Academic Exercises (72 page)

I must’ve fallen asleep, because when they woke me, I was face down on the paper, with the ink forming a small lake on the bench-top. I looked up. Scuttlehats.

“Come with us,” they said.

“Do I have to?” I said, with a yawn. “It’s been a really long day.”

“On your feet,” they explained. I got up, and they shunted me out of the door. I wasn’t happy about being manhandled, but then I thought about the man whose skull I’d broken and decided not to make an issue of it. Memo to self, I thought; must make special effort not to hurt people.

Phocas was waiting for me in the South Library. Disconcerting. I’d been in there twice before, once as a friend and honoured guest, once when I was burgling the palace (long story) and took a wrong turning. It’s a hell of a room; on the small side, by palace standards—you could just about squeeze a cavalry squadron in there, but they’d have to leave their horses outside in the corridor—half-panelled in rich golden oak with late Idealist carvings of harvest and pastoral subjects, with a moulded-plaster roof gilded and painted in trompe l’oeil to represent a canopy of vines and mulberries (traditionally there’s a two-angel prize for new visitors if they can spot the life-size moulded wren hidden among the vine-tendrils; I didn’t find it until my second visit); five free-standing bookcases, unchained, one of which houses the current prince’s own personal collection of books. I was touched to note that three shelves of this bookcase were taken up with the collected works of Saloninus.

“You’re impossible,” he said.

“Strictly speaking, no. Highly improbable, yes, but—”

“You put a guard in the hospital.” Phocas not in mood for jokes. “The other one lost two jaw teeth.” He paused, and looked at me. “Where did you learn to punch like that?” he said. “Not at the university.”

“I sort of picked it up as I went along,” I said truthfully. “Look, I’m really sorry about the guards. It wasn’t—”

“Deliberate?” He shook his head. “Well, they’re the least of our problems.” He picked up a sheet of paper and waved it at me. “You know what this is?”

“Enlighten me.”

“It’s a warrant of friendly rendition,” he said, and I saw that his face was milk-white. “Sworn and sealed by the Mezentine charge d’affaires, relating to charges of forgery, sedition and false coining. You know what that means?”

In other words, extradition. I just about managed to keep a straight face. “You won’t let them take me,” I said.

He closed his eyes for a moment. “I really don’t see that I have a choice,” he said. “It’s a properly-drawn warrant, there’s a valid treaty, they know you’re here, and they went to the Senate instead of me personally. If I try and bury this, the Tendency’ll have my head on a pike.”

I didn’t dare look him in the eye, so I concentrated on the tiny plaster wren, directly above his head. It seemed as though it was singing to me. Extradition; I get formally handed over at the Northgate into the custody of three or four armed couriers. I go quietly. Sooner or later we stop at an inn or a post-house or a road station. A walnut-sized gob of pulveus fulminans goes in the fire, I go out through the window; free and clear. Of course, most of the major governments know me quite well by now, there’d be searches, including body cavities. But if it came down to a choice between my dignity and comfort and my life, no contest. You can easily hide enough pulveus fulminans to take out a wall where the sun doesn’t shine.

“Please,” I said. “Don’t let them do this. It’s the gibbet for coining in Mezentia.”

“Should’ve thought of that before you did it.” He paused. “You did do it.”

I nodded. I make it a rule to tell the truth when there’s nothing much riding on it. “I was starving,” I said. “I met some men in a bar. They said it was for jewellery, not counterfeiting.”

“Nino, you idiot.” There was something in his voice, something so close to genuine feeling, that for a moment I felt physically ill. “What can I do? Come on, you’re the genius. Suggest something.”

“I’m not a lawyer,” I said. “Ask the professionals, it’s what you pay them for.”

“I already did,” he snapped, turning his head a little so he wasn’t meeting my eye. “They couldn’t think of a damned thing. Best they could come up with was a plea of benefit of clergy. But that won’t wash unless it’s made when you’re on Mezentine soil.”

Benefit of clergy, I thought, now that’s smart. I liked it. Never been a priest before. “Will it work?”

He scowled, a sure sign of deep concentration. “They believe so,” he said. “The treaty’s four hundred years old, it was meant to protect our missionaries when they made trouble for themselves preaching the overthrow of the Guilds, but it’s still in force and it specifically covers sedition and related offences. So, yes, probably.”

“So you can get me out.”

