The Devil You Know

by K. J. Parker

  He frowned at me. “Alchemy is an abomination,” he said. “It’s not natural. Unnatural things can’t exist in nature, they’re intrinsically unstable. That’s why the materials alchemists use are so exceptionally volatile. It’s in their nature to blow up.”

  I decided I didn’t want to think about the implications of that. “Saloninus succeeded,” I said. “And survived.”

  “Well, he’s a special case, isn’t he?” my supervisor snapped. “Extraordinary man. He sets up the ultimate experiment and then walks away before it’s complete. He sets it up precisely because he knows it’s liable to explode—taking all his enemies with it, yes, but to start the procedure and not to care about the result; it’s unthinkable, literally. He had the answer to the secret of the universe in his hands, but he was more interested in saving his own neck and making money. Extraordinary man.”

  “He is.”

  “Yes. And that’s not a good thing. You do realise,” he went on, “that the contract means that if he’s conducting alchemical research, even if he blows himself up, he won’t die. It won’t stop him. We’ve guaranteed that he can’t die in war or by accident.” Suddenly he laughed, not in a healthy way. “You have to hand it to him,” he said. “The contract, selling his soul to us, is the only way he could be sure of conducting his research and living to tell the tale.”

  My head was starting to spin. “If he’s made this woman immortal,” I said, “what’s to prevent him doing the same thing to himself?”

  My supervisor looked at me. “What indeed?” he said. “Nothing, is the answer to that. And if he’s immortal, he won’t ever die. Bear in mind, the second part of the contract between him and us only comes into effect at the moment of his death. If he never dies—”

  I shook my head. “The contract’s for twenty years.”

  “Wrong,” my supervisor said grimly. “We guarantee him twenty years. At the end of that period, we withdraw our support, the action of his natural functions is resumed, and he dies. But if his natural functions have been superseded by some appalling chemical and he doesn’t die—” He held up both hands. “It’s you I feel sorry for.”

  “Me?”

  “Oh yes. Bear in mind, under the contract you’re bound to be his servant for life.”

  Believe it or not, I’d been so preoccupied with the cosmic implications of the situation that I hadn’t stopped to consider what it could mean for me personally. Not that that could possibly matter; I live to serve, my existence is founded and centred on my function as a willing tool. Even so.

  “There’s got to be something we can do,” I said.

  He gave me a sad smile. “Indeed,” he said. “And I’m open to suggestions.”

  * * *

  The thing about me that seems to puzzle people the most—people who know me, who believe what I tell them—is that I can write the most profound things without actually meaning them. I can persuade people of things I don’t myself believe, or (more usually) simply don’t care about.

  Take, for example, my greatest philosophical works, in which I demonstrate the vacuity and inanity of superstition and belief in the supernatural, demolish all existing moral and ethical systems and reveal the truth about Man, that he’s an animal that needs to delude himself in order to live. Man, I argue accordingly, is therefore something to be overcome, evolved beyond, left behind. Only by evolving ourselves into the higher human being, the superman—

  But you know all that. You’ve read it, or a potted summary. If you aren’t convinced by it, it’s only because you haven’t taken the trouble to read it properly and follow the arguments.

  Do I believe any of that? I don’t know, I’ve never given it much thought. I wrote that particular sequence of tracts for a particular patron, a man who loathed the priesthood and didn’t like being taken to task for breaking various laws. He paid well, and I needed the money.

  I started from the premise, which sort of came with the brief, that priests and religion are full of shit; from there it followed naturally that the morality they espouse must be false or faulty. Having established the side I was on, I looked around for arguments to support it. I found they came quite easily to me. I started with various inconsistencies in religious doctrine, and found that they derived from compromises made by long-ago ecumenical councils to reconcile violent political disputes within the clerical hierarchy. I argued, if the priests make up bits of doctrine to suit themselves, maybe they made up the whole thing. From there it was no big deal to demonstrate that they’d done exactly that. The Book as we know it proved to be not a monolithic and unambiguous record of the word of the Invincible Sun, but rather a negotiated construct, patched together from four or five sources, revised and edited and redacted by generations of scholars, some of whom belonged to such and such a sect or interest group, others of whom supported diametrically opposite positions or interests. It was no bother at all to show that the Book was a political object with no real credibility. And once you’ve knocked out the Book, you’ve dealt religion a blow from which it can never recover.

  Of course I had my doubts. I could see that it was entirely possible that the Invincible Sun had indeed spoken to His prophets—once, long ago—and ever since, the prophets and their successors had spent all their time and energy misreporting, misrepresenting, and generally screwing around with what He had told them. That was a valid interpretation, and if I’d chosen to espouse it, I bet you I could have made it every bit as convincing as the argument I put my whole weight behind, namely the case for the prosecution. But nobody was going to pay me to do that, so I didn’t.

  From that foundation, everything else sort of followed organically. My patron was thrilled with what I’d done for him, and gave me a great deal of money to write some more. Did I believe any of it? I don’t know. I preferred to keep an open mind. Just as a good general puts himself into the mind of his opponent—if I were him, what would I do in this situation?—I inhabited both sides of the argument, a kind of double agent looking to betray everybody. The fact is, the more you look for something, the likelier you are to find it, even if it isn’t actually there; sooner or later, if you look hard enough, you’ll find something. The trick is then to interpret what you’ve found as what you were looking for.

