The Devil You Know

by K. J. Parker

  I shrugged. “To see if I could, I guess.”

  “Not good enough.”

  I laughed. “I forgot,” I said, “you’ve got this bee in your bonnet about alchemy.”

  “You could put it that way.”

  “Though I really don’t see why. I mean, what harm does it do anyone?”

  “You know perfectly—”

  “I admit,” I said, “a grossly expanded gold supply could lead to inflation and devaluation of currencies, which might trigger an economic crisis. Though if you took the trouble to read my Wealth of Nations, you’d discover that an ample money supply can also fuel economic growth, particularly in circumstances of restricted credit. That’s not what’s upsetting you, is it?”

  “I did read it,” he said. “It’s very good.”

  “You’re afraid I’m going to stuff you in a bottle and kill you.”

  He looked at me. “You wouldn’t do that.”

  “No, of course not. I value you too much. You’re my friend.”

  A look of panic swept across his face. “No, I—”

  “Yes,” I said firmly. “You are. Yes, I know that the day will come when the bond will fall due and you’ll lead me off to eternal torment. I accept that. All friends betray you, in the end. But until that day comes—” I shrugged. “We’re friends. I wouldn’t hurt you.”

  He sat down on an upturned barrel. Luckily he didn’t weigh anything. “I’m not handling this very well,” he said.

  “Nobody’s perfect.”

  That made him laugh. “I’m finding this assignment difficult,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. You’re doing your best.” I poured a glass of wine. He could smell it, at any rate. “I understand,” I said. “You’re a fundamentally decent person who happens to work for an employer whose values you don’t always share. You aren’t the first and I don’t suppose you’ll be the last. Don’t have a crisis of conscience about it.”

  He lifted his head and looked at me. “Right now,” he said, “I work for you.”

  “That’s what I said,” I reply. “You don’t hold with alchemy, but never mind. If it’s anybody’s fault, it’s mine. I accept full responsibility.”

  “You can’t—”

  I waited to learn what I couldn’t do, but he’d shut up like a clam. I didn’t press the issue. “Who knows,” I said, “I might turn this whole country to gold. Isn’t there a legend about that?”

  He shuddered. “Please don’t.”

  “Are you asking me as a friend?”

  * * *

  Alchemy indeed; to turn one thing into another—its opposite, its antithesis. Rock to gold, base to noble, enemy to friend. Indeed, it is unnatural, and I can see why it worried him so much. A reevaluation of all values; that’s a quotation, isn’t it? Oh yes. From me. Well.

  To turn good into evil, right into wrong; and vice versa, of course. I was beginning to wish I’d stuck at alchemy when I was younger. Except back then I was fooling people, a fraud, a con man. At least I think I was. But then, I never did discover how that experiment came out.

  Evil into good—take a demon, trap him in a flask, boil him up, and turn him into an angel. You can see why they’d be worried about that. Very worried indeed.

  The barrel he’d sat on contained a new invention of mine, of which I was quite proud. I named it aqua tollens—to myself; naturally I couldn’t tell anyone about it. For the record, it’s a subtle blend of strong acids—vitriol and nitre—and sugar (no, it isn’t; but I’m damned, excuse the expression, if I’m going to tell you what’s in it or how to make it; I don’t know you and I certainly wouldn’t trust you with that stuff). It’s so tricksy you have to mix the ingredients on a block of ice; and if a single drop of it falls a man’s height onto the ground, it blasts a hole about as wide and deep as a good workman can dig in an hour. An invaluable aid, you’ll agree, to the mining industry.

  * * *

  “I’d like you to do something for me,” I told him. “But I’m afraid you won’t want to.”

  Ever since we’d had our brief chat about alchemy he’d been different; wary, nervous, unsettled. “Your wish is my command,” he said. “You know that.”

  “That’s all very well,” I said. “But I’ve given you a lot of anxiety and stress over this alchemy thing. I don’t know. I’d better think about it some more.”

