The Devil You Know (9 page)

* * *

They stared at me. Eventually, one of them said, “That’s unheard of.”

I wasn’t going to be put off by mere staring. “Nevertheless,” I said.

But one of them shook his head. “You’re going to have to do better than that,” he said.

On the way out, I reflected on the way in which so many mortals pray. It’s strictly a rational proposition. If He exists, they argue, it’s best to be on the right side of Him; if He doesn’t, well, no harm done, it hasn’t cost anything. I’m not like that, unfortunately. Either I believe or I don’t. And I believed—thought I believed—in the doctrines of Saloninus concerning the invalidity of conventional morality. I believed that there are no absolutes of good and evil and that all that matters, in the final analysis, is which side you’re on. It was, I felt, a doctrine which accorded exactly with my own observations and experience.

The problems start when your side isn’t on your side anymore.

I had one more call to pay.

We’re supposed to observe the chain of command, but it’s not an absolute requirement. It’s recognised that there are times when you have to bypass all that and go straight to the top. This, I felt certain, was one of them.

Not the
top
top, of course. The highest I could aspire to was Divisional Command. It meant a great deal of heel-kicking in anterooms, but time where we come from isn’t exactly linear. Still, I should’ve taken a book to read while I was hanging about.

I was shown in, and explained the situation as concisely as I could. “So you see,” I concluded, “we definitely have a problem.”

“You think so.”

The thing about Divisional Command is, they seem to have this antipathy to answering questions.

“Yes, I do,” I said. “Here’s a mortal who appears to have perfected the process of alchemical transmutation. Normally, the very act of doing so would result in his immediate death, by explosion, since the compounds that effect the change are inherently unstable. That’s why we’re not knee-deep in immortal humans. But this one is smart. If he blows himself up, by the terms of this wretched contract, we have to protect him. He’s outsmarted us. He’s won.”

“You think so?”

“I do.” I paused, trying to interpret the blank, hollow stare facing me. “If he succeeds in performing the transmutation, naturally he won’t keep quiet about it. Or even if he tries to, word will get out. People will know that alchemy works, that it’s possible to achieve eternal life. Millions will blow themselves up trying to do it. A few will succeed.”

“You think so.”

“Yes, just look at this Eudoxia woman. She drank the stuff. There was the usual explosion, but she survived. She hasn’t aged a day in forty years. Without knowing precisely what he did, I can’t tell you the extent to which the process is reproducible, but it makes me feel sure that it can work, sometimes. What with that, and the wholescale carnage of those who try and fail, I think you’ll agree, it’s an impossible situation. We have to do something.”

“What do you have in mind?”

I felt the whole weight of Creation on my shoulders. “We have two options,” I said. “One of them is to break our word. We find some way of stopping him, even though it means lying, misleading, or downright force.”

“What do you have in mind?”

I closed my eyes. This was all really hard for me. “What happens to us,” I asked, “if we breach the contract? For example, what would be the consequences if we killed him? His mortal body, I mean. For sure, it would mean the deal is off; we wouldn’t get his immortal soul for perpetual torment. I for one could live with that. But would we have to restore his body to life, wind the clock back so that the killing never took place? Can we actually do that, because strictly speaking it’d be necromancy, which is forbidden? Of course, so is murder.”

“What do you think?”

“I think we’re in so much trouble that anything we do is going to have bad repercussions. Being seen to have broken our word will mean that mortals will no longer trust us. We can forget about future contracts of this sort. Again, I can live with that.”

“Is that all?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know who enforces our rules against us,” I said. “We do, presumably. If he has a valid complaint against us, who does he appeal to? Who judges us? What can they do to us, if they find against us?”

“What do you think?”

“I think I don’t want to find out,” I said firmly. “I think that going down that road is unthinkable. We
do not
break our word. We
do not
assassinate those who pose us problems. The pursuit of expediency is a luxury we don’t have.”

“Why?”

“Because it would force us to answer the question I just asked,” I said. “I guess.”

“What’s the other option you talked about?”

I sighed. “Simple,” I said. “We buy him off.”

