"The Master requests your presence," said a voice. "There is a coach waiting."
I looked into the bedroom and saw that Calloo had not moved off the bed. "Get in the closet," I said.
"Paradise," he mumbled but remained still.
I left with the coachman, and it seemed only minutes before I was across town in an elevator on the way up to the Master's offices. As I walked down the hall of hardened heroes, my mind was ablaze with fabulations and excuses for Below, but when I pushed through the door of his office, they twisted together and strangled each other. I stood, empty-headed before him. He sat with his elbow resting on the desk and a hand clutching his forehead. The expression he wore was grimmer than Calloo's.
"Sit down, Cley," he said, waving me into the chair.
There was a long pause, in which he closed his eyes.
"Did you hear about the demon?" he finally asked.
"Yes," I said.
He started to laugh. ''That's right," he said. "I sent that note to you."
"Have you captured it?" I asked.
"Captured it," he said, "I was the one who let it go. I realized that change requires access to random possibility, so I released the demon into the City. He is your competition. As you methodically gather the unworthy for expungment, he kills them as he sees them. I'm thinking big, Cley, very big."
"Brilliant," I said. "By the way, I much appreciated your gifts."
He waved his hand at me and shook his head. "What I've called you here for is to discuss these headaches I've been getting ever since I ate that white shit of the wilderness. My, was that a mistake. Stomach pains and these blasted headaches."
"I have some familiarity with chemistry," I said. "What were the ingredients your researchers found in it?"
"Who knows," he said.
"Can you describe the pains?" I asked.
"Like a fist squeezing my brain," he said. "I can feel that it is projecting energy from my head. Never before has the Weil-Built City of my imagination seemed so inextricably tied to the physical City we now inhabit. These attacks make it hard to distinguish between the two."
("I can't think of what that might be," I told him. "How is your special assignment coming?" he asked. "I read a group yesterday afternoon and already have some participants for the Memorial Park affair," I said.
"Excellent work," he said, clutching at his head again. When he didn't speak for quite some time, I started to get up to leave. As I made for the door, he stopped me.
"Cley," he said, not looking up, "keep that leather glove of yours clean." He began to laugh, but soon it quieted into a wince.
By the time I got to the office, the morning was gone. I had just enough time to send out some appointment cards by messenger. I gave instructions that they should be distributed to the Minister of the Treasury and all the members of his family.
I longed for the beauty, but I did not take it. Instead, I smoked and stared out the window, trying to wrap my mind around the Master's gibberish about random possibility and the demon being my competition. He did not appear well at all, which was a blessing for me. I knew I would have to take bolder and bolder steps to get where I wanted to be, and to have Below distracted could only be beneficial. Then the Minister of the Treasury and his family arrived.
The minister was heavy and sweating profusely as I put him through his paces. Calipers, cranial radius—every tool I had in my bag. As I worked away, I praised his features and told him he was remarkable. He spoke of his accomplishments and his importance to the realm. I duly noted in my book the elegance of his third chin. I offhandedly questioned him about the treasures brought back from the territory.
"I am not at liberty to divulge that information," he said.
"Good," I told him. "You have passed the test. The Master will be pleased with your reliability concerning the subject."
He left smiling.
With his three daughters and their mother, it hardly took any praise at all to get them to talk. I barely even scratched the surface and they each separately told me how much they despised the minister. "I can see what you mean," I told them. His wife got so carried away that she spat on the floor. I gave her a tissue which she used twice more. Even his youngest daughter, little more than a baby, gave the thumbs-down when I asked her about Daddy. I wondered where, inside all that flesh, he was hiding. When they left my office, they went quietly, calmly, with the minister in the lead.
Now it was time for the beauty. I went to my desk and prepared a full dose. Later, when I came out of it, I could hardly remember anything from the experience. Moissac had made a brief appearance, and Silencio had perched on the win-dowsill, picking ticks from his fur and crunching them in his teeth. The sun was going down, and I had to leave immediately. I had plans for Calloo and me to go on an expedition.
Even under cover of darkness, trying to be inconspicuous with Calloo was an effort. I had dressed him in a rather large topcoat of mine, the sleeves of which came nearly to his elbows and the bottom hem to mid-thigh. In addition to this, I shoved an old broad-brimmed hat onto his head and folded the front down to cover his face. He lumbered along behind me as I navigated a path through the alleys to the western side of town. It was clear to me that somewhere in his scrambled, gear-work head, he understood most of what I had told him, because when I arrived home from the office, I found him huddled in my bedroom closet. "We're going for a stroll," I had said to him.
I spoke quietly as we walked along through the shadows, but I could not stop from telling him everything that had happened to me since I had last seen him. I was not sure how much of an asset he would be to my plans, but it didn't matter. He was to me what I needed most, a coconspirator, a friend to plot with. I had the courtesy not to mention his ghoulish condition, and I got the feeling he was thankful for this. Occasionally, he would mutter some words in his deep mechanical voice, and though I could not always pick up what he was saying, I tried to respond with a likely comment. He said my name once or twice, and when he did, I turned and smiled and patted him on the shoulder.
I could see that the duration of my companion's strange life was in some question, considering that there were times when his inner workings screeched and whined so badly I thought he was going to explode. Then he stopped walking and began to sway back and forth. Sparks were visible in his eyes and puffs of smoke drifted from his open mouth. A minute or two later, these episodes passed and we continued. Calloo was, for the most part, no different than the Minister of Treasury and the Minister of Security, his true self trapped somewhere deep within. The one thing that set him apart from them is that even in the condition he was in the voice that moved him was the one in search of paradise.
It took a good hour or so to traverse half the distance to the sewage treatment plant, and I realized after walking so far, that I had not eaten anything all day. My head was light, and I began to feel weak. I knew I should get some food, since I might be required to run or fight before the night was over.
"Hungry?" I asked Calloo.
He grunted and I took that to mean yes.
"We'll go up onto the main street, but whatever you do, don't talk to anyone, don't look at them," I said.
He put his hand up to scratch his beard, and a clump of hair sloughed off his face and came away on the ends of his fingers. I wasn't sure if that was a sign that he understood or not. We made our way out of the alley and up onto Quigley Boulevard, one of the less traveled thoroughfares of the city. I knew there were a few restaurants there.
I chose a small place that had dough-gummels to take out. The man behind the counter was extremely talkative, extremely inquisitive. It was just my bad luck that he, like the bartender the other evening, knew who I was. He welcomed me back and asked a lot of questions about the territory as he waited for a rack of the pastries to come out of the oven.