  “Please,” he said wretchedly. “My feelings don’t enter into it. Tell me what you want me to do.”

  “Well,” I said. “I’d quite like you to raise the dead.”

  His eyes rolled, but he didn’t say a word.

  “It’s just,” I went on, “I’d quite like to see my wife again.”

  “The one you may or may not have murdered.”

  “I’ve only been married once,” I said, a little frostily. “And I always tell people I murdered her, but really it was all her fault.” I sighed. “We parted on bad terms, obviously. And it’s been on my mind. I don’t like to think she actually believes I killed her on purpose.”

  He’d turned a sort of pale grey, like a dove’s stomach feathers. “First alchemy, then necromancy,” he said. “You realise—”

  “The two worst things a human being can do, yes, thank you. Though personally, I would interpret them as making some money and talking to my wife. Believe it or not, people do that sort of stuff every day and nobody gets particularly worked up about it.”

  The look in his eyes was more reproach than anything else. “You twist everything,” he said.

  “Guilty,” I said. “Though I prefer to think of it as a form of art.”

  * * *

  Which I couldn’t really deny. Creativity—the ability to make something out of nothing; no, because we can do that, proverbially. The ability to take something and turn it into something else; that’s more like it. The thing humans can do and we can’t. Art. Alchemy. Fiction. Lies.

  Raising the dead, however, is something quite other. There’s nothing artistic about that. It’s just wanton rule-breaking, pure and simple.

  So I looked him in the eye and said, “When do you want to do this incredibly stupid, ill-advised thing?”

  “How about right now?”

  I shook my head. “It takes time,” I said. “There are procedures, protocols, that sort of thing. You’ll have to give me at least a week.”

  He laughed. “Don’t be silly,” he said. “You exist outside time and space.”

  He was starting to annoy me. “Quite. Even so. I’ll need a week.”

  “Not if we do it my way.”

  I was so stunned I couldn’t speak. If I needed to breathe, I’d have choked. “Your way—”

  He nodded. “Maybe I’ve been a bit economical with the truth,” he said. “The fact is, I want to talk to my wife.”

  “She’s dead.”

  “Well.” He pursed his lips. “Maybe, maybe not.”

  I very nearly lost my temper. “She’s dead. You killed her.”

  “Sit down,” he said. I interpreted that as an order. “She died from drinking an alchemical potion.”

  “Yes. One that you—”

  “Quite. Let’s not harp on too much about that.” He sat down opposite me. “She thought I’d managed to concoct the serum of perpetual youth.” He smiled sadly. “She was always a bit obsessive about staying young and beautiful. I think that’s why she married me, because she thought I could do this elixir of life thing. Can’t think of any other possible reason.” He fell silent for a moment, then went on; “She was convinced I’d succeeded and was holding out on her. In fact what I was working on was your basic dross-into-gold process. She gobbled down half a pint of cinnabar and aqua regia, among other things. I’d told her it was poison. She didn’t believe me.”

  I frowned at him. “That’s all in your file.”

  “Indeed, I’m sure it is. But here’s the thing.” He hesitated, I don’t know why. As though he were summoning up his courage. “The work I’ve been doing recently is b
asically perfecting those early experiments. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was almost there; I’d cracked it, the great mystery, dross into gold. There were just one or two errors that needed to be ironed out and fixed; mostly to do with the imperfect sublimation of cinnabar.” He looked at me and laughed. “Would you please not pull those dreadful faces,” he said. “I know this is all stuff you don’t like talking about, but you’re going to have to bear with me if you want to understand what I’m trying to tell you. I think that the reason why the earlier version of the elixir didn’t work—the one she drank—is because of a slight imbalance in the cinnabar’s sublimation ratio. From what I’ve found out since and know now, I overcooked it a bit, which means it wasn’t quite receptive enough to act on inorganic matter. Rock and metal and wood,” he translated, unnecessarily. “But organic matter; flesh and blood—”

  The implications hit me like a tidal wave. “A higher inclusion rate.”

