Prosper's Demon

by K. J. Parker

  I shrugged. “Particularly vulnerable,” I said. “And incredibly tempting, under the circumstances, if you consider the implications.”

  He sat down on a window ledge. “But that would be terrible. The worst disaster imaginable.”

  “Yes.”

  He looked up at me, the way people do. “If it’s true—”

  “I could tell you at a glance if it is or not.”

  “Would there be—? Could you do anything?”

  I gave him the customers’ smile. “Like I said. I’m a professional.”

  “But very young children—I understand the dangers are considerable.”

  “Yes,” I said. “But I’m the best there is.”

  He thought, for a very long time. She was howling and screaming and threatening to stop his pulse or give him a massive stroke. It was fun, watching Her lose Her cool like that. “All you need to do is see the Prince, and you can tell, one way or the other?”

  “I need to be ten feet away or closer,” I lied, “to be absolutely sure.”

  “That can be arranged.”

  “If it’ll set your mind at rest,” I said. I can be so thoughtful and considerate. “It’ll only take a minute.”

  * * *

  Me again, I said.

  Poor soul, He was terrified. Keep that bastard the hell away from me! He yelled. I’m not used to Them addressing me in the third person. Then I realized. He was talking to Her.

  She didn’t seem unduly concerned. Is that him? The one you told me about, who keeps picking on you?

  That’s him, all right. You said—

  Did she promise? I asked him. To protect you from the horrible monster?

  Yes.

  After all these years, you still don’t know me very well. I grinned at him. You’re safe, I said. I can’t get you out without hurting the Prince.

  You don’t care. You don’t give a damn. You never did.

  Oh, come on, I said. You know me better than that.

  I know you. A world of pain and resentment in three little words. I get it, you’re trying to kid—what did you call it, Her? Pause, while the implications sank in. You’re sick, you know that?

  Why should I bother trying to deceive one of you?

  You’re capable of anything.

  Bless the child, I said, so She could hear me—neat trick, by the way, which to the best of my knowledge none of my order has ever attempted, let alone succeeded. He doesn’t like me. Trying to get me into trouble by pretending I’ve done bad things. She knows better than that.

  Don’t use that word. It’s disgusting.

  She knows I wouldn’t try and pull you out of the Prince, because of the risk. The baby and the bathwater, as the saying goes. I paused, letting him have a nice long soak in my personality. My job’s to save people, not to rip them apart. No, I’m just paying my respects to an old friend, that’s all.

  Can’t you get him killed or something? he yelled past me, at Her. Or arrested or banished or something? He’s evil. He’s a lunatic.

  I sighed. She’s been keeping you out of the loop, I said. Didn’t She tell you? We’re all on the same side now.

  I turned my head, so I couldn’t see either of them.

  “Well?” said Master Prosper.

  Smile. “Clean as a whistle,” I said. “Nothing in there except the future Duke of Essen.”

  * * *

  Actually. Little white lie there.

  Which might explain the violence of His reaction on seeing me; also various other incidents in our relationship. Because it’s true, we don’t intervene when the damage we’d do to the host outweighs the damage caused by the infestation. Defeating the object of the exercise. Whose side, it could reasonably be asked, are we on, anyhow?

  But—well. I’m—I was going to say, only human. On reflection, you may disagree.

  It was still His fault, for bearing grudges. I grant you, I was a bit excessive, after that first time He tried to fit me up and kill me. I may have overstepped the line just a bit, with regard to the purely voluntary code of conduct we have in these matters. But what He did after that was—

  Did I mention I have a sister? And my sister had a baby.

  * * *

  Genius is a word you hear far too often these days, like hero or tragedy. Properly speaking, following the criteria officially approved by the Studium’s standing committee on nomenclature, there have been only two geniuses so far in the whole of history: Saloninus (of course) and Prosper of Schanz.

