Sympathy for the Devil (21 page)

Snowball's Chance

Charles Stross

The louring sky, half-past pregnant with a caul of snow, pressed down on Davy's head like a hangover. He glanced up once, shivered, then pushed through the doorway into the Deid Nurse and the smog of fag fumes within.

His sometime-conspirator Tam the Tailer was already at the bar. "Awright, Davy?"

Davy drew a deep breath, his glasses steaming up the instant he stepped through the heavy blackout curtain, so that the disreputable pub was shrouded in a halo of icy iridescence that concealed its flaws. "Mine's a Deuchars." His nostrils flared as he took in the seedy mixture of aromas that festered in the Deid Nurse's atmosphere--so thick you could cut it with an axe, Morag had said once with a sniff of her lop-sided snot-siphon, back in the day when she'd had aught to say to Davy. "Fuckin' Baltic oot there the night, an' nae kiddin'." He slid his glasses off and wiped them off, then looked around tiredly. "An' deid tae the world in here."

Tam glanced around as if to be sure the pub population hadn't magically doubled between mouthfuls of seventy bob. "Ah widnae say that." He gestured with his nose--pockmarked by frostbite--at the snug in the corner. Once the storefront for the Old Town's more affluent ladies of the night, it was now unaccountably popular with students of the gaming fraternity, possibly because they had been driven out of all the trendier bars in the neighbourhood for yacking till all hours and not drinking enough (much like the whores before them). Right now a bunch of threadbare LARPers were in residence, arguing over some recondite point of lore. "They're havin' enough fun for a barrel o' monkeys by the sound o' it."

"An' who can blame them?" Davy hoisted his glass: "Ah just wish they'd keep their shite aff the box." The pub, in an effort to compensate for its lack of a food licence, had installed a huge and dodgy voxel engine that teetered precariously over the bar: it was full of muddy field, six LARPers leaping.

"Dinnae piss them aff, Davy--they've a' got swords."

"Ah wis jist kiddin'. Ah didnae catch ma lottery the night, that's a' Ah'm sayin'."

"If ye win, it'll be a first." Tam stared at his glass. "An' whit wid ye dae then, if yer numbers came up?"

"Whit, the big yin?" Davy put his glass down, then unzipped his parka's fast-access pouch and pulled out a fag packet and lighter. Condensation immediately beaded the plastic wrapper as he flipped it open. "Ah'd pay aff the hoose, for starters. An' the child support. An' then--" He paused, eyes wandering to the dog-eared NO SMOKING sign behind the bar. "Ah, shit." He flicked his Zippo, stroking the end of a cigarette with the flame from the burning coal oil. "If Ah wis young again, Ah'd move, ye ken? But Ah'm no, Ah've got roots here." The sign went on to warn of lung cancer (curable) and two-thousand-Euro fines (laughable, even if enforced). Davy inhaled, grateful for the warmth flooding his lungs. "An' there's Morag an' the bairns."

"Heh." Tam left it at a grunt, for which Davy was grateful. It wasn't that he thought Morag would ever come back to him, but he was sick to the back teeth of people who thought they were his friends telling him that she wouldn't, not unless he did this or did that.

"Ah could pay for the bairns tae go east. They're young enough." He glanced at the doorway. "It's no right, throwin' snowba's in May."

"That's global warmin'." Tam shrugged with elaborate irony, then changed the subject. "Where d'ye think they'd go? The Ukraine? New 'Beria?"

"Somewhaur there's grass and nae glaciers." Pause. "An' real beaches wi' sand an' a'." He frowned and hastily added: "Dinnae get me wrong, Ah ken how likely that is." The collapse of the West Antarctic ice shelf two decades ago had inundated every established coastline; it had also stuck the last nail in the coffin of the Gulf stream, plunging the British Isles into a sub-Arctic deep freeze. Then the Americans had made it worse--at least for Scotland--by putting a giant parasol into orbit to stop the rest of the planet roasting like a chicken on a spit. Davy had learned all about global warming in Geography classes at school--back when it hadn't happened--in the rare intervals when he wasn't dozing in the back row or staring at Yasmin MacConnell's hair. It wasn't until he was already paying a mortgage and the second kid was on his way that what it meant really sank in. Cold. Eternal cold, deep in your bones.

"Ah'd like tae see a real beach again, some day before Ah die."

"Ye could save for a train ticket."

