Academic Exercises (71 page)

Not everybody agreed, needless to say; but I think I had something there. Where I messed up was going on to associate the vis mutationis with the human emotion of love, and the process of burning with the transmutation of love into hate, or guilt, or misery, or pain, analogous to the refining of the noble metals from base ores by the agency of quicksilver. What can I say? It’s one of those intuitive connections you feel but can’t really prove, and once you get a reputation for intuition in academic circles, you’re screwed. Not that it mattered particularly, in this instance. Three months after I gave the lecture I got caught trying to stow away on the stupid bloody avocado freighter, and that was that; no more public appearances, ejected from my Chair, back to the laboratory with two guards on the door. Story of my life, really.

So there I was in the passageway. Right or left? I went left. Good idea at the time.

Left led past the minor state apartments (where they dump lesser ambassadors, trade attaches, counsel for appellants in civil cases, unimportant dependents and poor relations) to the back or kitchen stairs, which go down two flights to the stable yard, from which it’s possible, if you’re agile enough, to climb the curtain wall and sneak out onto the leads of the chapel roof; then down the waterspout into the cloister garden, pinch a gown from the vestment room, and then you’re just another Brother milling about in the chapel forecourt. That was how I got out the time before last, and on that occasion I got no further than the Chapter yard before the scuttlehats grabbed me and hauled me back in. Therefore, they’d argue, I wouldn’t go that way again.

The important thing is, not to run. It’s hard. The temptation is to move as quickly as possible while unimpeded movement is feasible. But running sounds like nothing else, and in the palace, nobody runs. So I walked, hands in pockets, down the corridor, trying to sound like some minor functionary, in no particular hurry, waddling from office to archive or one duty station to another. Authenticity is the key. Learnt that the hard way.

I was three quarters of the way along when I heard footsteps coming the other way. The corridor floors are ancient oak boards; you can’t help making a racket, unless you’re wearing slippers. Only one thing I could do. I pushed open the first door I came to and slipped inside.

It turned out to be a bathroom. Phocas has a minor fetish about cleanliness, so there’s bathrooms everywhere in the residential areas. Lucky for me, I thought. I ducked down behind the bath and crouched on the floor, waiting for the footsteps to go away.

There was this smell; really strong (it’d have to be, or I wouldn’t have noticed it. You can’t spend a large slice of your life in close association with oil of hartshorn and similar noxious substances and expect to keep your sense of smell). Familiar. It was a hell of a time to be struck down with scientific curiosity, but I couldn’t resist. Why had somebody filled a whole bath full of honey?

So I looked.

She lay on her back, naked, with the meniscus of the honey just covering the tip of her nose. Her eyes were open, and her face still had that look of mild bewilderment that I’d seen the last time I saw her, as the beaker slipped through her fingers and smashed on the floor. Her hair was trapped in the stuff; she reminded me irresistibly of a fly caught in amber, and that, of course, was the general idea. Honey, as is well known, is of all the soft materials the least prone to corruption, which is why it’s such a good preservative. Immerse a piece of meat—which was what Eudoxia was, now—in pure, clear honey, and it’ll stay good almost indefinitely.

Good is a comparative term, and not one I’d ever be in a hurry to apply to my late wife. But, lying there submerged in the liquid gold, she was fighting decay and winning, no doubt about that. There was none of the shrinking of the flesh, withering of the lips, puffing and poaching of the ears and fingertips that you generally get with a dead body at that stage of the process. If there was a distortion, it was only the effect of light refracted in slow, golden liquid, adjusting rather than bending the line of her jaw, the angle of her nose to her brow. She was, I have to say, as beautiful as ever, and likely to remain so; exactly what she always wanted, frozen in her youth in her golden bath, finally safe from the vis mutationis, the weakness of earth, the spite of water, the gnawing of air and the irresistible compulsion of fire. I guess it comes down to what you want and what you’re prepared to pay in order to get it. In her case, death; but she’d never really got much out of being alive, because of the constant terror of loss, change, deterioration, decay. It was enough to make me want to sit down and write a paper then and there. I’d finally given her what she wanted, the elixir of eternal youth, effected by the removal of her internal fire (the catalyst of change) through the agency of death. She’d have been so pleased, if only she’d been there to see it. Still, you can’t have everything, and her body always mattered more to her than her soul, for want of a better word. I couldn’t help smiling. Now that’s alchemy, I thought.

