The Devil You Know

by K. J. Parker

  I did my gesture of graceful acknowledgement. “In the blue.”

  “Two rings out.”

  “Close enough.”

  He steepled his fingers. It can be a dignified gesture betokening intelligence. I do it myself sometimes. It made him look like a clown. “Would you care to tell me what you’re working on?”

  I smiled at him. “No.”

  That displeased him. “I ask,” he said, “not in any professional capacity but as your greatest fan.”

  “I don’t want to spoil the surprise.”

  “Then in my professional capacity—”

  I shook my head slightly. “I walk into your shop and ask to buy a twelve-inch double-edged knife. Do you ask me what I want it for?”

  “Yes.”

  “No,” I said. “You don’t ask. You’re selling, I’m buying. Or do you want to report back to your superiors and tell them you blew the deal?”

  He gave me a funny little frown. “Why so secretive?”

  “Why so inquisitive?”

  “Uh-huh.” Little shake of the head. “Bear in mind we know all about you, everything, every last indiscretion, every nasty little secret, everything you ever did when you were absolutely sure nobody was looking. And we aren’t shocked. Nothing shocks us. We are incapable of disapproval. The only possible reason, therefore, for not telling us is that you’re up to something.”

  I laughed in his face. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Is it?” he gave me a cool, level look. “You’re a clever man, probably the cleverest who ever lived. And you’re treacherous, and cunning, and entirely without scruple.”

  “I resent that. Bitterly.”

  “Oh come on. You proved there’s no such thing as right and wrong.”

  “I have my own rules,” I said. “I stick to them.”

  He breathed out slowly through his nose. A total sham, of course; he didn’t breathe air. “I’m sorry,” he said. “This has got to be the deal-breaker. Either you tell me what you have in mind, or I go to my superiors and tell them I can’t trust you enough to contract with you.”

  (He’d never kept pigs, that’s for sure. If he had, he’d have known how you get pigs into the cart, to take them to market. You can put a rope round their necks and pull till your arms get tired or you strangle the pig; they won’t shift. They just keep backing away. They simply won’t go in the direction you try and force them to go in. So the trick is, you try and drag them in the other direction, away from the cart. Next thing you know, they’ve backed away right up the ramp, and all you have to do is drop the tailgate.)

  I held up my hands. “Really,” I said, “there’s no big secret. You were quite right. I wish to continue with my philosophical studies. I’m convinced I’ve found the key to a whole new way of understanding the universe, through scientific observation and mathematical representation. I believe the universe is a machine—a huge, complex machine, but no more than that. I believe that, given time, I can figure out how the machine works; not completely, of course, but to the extent where others will believe me and carry on the work. In doing so, I can free Mankind of the chains of superstition, cast down the false idols of Good and Evil, and allow the human race to grow uncramped, unfettered and undistorted by self-imposed restraints. If I can do this, my immortal soul is a small price to pay.”

  He squinted at me, as though I had the Invincible Sun standing directly behind me. “But you know that’s garbage,” he said.

  “You said you liked my books.”

  “I do. I believe the stuff about conventional morality. I know it’s true. I was on the team that set all that stuff up in the first place. But false superstitions and a completely mechanistic universe with no gods or devils—come on, look at me. I’m real. I exist. Therefore—”

  I smiled at him. “I didn’t say I believed it myself,” I said.

  I’d shocked him. You see? Not so unshockable after all.

  “But that’s beside the point,” I went on. “The point is, given time and resources, I can prove my hypothesis, beyond all reasonable doubt.” I paused. “Nobody else could, but I can. Because I’m Saloninus, the greatest ever. I can phrase arguments to make them unanswerable, I can bend the truth like hot steel until it’s exactly the shape I want it to be. I can prove it so that future generations will believe it without question. They will follow my precepts and revere me, and my name will be on every man’s lips and I shall live forever in their praises. The greatest philosopher, the wisest man who ever lived. Now, what more could an old, egotistical man want?”

  His eyes were very wide. “That’s insane.”