"Away wi' ye! Where'd Ah go tae?" Davy snorted, darkly amused. Flying was for the hyper-rich these days, and anyway, the nearest beaches with sand and sun were in the Caliphate, a long day's TGV ride south through the Channel Tunnel and across the Gibraltar Bridge, in what had once been the Northern Sahara Desert. As a tourist destination, the Caliphate had certain drawbacks, a lack of topless sunbathing beauties being only the first on the list. "It's a' just as bad whauriver ye go. At least here ye can still get pork scratchings."

"Aye, weel." Tam raised his glass, just as a stranger appeared in the doorway.

"An' then there's some that dinnae feel the cauld." Davy glanced round to follow the direction of his gaze. The stranger was oddly attired in a lightweight suit and tie, as if he'd stepped out of the middle of the previous century, although his neat goatee beard and the two small brass horns implanted on his forehead were a more contemporary touch. He noticed Davy staring and nodded, politely enough, then broke eye contact and ambled over to the bar. Davy turned back to Tam, who responded to his wink. "Take care noo, Davy. Ye've got ma number." With that, he stood up, put his glass down, and shambled unsteadily towards the toilets.

This put Davy on his lonesome next to the stranger, who leaned on the bar and glanced at him sideways with an expression of amusement. Davy's forehead wrinkled as he stared in the direction of Katie the barwoman, who was just now coming back up the cellar steps with an empty coal powder cartridge in one hand. "My round?" asked the stranger, raising an eyebrow.

"Aye. Mine's a Deuchars if yer buyin'..." Davy, while not always quick on the uptake, was never slow on the barrel: if this underdressed southerner could afford a heated taxi, he could certainly afford to buy Davy some beer. Katie nodded and rinsed her hands under the sink--however well-sealed they left the factory, coal cartridges always leaked like printer toner had once done--and picked up two glasses.

"New roond aboot here?" Davy asked after a moment.

The stranger smiled: "Just passing through--I visit Edinburgh every few years."

"Aye." Davy could relate to that.

"And yourself?"

"Ah'm frae Pilton." Which was true enough; that was where he'd bought the house with Morag all those years ago, back when folks actually wanted to buy houses in Edinburgh. Back before the pack ice closed the Firth for six months in every year, back before the rising sea level drowned Leith and Ingliston, and turned Arthur's Seat into a frigid coastal headland looming grey and stark above the permafrost. "Whereaboots d'ye come frae?"

The stranger's smile widened as Katie parked a half-litre on the bar top before him and bent down to pull the next: "I think you know where I'm from, my friend."

Davy snorted. "Aye, so ye're a man of wealth an' taste, is that right?"

"Just so." A moment later, Katie planted the second glass in front of Davy, gave him a brittle smile, and retreated to the opposite end of the bar without pausing to extract credit from the stranger, who nodded and raised his jar: "To your good fortune."

"Heh." Davy chugged back a third of his glass. It was unusually bitter, with a slight sulphurous edge to it: "That's a new barrel."

"Only the best for my friends."

Davy sneaked an irritated glance at the stranger. "Right. Ah ken ye want tae talk, ye dinnae need tae take the pish."

"I'm sorry." The stranger held his gaze, looking slightly perplexed. "It's just that I've spent too long in America recently. Most of them believe in me. A bit of good old-fashioned scepticism is refreshing once in a while."

Davy snorted. "Dae Ah look like a god-botherer tae ye? Yer amang civilized folk here, nae free-kirk numpties'd show their noses in a pub."

"So I see." The stranger relaxed slightly. "Seen Morag and the boys lately, have you?"

Now a strange thing happened, because as the cold fury took him, and a monstrous roaring filled his ears, and he reached for the stranger's throat, he seemed to hear Morag's voice shouting,
Davy, don't!
And to his surprise, a moment of timely sanity came crashing down on him, a sense that Devil or no, if he laid hands on this fucker he really would be damned, somehow. It might just have been the hypothalamic implant that the sheriff had added to the list of his parole requirements working its arcane magic on his brain chemistry, but it certainly felt like a drenching, cold-sweat sense of immanence, and not in a good way. So as the raging impulse to glass the cunt died away, Davy found himself contemplating his own raised fists in perplexity, the crude blue tattoos of LOVE and HATE standing out on his knuckles like doorposts framing the prison gateway of his life.

"Who telt ye aboot them," he demanded hoarsely.

"Cigarette?" The stranger, who had sat perfectly still while Davy wound up to punch his ticket, raised the chiselled eyebrow again.

