A few moments later, Aria called over the wind, "Did you see those boys were building a likeness of the Traveler? It has become a childhood tradition ever since he was discovered."
"Children," I said, "a race of bizarre deviants."
Then she said something and actually laughed aloud, but her words were swallowed by the wind.
I never thought I would be pleased to enter that Temple of the Off-Kilter, but not to have the snow driving into my face made the church almost acceptable. As Aria closed the big misshapen door behind us, I stood for a moment, listening to the immediate silence and behind it the wind howling as if at a great distance. Her hair was wet and the smell of it seemed to fill the dark foyer. My hand involuntarily came up to touch her face, but luckily she had already begun to move toward the bridge. We crossed over, myself a little unsteadily, reeling with her wet-forest scent. I'd have given a thousand belows to have been reading her that night instead of Garland's six-and-a-half-foot dried-dung manikin.
The father was there, waiting for us, and somehow he had moved the Traveler to the flattened boulder that was the altar.
"Your honor," he said and bowed, his disposition apparently having lightened since that afternoon.
I waved halfheartedly to acknowledge him.
"Aria, my dear," he said, and she went over to him and kissed him on the forehead. As she did, I noticed him rest his pointy little hand lightly on her hip.
"How did you get him in here?" I asked, wanting to shorten their coziness.
"The Traveler is light," he said, "almost as if he were made of paper or dried corn stalks. Of course, I had to drag his feet, but I barely lost my breath bringing him up the stairs."
The thought of Garland losing his breath seemed a near impossibility.
I stepped up to the altar and rested my bag of instruments down next to the subject's head. Aria followed and helped me off with my topcoat. As she removed her own, I began laying the tools out in the order in which I would need them.
"Can I be of assistance?" Garland eagerly asked.
"Yes," I said, not looking up from my work, "you can leave us now."
"I thought I might watch. I'm keenly interested," he said.
"You may go," I told him without raising my voice.
He sulked over to the corridor that led to his office, but before he finally left, he offered an aphoristic blessing: "May God be everywhere you are about to look and absent where you already have."
"Thank you, Father," Aria said.
I turned to look at him and quietly laughed in his face before he disappeared down the corridor.
"Hand me that cranial radius," I said to her, pointing to the first instrument, a chrome hoop with representative screws at the four points of the compass; and, with this, we began.
In order to perform the reading, I had to overcome my initial revulsion at touching the brown shiny beetle-back skin of the Traveler. One of the first things we learned at the academy was that dark pigmentation of the flesh is a sure sign of diminished intelligence and moral fiber. In addition, the consistency of it, like a thin yet slightly pliant eggshell, put a fear in me that my sharp instruments might leave a crack in the subject's head. I put on my leather gloves and then set to work with the radius.
The slender nature of the cranium made Mantakis's thin head seem almost robust, but at the same time there was something so concise and elegant about this expression of Nature that the computations, when I figured them in my workbook—a tiny leather-bound volume in which I recorded all my findings in secret code with a needle dipped in ink—at once pointed to both a severe paucity of rational thought and a certain sublime divinity. The numbers seemed to be playing tricks on me, but I let them stand since I had never read anything before quite like the Traveler. Is he human? I wrote at the bottom of the page.
"Pass me the nasal gauge," I said to Aria, who stood close by me, rapt with interest. Now I could see that to have invited her along on this venture might have been a mistake. I did not want her to sense my uncertainty in the face of the Traveler. What could be worse than a pupil discovering a lack of confidence in her mentor?
"He is most peculiar looking up close," she said. "Nothing physically would suggest anything but the weakest link to humanity, yet there is something more there."
"Please," I said, "we must let the numbers do the thinking." I fear she took this as a reprimand and was from then on completely silent.
The bridge of the nose began almost at the hairline, and instead of flanging at the nostrils tapered to a sharp point with two small slits, like the puncture wounds of a penknife on either side. "Madness," I muttered, but, again, I put down precisely what I found. Instead of the math solidly confirming my suspicions that he represented a species of prehistoric protohuman, the measurement was in direct ratio to that of a Star Five, my own and Aria's illustrious physiognomical evaluation.
The hair itself was long, black, and braided, and appeared as healthy as Aria's beautiful tresses. There was a point where the braiding ended, but the hair had continued to grow a full six inches. From the look of it, I was forced to wonder if it was still not growing beyond death, slowly reaching outward through the centuries. I removed my glove and tentatively ran my fingers through it. Soft as silk, and I could almost feel life in it. I wiped my hand on my trousers and quickly put the glove back on.
I continued, calling for Aria to pass the various instruments— the Hadris lip vise, the ocular standard, the earlobe cartilage meter, etc. I took my time, working slowly and carefully, recording, as always, precisely what I found, yet all the time a feeling of frustration was mounting in my intestines. The representative mathematics of this strange head was acting more like magic, conjuring something utterly superior to even my own features. When all I had left to apply was the calipers, my specialty, I stepped back from the altar and motioned to Aria that we would take a break.
I turned away from the Traveler and lit a cigarette in order to calm my nerves. Sweat trickled down from my brow, and my shirt was damp. Aria said not a word but gave me an inquiring look, as if I should relate to her my findings so far.
"It is too early to make any determination," I said.
She nodded and glanced past me at that long face. From the cast of her gaze, I knew what it was she was looking at—the same eye-crease-to-jawline measurement we had earlier discussed about her grandfather. I didn't need the calipers to know that I would find a measurement there well within the bounds of the Grandeur Quotient.
"Your honor," she said, "I think he is moving."
I spun around, and she brushed past me. She put her hand out and laid it on his chest. "I feel it," she said, "the slightest movement."
I reached over and withdrew her hand with my own. "Now, now," I said, "at times we can doubt what we see, but I'm afraid there is no doubting Death, especially since it has had residence in this fellow for a thousand years or more."
"But I felt it move," she said. There was a look of fear in her eyes, and I could not let go of her.
"Garland probably upset the internal structure of the thing when he moved it. You must feel the breaking of brittle bones turned to salt or the rearrangement of petrified organs. That is all."
"Yes, your honor," she said, but still stepped back with a look of horror on her face.
How could I have told her that all of my calculations to this juncture pointed to an individual of great awareness and subtle nuance? How could I admit that this freak of nature, with his insect skin and webbed fingers, was, as far as I could tell, the very pinnacle of human evolution? "Where does this put me?" I wondered. I wanted desperately to change my findings. It would have been easy, and I knew, for all involved, it would have been better, but the magic that had infected my computations had put a hex on me that tied me to the bitter truth.