  Saloninus I know nothing about, except that a lot of scholars now believe he never existed. But Master Prosper, arrogant pinhead and grandson of a goatherd, is a genius, or the word simply has no meaning. To hell with whether or not the Great Horse would eventually get cast in bronze; the sketches alone, scrawled onto a painted-over masterpiece of early Mannerist fresco with a stick of charcoal, were among the most sublime expressions of the human spirit I’ve ever come across. Now, whether the credit for that goes to him or to Her . . . or maybe to both of them. There’s a school of scholarly opinion that maintains (on what grounds, I have no idea) that They are incapable of creating anything. They can’t die; neither can they impart life, either literally or metaphorically. If that’s true, then the divine creations of Master Prosper must be, for want of a better word, a collaboration, just as man and woman are both needed to collaborate on a child. The alternative is that all that remarkable stuff was dreamed up and put into practice by that clown, on his own, unassisted—which, having met the man and spent a lot of time with him, I solemnly declare to be unthinkable.

  A collaboration, between us and Them—enough to turn your stomach just thinking about it. But maybe that’s what it takes to come up with something so unspeakably, unthinkably—impossibly—wonderful as the sketches for the great bronze horse, or the violin concerto, or that extraordinary contraption of birchwood laths, feathers, and string that—if he ever gets around to building it—will turn a human being into a bird.

  And if so, would it be too high a price to pay?

  Speaking of impossible—I was there when he solved most of the major insurmountable difficulties in the casting process. We were sitting in the cloister garden, on either side of a section of broken column, which served us as a table for our drinks and nibbles. He liked talking to me, he said, forgetting he’d already told me that; or rather, thinking aloud at me. I made him feel safe, and his mind could come out of its shell and soar, instead of cowering.

  The weight of the molten metal bursting the mold was nothing, he told me. Simply do the casting in a deep pit, and let the walls of the pit support the sides of the mold. The balance problem? Obvious, really. Fit massive steel rods inside the hind legs of the horse, reaching from hoof to fetlock in one direction and the same length in the other; cut a screw thread on the lower section; the projecting ends of the pins pass through the marble plinth and are secured with washers the size of well-covers and gigantic nuts; thus the statue is bolted solid to the plinth, the ankles are reinforced so they won’t snap or bend, and the length of the plinth supplies the balance. As for the problem of moving around these colossal weights: He’d happened to cast an eye over the inventory of the royal arsenal and noticed that somewhere, in a deep, dark shed, the Duke had forty-six trebuchets, mothballed in his father’s time, when cannon first came in. Now, what is a trebuchet but an enormous crane, fitted with a substantial counterweight, and perfectly serviceable mechanisms for raising and lowering both counterweight and beam without undue effort through the proper application of mechanical advantage? A few simple modifications, and that would be that.

  What about the differential cooling? I asked him. He smiled. He’d given that a lot of thought, he said, and then it suddenly came to him, out of the blue, like (his own simile) being shat on by a seagull. Into the plaster core, insert a network of coiled copper pipes, through which cold water can be continually circulated during the actual pouring of the metal, thereby making sure that the outside and the inside of the bron
ze cools at approximately the same rate.

  Genius, I said. He tried to look modest. Well. Nobody, not even Master Prosper, can be expected to succeed at everything.

  Which just leaves, I said, the coating of the inside of the initial mold with wax. Which, unless you can think of a way of picking the mold up and swirling it around—

  He scowled at me, and She smirked. He’s a clever boy, She whispered. He’ll think of something.

  * * *

  Scruples. You may remember, I volunteered my lack of such as my contribution to the partnership.

  It all depends on how badly you want something; in this case, the success of the project. A few years ago, it was revenge, or (a bit less melodramatically) to get my own back on Him for trying to have me killed. As I said, I may have overreacted slightly. That was His excuse, the next time I met Him, inside the head of my sister’s three-month-old daughter.

  It’s the only place where I know I’ll be safe, He said.