I stood there looking at her for quite some time, until an observation eventually filtered its way through my thick skull. The footsteps I’d heard in the corridor had got gradually louder until they reached more or less where I was, and then they’d stopped. Which meant that the stepper of those steps must have stopped too, directly outside the door of this bathroom. Factor in the presence of the prince’s dead sister—not something you’d leave lying about unguarded—and I was forced to a painful and humiliating conclusion. I could only suppose that the scuttlehat detailed to guard the body of the princess had gone away for a short while—call of nature or whatever—during which time I’d slipped in and closed the door. Now the guard was back, and I’d trapped myself in there, with no realistic chance of getting out.

Idiot, I thought.

Well, there was nothing for it. I went to the door and belted it with my fist.

Wish I could’ve been on the other side of that door and seen the poor bugger’s face. The guard would’ve been aware that he was standing outside a room containing one dead woman. Forcible knocking from inside the room, therefore—Well, he must’ve pulled himself together by the time he opened the door, because he had that scuttlehat look on his face; dead, stuffed and mounted. He recognised me, of course. They all know me.

“Sorry,” I said. “Must’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere. Do you think you could show me the way to the back door?”

He thought about it just long enough. I really hate punching out scuttlehats. Miss by an eighth of an inch, and either they don’t go down or you skin your knuckles on the sharp edge of the steel ear-flaps. Luckily, I was on target this time. He sank to his knees with that faint sigh you get sometimes. I stepped over him and ran for it.

Really, though, I was just killing time. I made it as far as the porters’ lodge, just inside the main gate. There’s a little sort of alcove in there, where they dump the mail sacks. I scrambled in and pulled a full sack on top of me, making sure there wasn’t a telltale foot or elbow sticking out. Time to think.

Time, as I think I may have told you already, melts. In its liquid form (aqua temporis?), it seeps and penetrates, like a thin mineral oil, and pools, and floods, under the influence of heat (the agency of fire; see above, passim). Withdraw that influence and it congeals, like hot fat in a pan, and in its solid state undergoes a kind of slow transmutation into a gooey mess, in which you get stuck. Time pooled and congealed under that mail sack, whose coarse hemp fibres chafed my cheek as I huddled, denying myself the agency of movement. I hate waiting. I can feel time passing, I sometimes kid myself—time passing is a transmutation of decay, communication by an exchange through loss; components dwindle and are lost, though what remains is by definition the enduring, therefore the refined, the desirable. In theory, you can refine gold by just leaving it lying around, letting the rain and the damp air corrode out the impurities, until only the gold remains. Wouldn’t try it though. Someone like me might come along and steal it.

I thought; do I really have to go through with this?

They found me, in the end.

Picture the scene. Phocas and me, at the university, two fresh-faced young intellectual drunks bumping along a narrow alley, having been thrown out of the
Divine Forbearance
, on our way to create the circumstances that led to us being thrown out of the
Charity and Social Justice
(breathing with intent gets you slung out of the
Forbearance
, or it did in my day, but in order to get bounced from the
Charity
, you really have to try). Talking, the way students do; too loud, too fast, from the bottom of our hearts, about things we understood in theory and principle, though we hadn’t got a clue about the proof and the practice.

“Hell of a good way to make money, though,” I think I said.

“Alchemy.” He snorted. It’s thing people only do when they’re drunk.

“Not that it’s possible,” I pointed out. “Can’t be done.”

“Don’t be so sure,” he replied darkly. “Amazing, what people can do. Look at cattle-breeding. Or glass-making, I mean, there’s a case in point. I mean, who’d have thought you could take a load of sand, like just ordinary sand, off a beach, any God’s amount of the stuff, and you stick it in a crucible and heat it up really, really, really hot, and next thing you know, you got glass. I mean,” he added with intense feeling, “
glass
. Impossible.”

“No it’s not,” I felt obliged to point out. “Glass is actually no big deal. People make the stuff every day.”

