and took to staring at the wall.
I got up from where I had slept and walked over to him. "Misrix," I said.
He gave no reply.
"Misrix," I said, and touched his wing. He turned his head slowly, and said, "Yes, Cley, I know, the lab." He pushed back his chair and stood. "No resting," he said. "When we get out into the ruins, we must move quickly."
I nodded, letting him know I understood, but he had already brushed past me and was heading out the door. I followed him down the hallway almost to Below's room when he abruptly stopped and put his hand to his head.
"Wrong way," he said, turned around, and went past me in the opposite direction. Imagine yellow eyes, bloodshot, and hands that were slightly trembling. Just the very mention of the beauty was bad business as far as I was concerned. This drug had been the leash that Below had used to restrain us all in the days when the City was still whole. Its powerful hallucinogenic effects left one in a rictus of paranoia, totally suggestable, the Master's favorite environment through which to govern. I had spent many years wrapped in its hellish nightmare and quite a few more trying to forget its insistent tug. Misrix was using it, much as I had in the old days, as an antidote for his fear of being human.
We went through another door which opened onto another long hallway. At the next door, Misrix let me catch up to him. "Cley," he said, and smiled foolishly. "When we go out this door, I will lock it behind me. We will have entered the remains of the public baths. Through these we will get to the street."
"What are you thinking about right now?" I asked him.
"About the white fruit."
"Let's think about werewolves instead," I said.
He laughed and put his arm on my shoulder. "You think about them," he said, and pushed the door open.
I followed him out quickly. He turned around, and with a long key I had not noticed him holding before, locked the door. Then he straightened up, and we made our way amidst the still-bubbling cisterns. Great chunks of the roof had fallen into the pools, letting the daylight stream into the water that had remained crystal clear. When I looked down, I could see frogs and fish darting about, and down deeper yet, I could make out the remains of a human rib cage.
Although the baths had sustained less damage than many other sites in the City, broken tile lay everywhere, and there was one spot where we had to leap over a fissure in the floor through which a swift stream of purified water now ran. The real problem came when we reached the entrance. That once grand archway that had led to the street was choked almost to the top with an enormous hill of shattered coral masonry. Misrix began the climb toward the sliver of daylight that shone in at the very peak. I took to the hill and made my way up the uneven slope, twisting my ankle and cutting my forearm in the process. Misrix reached a hand down and dragged me up the last few feet. We had to lie on our stomachs in order to slip through the opening into daylight.
The sky was clear and the sun had already lifted away from the horizon. For the first time, I could see the extent to which the City had been decimated. Entire ministries that at one time had held hundreds of workers on any given day were completely leveled. The pink coral that Below had used for the structures lay in boulders, slabs, and jagged toppled columns everywhere. Reaching from beneath these weighty fragments were the skeletal arms and hands of the citizens of the City. In the crevices, I could make out the glint of brass gears and the twisted belongings of Below's children. A fine pink powder swirled in the street when the breeze blew.