* * *

A split second later, I was back. As I’d hoped, Saloninus hadn’t noticed I’d been gone.

“It’s her, then,” I said.

“I think it could well be,” he replied.

We were standing behind an invisible wall, watching her; we could see her, she couldn’t see us. She was combing her hair, getting ready for another day of doing whatever it is that mortal women do. I’m no judge of these things, but she seemed perfectly happy.

“Thank you,” Saloninus said.

“Excuse me? What for?”

“For setting my mind at rest,” he said. “All these years I’ve been torn up with guilt about what I did to her. Well, you know that. I always say I murdered her, even though I knew it was an accident. Now it turns out she’s not dead. In fact, she got exactly what she wanted: eternal youth and beauty. I feel so much better now. Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it,” I said.

He breathed out long and slow, then turned to me. “We’ve intruded on her privacy long enough, don’t you think? Let’s go.”

I was confused. “Don’t you want her back? I thought—”

He grinned. “Dear me, no. I never liked her much. Dreadful woman. But she didn’t deserve to die like that. But she didn’t, so everything’s fine. And she seems so much happier than she ever did when I used to know her, and she was a princess. Come on, I want to go home now.”

Back at the shack, I sat down on the barrel of explosive. “What’s this for?” I asked.

“That? I told you. It’s for blasting the deeper seams.”

“It’ll be years before anyone gets that far down,” I said. “What’s it really for?”

He smiled at me. “There’s no kidding you, is there? It’s for a little experiment I mean to try.”

I waited, then said, “What?”

“I’m going to blow myself up.”

I was looking straight at him. As far as I know, my face didn’t move at all. I have infinitely better control over my face than any human. “Why?”

“To see if my research has been successful. If it has, being blown up won’t hurt me. If not—” He grinned. “I may need your help, in that case. Under the terms of the contract.”

I did some calculations. Based on what he’d told me earlier, the contents of the barrel would dig a crater large enough to hold the island of Scona. “The whole barrel?”

He shrugged. “In my opinion, bangs can never be too loud.”

“When are you planning on doing this?”

“When I’m ready. No point in rushing things. I’ve got seventeen years, after all.”

I stood up. “The gold,” I said. “It’s not just for politics, is it?”

“Maybe not.”

“To make the elixir of life, you need gold. It’s a key ingredient. You’re planning on making a huge batch of the stuff. And then you’re going to give it to as many people as possible.”

He gazed at me, and I couldn’t read his face. “Now why would I want to do a thing like that?”

* * *

To raise an army of immortals. To storm Heaven.

Well, it’d be an option. I believe in options. I think everybody should have as many of them as possible.

Could it be done? I really don’t know. Of course, you’d have to persuade them to try. How would you sell an idea like that to a bunch of thieves, outlaws, mercenaries, and professional desperados? You’d need a certain degree of eloquence, a way with words. Come to think of it, I’ve got that.

Maybe not actually storming Heaven, at least not to begin with. Start with a modest, attainable goal and work upward from there. First, conquer the world; an immortal army could do that standing on its head. Defy the gods; set yourself up in their place. I give you the superman; man is something to be evolved up from. What is the defining limitation of Man? His mortality. Take away that, and his pathetic need for his daily bread, and his health and physical safety—now he’s equal with the gods on that score, their superior in so much more; all the arts and sciences he’s learned in the days of his mortality make him stronger than the gods, now that he’s escaped the great restriction. Consider men and elephants; consider which one hunts, kills, tames the other. Man is small but clever; the elephant is big but stupid. Being small made us need to be clever. We’re smarter than the gods. Need proof? Look at me. Living proof; the emphasis being on the living.

He was right about the crucial role of gold in alchemy; he got there, eventually. Not soon enough to beat me to it; he arrived at the realisation just nicely in time to save me the effort of explaining it to him.

