Academic Exercises

by K. J. Parker

  I got four yards down the catwalk when the blast hit. Shook me off my feet; I landed painfully on my outstretched hands and one knee, only just kept myself from sliding off the catwalk and getting splatted. I dragged myself into a ball and curled up under the rampart.

  I counted. On five, a dog started barking, about a hundred yards away. Then I heard the first running footsteps, and got my head down. Even if someone tripped over me in the dark, they wouldn’t think twice about a drunk hunkered down out of the wind in the shelter of the rampart, and they wouldn’t stop to arrest him for vagrancy, not when there were enemies loose in the City, blowing holes in the walls. Four or five watchmen did in fact run straight past me, but whether they noticed me or not I couldn’t say. There was yelling and running, lights waving about, doors slamming in the guard-house. I stayed put and clung to my vagrant persona like a drowning man clinging to driftwood. Even when the running around had stopped, I stayed where I was till five o’clock, by the Priory bell. Then I got up and hobbled back to the tannery.

  A wise man once said that any human being is capable of infinite achievement, so long as it’s not the work they’re supposed to be doing. The Dialogues were a case in point. My thesis was supposed to be a metalingual analysis of Eustatius’ On Various Matters; I started out with a hypothesis I really and truly believed in, and it took me two years of diligent, painstaking work (during which time I was working as a college porter, since I couldn’t afford the fees) to prove conclusively that my hypothesis was wrong. Along the way, quite by accident, I stumbled on some leads in a totally different field. I mulled them over while I was lugging heavy trunks about and scraping vomit off the flagstones after end-of-exams parties, and in a few idle moments I jotted down some stuff. That was the Dialogues. When the time came to present my thesis, I realised that it was going to be rather short—

  Did Linguistic Forms Materially Affect Eustatius’ Logical Structures in ‘On Various Matters?’ No.

  —so I left Elpis the night before I was due to appear before the examining board, leaving behind my notes, some unpaid bills and an old pair of shoes I couldn’t cram into my haversack. The shame, you see. Curious insight into the mind of my younger self; I thought it less disgraceful to take up highway robbery than to admit to my tutors that I’d just wasted two years of their time and my life.

  Though I say it myself as shouldn’t, I was a good robber. I thought about it carefully first, rather than just plunging in at the deep end, which I gather is what most robbers do. I spent a week walking the City, taking notes on watch patrol routes and timings, lines of sight, direct routes from the big mercantile houses to the major banks. I went to the Court archive and read transcripts of hundreds of highway robbery trials, which gave me a pretty clear idea of where most robbers went wrong (sixty-seven per cent of robbers are caught because they start throwing money around in a suspicious manner; thirteen per cent attack men carrying concealed weapons; six per cent rob the same courier in the same place more than four times). I trained for two weeks at the School of Defence in Haymarket, and spent another week picking fights in bars. Only then did I sit down with a large sheet of paper, a map and a pair of compasses, and plan out my first robbery. It went beautifully and netted me seventeen angels thirty. I very nearly quit while I was ahead.

  But Elpis isn’t a big town, and there were too many people there who knew me, so I took the mail coach to Paraprosdocia. Took me a month to get it mapped out and reconnoitred, and what happened? Third time out, the sedan chair I robbed in Goosefair turned out to be carrying the provost of my old college back at Elpis. I cleared out the next day and got as far as Choris Seautou, where I banked my savings and organised a bolthole for future use. Then I went back to Paraprosdocia and sent a letter to my old college chum, prince Phocas, making him an offer I knew would interest him. On reflection, I still believe it was the smart thing to do; if the watch had got me, the Prefect would’ve strung me up before Phocas knew anything about it, and I’d have been dead. Death or Phocas; a close call, but on balance I reckon I made the sensible choice.

