Blue And Gold Part 2

Did Linguistic Forms Materially Affect Eustatius' Logical Structures in *On Various Matters?' No.

a"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 compa.s.ses, 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 s...o...b..ring-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 Chast.i.ty 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 circ.u.mstances 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 a.s.sets; 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 circ.u.mstances 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 n.o.body looked at me. This was because everybody there who might possibly have recognised me knew I was in Choris Seautou. I'd had 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 h.e.l.l 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, "h.e.l.lo, 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 knowa"?"

"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 herea""

"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 youa"?"

"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 antic.i.p.ated 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. "Whata"?"

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 fundsa""

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 a.n.a.logy 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 writea""

"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 a.s.sistant. 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 d.a.m.n about me. I genuinely believe she was incapable of any kind of affection. And she was terrifieda"real, tangible, wake-up-in-the-night-sweating feara"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 s.h.i.t. 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 coa.r.s.en 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 n.o.body 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 G.o.d. 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 maybea"just maybea"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, antic.i.p.ating 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 cer-ulea, 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.

I'd never been forcibly washed before. I told them I was perfectly capable, but I guess they were reluctant to allow me full use of my limbs, in case I got away. The shave wasn't so bad, in fact it brought back old memories. By no means the first time I'd had a blade pressed to my throat while four men held me down. They issued me with a plain, clean gown, slightly frayed cuffs, sort of beige colour. No pockets.

The captain and his men took me as far as the great hall, where I was handed over to the Duty Chamberlain's men. As he handed over the end of my rope, the captain nodded politely and wished me good luck. I was so stunned, I couldn't speak.

The first time I met Phocas, of course, he was n.o.body. In fact, he was less than n.o.body. He was twelfth in line to the throne, which meant he had no chance whatsoever, and his father had just been executed for treason. It was amazing how many people could look straight at him and not see he was there.

I, by contrast, was the favoured nephew of a prosperous land speculator with important political connections, a rising academic star, and one of the inner circle of the inner circle of the in crowd. In fact, I was so central, you could have plotted the location of everybody else by sticking the point of a compa.s.s in the top of my head. By rights, I should never have wasted my precious time and attention on a negative quant.i.ty like Phocas. But I liked him, then.

He was being thrown out of a party just as I was arriving. He was aggressive-drunk, and the reason for his expulsion, I later gathered, was that some of the puke missed his shoes and hit the hostess's dress, which he'd been endeavouring to remove, regardless of her objections, when his digestive system betrayed him. Two footmen carried him out into the street, with his feet off the ground, kicking in air like a hanged man, and dropped him neatly in a big brown puddle. He sat there for, I don't know, five seconds; then he stood up, a bit shaky but with a certain essential grace and dignity like a cat; then swayed and flopped up against the wall.

The people I was with marched past him, all don't-look-at-him-you-don't-know-where-he's-been. But he smiled at mea"I could see him clearly by the lantern lighta"and his face said, please don't think too harshly of me, you're not quite catching me at my best. I grinned back at him, and he fell over.

Next time I met him was at one of Menestheus' lectures on Stratylides. I'd been sitting patiently, formulating a question in my mind that'd demonstrate beyond doubt to any perceptive witness that I was ten times cleverer than Menestheus, and at least three times smarter that Stratylides. I was putting the finishing touches to it when the old fool stopped talking. Phocas promptly stood up and asked precisely the question I'd been planning.

Well, not precisely the same. Not nearly as tersely or elegantly phrased. But he'd picked up on the same frayed end in the logic as I had. Menestheus gave him a look, then said, "Actually, that's not quite as stupid a question as it sounds", and went on to give an answer I'd have had great difficulty beating. I was grateful to Phocas for saving me, and impressed with the quiet, good-humoured grace with which he accepted the mincing he got. I asked some people I was with who the kid who asked the question was, and they told me. I arranged to have him invited to a party I was going to, and made a point of talking to him; we chatted for half an hour about ethical positivism, then slipped the party and went for a drink. He didn't have any money, so I lent him half an angel.

A year later, we had the plague. It killed off nine of Phocas' eleven supervening cousins, and my uncle, who proved to have been on the edge of bankruptcy. He was, in fact, a conman of substantial ability but limited intelligence; he hadn't foreseen the flaw in his scheme, which would've collapsed round his ears inside of a month if he hadn't died first. I was six months off my final exams; I had a trunkful of clothes, which my landlord distrained on for arrears of rent, five dozen books and four angels cash.

It never ceases to amaze me how adaptable social geometry can be. Within a couple of days I went from being the centre of the circle to an indefinite point outside its circ.u.mference. I couldn't even get close enough to my old friends to ask them for money, and Phocas, newly rich, was out of town, up at the capital for the funerals. My tutor, who admired and loathed me, got me the porter's job. I stayed on and became invisible.

So what? Big deal. I learned an important lesson in alchemy, at any rate; the catalytic agency of gold in the process of conversion between precious-rare and dross, the mutability of all things. Other things I learned; how to shift heavy objects, how to sweep floors, clean up mess, stand perfectly still and quiet for three hours and not be noticed. All good stuff, much more use to me in later life than the course material. I take the view that we're the sum of everything that happens to us, good and bad. It's an alchemist's interpretation, of course, seeing people as a compilation of ingredients combined and acted on by processes. The implication is, if you leave out one of the ingredients, even if, particularly if, it's unstable or noxious, you get a different result. If the experiment comes out well, then you can't say any one particular ingredient or process was bad. If you end up with a result like mea"well, good and bad are by definition unscientific terms. What matters is the purpose of the experiment and whether or not you achieve it.