  “No, just extremely selfish.”

  “But millions of people will live by your teachings, die, and be damned to hell.”

  “Omelettes and eggs.” I paused for effect. “And, from your point of view, exceptionally good for business.”

  His lips moved noiselessly for a moment. Then he said, “I knew you were devious.”

  “And very, very selfish. And an artist, a creative. What could be better for an artist than to spin a fiction so convincing that it deceives the whole world?”

  He shrank back a little. “You’re up to something,” he said.

  “Yes. And I’ve just shared it with you. Now, do we have a deal?”

  * * *

  I wasn’t always a philosopher.

  I grew up on a farm, which is how come I know about pigs. My father was a big man who worried about everything. He worried about the sheep getting out, the bullocks poaching the ground in the top meadow, the rats spoiling the seed corn, the rain falling, the rain not falling, the wool price, and the looming threat of civil war. Worry leached every last grain of pleasure out of his life. The more he gained in his brief spells of prosperity, the more he worried about losing those gains. I never once knew him to enjoy a bright, clear spring morning or a sunset. He worried about me; as soon as it became apparent that I was smart, he worried about stifling my abilities and wasting my talents, so off I went, to school and then the Studium, and never came home again. He died while I was away, just before the war broke out and our farm was burned by General Aichmalote’s retreating Sixth Army. None of the things he’d been afraid of came to pass in his lifetime, but all of them did shortly after his death. In a way, I think he missed out. If he’d lived another nine months, he’d have been proved right. As it was he died fretting his heart out that he’d frittered away his life in pointless anxiety.

  My mother was a slender, elegant woman who’d worked in the leisure and entertainment industry. When I was a kid I could never figure out why the neighbours disapproved of her so much. After my father’s death, she told me in a letter that he’d always been terrified she’d run off and leave him. He was wrong about that, she told me, left with a derelict farm, no livestock, and no money; I was never going anywhere, she wrote.

  Many years later I settled my family’s account with General Aichmalote; I forged evidence that led to him being executed for treason. He was guilty, as a matter of fact, but he’d covered his trail so well that there was no proof—boasted as much to me, thinking I was his friend and on his side—which gave me the idea in the first place. I’m an exceptionally good forger, though I say so myself. I take trouble with inks, paper, nib-shapes. (A hint for you: lawyers will sell you obsolete title deeds for a few coppers. Grind the writing off the parchment with brick dust, and you’ve got an irreproachably authentic vintage surface to write on. Nothing helps a lie succeed more than a generous helping of the truth.) I went to see the General in prison, the night before they cut his head off. He was utterly bewildered. “I know for damn sure I never wrote any of that stuff down,” he said. “I know I’d never have been so stupid.”

  “You didn’t,” I said. “You have no reason to reproach yourself on that score.” And then I told him what I’d done, and why. He took it badly; started howling vulgar abuse at me, whereupon I left in a huff. People can be so unreasonable.

  I digress. My point is, I did
n’t inherit anything—nothing, not so much as a buckle. I’m a self-made, self-ruined man; my own achievement, my own fault. I didn’t get my brains from my parents, and I most certainly didn’t get any money. Query: if I’d had less brains and more money, would I have been happier? Answer: if a circle had four straight sides, wouldn’t it be a square?

  I’m my own property, to dispose of as I wish.

  * * *

  “Are you sure,” he said, “you wouldn’t rather have a lawyer read it through first?”

  I was starting to feel tired. Old age; too much exertion, and I begin to fade. “Presumably,” I said, “you’re worried in case I try and get the agreement set aside on the grounds that I was rushed into it and didn’t know what I was signing. Excuse me. You claim to have read my books. Whatever else I am, I’m not stupid, and I’m not senile, and I’ve read it and understood every word.”

  “And you’re prepared to sign?”

  “Yes.”

  He took the paper back from me. “Let me just have a quick look at that.”

  I grinned. Sensible; if there was a loophole I’d spotted, it’d be his fault. He read it carefully—I noticed he moved the tip of his forefinger along the lines—then stared at it for a while. “It’s our standard form of contract,” he said.

