Blue and Gold (9 page)

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.

I’d made up my
mind to kill her quite some time ago; then I changed it. I’m deeply ashamed of
this, but I’m helpless around beautiful women. That’s how I allowed myself to
fall in love with Theodosia, and after Phocas killed her, Eudoxia was still
there, just as lovely, just as desperate to keep me hooked so I’d brew her
stupid elixir for her. Just run away, I told myself, there’s no need for
another lovely woman to die. The transmutation of flesh to putrefaction, of
warm to cold, is established fact, it doesn’t need proving again. Just run
away, and leave them both behind.

On that occasion I
got as far as Lachrima, on the shores of the Great White Lake.

*

Extradition. So much
to do, so little
time.

The worst part, of
course, was knowing I’d have to rely on other people. I have a thing about
that. Mostly, I guess, because other people have always let me down, when it
mattered; but it’s also this deep-rooted hangup I’ve got about trusting people.
Never really been able to do it. I guess it’s because we always instinctively
use ourselves as paradigms of humanity when calculating the likely behaviour of
others. I wouldn’t trust me further than I can spit, so why would I trust anybody
else?

Also, there’s some
procedures you just can’t rush. It takes time for Element A to react with
Essence B and produce Compound C; sometimes you can bustle it along with a
little judicious heat, but not always, and if you get it wrong, you screw up
Compound C or blow a hole in the roof. Furthermore, it’s never ever a good idea
to hurry when you’re using strong acids. Think about it.

Add fine silver to
aqua fortis, then add wood alcohol, as pure as you can make it. I spent years
figuring out how to do this reaction so as to produce a stable product. Now I
was faced with the tricky problem of making it so it’d be unstable. That too is
the story of my life.

I started with
twenty silver dollars; not the crappy government issue, which is ninety parts
silver to ten parts copper, but some home-made (I prefer the term hand-made) of
my own manufacture, ninety-nine point six pure, which I’d collected from a safe
place after I went to see Astyages. One of the reasons I’ve never made any
money out of counterfeiting is, I make better coins than the State. Can’t seem
to help it. Always the quiet voice in my head telling me; if a thing’s worth
doing, it’s worth doing properly.

Put the dollars in
the bottom of a big glass beaker. Slosh in a whole pint of the very best aqua
fortis; made it myself, because you can’t get good stuff commercially. Stand
well back, because the foul-smelling white steam will kill you if you breathe
it in. Watch those little smiling bubbles as the acid eats the silver. Enough
to break your heart.

The guards turned
up with the ice I’d asked for. They treated me like a cross between a leper and
an active volcano. I smiled, and gave the sergeant the twenty-first dollar.

“No, really,” I
said, as he stared at it. “And thanks.”

You could see the
battle going on in his mind. On the one hand, I was the unbelievably devious
master of escapes, who thought nothing of maiming honest soldiers if they got
in my way. On the other hand, a silver dollar is a silver dollar is a month’s
pay. Of course, it wasn’t a silver dollar, because it was in fact illegally
better, but he wasn’t to know that. Eventually his fist closed round it, and he
got out of the room really fast.

I get my wood
alcohol from Sirmis. It’s the best money can buy. I put the beaker on the ice,
glugged in the wood alcohol, stoppered the bottle and stood well back. So far,
so good. As soon as it stopped gushing out killer fumes, I trickled in cold
water, to start the crystals growing. Tricky part over; now all I had left to
do was the relatively trivial chore of turning base metal into gold.

I don’t actually
know—I’m being totally honest with you now—whether it’s possible or not. Truth
is, I’ve never had the enthusiasm to run the experiment to its conclusion. If
I’d happened to stumble across the secret before Phocas got hold of me, maybe
I’d have been a bit more motivated. As it was, discovering how to do it
would’ve been my death warrant, so it stayed entirely theoretical. I didn’t
even dare write it down and work it out on paper, in case Eudoxia saw it. It’s
been in my head for years, and I never tried it out.

It’s a six part
procedure—you’ll pardon me, I’m sure, if I don’t tell you about it, just in
case you’re tempted to give it a go yourself, which (trust me) would lead to
all manner of horrible consequences for you as and when your king, prince, duke
or city council finds out what you’re up to. The most I can bring myself to do
is give you a hint. You add stuff to stuff, do stuff to the resulting stuff,
and you get stuff out at the end, which may or may not be gold, depending on
whether or not it works. It’s all quite straightforward and doesn’t need ice;
you could do it at home, on the kitchen table, but don’t, please.