  So; it was all for money. Let’s consider money, shall we, just for a moment.

  When I was a kid, we had it. My father was, to all appearances, a wealthy gentleman farmer. I grew up not thinking about money the way fish don’t think about water. Then, while I was away at the Studium, my father died and it turned out there was no money after all. The water had all vanished, and I was the fish on dry land, twisting in agony, unable to breathe.

  I was twenty years old; no skill, no trade. I suppose I should’ve touted round for work as a clerk—I could read and write, and people pay you a living wage for doing both, but I was spoilt, I couldn’t possibly live on a living wage, I’d suffocate. I considered, therefore, the ways in which I could obtain money, given the resources I had and those I lacked. They were:

  Literary, artistic, and scientific excellence.

  Deception.

  Theft.

  Arguments for and against all of these. The first one is the safest, but it takes too long, is uncertain and insecure, and doesn’t pay enough. The second is safer than the third, but usually takes a bit of setting-up; not much use when you haven’t eaten for three days and the soles of your shoes have just fallen off. The third is risky, downright terrifying, but answers the immediate, pressing need. Luckily, I was good at all three.

  I made money; making it and holding on to it are two different things. I could never quite earn or steal enough; the one big score always eluded me. I trimmed back my expectations to the bone and found I was perfectly content with the austere life of the scholar—plain but regular meals, a roof over my head, that was fine by me. Unfortunately, every time I got my hands on secure tenure and settled down, some past indiscretion from my thieving and deceiving days would com
e swooping back to haunt me and drive me back on the road. I spent an awful lot of time sleeping in ditches and derelict barns, and all because I’d been afraid of having to do without the comforts of affluence. My big deceptions, such as the alchemy scam I pulled on my college friend Prince Phocas, tended to blow up (often literally) in my face. More and more of my intelligence and ingenuity was getting used up on digging myself out of the trouble I’d got myself into. The spade I used for this digging was, as often as not, my knack for philosophy, poetry, and science; they paid the bills and induced patrons to shield me from my enemies, so I developed them, the way you build up certain muscles by constant use. The stuff I came up with no longer interested me in the least, beyond what someone was prepared to give me for it. Simple as that. Do bees necessarily like honey? I don’t know. Who cares?

  When the one big score finally came along—the recipe for synthetic blue paint—I reckoned that all my troubles were finally over and I could at last relax, calm down, and be myself. I could do the important work I knew I was capable of, or simply lie in the sun and eat raisins, or both. And then it suddenly struck me; I was sixty-seven years old, and most people don’t live much past seventy. I’d got back to where I started from, but it was too late.

  It was time, I told myself, to start considering my options.

  The great thing about not necessarily believing in your beliefs is that it’s so much easier to revise them. What, I asked myself, if I’d been all wrong about religion, the supernatural, magic, and the Divine? What if it really exists? I set out to prove that it did; and (having the incentive, just as I’d had the incentive to prove the opposite years ago) I succeeded. Having established that, I was in a position to address the real issue. How could I persuade, bluff, charm, or trick the Divine into giving me what I wanted?

  * * *

  They stared at me. Eventually, one of them said, “That’s unheard of.”

  I wasn’t going to be put off by mere staring. “Nevertheless,” I said.

  But one of them shook his head. “You’re going to have to do better than that,” he said.

  On the way out, I reflected on the way in which so many mortals pray. It’s strictly a rational proposition. If He exists, they argue, it’s best to be on the right side of Him; if He doesn’t, well, no harm done, it hasn’t cost anything. I’m not like that, unfortunately. Either I believe or I don’t. And I believed—thought I believed—in the doctrines of Saloninus concerning the invalidity of conventional morality. I believed that there are no absolutes of good and evil and that all that matters, in the final analysis, is which side you’re on. It was, I felt, a doctrine which accorded exactly with my own observations and experience.

  The problems start when your side isn’t on your side anymore.

  I had one more call to pay.

  We’re supposed to observe the chain of command, but it’s not an absolute requirement. It’s recognised that there are times when you have to bypass all that and go straight to the top. This, I felt certain, was one of them.

  Not the top top, of course. The highest I could aspire to was Divisional Command. It meant a great deal of heel-kicking in anterooms, but time where we come from isn’t exactly linear. Still, I should’ve taken a book to read while I was hanging about.

  I was shown in, and explained the situation as concisely as I could. “So you see,” I concluded, “we definitely have a problem.”

  “You think so.”

  The thing about Divisional Command is, they seem to have this antipathy to answering questions.

  “Yes, I do,” I said. “Here’s a mortal who appears to have perfected the process of alchemical transmutation. Normally, the very act of doing so would result in his immediate death, by explosion, since the compounds that effect the change are inherently unstable. That’s why we’re not knee-deep in immortal humans. But this one is smart. If he blows himself up, by the terms of this wretched contract, we have to protect him. He’s outsmarted us. He’s won.”