  It was all over town the next day. A certain Saloninus, alchemist, scholar and gentleman thief, wanted for questioning in connection with the death of the lady Eudoxia, had skipped town by the rather drastic expedient of blowing a seven-foot hole in the City wall. It could only have been Saloninus, they reckoned, because the only known explosive capable of doing that much damage was ichor tonans (invented by the said Saloninus); only five men in the world know how to make that stuff, and of those five men, four were out of town at the time. According to a watch captain I overheard in a barber’s shop, where I’d just got a job sweeping up for three bits a day, the Prefect had sent a whole company of light cavalry after this Saloninus, so there was no way he’d get far. Meanwhile, the prince was absolutely livid, and had sent a squadron of scuttlehats after the Prefect’s men, thereby implying he didn’t trust them to do a proper job, an implication the watch captain clearly resented.

  I managed to stick it in the barber’s for three days, just to make sure the watch wasn’t still looking for me in town. Then I mugged a slobbering-drunk Vesani merchant outside the Wisdom & Temperance; five angels twenty. Next morning, I booked on the first mail coach to Choris Seautou. Piece of cake.

  Goes without saying, I didn’t get on the coach. I turned up at the stop, outside the Mail Office, making sure the booking clerk, yard master and coachman all got a good look at me; got in the coach and sat inside for quite some time, till it was ready to leave; then quietly opened the door on the blind side, slipped out and darted up that little alley that leads to the cheese warehouse; scaled the wall, quickly across the yard, through the back gate into Cutlers’ Yard. Then I went to the tannery, cleared out my stuff and hired a cellar under a closed-down inn next to the old Instruction Theatre in Browngate. Sure enough, a few days later, I overheard two off-duty scuttlehats in the Chastity Rewarded telling someone they had a red-hot lead on Saloninus that put him in Choris Seautou, and he’d be in custody inside of a week.

  The trouble is, when you get a reputation for being clever, you have to live up to it.

  The cellar under the inn was perfect for what I had to do. Money, of course, was my biggest problem, followed by the dangers I’d have to run getting supplies. I really didn’t want to do any more robberies. Even under ideal circumstances it’s a horribly dangerous way of earning a living, and my background information, I knew for a fact, was seriously out of date. Also, I don’t think it’s a very nice way to behave. And, as the greatest living authority on ethical theory, I guess I have a duty to set an example. But I needed money; not so much for food and stuff, because I’ve learned the hard way how to do without it for prolonged periods, but for supplies and equipment; my other difficulty. I thought long and hard, but no flash of inspiration came. With great regret, I decided it was time to cash in one of my last few remaining assets; namely, Professor Laodicus.

  Things are best, but people can be useful sometimes. Laodicus is a case in point. Back at Elpis, the second time I was there, just after the Dialogues came out, I was the newly-appointed lecturer in moral and ethical philosophy, and Laodicus was the scrawny, tongue-tied, earnest student who doesn’t make friends and can’t seem to get a handle on the course material. I was going through one of my recurrent being-a-decent-human-being phases at the time, and I got Laodicus through Preliminaries, albeit by the skin of his teeth. He was shaping up to be a worthwhile student when my circumstances changed and I had to get out of town in a hurry. Now, here he was at the Studium, professor of Major Arts, with a keyring that gave him access to the petty cash and the store cupboard. In Essay on Ethical Theory I argued strenuously against the enlightened-self-interest view of altruism, dismissing it as thinly-veiled mystical nonsense. Guess I was wrong about that, too.

  I walked in through the front gate of the Studium and nobody looked at me. This was because everybody there who might possibly have recognised me knew I was in Choris Seautou. I’d ha
d a wash in a horse-trough and a shave in a barber’s shop, and I was wearing a smart, quiet gown I’d lifted off a washing-line on the other side of town. I asked at the porter’s lodge where I might find Professor Laodicus at that time of day. Easy, they told me, he’ll be in the Old Library. I nodded my thanks, which was what a distinguished visiting academic from the provinces would do. It was a trifle stiff and cold, because of the handle of the axe sticking into the inside of my thigh.

