Memoranda

by Jeffrey Ford

  “One lump or two?” he asked, lifting the lid off a silver sugar bowl that was part of the service he had brought in on a lacquered tray.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  He bowed his horned head and reached daintily into the bowl with two of his claws, like pincers, to pull out one cube at a time. Putting two in my cup, he lifted a spoon and stirred five times, his wings rising slightly with each orbit.

  “We haven’t had lemon for a long time,” he said, averting his glance.

  I said nothing but continued to stare in disbelief at his cordiality. “A shy beast of prey?” I said to myself. It might even have been easier had I come to my senses and found Greta Sykes chewing my leg. All I could think of was having seen my friend, Bataldo, the Mayor of Anamasobia, attacked by demons in the Beyond.

  While preparing his own, he looked up every so often, showing enough fang to make me uncomfortable. He brought the cup to his lips when he was done and tested the mixture. The steam rose from the tea and fogged his spectacles, so he took them off and cleared them against the reddish brown fur of his stomach. His eyes intrigued me with their vertical serpent slits instead of irises, but at the same time they stirred some primal fear in me, and I could not look for long.

  “You saved me tonight,” I said.

  He nodded. “I was out for some air, and I saw you running.”

  “The werewolves,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” he told me. “I have no control over them. I’m as frightened of them as you are. If I landed outside the walls and stayed on the ground, they would as soon rip me apart as you.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “You are welcome, Cley.”

  “How do you know me?” I asked, lifting my tea.

  “My father,” he said.

  “Who is your father?” I asked.

  “Master Below is my father. He showed me you,” said Misrix.

  “Drachton Below?” I asked.

  “He birthed me into the world of men. He gave me language and understanding,” he said.

  “Is he here, in the ruins of the city?” I asked.

  “He is here,” said Misrix.

  “I’ve got to speak to him,” I said.

  “I will take you to him soon.”

  “How were you birthed into the world of men?” I asked.

  “It was like a great wind blowing out a candle in my head. With the brightness of the Beyond extinguished from me, I could concentrate. I began to think as humans do.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Very well, Cley,” he said, and with this reached back into the folds of his leathery wings and brought forth a pack of cigarettes and a small box of matches.

  “You smoke?” I asked.

  “From what I have read, it is most appropriate that a demon should smoke,” he said with a bashful grin. “But you won’t tell my father, will you?”

  “Not if you give me one,” I said.

  He reached the pack across to me.

  “Where did you get these?” I asked.

  “In the ruins. I can find almost anything in the ruins if I look long enough. These spectacles, do you like them?” he asked, leaning his head down and peering over the top of them. “I found them on a dead one. My father says they do not help my sight, but I like them. When I look at myself in the glass, I see ‘intelligent.’”

  As he lit his cigarette and inhaled, his hooves clicked a rhythm against the stone floor. He passed me the matches and coughed profusely, like the muffled roar of a lion. The smoke wreathed his head, and if not for the spectacles, I saw before me an illustration from the catechism of my childhood. He flapped his wings to clear the air, took another drag, and began.

  “I still vaguely remember when I was a beast, gliding through the forest, sniffing at the breeze of the Beyond for a trace of living flesh. Then I was captured and brought to the City. All I remember from that time is rage and fear. I escaped from my captors. Food was easy to find, though, and rarely put up much of a fight. Once I battled a powerful man in the underground, and he cracked off one of my horns. The horn grew back, and I went on to hunt again. Finally, there were explosions everywhere, and I flew up out of the City and circled in the air until they ended. After that, it was difficult to find food. I could not eat the dead even though there were so many. To eat the dead is to die. I lived on stray cats and dogs who survived the end of the City. Sometimes I would swoop down on pigeons, but this was meager food, and I was beginning to starve.

  “One day I saw a man, it was my father, before I knew he was my father, standing out in the open. I flew down on him to take his living flesh, but as my claws ripped into him, he was not there. He had vanished like smoke, and what I knew next was a net dropping over me. Then he was there, and he stuck a long, sharp thing into my arm. I was awake and dreaming all at once for a very long time. Through that time I heard his voice always speaking to me. The words seeped into me and twisted around my inside, grew like vines and flowers, blossomed in my skull. It was painful, but the pain was far away.

