The Devil You Know

by K. J. Parker

  Now that rang a bell: I give you the superman; man is something to be overcome. Saloninus in his rare poetic vein. “You think so?”

  He laughed. “Look at Aelia,” he said. “Founded by convicts transported for nameless crimes from their native land. Or take the old Empire. That all started with a band of outlaws and bandits who stole a load of women from a nearby city. Their offspring went on to conquer the world. Of course, you’ve got a much better situation here, seeing as how you’re strategically poised to dominate the three great nation-states of the civilised world. I don’t much like the term ‘manifest destiny,’ but it’s hard to think of another way of putting it.”

  Up to something, I said to myself under my breath, and went to see Saloninus.

  “But my dear fellow,” he said, “you’ve got it completely wrong. I did it for you.”

  That walking-into-an-invisible-wall feeling again. “You what?”

  “For you,” he repeated. “I could see how bored you were, and I know how much you like art. So I sent you out for some artists.” He smiled. “And it worked. You’ve been so much happier these last few months.”

  That I couldn’t deny. “For me?” I repeated idiotically.

  “Why not? It didn’t cost me anything and it’s given you pleasure.”

  “Yes, but—” My mouth sort of seized up. You can’t work closely with a man for nearly two years and not learn something about him. I was as sure as anyone ever can be; he was telling the truth. “Why?”

  “Excuse me. I don’t understand.”

  “Why would you do something just for me?”

  He sighed. “Oh dear,” he said. “I thought we’d got past all that. Sit down, put your feet up for a moment. Go on, that’s an order.”

  I have to obey orders. I sat down, and put my feet up. “The fact is,” he said, “you’re not a bad person. You work for Evil, but as a—well, I can’t say as a human being; as an entity, you’re a normal, decent individual with a basically kind heart and an appreciation of the finer things. You can’t deny that, it’s true.”

  I frowned. “We’re on different sides.”

  “No, we’re not. For the next seventeen years and ten months we’re on my side. After that—” He shrugged. “What am I supposed to do, be nasty to you all the time? I haven’t got the energy. You know what they say, it takes seventeen muscles to smile and forty-three to frown. I only have a limited time at my disposal, I’ve got work to do. I can’t waste time and effort on counterproductive friction and hostility.”

  I felt like I was being overwhelmed by a great wave. “But the outcome,” I said. “The ideal society.”

  He shook his head. “I told you to hire some artists,” he said. “You were the one who built all the palaces and studios for them. Also, you were the one who shipped in all the whores. Splendid idea, by the way, I’m not criticising. Nevertheless, the fact remains: if the result of all this is a race of superior human beings, if it’s anyone’s doing it’ll be yours, not mine.”

  * * *

  My blood can’t run cold because I have no blood. Just as well.

  I’m permitted to do small, unobtrusive acts of goodness. Well, strictly speaking I’m not, but a blind eye is generally turned when I give small sums of money to struggling artists and street musicians, when I’m off duty, because such acts of kindness are trivial and without lasting consequences. It’s one of the small perks I get for having to spend my life in the field, among humans. But there’s a world of difference between that and taking a decision that could—who am I trying to kid; that will inevitably lead to the ideal society, the race of superior human beings. He was quite right, of course. He hadn’t said anything about female companionship, for the artists or the cutthroats. That had been my idea.

  He doesn’t like people talking about it, but Saloninus once wrote an opera. He needed the money, is his excuse. I have no reason to disbelieve and not forgive.

  In the culminating scene (it’s actually quite good, for opera) the intellectual sort-of-chorus character who’s been watching the drama unfold congratulates the protagonist; how wonderful, he says, your luck’s turned out to be. Look, there are your enemies, slaughtering each other for something you already discarded.

  Just thought I’d mention that, as an insight into the way his mind worked.

  I had two options. I could report what I’d done to my superiors and throw myself on their mercy.

  Exactly. So I did the other thing. I kept quiet about it, did nothing, stood idly by and allowed the disaster to unfold. There was, after all, the very real chance that nobody would ever figure out that it had been my fault. Great nations and ideal societies do emerge from time to time, after all; by accident, by chance, through the agency of natural evolution. The examples my artist friend had mentioned, for instance; Aelia was nobody’s fault, and neither was the old Empire—and besides, once they’d passed their zenith and fallen into decadence and decay they were no problem to anyone—very good for business, in fact, from our perspective. And our lot may be all-seeing and all-knowing, but that’s a long way removed from all-understanding. There was even the remote possibility that the founding of the New Mysia wasn’t my fault or an accident but in fact part of some grand overarching plan by our opposite numbers in the organisation, which I simply didn’t know about—and that’s what you get for being out of the office most of the time and never reading the memos.

  But I couldn’t help wondering. Was that what he’d been up to, or was it something else? Could he have foreseen that I’d have exceeded my discretion to that small, disastrous extent? Am I that predictable? Was he that devious?

  * * *

  “I’ve been thinking,” I said. “Maybe we should send the women away. After all, this is supposed to be a mining colony, not a cathouse.”