By any reasonable criteria, Phocas was a successful experiment. He started off as garbage and came out of the crucible pure gold. A lesser man might've celebrated his sudden, unexpected transformation into heir apparent with a whirlwind ma.s.sacre of everybody who'd derided and despised him when he was n.o.body; this would've entailed wiping out ninety per cent of the university of Elpis, but that was the sort of thing Phocas' family had been doing for centuries, and n.o.body seemed to think any the less of them for it. But Phocas wasn't like that. He forgave his enemies and rewarded his friends, except for me. Don't get me wrong. He wanted to help. He tried quite hard to find out what had become of me. But by then my tutor was dead (the plague; we had it relatively easy at Elpis, but he was one of the victims) and n.o.body else knew or cared. I carried on portering and working in the library when the students were in bed or out drinking, without the faintest idea that Phocas was trying to find me, until I ran into a spot of trouble and had to leave town.

History will have all manner of nice things to say about Phocas; how he checked the power of the provincial n.o.bility, ended the war with the Ammagene, got the public finances under control. In fact, history will love him. No matter which side's in the ascendancy, there'll be a bit of Phocas they can grapple on to and make their own. The Optimates will admire the way he broke the power of the labour guilds and supported free trade, while the Tendency will worship him for his welfare provisions and land reforms. They'll debate endlessly about what his real agenda was, which side he was actually on, and they'll never get within a long spit of the truth, because history refuses to recognise the possibility that great events and changes of lasting significance could be brought about just because once upon a time there was an absolute ruler who simply couldn't make up his mind. His intentions were always good. Where he was luckier than all his fellow altruists was in somehow contriving to pursue his good intentions without doing irreparable damage to everyone and everything around him. The truth is, he was a simple-minded, basically decent sort of a fellow, born well outside the dangerous confines of the purple, who did the best he could to keep things ticking over quietly so they wouldn't distract him from his overriding mission in life; to discover, or more realistically sponsor the discovery, of the secret of turning base metal into gold. If ever I get around to finishing my Ideal Republic (started it ten years ago, paid in advance, spent the money), I'll have to fit him in somewhere as a model autocrat; the man who rules well because he doesn't really want to rule at all.

"h.e.l.lo, Phocas," I said.

He looked up at me from the papers he'd been reading. "What the h.e.l.l was all that about?" he said.

I shrugged. "I'm sorry," I said. "I thoughta""

"No," he snapped, "you didn't, that's the point. d.a.m.n it, I wrote you a letter. And you're supposed to be smart."

I sat down. The guard didn't like it, but Phocas didn't notice. "You see," I went on, "I had the idea that you might, well, blame mea""

"Really." He gave me a hurt, angry look. "How long have we known each other?"

"I'm sorry," I repeated. "I panicked, all right? It happened, and I just had to run, get out of there, as far away as I could. And then I thought, how suspicious does that look? I thoughta""

"You thought I'd a.s.sume that because you ran away, you'd killed her." He shook his head, as though stunned that anybody could be so stupid. "Well, the main thing is, you've come to no harm. But really, for crying out loud, Nino, did you have to blow up a f.u.c.king wall?"

I did my sheepish idiot grin. "I couldn't think what else to do."

"Amazing." He smiled at me. "Someone could've been killed, you realise. And then you'd have been in the s.h.i.t."

I hung my head. "Wasn't thinking clearly."

"Just having the stuff'll get you your neck stretched. There's only so much I can do, you know." He took a deep breath, let it out slowly. "How did it happen?" he said.

I told him. When I described how his sister died, he closed his eyes and turned his head away, just for a moment. Reminded me of me, when I was a kid and my mother killed a chicken. Thing was, I ate the chicken, even though I disapproved of death. Some things are ugly but necessary.

Then he shook himself, like a wet dog, and said, "Why didn't you warn her?"

"I'm sorry?"

"Not to drink the stuff."

I smiled weakly. "You think she'd have listened?"

"No," he conceded. "No, I guess not."

"Besides," I went on, "it was all so fast. And I suppose I a.s.sumed she'd know better than come in the lab and drink a beakerful of stuff without asking if it was safe."

He was interested. "She justa""

"She asked me what it was. I told her the ingredients. Next thing I knewa""

"Ah." He nodded. "That makes sense. She'd have reckoned she knew what it was from what was in it. Always had a very high opinion of herself, my sister."

"She was a good scientist," I said. "She'd learned a h.e.l.l of a lot."

"Which killed her," he said, quietly, like a man finally winning a chess game he'd lost interest in a quarter of an hour ago. "Excellent argument against the education of women, if you ask me. Thought she knew what it was, decided to swallow it before you told her she couldn't. Impatient, you see. She was like it as a kid. Always s.n.a.t.c.hed the honey-cakes as soon as the servants brought the plate in."

"If I'd had the faintest ideaa""

"Of course." He raised his hand. Subject dead and buried. "Well," he said, "I guess we can draw a line under all that. I'll issue a statement saying my sister died of natural causes. We'll have to have a state funeral, of course, I'll need you there as chief mourner. Sorry," he added. "I know you can't be doing with official occasions."

"Don't worry about it," I replied. "Least I can do."

"It'll take a week to arrange," he went on. "And in the meantimea""

He didn't need to finish the sentence. Back to my bench, enough time wasted already. He really didn't mean it as a punishment. He sincerely believed I enjoy doing all that stuff.

I stood up. "Just one thing," he said. "Not that it matters worth a d.a.m.n, but somebody must've helped you. Else, how did you get all that gear? You know we're just fine, but I'm going to have to ask you who helped you out. Got to give somebody to the Prefect, or my life's going to be h.e.l.l for months."

I sat down again. "I have contacts," I said.

"Yes, I'd gathered." There was a cold core to his eyes. I knew that look. "I'm sorry, but I need some names."