  “Sheer beauty were the first words I came to understand, and I knew they meant the bite of the needle. When I awoke, I no longer desired living flesh. Father fed me plant meat. I no longer knew every moment what I would do in the next moment, but instead sat for long moments thinking. This thinking was a curious thing at first. It was a clock ticking, a music I did not want to hear the end of. Finally, I was released from my waking dream, and I knew before I stood up and took my first step that I was Misrix. I cried to know that I was born then. My father put his arms around me. ‘You have much to learn,’ he said.”

  Here the demon motioned for me to return the pack of cigarettes. He took another and this time reached up and struck the match head into flame against his left horn. As he brought the light down, he looked out of the corner of his eye to make sure I had caught his performance.

  “So,” I said, “Below dragged you into humanity.”

  “Birthed me,” he said. “He showed me many things. Told me many things. And then one day, we discovered that I had a special way of learning. I used to be his assistant in the laboratory. I watched him make his inventions and experiments, as he called them. At the time, he was turning men into the wolf-things that surround the ruins. A group of men from somewhere came to the City. They had weapons and were hunting through the debris for treasures. We captured them, he and I and Greta. He told me that he was going to help them to return to their true forms. What they were really searching for was to be turned into wolves. We put them all alive in cages and then one at a time, he would take them out and work on them. Their screams upset me. He told me it was not easy for them to become what they needed to become.

  “One day when he was sleeping, I heard one of them screaming in the laboratory. I went in there, although I was not supposed to without the Master. The man begged me to let him go. I tried telling him he needed to become a wolf, but he cried most pitifully. He told me he would be all right if I would just let him loose to take a walk for a few minutes. I hurt inside for him and undid the straps, letting him up. He ran away. Father was furious with me. He yelled and even struck me in the face. I was told to stand in the corner, and he sent Greta out to find the man. She returned an hour later, but I guess she never found him.

  “Later, the Master came to me and told me never to do anything in the laboratory without his permission. I told him I was sorry, and he said I was good then. I wanted to put my arms around him, but his face was still frowning. Instead, I reached out and laid my hand on top of his head. That is when the learning came in a great storm through my hand and arm and into me. It was like his life was in my mind. I saw him as a boy and a young man. I saw him doing a thousand things and speaking a million words. ‘Remarkable,’ he said as he lifted my hand from his head. He had felt it too and said it was a part of my animal nature that I had not lost—that it would be a valuable tool. From then on, we learned to contain the storm, we birthed it into a human thing, and this
is how he taught me so much in the few years I have been alive.”

  “And what did he teach you about me?” I asked.

  “He told me you were one of his children and showed me you in his thoughts.”

  “Did he tell you he once tried to have me killed?”

  “No,” he said, and pushed his chair back. He stood and his wings lifted, his tail danced.

  “What kind of father tries to kill his children?” I asked.

  The demon took off his spectacles and stood quietly for a long time, pulling at his pigtail of a beard.

  “I know,” he said in a quiet voice. “That first time the storm came through my hand and into me, before we learned to contain it, I saw everything.”

  “It bothers you, doesn’t it?”

  Misrix shook his head. “Why did he do that to the woman with the green cloth? Why did he shoot the man? Why did he make the soldiers scream with pain to become wolves? The knowledge came to me through him, but also there came a small stinging insect, always buzzing through my thoughts. Everything I have come to know is poisoned by the sting of this creature. At night I cannot sleep for wondering.”

  “Why do you stay here?” I asked.

  “He is my father.”

  I told him what had happened at Wenau—about the exploding bird and the sleeping disease.

  “Yes,” he said, “I know.”

  “Please. I must help those people,” I said. “Take me to him. Let me reason with him.”

  “Come, Cley,” he said.

  He waited for me to get out of my chair, then led me through the door, holding it open as I passed. We walked in silence down a long, door-lined corridor, and I marveled at this beast with a conscience. What struck me was that as depraved as Below was, he was somehow capable of raising a “child” who had a sense of morality. I thought I might be able to enlist the son as an ally.

  At the end of the corridor there was another door. As we approached it, Misrix reached out and put a hand on my shoulder, the claws curving down to point at my heart.

  “You must promise that you will not hurt him,” he said.