  You may also recall that when one of Them gets inside an infant, it’s horribly dangerous to the host to evict it before the child reaches a certain age, usually two or three years before the onset of puberty. I give you my word, He said, I’ll bide here nice and quiet, nobody will know I’m here, I won’t hurt her, I’ll just curl up in a ball and go to sleep, like a squirrel.

  I was too angry to say anything. I’d warned Him, over and over again: Leave my family alone. Play your nasty games with me, if you have to; but if you do anything to them, anything at all, then so help me— And He’d taken no notice. Making a big show of being terrified, but really just laughing at me.

  When you’re being trained, they give you various no-win scenarios, to see how you react. One of them is a very strong demon firmly dug in to a very weak, vulnerable host. Getting It out would kill the host, no question about it. So what do you do? Leave It in there, to torture and agonize a fellow human being, for as long as the malevolent intruder can keep the physical body alive, purely and simply for the purpose of suffering torment? You have to use your own judgment, they tell you. No good can come of the situation. You have to choose the lesser evil. And if you listen to your scruples, the bleatings of conscience and its misguided appeals to the basic standards of our common humanity, you could well allow a greater evil because you shrink from getting your hands red with a lesser one.

  I learned that lesson well. Ten out of ten, alpha double plus, and a commendation.

  Afterwards, my sister said it wasn’t my fault. I’d done all I could—somehow she’d got the impression that I was a medical doctor—and I wasn’t to blame myself.

  And I didn’t. I don’t. I blame Him.

  * * *

  The horse had to succeed. It would mean so much. It would mean everything.

  We live in a miserable world, where the best we can honestly hope for is that one empty, meaningless day will follow another without things getting actively worse. A great man once said that the beating of the heart and the action of the lungs are a useful prevarication, keeping all options open. It’s a good line (though it doesn’t scan properly, in the original), but it presupposes that at least some of the options are good. I’m not convinced. Maybe it’s because I’ve spent so much of my life around immortals (creatures, by definition, of pure evil); the way I see it, when you’ve got only seventy-odd years maximum, and half of those are going to be spent gradually sliding downhill into arthritis and senility, how the hell can you expect to achieve anything worthwhile?

  Unless you happen to be a genius, like Master Prosper. The idea that there are men like that, capable of fiddling around with paper, pens, paints, bits of rock, and using that rubbish to create things so wonderful that even a soul-dead idiot like me has to stop and take his hat off and stare in wonder—it makes you doubt your etched-in-the-bone pessimism, just a little, just for a moment. Only Master Prosper never finishes anything; whereupon we can all say that that proves our point. He gets good ideas, but life is too short.

  To put it another way, more concise and less whinging: only two things live forever, the instruments of darkness and works of genius. Which, I now had disturbingly good reason to believe, might not be such separate categories as I’d once thought. Collaborations.

  (Good word. Two artists collaborate on a masterpiece. Traitors collaborate with the enemy.)

  Therefore, the horse had to succeed, to show that the impossible could be done, and that occasionally, works of genius do get finished. But how—how, in God’s name—do you apply a three-inch coating of wax to the inside of a mold for a colossal statue of a prancing horse?

  * * *

  Differential cooling, Master Prosper suggested. Molten wax cools faster against the edges than in the middle. So, fill the mold with liquid wax, and pump it out again.

  We tried it, on a one-tenth scale model. Disaster. The wax cooled and went solid inside the hoses of the pump; and with hot wax, you only get so much time. Result: a quarter of the way down, the ample coating on the sides of the mold turned into a solid block. Solid block meant no core, no core meant no water-cooling, meant the whole thing would crumble into bits as soon as the clay was chipped off. Can’t be done. Some things are possible; others aren’t. Simple as that.

  How about, Master Prosper suggested, cutting a hole in the top of the mold and reaching inside with a paintbrush on a very, very long handle? We tried that on the small model. It 40 percent worked, which is to say it 60 percent failed. There were too many bits where a straight long handle simply wouldn’t reach, and hot wax runny enough to apply with a paintbrush won’t stick properly to the sides. You’d have to get a man inside, I pointed out, and have him knead half-soft wax into the cracks and crevices with his thumb. And, of course, you couldn’t get a man in there. Not enough room.