  “You think so?”

  “I do.” I paused, trying to interpret the blank, hollow stare facing me. “If he succeeds in performing the transmutation, naturally he won’t keep quiet about it. Or even if he tries to, word will get out. People will know that alchemy works, that it’s possible to achieve eternal life. Millions will blow themselves up trying to do it. A few will succeed.”

  “You think so.”

  “Yes, just look at this Eudoxia woman. She drank the stuff. There was the usual explosion, but she survived. She hasn’t aged a day in forty years. Without knowing precisely what he did, I can’t tell you the extent to which the process is reproducible, but it makes me feel sure that it can work, sometimes. What with that, and the wholescale carnage of those who try and fail, I think you’ll agree, it’s an impossible situation. We have to do something.”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  I felt the whole weight of Creation on my shoulders. “We have two options,” I said. “One of them is to break our word. We find some way of stopping him, even though it means lying, misleading, or downright force.”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  I closed my eyes. This was all really hard for me. “What happens to us,” I asked, “if we breach the contract? For example, what would be the consequences if we killed him? His mortal body, I mean. For sure, it would mean the deal is off; we wouldn’t get his immortal soul for perpetual torment. I for one could live with that. But would we have to restore his body to life, wind the clock back so that the killing never took place? Can we actually do that, because strictly speaking it’d be necromancy, which is forbidden? Of course, so is murder.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think we’re in so much trouble that anything we do is going to have bad repercussions. Being seen to have broken our word will mean that mortals will no longer trust us. We can forget about future contracts of this sort. Again, I can live with that.”

  “Is that all?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know who enforces our rules against us,” I said. “We do, presumably. If he has a valid complaint against us, who does he appeal to? Who judges us? What can they do to us, if they find against us?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think I don’t want to find out,” I said firmly. “I think that going down that road is unthinkable. We do not break our word. We do not assassinate those who pose us problems. The pursuit of expediency is a luxury we don’t have.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it would force us to answer the question I just asked,” I said. “I guess.”

  “What’s the other option you talked about?”

  I sighed. “Simple,” I said. “We buy him off.”

  * * *

  A split second later, I was back. As I’d hoped, Saloninus hadn’t noticed I’d been gone.

  “It’s her, then,” I said.

  “I think it could well be,” he replied.

  We were standing behind an invisible wall, watching her; we could see her, she couldn’t see us. She was combing her hair, getting ready for another day of doing whatever it is that mortal women do. I’m no judge of these things, but she seemed perfectly happy.

  “Thank you,” Saloninus said.

  “Excuse me? What for?”

  “For setting my mind at rest,” he said. “All these years I’ve been torn up with guilt about what I did to her. Well, you know that. I always say I murdered her, even though I knew it was an accident. Now it turns out she’s not dead. In fact, she got exactly what she wanted: eternal youth and beauty. I feel so much better now. Thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it,” I said.

  He breathed out long and slow, then turned to me. “We’ve intruded on her privacy long enough, don’t you think? Let’s go.”

  I was confused. “Don’t you want her back? I thought—”

  He grinned. “Dear me, no. I never liked her much. Dreadful woman. But she didn’t deserve to die like that. But she didn’t, so
everything’s fine. And she seems so much happier than she ever did when I used to know her, and she was a princess. Come on, I want to go home now.”

  Back at the shack, I sat down on the barrel of explosive. “What’s this for?” I asked.

  “That? I told you. It’s for blasting the deeper seams.”

  “It’ll be years before anyone gets that far down,” I said. “What’s it really for?”

  He smiled at me. “There’s no kidding you, is there? It’s for a little experiment I mean to try.”

  I waited, then said, “What?”

  “I’m going to blow myself up.”

  I was looking straight at him. As far as I know, my face didn’t move at all. I have infinitely better control over my face than any human. “Why?”

  “To see if my research has been successful. If it has, being blown up won’t hurt me. If not—” He grinned. “I may need your help, in that case. Under the terms of the contract.”

  I did some calculations. Based on what he’d told me earlier, the contents of the barrel would dig a crater large enough to hold the island of Scona. “The whole barrel?”

  He shrugged. “In my opinion, bangs can never be too loud.”

  “When are you planning on doing this?”

  “When I’m ready. No point in rushing things. I’ve got seventeen years, after all.”

  I stood up. “The gold,” I said. “It’s not just for politics, is it?”

  “Maybe not.”

  “To make the elixir of life, you need gold. It’s a key ingredient. You’re planning on making a huge batch of the stuff. And then you’re going to give it to as many people as possible.”

  He gazed at me, and I couldn’t read his face. “Now why would I want to do a thing like that?”

  * * *

  To raise an army of immortals. To storm Heaven.

  Well, it’d be an option. I believe in options. I think everybody should have as many of them as possible.

  Could it be done? I really don’t know. Of course, you’d have to persuade them to try. How would you sell an idea like that to a bunch of thieves, outlaws, mercenaries, and professional desperados? You’d need a certain degree of eloquence, a way with words. Come to think of it, I’ve got that.