“Only if we let them take you in first.” He rubbed his eyes, as though he’d been awake for three days. “It’s those bastards in the Tendency,” he said, “using you to get at me. Bet you anything you like they put the Mezentines up to it.”

“Let’s think about this,” I said, in my best serious voice. “If you try and bury it, like you said, you’ll play into their hands and you’ll have a constitutional crisis. If we go along with it, due procedure, all straight and above board, you can get me out and stick it to the Tendency at the same time.” I shrugged. “Looks pretty straight-forward to me,” I said. “I’ll go.”

He sat still and quiet for a while, during which time I had to make an effort to remember to breathe. Then he seemed to come to a decision, then pull back from it. “Talk about timing,” he said. “When you’re so close—”

He looked up as he said that. There’s a card game we used to play in the prison hulk at Phrontis Tropaea. I forget the name of it, but there’s a point in the game where you’ve got the option of deliberately letting the other players see your cards. Never played it against Phocas, but I bet he’d have been good at it.

(When I’d gone back to the laboratory after my last outing, I’d picked up the gold ingot, once I’d noticed that it had been moved, and checked the underside. Sure enough, there was a thin line scribed on it, deep enough to cut through the layer of gold plating formed over the silvered copper by the Polycrates process. What I think I neglected to mention was the other ingot, which I’d cast some time earlier from the same mould, out of pure gold, which I’d put next to it. Archestratus in the
Materials
conjectures that the transmutation process starts with the outside and works slowly inwards, like the thawing of frozen meat.)

I managed to make myself look offended. “I said six weeks,” I said. “I don’t make promises I can’t keep.”

The enormity of that lie filled the room for a moment, then dissipated like gas in a breeze. “You’re following Archestratus?”

I pulled a disdainful face. “Hardly,” I said. “But it looks like he may have been right about something, for a change. But it’s not ready,” I went on. “If you’d cut into that bar with a chisel, you’d have found it’s still copper half-way through.”

(Which was true. Hell of a job, casting gold round a copper core. I had to support the copper bar inside the mould with four copper nails, so the molten gold would flow round and under it. Attention to detail, you see. It’s everything.)

“If I let them take you—”

“Don’t worry,” I said bravely. “I’ll be fine. And when I get back, I can finish the job.”

It’s been on my conscience for some time now that I haven’t been exactly straight with you. What really happened was this.

She came in. She saw the stuff on the bench. “What’s that?” she said.

“Nothing.”

She gave me that look. “What?”

I told her what was in it, leaving out one key ingredient. Took her about five seconds to put the pieces together. “Will it work?”

“How should I know?”

She bent over the beaker and sniffed it, pulled back and made a face. “It went volatile.”

“Yes, but I put in some sweet spirits of colocynth to calm it down.”

She inspected it, then nodded briskly. “So?”

I shrugged. “What’s the hurry?” I said. “If it works, I’ll have forever. If it doesn’t—”

“You’ll make some more,” she said quickly, as if she hadn’t intended to say anything. “For me.”

I didn’t reply. She scowled at me. “No,” I said.

“What?”

“No,” I repeated. “You want to try it, you know the recipe.”

“What the hell—”

“All due respect,” I said, “but immortality is one thing. Being married to you for ever and ever, on the other hand—”

“You bastard.”

“That’s unfair,” I said. “I’m not divorcing you. We’ll live out the rest of your natural life together, and then I’ll be free. That’s the deal you signed up for.”

“You’d let me die.”

“Everybody dies,” I said. “Mortality is the constant that defines our existence.”

“Fuck you.”

“Besides,” I said, “it probably doesn’t work. And it could be poisonous.”

“If it is,” she said pleasantly, “you’ll die, and I’ll know not to drink it.”

“Could be it takes hours to work. Or days. Weeks, even. It’d be criminally irresponsible of me to let you drink it.”

“You going to give Phocas some?”

I smiled. “If it works,” I said, “I may eventually publish. But not till I’ve given it a really thorough trial. Say, two hundred years. Earlier than that, it’d be bad science.”

“Are you going to give my brother some or aren’t you?”

“No,” I replied. “He’s funding me to turn lead into gold, which we all know is impossible. This is just a sideline of my own. He doesn’t own the research. This,” I went on, smiling beautifully, “is just for me. Because I’m worth it.”