In the course of my travels, I’ve seen the most extraordinary things. For example: in the Blemyan desert there are sandstone cliffs, split by earthquakes. In those rifts you can find the bones of giant monstrous creatures, buried long ago. Now, you don’t have to be a genius to figure out that once upon a time, that desert was actually the bottom of the sea. The sandstone cliffs were once the seabed, and the bones are the remains of huge sea-creatures, who died, drifted to the bottom, and sank into the soft mud, a hundred feet deep. Clearly a lot of time has passed since then—thousands of years, maybe, who knows? The bones themselves have rotted away, and what you’re actually seeing is an impression in the sand, squashed into rock by the sheer weight of the water. They were remarkable animals, those sea-monsters; forty, sixty, a hundred feet long, enormously strong, unbelievably powerful. But look at their tiny little heads, and then discount the space inside those heads taken up with bone, muscle, sinew, eyes, ears, and other ancillary equipment. Those awesomely strong monarchs of the deep had brains the size of walnuts. And so it is, as far as I can tell, with the gods. All power and no intellect. Strength makes you stupid. It’s the weak who grow smart.

And what makes us weak? The passage of time. That’s all.

Man is something to be out-evolved.

* * *

You’re not supposed to be always on the doorstep clamouring for instructions. Use your discretion and your initiative, they say, that’s why you’re the grade you are. And then, when it all goes wrong, it’s all your fault. What on Earth possessed you to do all that without checking back first? How could you have been so stupid?

So back I went. You can never tell, of course, but I had the distinct impression he’d been expecting me.

“It gets worse,” I told him. “He’s brewing up gallons of the stuff. Enough for an army.”

“Is that right?”

“That’s not all. He’s also invented a super-weapon.”

He gazed at me, as though I were the view from a high window. “What sort of weapon?”

“An explosive,” I said. “An eggcupful blasts a hole big enough to bury a man in.”

That provoked a frown from the impassive face. “Is that right?”

“I did a full analysis,” I said. “It’s just nitre and vitriol mixed with distilled honey. You don’t need me to tell you what that means.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“It means the ingredients are in plentiful supply. He could cook up thousands of gallons of the stuff. Millions. He could brew up enough to blow up the world.”

Silence. Then: “Why would anyone want to do that?”

Such an odd question to ask. “It’s a threat,” he said. “Think about it. He has an immortal army, and a weapon that can destroy the Earth.”

“Do you seriously believe he could overcome us?”

I shook my head. “That’s not how mortals think. I think he’s going to issue an ultimatum; hand over power, or I’ll destroy everything. It’s death,” I explained. “It colours every aspect of how mortal minds work. Everything is conceived of in finite terms. If I’ve got to go, I’ll take the whole lot with me.”

Another silence. “Do you think he’d be capable of that?”

“He’s Saloninus. He’s capable of anything.”

He looked at me again. This time, I was some sort of optical illusion, something that couldn’t possibly exist, but did. “Do you think he wants to rule Heaven and Earth?”

Now that was a question I hadn’t asked myself. But I found the answer came to me without much hesitation. “I think he feels he has no choice. It’s that or eternal damnation. Again, it’s how mortals do things. Think of palace coups; a man kills the king and takes his throne because if he doesn’t he knows he’ll be executed. They’re such an all-or-nothing species.”

“If he were to blow up the world, wouldn’t we simply rebuild it?”

My turn to be silent for a moment. “Would we, though? Or would we wash our hands of the whole experiment and move on to something else?”

“Would we?”

I shrugged. On a need-to-know basis, presumably. “I can’t possibly make decisions when the stakes are as high as this. I need instructions. What should I do?”

He turned his face away. “Need you ask?”

* * *

Well; since my superiors in my organisation had failed me, I turned for guidance to a source of wisdom I had always believed in and trusted. Fortunately, I had a copy with me. Signed by the author.

I opened the book at random. I saw—

I give you the superman. Man is something to be overcome
.

Indeed. Make some immortal, blow up the rest. Evolution takes no prisoners. A loathsome philosophy, but hard to argue against. Repulsive, but entirely valid. Otherwise, the Earth would still be populated by giant pea-brained lizards.

(Actually, I remember them with affection; even though they spent their entire lives poised between blood-lust and mortal terror, eating and being eaten, trampling down forests with every pace, and stealing each others’ eggs from the nest, at least they never invented morality. Simpler times. Happier times.)