  “Quite. Which has been used many times before, and on each occasion has proved lawyertight. Mind you, there’s always a first time for everything.”

  Unkind of me to say that; he gave me a startled look, and read the whole thing over again. “In any case,” I said, “I don’t suppose you’ve got the authority to change anything without getting it cleared first.”

  “On the contrary, I have full—” He stopped, peered at me as though I were a smeared window. “I just find it hard to accept,” he said, “that someone I’ve admired and respected for so long would condemn himself to eternal damnation just so as to massage his own ego. It’s such a stupid thing to do.”

  My turn to peer. But he looked genuinely concerned. “Honesty,” I said.

  “We’re always honest. We always tell the truth.”

  I nodded. “If you can’t trust the Father of Lies,” I said. “Do you want me to sign the bloody thing, or not?”

  * * *

  “Of course I do,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.”

  He drummed his fingers on the desktop. “Fortunatus of Perimadeia,” he said. “A man I’ve always looked up to. Caught one of your lot in a glass flask and heated him up over a hot flame until he turned into vapour. He wrote it up in his Natural History. Of course, the most fundamental thing about an experiment is that it’s capable of producing the same result when repeated.”

  “Have you got a pen?” I asked. “If not—”

  “Tisander of Scona, two centuries later,” he went on, as if he hadn’t heard me. “Tried to reproduce Fortunatus’s results. The likeliest explanation is that he applied too much heat too quickly. They had to redraw several maps.”

  Tisander of Scona was new to me. Mind you, there are some things they don’t want you to know about. “Sign the bottom of the page,” I said, “and your initials at the foot of each paragraph.”

  He shrugged. “Will you be my principal liaison and point of contact? Paragraph three, section two.”

  “Yes.”

  “Splendid. I think we’re going to get along famously.”

  * * *

  Our standard form of contract—

  Slightly amended to suit the specific requirements of the customer, but the core phraseology, the magic words that do the business, always stay the same—indefeasibly and absolutely devise and remit, in perpetuity, and so forth. In this case, we’d thrown in a guaranteed twenty years of healthy life, plus rejuvenation to age twenty-five. Apart from that, he was entitled to the usual package of benefits; access to limited specified supernatural powers through the agency of his designated case officer. That would be me.

  “Not,” he assured me, “that I’ll be wanting any of the conjuring tricks. Cures for headaches and backaches, perhaps, and it would be nice to fly from library to library instead of having to walk or take the coach. But what I’m really after is something you couldn’t possibly do for me. By definition.”

  Query: could there possibly be a mortal who’s cleverer than Us? I filed the question with Department and got back the immediate reply That remains to be seen. Thank you so much.

  “What you do with the benefits is entirely up to you,” I said. “You can’t make things worse for yourself by indulging your very basest desires, and you don’t get credit for good works. In your shoes, I’d really let go, have as good a time as possible.”

  “I intend to.” His eyes were cold and clear. “Do we need a witness?”

  “That’s me.”

  “Ah.” I spread out the parchment, and in doing so knocked the cap of my inkwell off the desk onto the floor. “I wonder, could you possibly get that for me? I don’t bend as easily as I used to.”

  By the time he’d straightened up I’d already signed. “There,” I said. “All done.”

  He looked surprised, even shocked. “Splendid,” he said.

  * * *

  I took the parchment from him, rolled it up, and stuffed it back in its tube. As easy as that.

  “Right.” He was smiling. “First the rejuvenation, and then do you think I could trouble you to show me all the kingdoms of the Earth?”

  “No bother at all,” I said, and rejuvenated him. His back straightened. His face sort of bubbled for a moment, as the surplus under his chin flowed upward to fill the sunken cheeks and the hollows under his eyes, stretching and smoothing the skin. Involuntarily he flexed his fingers as the arthritis and rheumatism dissipated; they lost that clawlike look, and the knuckles seemed to subside. His hair changed colour and sprouted back. He winced, as his missing teeth burst back up through their long-healed gums. “You might have warned me it’d hurt,” he grumbled.