  The Old Library at the Studium is big. If you burnt it down and ploughed over the site, you could grow enough grain there to feed a village. The philosophy section is the whole of the second floor (up a tightly-coiled stone staircase that plays hell with my vertigo). It took me a while to track down Laodicus, but I recognised him from twenty yards off. He’d lost his hair (he was thin on top at nineteen) and puffed out round the middle, but his face was the same. Unnaturally so; as though someone had flayed it off and sewn it onto a bald head attached to an older, chubbier body.

  He was standing with his head bent over a book. I couldn’t resist. I walked up on him nice and quiet, until I was directly behind his left shoulder, and said, “Hello, Laodicus.”

  Wasn’t the smart thing to do. I could have triggered heart failure. As it was, he jumped about a foot in the air and made a squealing noise, like six pigs at market. He looked at me, mouth open and moving, no words coming out.

  “Walk with me,” I said.

  One of those people who’ll obey you instinctively if you use the right tone of voice. He turned his head so he didn’t have to see me, and said, “What are you doing here? Don’t you know—?”

  “I’m not here,” I said, smiling, as though we were sharing a pleasant memory. “I’m in Choris Seautou.”

  “You can’t stay here.” His eyes were bulging, as though I’d put a cord round his neck and pulled it tight. “If they find you here—”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “You can get rid of me very quickly and easily. Where’s your office?”

  “New Quad,” he replied, then realised he shouldn’t have. “What do you want?”

  “Keep going,” I said. “And smile.”

  I wish I hadn’t told him to do that. He looked like one of the heads they hang up on Northgate, after it’s been out in the sun for a week. “What do you—?”

  “Shh.”

  Down the back stairs, out into South Quad, through the cloister to New, turn left. He had a ground-floor set, which implied status. Didn’t lock his door, implying either beautiful trust in his fellow men or rank carelessness. I shut the door and slipped the bolt.

  “You don’t seem pleased to see me,” I said.

  “You’re mad coming here,” Laodicus said. “If they catch you here, it’ll ruin my career. I’ve already had the prince’s men here, asking questions.”

  I hadn’t anticipated that, though I should’ve done. “Well, that’s fine,” I said. “Obviously they believed you when you said you hadn’t heard from me, and there’s no reason for them to come back. Now, listen. I need your help.”

  He looked very sad. “What—?”

  I told him. He stared at me, as though I’d just asked for his liver. “I can’t do that,” he said. “It’d be stealing. If anyone found out I’d misappropriated supplies and funds—”

  I gave him my hurt look. “In chapter seven, section five, paragraph nine of Ethical Dilemmas,” I said, “you argue that loyalty to a friend must always come before loyalty to the State. You use the analogy of bricks in a wall; unless each brick bonds to its neighbour, you say, it doesn’t matter how straight and level the rows are, the base will never support the upper floors.” I smiled at him. “I used to take the opposing view, but you changed my mind. You know, you really have come a long way since your first year at Elpis.”

  He gave me a terrified look. “I can’t,” he said. “I’m too scared.”

  “Nonsense.” I’d already won the battle. “You’re confusing moral and physical courage. In chapter nine, section two, paragraph four, you write—”

  “All right.” One of those born academics who’d rather have his teeth ripped out with pliers than have his own words cited against him. “Stay here. I’ll be as quick as I can.”

  I shook my head. “You won’t be able to carry all that stuff on your own,” I pointed out. Which was true. I, on the other hand, had two years as a porter and a succession of heavy-lifting jobs during my bad years behind me. He couldn’t fault my logic.

  Fact is, I stumbled into alchemy by accident, during my second spell at Elpis. I’d always been vaguely interested in it, but I was far too busy with my prescribed studies and besides, I couldn’t afford the kit. Then I got to know Euelpides, one of the research fellows. He was looking for an assistant. Pretty soon, we’d exchanged roles; and when he retired, they offered me his job. I needed the money.

  Never hard, of course, to attract research funding for alchemy. As long as people believe it’s possible to turn base metal into gold (it isn’t), you’ll find rich men willing to invest. So long as they were prepared to pay, I was happy to try and do the impossible. Where I went wrong, of course, was falling in love with the subject, about three months after I took the job.