  Stupid, isn’t it? You solve half a dozen insuperable difficulties, so why can’t you solve just one more? Because some things are possible, and some aren’t. Simple as that.

  * * *

  But the horse had to succeed. So I made an excuse, and went hunting.

  As luck would have it, the first one I ran into was an old sparring partner; we must have run into each other a dozen times over the years. It knew me very well.

  Fine, It said as It saw me scowling in at It through some poor devil’s eyes. I give up. I’ll go quietly.

  No, you won’t, I said. I’ve got a job for you.

  You what?

  You’re going to do something for me, I said. Or I’ll hurt you so badly you’ll remember the pain every day for the rest of your everlasting life.

  Two pale eyes gazed at me. If I’d been capable of pity, I’d have felt it. You’re serious, aren’t you?

  About the job, yes. And the pain.

  Completely stunned. Tens of thousands of years of existence, you think you’ve heard it all, but apparently not. You want me to help you?

  I nodded. Collaboration, I told It. It’s the next big thing.

  * * *

  I’d already suggested it, minus one salient detail, to Master Prosper, but he hadn’t been interested. Yes, he said, a five-year-old child (a particularly small, skinny one) might just fit inside; but first, where would you find a kid who’d go in there without fainting or dying of fright; and even if you found one, you couldn’t possibly trust a kid to do the sort of careful, thorough, skillful job we’d need him to do. Forget it, he said. It’s a nice thought, but impractical.

  So I went away, and then I came back, leading by the hand a five-year-old girl. She was mine; I’d paid good money for her, in a back alley in Poor Town where you can buy anything.

  Master Prosper was horrified. “You did what?”

  “For the project,” I said. “For the horse.”

  He struggled with himself; and while he was doing it, She was demanding to know what I thought I was playing at. But I wasn’t talking to Her.

  “It’ll be fine,” I said. “Think about it. If I hadn’t bought her, she’d have led a nasty, brutish, short life in Poor Town and
probably be dead at thirty. Instead, she does a quick, simple job for us—not pleasant, but not exactly torture either—and the Duke settles money on her, she grows up well fed and educated and marries an army officer. We’re actually doing her a favor.”

  He gave me an agonized look. “What makes you think,” he said, “she’ll go in there? Or do a proper job?”

  “Leave that to me.”

  “But that’s—”

  “Don’t ask.”

  “What do you mean, don’t—?”

  “Don’t ask.”

  He went white as a sheet.

  * * *

  Master Prosper’s authorized biographers (two of them; one or the other on duty round the clock, day and night) had been part of the royal marriage settlement, to be paid for, naturally, by the Duke. Accordingly they were, strictly speaking, public employees, and therefore had to be accredited members of the Notaries’ Guild, whose members take a solemn oath to tell the truth.

  But not necessarily the whole truth. For one thing, there simply isn’t room, in a book that anyone could ever be expected to lift, let alone read; not for every last detail. Some things, no matter how true, get left out, inevitably. So the account of the casting of the Great Horse lists some of the insuperable problems that the great man overcame and the measures taken to overcome them, but not all. Space does not permit, and so forth.

  I see what you meant about scruples, She said to me. We were back on speaking terms, just about.

  You were the one who convinced me of the merits of this collaboration idea, I told Her.

  Absolutely, She said. Even so.

  As well as notaries, the biographers are also fully paid-up associates of the College of Authors, so their description of the casting of the Great Horse is much, much better than anything I could come up with. Look it up, enjoy, be suitably inspired. It’s an amazing story, of obstacles overcome, dreams made real, abstract perfection trapped in a blob of metal like a fly in amber, and if they hadn’t done it justice, they’d have deserved to have their legs broken. After all, the making of that story was expensive, even though the end result absolutely justified the means.