I saw her slide her hand round the base of the beaker. With a really rather graceful movement, she lifted it to her mouth. I sat back in my chair to watch the show. When it was over (and it wasn’t long; I chose sal draconis because it’s quick) I got up and stood over her, turned her face with my foot so I could see her eyes. Not a flicker.

One down, I thought. I’d known, ever since college when she came up to visit Phocas and met me for the first time, that she was trouble. When Phocas more or less kidnapped me and brought me to Paraprosdocia, in the ludicrous but utterly sincere belief that I could figure out how to turn base metal into gold one day, she didn’t object. Far from it.
Don’t you ever let him go
, I heard her say to him once; it was the third, no, sorry, make that the fourth time I tried to escape. I was wandering aimlessly through the palace trying to find a door that led to the street, and I happened to stray into the small cloister garden, where they were drinking wine beside the fountain. He assured her that the only journey I’d be making from the palace was the short distance from the back door to the midden—technically outside the palace grounds, because it’s on the other side of the curtain wall.
Soon as he’s cracked transmutation, I get rid of him
, Phocas said.
Don’t you dare
, she replied,
not till he’s made me the elixir.
He grinned at her.
Oh, go on, then
, he said.
But then—

Didn’t come as a surprise, not one bit. I’d always known, ever since that drunken episode back at Elpis. The last thing Phocas wanted was for there to be a way to turn garbage into gold. After all, the prince owns more gold than anybody else this side of the Eastern Sea, so he’s got the most to lose. Hardly a coincidence that the half-dozen or so incredibly eminent alchemists who’d worked for him before I came, men whose glassware I wouldn’t be worthy to wash out, had died in the palace. Irony; transmutation really and truly isn’t possible. But I can easily picture what happened. Phocas keeps putting pressure on them to achieve results. They can’t do the impossible, so they cheat. Cheating’s easy. There are a dozen reliable recipes for instant gold plating, as many again for fool’s gold that’s practically indistinguishable from the real thing, and let’s not get into the murky realm of rigged experiments, sleight of hand, false-bottomed cupolas, and the third and fourth books of Xenocrates’
Experiments
(I lost my copy years ago, but not before I committed the whole of those books to memory). So; they cheated, plausibly enough to convince Phocas that they’d finally done the trick, and that the trick was possible after all. And then he killed them.

Eudoxia was, of course, much smarter than her brother, and she’d taught herself alchemy to a remarkably high level. She knew transmutation couldn’t be done. I guess she thought, if it gives my brother pleasure to kill a bunch of charlatans, let him. She certainly knew better than to argue with him once he’d got an idea stuck in his head. But she’d read that universally-acclaimed early work of mine,
On the Properties of Organic Materials
, in which I proved conclusively that an elixir of eternal youth was not only theoretically possible but almost within our grasp.

Properties
was another of my little grey lies. There’s a fault in its logic that’s so huge, I didn’t feel guilty about publishing, on the grounds that anybody who couldn’t spot it deserved to be made a monkey of. But nobody spotted it, not even brilliant Eudoxia. Now, she knew me well enough to know that bullying just doesn’t work. More flies with honey than vinegar has always been the core of her philosophy. She figured that if I was deeply, hopelessly in love with her, I’d make her the elixir to preserve forever the beauty to which I was devoted. To be fair, I don’t think she planned to have me killed after I’d come across with the stuff. She’d just leave me to Phocas. At any rate, she sold the idea of marrying me to him by arguing that a man with my propensity to running away couldn’t be restrained by force. Instead, make me want to stay; and afterwards, when she was a widow, she could marry again. Phocas agreed; not because he was convinced by her arguments, but because he knew she’d very nearly married Opianus, leader of the Popular Tendency and Phocas’ deadliest enemy in politics; her reason being, she’d done the sums and figured out that it was only a matter of time before the Tendency prevailed and Phocas’ head found its way onto a spike on Northgate. If she married Opianus, she could hurry along the inevitable, secure her own position and effectively rule through him, if she could be bothered. I don’t suppose she could, actually. My belief is, she wanted to make sure her head didn’t end up next to her brother’s when the end finally came. In any event, the deal fell through when Opianus was supplanted in a particularly nasty bout of Tendency in-fighting; his successor as Tendency leader, Pescennius, was widely known not to like girls, so she gave up. It was therefore in Phocas’ interests to have his sister safely married to a political nonentity; the collateral benefit of keeping me on a leash, if it actually worked out that way, was just icing on the cake.