  He shook his head. “It was supposed to be a garrison,” he pointed out. “The miners and the artists more or less just happened. And you can’t send the girls home now, there’d be riots. And besides, they’re happy here, they’ve got a much better life than they ever had back in the cities. No, they can stay.” My face must’ve betrayed me, because he frowned. “My mind’s made up,” he said. “Sorry if it offends your puritan sensibilities.”

  “But the unforeseen consequences—”

  “What consequences?”

  “I don’t know, I can’t foresee them.”

  He sighed and patted me on the shoulder. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “That’s your problem, you’re always worrying. You can’t enjoy life if you’re a worrier. I know you’re concerned about this ideal society thing, but who knows, it may never happen. Nothing’s set in stone, you know. Now push off and admire some paintings, while I get on with some work.”

  * * *

  I felt sorry for him, but what can you do?

  Besides, I had other things on my mind. The passage of time, for one thing. My simple ruse for getting him out from under my feet had succeeded beyond my wildest dreams—it had never occurred to me that it would be so easy—but I still had the work itself to do, and it wasn’t going as well as I’d hoped.

  You probably don’t know about my brief, inglorious career in alchemy. It’s a segment of my life I’ve tried to underplay, because nobody likes to admit failure. At one stage I felt I might possibly be on to something, but stuff kept getting in the way—I had endless trouble with patrons, and then I sort of murdered my wife, and I blew up my laboratory, and then I had to leave town in a hurry. So I never found out if the last experiment I’d set up actually came out right in the end. For reasons I won’t bore you with, I had to get out while it was still in progress, leaving the big question unanswered: had I succeeded in turning base metal into gold, or hadn’t I?

  (Actually, it wasn’t murder, though it felt like it. I warned her not to drink the stuff, but she drank it anyway. I still feel guilty about that, even though it’s one of the very few bad things that have happened in my lifetime that wasn’t really my fault.)

 
Since all my notes had gone up in flames, along with my workshop and the royal palace, I had to go back to first principles and start again. I had assumed that wouldn’t be a problem; I was clever then, I still was clever, piece of cake. But I’d discounted the crucial element of luck, serendipity, call it what you will. Back then, I’d stumbled across vital conclusions or reached them through flashes of intuition. That didn’t seem to be happening this time around. I wondered what was different. The conclusion I came to was that my circumstances were too easy. Admittedly I had damnation waiting for me seventeen years down the line, but I couldn’t make myself panic about something so relatively distant. The first time, I’d either been desperately short of money or running late on a king’s deadline, with the noose or the block just a day or so away. I’m guessing my brain needs the special extra stimulus of rank terror to kick it into a higher gear. And that, of course, was missing.

  Alchemy is simple stuff, really. The world we know is made up of components, very small ones. The smaller you go, the more interchangeable these components are. If you go right down, really, really small, it’s theoretically possible to exchange one lot of components for another. And that’s alchemy.

  Of course I’m exaggerating, simplifying and bending the truth. If it were as easy as that, anyone could do it. There’s also the not-so-trivial matter of the world we don’t know; the things we don’t know are there, the consequences we can’t foresee. The harder I worked, the more of that sort of thing I seemed to come up against. I didn’t like that. I’m used to everything coming easily. Usually, I just sit down and concentrate and it all comes gushing out; I scrape away a bit of turf, and there’s the gold, a few inches under the surface. Rolling up my sleeves and digging isn’t what I’m used to, and I sort of resent having to do it. Silly of me, but that’s my nature.

  Keeping secrets from the All-Seeing isn’t as hard as it sounds. The key is making sure they don’t correctly interpret what they see. Simple misdirection; the street corner conjurer’s stock-in-trade. I don’t care how mighty or sublime they are, if they’ve got a personality, they can be understood; if they can be understood, they can be deceived. If they can be deceived, I can deceive them. What can I say? It’s a gift. I was born with it. God-given, you might call it.

  But nothing lasts forever, not even the spell I weave. Sooner or later, he was bound to find out what I was up to in my damp, cold little shack. I’m guessing it was the thin plume of smoke; even the finest charcoal isn’t entirely smokeless. I’d been planning to pretend it was just the stove, but since it was freezing cold in there (had to be, for sound alchemical reasons), that wasn’t likely to fool him for long.

  I remember the scene as though it were yesterday. He stood in the doorway of the shack, staring at my modest array of alchemical equipment, his face grey as slate. “May I ask,” he said in a thin, strained voice, “what you’re doing?”

  “Certainly you may. I’m just trying to reproduce an experiment. As you know, the essential quality of a successful experiment is that it should be capable of being—”

  “Fortunatus of Perimadeia.”

  I looked away. “No,” I said.

  “Don’t lie to me,” he screamed; I confess, I was shocked. “Don’t you ever dare lie to me.”

  “I’m not lying,” I said calmly. “This experiment was designed by Fortunatus’s teacher and mentor, Sedulius of Ligois. True, Fortunatus later elaborated on it, but—”

  “I’m not going in that thing. You can’t make me.”

