The Devil You Know (8 page)

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.”

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 come 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?