"Ya bas." But Davy's hand went to his pocket automatically, and he found himself passing a filter-tip to the stranger rather than ramming a red-hot ember in his eye.

"Thank you." The stranger took the unlit cigarette, put it straight between his lips, and inhaled deeply. "Nobody needed to tell me about them," he continued, slowly dribbling smoke from both nostrils.

Davy slumped defensively on his bar stool. "When ye wis askin' aboot Morag and the bairns, Ah figured ye wis fuckin' wi' ma heid." But knowing that there was a perfectly reasonable supernatural explanation somehow made it all right.
Ye cannae blame Auld Nick for pushin' yer buttons
. Davy reached out for his glass again: "'Scuse me. Ah didnae think ye existed."

"Feel free to take your time." The stranger smiled faintly. "I find atheists refreshing, but it does take a little longer than usual to get down to business."

"Aye, weel, concedin' for the moment that ye
are
the deil, Ah dinnae ken whit ye want wi' the likes o' me." Davy cradled his beer protectively.

"Ah'm naebody." He shivered in the sudden draught as one of the students--leaving--pushed through the curtain, admitting a flurry of late-May snowflakes.

"So? You may be nobody, but your lucky number just came up." The stranger smiled devilishly. "Did you never think you'd win the Lottery?"

"Aye, weel, if hauf the stories they tell about ye are true, Ah'd rather it wis the ticket, ye ken? Or are ye gonnae say ye've been stitched up by the kirk?"

"Something like that." The Devil nodded sagely. "Look, you're not stupid, so I'm not going to bullshit you. What it is, is I'm not the only one of me working this circuit. I've got a quota to meet, but there aren't enough politicians and captains of industry to go around, and anyway, they're boring. All they ever want is money, power, or good, hot, kinky sex without any comebacks from their constituents. Poor folks are so much more creative in their desperation, don't you think? And so much more likely to believe in the Rules, too."

"The Rules?" Davy found himself staring at his companion in perplexity. "Nae the Law, right?"

"Do as thou wilt shall be all of the Law," quoth the Devil, then he paused as if he'd tasted something unpleasant.

"Ye wis sayin'?"

"Love is the Law, Love under Will," the Devil added dyspeptically.

"That's a'?" Davy stared at him.

"My employer requires me to quote chapter and verse when challenged." As he said "employer", the expression on the Devil's face made Davy shudder. "And she monitors these conversations for compliance."

"But whit aboot the rest o' it, aye? If ye're the deil, whit aboot the Ten Commandments?"

"Oh, those are just Rules," said the Devil, smiling. "I'm really proud of them."

"Ye made them a' up?" Davy said accusingly. "Just tae fuck wi' us?"

"Well, yes, of course I did! And all the other Rules. They work really well, don't you think?"

Davy made a fist and stared at the back of it. LOVE. "Ye cunt. Ah still dinnae believe in ye."

The Devil shrugged. "Nobody's asking you to believe in me. You don't, and I'm still here, aren't I? If it makes things easier, think of me as the garbage collection subroutine of the strong anthropic principle. And they"--he stabbed a finger in the direction of the overhead LEDs--"work by magic, for all you know."

Davy picked up his glass and drained it philosophically. The hell of it was, the Devil was right: now he thought about it, he had no idea how the lights worked, except that electricity had something to do with it. "Ah'll have anither. Ye're buyin'."

"No I'm not." The Devil snapped his fingers and two full glasses appeared on the bar, steaming slightly. Davy picked up the nearest one. It was hot to the touch, even though the beer inside it was at cellar temperature, and it smelled slightly sulphurous. "Anyway, I owe you."

"Whit for?" Davy sniffed the beer suspiciously: "This smells pish." He pushed it away. "Whit is it ye owe me for?"

"For taking that mortgage and the job on the street-cleaning team and for pissing it all down the drain and fucking off a thousand citizens in little ways. For giving me Jaimie and wee Davy, and for wrecking your life and cutting Morag off from her parents and raising a pair of neds instead of two fine upstanding citizens. You're not a scholar and you're not a gentleman, but you're a truly professional hater. And as for what you did to Morag--"

Davy made another fist: HATE. "Say wan mair word aboot Morag..." he warned.

The Devil chuckled quietly. "No, you managed to do all that by yourself." He shrugged. "I'd have offered help if you needed it, but you seemed to be doing okay without me. Like I said, you're a professional." He cleared his throat. "Which brings me to the little matter of why I'm talking to you tonight."