The Physiognomy

Cley is Physiognomist First Class of the Well-Built City, which means he reads guilt, virtue and criminal tendency from the calipered proportions of the human face, and he is very good at it. Dispatched by Drachton Below, the Master who designed and rules the city and everything in it, Cley travels to the mining village of Anamasobia to investigate the theft of the white fruit, an object said to have been taken from the body of a saint in the rock. He arrives cruel, addicted to a drug called sheer beauty, and entirely confident in his method. He measures a young woman named Arla Beaton, finds her guilty, and by the time he understands what he has actually done, the Master has withdrawn his protection and Cley is on his way to the sulphur mines at Doralice. Ford writes in a hallucinatory, deadpan manner that lets pseudoscience, mutilation and the wilder inventions of Below's engineering sit together without explanation. It is a short novel about a man discovering the exact size of his own atrocity, and it is far funnier than that description allows.