  A mistake; I can see that now. It was a bit like falling in love with your wife after you’ve been married three years. Warps your judgement, puts you at a disadvantage. I should know. Done both.

  Talking of which; Eudoxia never gave a damn about me. I genuinely believe she was incapable of any kind of affection. And she was terrified—real, tangible, wake-up-in-the-night-sweating fear—of getting old. Not death, which she never thought about, as far as I know. But being old; she said once that age was alchemy in reverse, turns gold into shit. I couldn’t really understand that, but I can reconstruct what led her there. At nineteen she was exceptionally beautiful. At twenty-five, she was starting to coarsen up a little, as though someone had subtly defaced a beautiful painting. She used to stand in front of the mirror staring at a new line or wrinkle nobody else could see, and I could practically smell the fear. So; once she’d reached the conclusion that I was the best alchemist in the world, it wasn’t enough that I was working for her brother, under contract and practically a prisoner in the wing of the palace he’d had converted into a laboratory for me. She had to make sure, which meant I had to be in love with her; with her beauty, to give me the strongest possible incentive. I came to hate her, the same way I came to hate alchemy, and for roughly the same reason. Even now, I find it hard to forgive her for that.

  It’s a central paradox that love and rape both find expression in the same act. For two years, I raped science, trying to give Phocas and Eudoxia what they wanted, gold and youth. Couldn’t be done, of course. Not possible. But they both had blind, unlimited faith in me; like being in love, or believing in God. I think I could’ve endured that. I might just possibly have been able to keep going, trusting that sooner or later the faith would start to crack and break up, they’d realise I wasn’t nearly as clever as they thought I was, and they’d eventually let me go, or kill me. What ruined that was the other thing; the discovery, or the faint possibility of it; my one and only truly worthwhile achievement, if only I could achieve it, that would bring me wealth, fame and maybe—just maybe—happiness.

  Thanks to Laodicus, I had everything I needed; the last remaining supplies and bits of equipment, and ten angels cash, which he kindly embezzled for me from the Social Fund, of which he was trustee. With my wooden box under my arm, I walked briskly back to my cellar, thinking only about the experiment I was about to conduct, anticipating problems, working through each step in my mind. I can’t actually remember reaching the cellar, setting up the new apparatus, lighting the fire, drawing the water. Time melts in the presence of intense concentration. It expands, so that a pot of water takes forever to come to the boil, and contracts as you work through each step of a procedure, trying to get seven things done at the same time without rushing. I’d organised my mind so carefully that I didn’
t waste a second, but either there wasn’t enough, or there was far too much.

  The blue and the green. I heated lacrimae dei and flowers of strong metal in a crucible while the compounds were reducing, then mixed the blue and the green in a stone beaker and added the solids to the liquid. No effervescence this time, but a dense white vapour, which made me realise that a windowless cellar wasn’t entirely ideal for my purpose after all. I added vis cerulea, a scruple at a time. The corner of a clean rag, dipped in the beaker, came up sky blue. Once step closer to genuine immortality.

  Trouble with concentrating on one thing, you neglect other stuff. I had my back to the door; they walked in quietly. First thing I knew about it was when they grabbed me.

  The captain told me it hadn’t been all that difficult. He’d sent out patrols with orders to report strange and unusual smells. Apparently, you could smell me halfway down the street. As simple as that.

  I had a short ride in a closed carriage, wedged in between the captain and a sergeant, with a rope tied to my ankle. When we reached the junction of Whitegate and Long Row, I waited to see which way we’d turn; left to the Station House, or right to the palace. We turned right.

  “We’d better get you cleaned up,” the captain said, as we drove through the main gate. “Can’t go and meet the prince in the state you’re in.”

  I pointed out that we’d been students together, living in self-induced squalor and degradation. First time I met Phocas, I told him, he hadn’t shaved for a week and he had vomit on his shoes. The captain smiled at me, and said that he hadn’t gone to university. He’d have liked to, but his father was a clockmaker with six children. That, apparently, was me put in my place.