  I turned and faced him. “Actually, I can,” I said gravely. “I can order you to get inside my alembic, and you’d have no choice but to do as you’re told. But since I have no intention of doing any such thing, I really don’t see what all the fuss is about.”

  He backed away until he was on the other side of the doorframe. “Alchemy is forbidden,” he said. “It’s a black art.”

  “Oh come on,” I said gently.

  “It is. It’s unnatural. It’s attempting to transform that which has been created into something else. It’s the worst possible sin. I’m going to have to report this.”

  Who to, I didn’t ask. “This isn’t that kind of experiment,” I told him. “This is just an improved method of extracting nitre from everyday organic materials. If it works, it means vastly improved crop yields in areas of marginal agricultural value.”

  “What?” He stared at me. “Why? Whatever for?”

  I sighed. “Look behind you,” I said. “Mountains. Scrub. If this miserable country’s going to be self-sufficient in food, we need to do something about it.” Then I frowned. “What did you think I was doing?”

  He came a step or two back into the shack and sniffed; his long, delicate nose detecting and analysing the contents of the alembic. “Chicken manure.”

  “A rich natural source of nitre.”

  “You’re boiling up chickenshit.”

  “Yes. But a hundred and sixty per cent more efficiently than usual. The result should be a fine white salt, which you mix with wood ash and sprinkle lightly on the newly turned earth, after ploughing but before the harrow. So go ahead, report me, I don’t care. But I don’t think your superiors are going to be all that interested.”

  * * *

  I’d made a fool of myself, and I was ashamed of that. I’d forgotten the first rule; the customer is always right. If he wanted to trap me in a bottle and boil me down into nothing, he was entitled to do just that. True, it’d be the end of me—that’s why alchemy is such a terrible thing; it changes all the rules, reevaluates all values, breaks down the fundamental order that we stand for. Along with necromancy, it’s the worst possible thing a human being can do, and I’m not entirely sure we understand it ourselves. I can’t believe I just said that. But I suspect it’s true. If someone changes the rules, who knows what the rules are?

  But when I made my silly outburst I hadn’t thought it through properly. If he destroyed me, what would he have achieved? Nothing, except deprive himself of his helper and slave, the only means by which he could access the power he’d signed his soul away for. Made no sense. He’d have the rest of his seventeen years, but that was all; no infinite power, nothing. He needed me. He wouldn’t do anything to hurt me. Surely.

  But then, what would I know about the workings of a mind like that?

  We still don’t know what became of our friend and colleague who fell into the hands of Fortunatus of Perimadeia. We carry on searching for him but with little hope. As far as we are able to ascertain, he’s fallen into a place beyond anything that we created or that we control—beyond good and evil, to coin a phrase—and the only man who could possibly tell us how to get there would have been Fortunatus of Perimadeia, who died centuries ago. Anyway, that’s why even the thought of alchemy makes me shudder. It’s a wicked, wicked thing to do.

  As you can imagine, I kept a very sharp eye on him after that.

  But to little avail. Think about it. How can you tell if a man’s succeeded in turning base metal into gold in a place where there’s gold everywhere you look? Literally. We were running short of storage space. All the dungeons and cellars were full; all the cupboards and wardrobes, every last toolshed and outhouse, anything you could put a padlock and hasp on, was bursting with ingots or earthenware pots of dust. Precisely because the supply was so plentiful and so easy to extract, the miners didn’t seem inclined to retire or quit. No, they carried on producing, while the going was good, before the dream ended and they woke up. They couldn’t be bothered or spare the time to cart their gold to the frontiers and sell it (and besides, they might get robbed on the way and lose it all). In any case, what were they going to sell it for? Food and drink were provided free of charge, likewise clothing and tools. This wasn’t one of those gold rushes where the only people who really get rich are the sutlers and the boardinghouse keepers.

  In such an environment, trying to keep track of the appearances and disappearances of small quantities of gold, as might be produced by alchemical p
rocesses, was out of the question. I tried standing behind him and watching every move he made very carefully, but he protested (quite reasonably) that I was getting in his way and ruining his concentration, and if I insisted on looming about like an architectural feature, would I please do it somewhere else? He was, it goes without saying, entirely within his rights to throw me out while he was working. As for making good my idiotic threat to report him—well. A sinner suspected of conspiring to commit sin. The only official response I could expect to that would be So I should bloody well hope.

  * * *

  My first experiment was entirely successful. I turned a mountain into gold.

  At least, that was what I told him. Go and look for yourself, I said, pointing to an unremarkable hillock on the skyline. Take a spade, chip away the turf, and look beneath the surface. It’ll be gold. Me, I’m so confident I can’t be bothered to look, but feel free.

  He gazed at me with that horrified, stupid look that people tend to wear when you start talking about alchemy. “You haven’t,” he said.

  “I have.”

  “But that’s—”

  “Yes.”

  He hesitated, just for a moment; then there was a blur, he was gone, he was back again. “Why?” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Why?” he repeated. “There’s already more gold in these mountains than anyone could possibly hope to use. If you want gold, I’m duty bound to give it to you, in unlimited quantities. So, I repeat. Why?”