“Yes, but it shouldn’t be possible, is what I’m saying,” he said. “Stuff that’s solid, so you can touch it, so it’s really there, but you can’t see it, you can just see
through
it. That’s not possible.” He paused to regain his balance, which had temporarily escaped him. “It’s more like bloody magic than anything sensible. Well, isn’t it?”

I shrugged. I’d forgotten what point he was trying to make.

“So,” he went on, his face screwed up in concentration, “maybe the same thing goes for alchemy. Base stuff into gold. Just because we can’t do it now doesn’t mean to say it can’t be done. Well?”

“But it can’t be done,” I said patiently. “Because of basic alchemical theory.”

He spat; so much, then, for basic alchemical theory. “And bloody good job too,” he said. “You know what? If ever I get to be prince—”

He paused, stopped dead and swallowed hard half a dozen times. I took a long step back, recognising the symptoms. But he was all right this time. “If ever I get to be prince,” he went on, “first thing I’m going to do. Want to guess?”

I shook my head. “What?”

“Hunt down all the alchemists,” he said, “string the buggers up. No mercy, no exceptions. You know why?”

“Enlighten me.”

“Because,” he said, “alchemists are the greatest potential danger to the state. Really. Because,” he went on, rubbing his eyes with thumb and forefinger, “what’s the basis of government revenue? The gold standard. Why? Because gold is scarce. You get some bastard comes along, figures out how to turn base metal into gold, what d’you get? Total fiscal chaos, that’s what. Market flooded, gold worthless, billions of angels wiped out of the economy in a matter of hours.”

I wasn’t really interested in the subject, but I felt obliged to argue, because when you’re that age, and a student, and drunk, you argue the toss about everything. “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Surely the trick would be, to keep it to yourself. Not let everybody know about it. Then you could have your tame alchemists down in the cellar cooking up millions of angels, and only you’d know it wasn’t the good stuff. You’d be rich, everybody’d be fine, no problem, surely.”

He gave me a filthy look. “Wouldn’t work,” he said. “Can’t keep something like that a secret for long. Bound to get out, and then you’re screwed. Only thing you can do, lure all the really good alchemists to you with bribes and stuff, keep a really, really close eye on them; then, soon as they look like they’re on to something—” He did that finger-across-the-throat thing, and hiccoughed.

“Bit harsh,” I said.

“Harsh,” he replied, “but right. The right thing to do. Always do the right thing, if you’re the prince. Hold on there a second, gotta take a leak.”

He paused in the doorway of the Convent of the Sisters of Divine Grace, and there was a trickling noise. Then he scampered to catch me up.

“So that’s what you’ll do, then, is it?” I asked. “When you’re the prince.”

He laughed. “Not going to be the prince.”

“Really?”

“Impossible,” he said. “Can’t happen.”

When I got back to my laboratory, the gold ingot was almost, but not quite, where I’d left it. Ah, I thought.

“Four guards,” the guard said.

“Excuse me?”

“Four guards,” he repeated. “Outside your door, at all times, from now on.”

“I’m flattered,” I said.

He gave me a look. “And private Syriscus is in the hospital. You cracked his skull.”

From time to time, I really hate myself. It doesn’t last long and then it goes away, and then it comes back. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“Sure,” he said, and left the room. I heard the lock. So what? I thought. He was a scuttlehat. They get paid to stand in harm’s way. He was there to keep me from getting out, and I’m a free man, a citizen of the universe, not a chicken in a coop. I never set out to hurt anybody, not ever. Well, not often. And when I do, it’s never the primary purpose, just an unfortunate inevitable consequence. Mostly.

I sat down and read a book; Arcadius on functions, which is fundamentally flawed but still makes a kind of sense. They brought me something to eat; fresh bread, strong white cheese, five slices of farm sausage, an apple. “How’s Syriscus getting on?” I asked. They just looked at me. I ate the food, then put my feet up on the bench and closed my eyes, but all I could see was her face just below the surface of the honey. Not guilt; more like the first stirring of an idea. I got up, found some paper and a pen and some ink, and started to write. (And if you happen to be a student in your second year at any decent Vesani university, you’d recognise what I wrote. Hell, you can probably recite the opening paragraph by heart, which is more than I can. There’s a really basic flaw on page three, by the way. A small prize if you can spot it).