  “Me, hurt Below?” I said. “I was hoping that you would protect me from his anger.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” he said as he turned the knob and pulled back the door.

  The room was small and dimly lit by one candle. It took me a moment for my eyes to adjust, and in that time Misrix had entered and was standing beside me. The candle sat in a holder on a small table next to a large bed with an ornate headboard. Lying in the bed was Drachton Below, his eyes closed. His head was propped up on cream-colored pillows as though resting on a cloud bank, and he was dressed in blue silken pajamas. In the time since I had last seen him, he had grown a long mustache and beard, the same color as the pillows. His face was remarkably clear of wrinkles for one as old as he, but the thick hair that he had once worn in an impressive wave was now all but gone.

  Misrix walked over to the side of the bed and reached out to pat him lightly on the head. I approached and asked if I could awaken him.

  “I wish you could,” said the demon.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. Before he could answer, though, I noticed the expression on Below’s face. He wore a subtle grin, the same I had seen back in Wenau on Roan and Jensen and the others who had succumbed to the disease.

  I turned to Misrix, and he simply nodded. “We were in the laboratory three days ago, and he was preparing one of his metal birds. He told me, ‘Another gift for my children at Wenau.’ There was a small beaker of steaming yellow liquid in his hand that he was preparing to pour into the mouth of the bird. He began to tell me something, and when he did, the beaker slipped from his fingers and crashed against the floor. I was on the other side of the laboratory, and I began to rush to his aid. By then a thick yellow smoke was rising around him. He spoke excrementally, and motioned for me not to come near him. I stayed at a distance, because he kept his finger pointed at me to remain. Then his eyes rolled back in his head. He said, ‘Good night,’ and fell onto the floor. I have not been able to wake him since.”

  I felt a tightening in my stomach. “Is there an antidote? Do you remember him mentioning or working on a cure for the yellow smoke?” I asked.

  The demon nodded his head sadly. “Yes. When he first created the smoke, he made an experiment using one of the werewolves. He put the creature to sleep and then after two days awakened it with a needle full of something.”

  “What was it?” I asked.

  “I never knew,” said Misrix, and I saw him begin to get upset.

  “That’s fine,” I told him. “It’s not your fault.” I put my hand on his arm. “Do you know where he keeps it?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Where is it?” I asked.

  With the tip of a claw, he touched Below’s temple. “In there,” he said.

  6

  I asked Misrix to take me to the laboratory, but he said it would be impossible until daybreak, when the werewolves would be sleeping. It was situated on the main floor of a partially intact building all the way on the opposite side of the ruins, and the path to it led through some treacherously narrow spots that were havens for ambush. The lab itself was unprotected, and the creatures knew how to get in.

  “They could trap us there, and we’d never get out,” said the demon as he took one last look at Below before shutting the door.

  “Why did your father keep a laboratory so far away from your living quarters?”

  “Two reasons,” he said. “In case one of the experiments escaped while we were sleeping, and he used the daily journey to it as a way to get physical exercise.”

  “Can you carry me through the air?” I asked as we walked the long hallway.

  “During daylight, the metallic birds guard the sky. They will not strike us on the ground, but flying is too dangerous while the sun is up. They are set to intercept anything that crawls or walks outside the City walls and anything that flies over it. My father was particularly frightened of an attack by military balloons or rockets.

  “This is my room,” he said, and opened it for me. He set about lighting the spire lamps as I looked around. The place was enormous, well lit, and spotlessly clean. It was divided into a small living area and the rest was more rows of library shelves. He beckoned me over toward the shelves, and I followed.

  “I’ve gotten rid of the books in here and begun my Museum of the Ruins. These shelves are lined with the most interesting items I have salvaged from the Well-Built City.”

  I looked to the shelves and saw row upon row of artifacts—bullets and skulls and huge shards of soap-bubble crystal, obviously scraps from the false paradise. As I moved along the aisles, staring at the remains and reading the hand-printed cards that went with each small display, the ghost of the City came over me, and I remembered so clearly. In my memory, I rode the crystal-enclosed elevator to the Top of the City, while in actuality I walked past squashed shudder cups, a demon horn, bracelets, dolls, teeth, mummified toes, and a severed head from one of Below’s gladiators—gear-work showing through empty sockets.

  “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, Cley,” 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.