  “So sorry,” I said, and eased the pain away.

  He was looking at his hands; first the backs, then the palms. “I never realised it had got so bad,” he said.

  “People don’t. It’s too gradual. And when a mortal looks in the glass, he never really sees what’s there.”

  He acknowledged that with a slight tilt of the head. “The extraordinary thing,” he said, “is how not-different it feels. More comfortable, but that’s all. A bit like sleeping in your own bed again after a long time staying in inns.” He looked at me. “You have done it properly, haven’t you?”

  I didn’t bother to answer that. He stood up—lost his balance and wobbled for a moment, had to grab the edge of the desk—and peeled his clothes off. They were either too loose or too tight, depending on where they touched. “Good heavens,” he said. “I haven’t seen that in ages.” He laughed. “Mind you, I’ve never let it rule my head. Still. I feel like turning somersaults.”

  “Be my guest.”

  He shook his head, grinning. “Out of practice,” he said. “I might slip, land badly, and break my neck. Not that I need to worry about that anymore.”

  Yes, he’d read and understood the contract. Absolute immunity from any form of disease, injury, sudden death by homicide, accident, or misadventure. Paragraph 16 subclause (4) says that if he chooses to fight in battle I have to hold my invisible shield over him and protect him from the slightest scratch. If he cuts his own head off, I have to put it back on again. Every eventuality covered in absolutely unambiguous phrasing. Of course, we have all the best lawyers.

  I conjured him raiment out of the air; he was entitled to one free outfit, like you get when you leave the army, or prison. I’d studied his tastes carefully, but there wasn’t much of a common denominator. Most of his life he’d dressed in what he could afford, or steal, or had been given as a going-away present (see above), or had had bought for him by gullible patrons. I settled on a customary suit of solemn black, which favours most men of his (restored) age and build, particularly intellectuals, and is neve
r out of style. He glanced down at the cuffs, then crossed his arms over his chest. “It fits,” he said.

  “Well, of course.”

  “I never had clothes that fitted when I was this age.”

  “Well, now you can afford the best. Anything else in the menswear line you have to pay for yourself, but I will of course issue you with infinite money on demand. I know,” I added, as he raised an eyebrow. “That’s bureaucracy for you. Never follow a straight line when a spiral will get you there eventually.”

  He cleared his throat and looked at me. Then he said, “All the kingdoms of the Earth, remember?”

  “What? Oh, right, sorry. I was miles away.”

  * * *

  In the absence of specific instructions from the customer I follow a standard itinerary; from the Republic to Scheria, Aelia, then Mezentia, the Mesoge, Perimadeia, follow the line of mountains to the Rhus, then due south to Blemya, quick tour of the Rosinholet and Cure Hardy khanates, up the River and back where we started from. It takes about four hours, unless the customer wants to stop and see anything in particular.

  I was impressed by how well travelled he was. Every now and again he’d point down and say, “I was in prison there once” or “I slept rough in those woods for a fortnight.” Over Scona he wanted to hover for a moment while he looked to see if the old Grace & Endurance was still there. It was. Am I still barred from there? he wondered. Yes, I told him, you are.

  “You visit a lot of places when you’re one jump ahead of the law,” he told me. “Most of them don’t hold particularly happy memories, I confess. Over there, look, that’s where I got lynched by the investors in that fake silver mine thing. If the branch hadn’t broken under my weight, I wouldn’t be here now.”

  We were sailing high over the Dragon’s Nest. I suggested lunch. He looked surprised. “Is it that time already?”

  I pointed up at the noon sun. “I know a good place in Choris Anthropou,” I said. “They do a passable spicy lamb with aromatic rice.”

  I don’t eat, of course. I experience food, like I experience every other transitory thing, but I don’t consume it and I can’t taste it. The smell, however, creates tantalising shapes in my mind. It shouldn’t do, but it does. Perhaps I’ve been down here too long.