  “Exactly.” His eyes were shining. “You see, you know all about it. Yes, the inclusion rate. It wouldn’t work on base metal. But it would have an effect on flesh and blood.” He looked straight at me. “I think what she drank really was the elixir of youth. Purely by accident, but it was.”

  “But she died.”

  “Did she? Or did she just lapse into a very deep coma while the sublimation took effect? It would look exactly like death to the naked eye. The flesh would be stone cold, the breathing so shallow it wouldn’t mist a glass. Two weeks? Three? Like a butterfly in a chrysalis. Bear in mind, her lunatic brother had her body put into a bath of honey, to preserve it. Sick idea, really, but he was like that. The point is, we wouldn’t have noticed the lack of decomposition. And then,” he went on, “I blew up the palace and left in a hurry. So I have no idea what happened after that.”

  “The body would’ve been destroyed in the blast.”

  He shook his head. “Flesh sublimated by cinnabar? No power on Earth could even scratch it. If I’m right, she’s not dead at all. She’s still out there, and not a day over twenty-eight.”

  My mind was reeling. “So what do you want me to do?”

  “Easy,” he said, quite calmly. “I want you to find her.”

  * * *

  27,886 women called Eudoxia living in the Northern hemisphere and aged between 24 and 34. None of them was her. 1,338,765 women of the right age living in the Northern hemisphere and answering her description. The one we were looking for was the 1,337,816th. So it goes.

  Her name was Heloria, and she was married to a respectable salt merchant in eastern Blemya. She wasn’t from those parts; that was obvious. How she came to be there she had no idea. Her earliest memory was waking up in the ruined shell of a collapsed building, with a roof-beam trapping her ankle. A party of looters, scrounging for floor tiles, found her and pulled her out; she went with them, having nowhere else to go, but they got sick of her temper and constant complaining and turned her out into the street. Her memory might have been a blank but she realised the danger she was in. Fortuitously she walked past the door of the Cold Star convent. The sisters were very kind to her, and she stayed there for a long time—six months, something like that—hoping her memory would come back. When it didn’t, she had to make a choice. Did she want to stay with the sisters and devote her life to contemplation and prayer? No, she realised, not in the slightest. She could read and write and do arithmetic. The sisters found her a place as a bookkeeper with a patron of their order, a good man who could be trusted not to take advantage of a vulnerable young woman. Three months after that they were married, and she’d been perfectly happy ever since.

  I showed him a vision of her. “Yes,” he said, “that’s my Eudoxia. I’d know her anywhere.”

  I was reading the file. “It can’t be her,” I said. “Listen. She turned up on the sisters’ doorstep seven years ago. She’s been married to the salt merchant for six years. You blew up Prince Phocas forty-one years ago. The figures don’t tally.”

  He frowned. “It looks just like her,” he said. “I could’ve sworn it was her.” He thought for a moment. “When was Phocas’s palace rebuilt?”

  Back to the files. “It wasn’t,” I said.

  “It must have been. Prime real estate in the middle of the city.”

  I shook my head. “Because of the way it was destroyed,” I told him. “Nobody wanted to go anywhere near the place, they reckoned it was bewitched. The only people who went there were thieves and looters.”

  He turned and looked at me.

  “It’s possible,” I said slowly. “She could have been there all that time. Could she?” I added.

  “Why are you asking me?”

  “Well, you’re the expert,” I said irritably. “You know about alchemy, probably more than we do. As I’ve been trying to get you to understand, it’s a subject we really don’t choose to dwell on.”

  He was silent for a long time. “It’s possible,” he said. “After all, nobody has ever done that experiment before, so it’s anybody’s guess how long the transmutation process takes. It could’ve been thirty-odd years, I just don’t know. Or maybe, once the process is complete, you hibernate like a caterpillar in a cocoon until somebody wakes you up.” He shook his head like a wet dog. “This is silly,” he said. “Why are we speculating, when you’ve got all the facts at your fingertips? Of course you know who she is; name, date and place of birth, date and place of death, come to that. You know everything.”

  I looked away, deeply ashamed. He was asking me for something—as was his right under the contract—and I couldn’t give it to him.

  Yes, we’re omniscient. Of course we are. And to us, all things are possible.

  Up to a point.

  Take human beings, for instance. We can track and trace any human being in an instant. Except that there are exceptions. Tiny ones, of indescribable rarity. Exceptions so trivial and insignificant that they can’t conceivably matter. And they aren’t really exceptions at all, because they’re all to do with that single unbearable overriding abomination, alchemy.

  A human being who’s been alchemically altered ceases, as far as our tracking and tracing protocols are concerned, to exist. Logical; the natural thing that stems from the Created has gone, having been unnaturally altered into something else. The something else, being beyond and outside nature, exists in spite of us—we don’t recognise it, the way a government doesn’t recognise the bunch of pirates and thieves who’ve seized power in the kingdom next door.

  This woman, the one Saloninus claimed as his Eudoxia, bore no trace. She wasn’t in the records. As far as we were concerned, before the moment she woke up in the ruins of Phocas’s palace, she hadn’t existed.

  Oh dear cubed and recubed.

  * * *

  This was too much. I consulted my superiors.

  It only took an instant, and I’m sure Saloninus didn’t even notice I’d gone. I travelled to the office of the Supreme Archive. As luck would have it, the deputy chief is an old acquaintance of mine.

  “It’s possible,” he said.

  He seemed curiously guarded, which I put down to the disgust and horror that alchemy stirs in all of us. “I know it’s possible,” I said. “What I need to know is, can there be any other explanation?”

  He was quiet for a moment. “This wretched woman doesn’t show up anywhere,” he said. “Right until the moment she wakes up with the beam across her.” He pulled down a ledger from a shelf. “The princess Eudoxia similarly disappears from the record at the moment when she drank the potion. I invite you to draw your own conclusions.”

  “Done that,” I snapped. “What I want—sorry, what I desperately need—is an alternative version. Anything. Anything I can sincerely believe in. Otherwise, you don’t need me to tell you, we’re in real trouble.”

  He looked at me, and I could see what he was thinking; no, you’re in trouble, not me, thank goodness. I was annoyed by that. For pity’s sake, we’re all on the same side, the same team. Why can’t people accept
that and work together? Still, there you go. “The only other explanation,” he said, “is that our system of archives and information storage and retrieval is so hopelessly inefficient and shot through with so many systemic faults and errors that in a case like this—irregular, as it were, not complying with normal practice in several key areas—a human could simply slip through the net, so to speak. But that,” he added sternly, “is impossible.”

  “Is it? I’m asking you as a friend. Be honest with me.”

  “Absolutely,” replied the deputy chief archivist. “It could never happen.”

  * * *

  Next I went to see my supervisor. “I can spare you five minutes,” he said. His idea of a joke.

  “It’s alchemy,” I told him. “It has to be.”

  “It does look that way,” he replied. “Unfortunate.”

  I was amazed at how calmly he seemed to be taking it. “Saloninus has found a method of performing alchemical transmutation that actually works,” I told him. “That’s a disaster, surely.”

  He pursed his lips. “It’s very bad,” he said. “Given the contractual relationship.”

  That struck me as an odd thing to say. “It changes everything, surely.”

  He chose to interpret that as a play on words, which I hadn’t intended it to be, and gave me a thin smile. “Not quite everything,” he said. “It’s not like it’s the first time it’s happened.”

  News to me. “You mean, there have been others?”

  “Oh yes.” He nodded solemnly. “None of which ever came to anything. The outbreak was always contained, if you want to look at it in those terms. The contagion never spread. The alchemist always died very soon after making his discovery, and his secret always died with him. Usually,” he added, “there was an explosion. Dreadfully unstable materials these people use. A terrific explosion, and all the notes and equipments destroyed in the blast.”

  I wasn’t entirely sure I liked the sound of that. “You make it sound like the explosions weren’t accidents.”