The big score, p.1
The Big Score, page 1
part #1 of Saloninus Series
THE BIG SCORE
K. J. PARKER
Subterranean Press 202I
The Big Score Copyright © 202I by K. J. Parker. All rights reserved.
Dust jacket illustration Copyright © 202I by Vincent Chong. All rights reserved.
Interior design Copyright © 202I by Desert Isle Design, LLC. All rights reserved.
First Edition
ISBN 978-I-64524-000-6
Subterranean Press PO Box I90I06 Burton, MI 485I9
subterraneanpress.com
I DIDN’T ENJOY my funeral nearly as much as I thought I would. I’d been looking forward to it, but it turned out to be something of a disappointment.
For a start, it rained, and that always takes the edge off a good party. Maybe it was the weather; there were far fewer people there than I’d anticipated, or catered for. I’d spent a lot of money I hadn’t really got on good food and fine wine (and I hardly drink at all myself, now I’m dead) and the servants ended up taking most of it home with them. The preacher's eulogy was dreadful, and most of the guests who did turn up proved to be representatives of my creditors or various law enforcement agencies. Nobody from the universities, the theatres, the Sashan embassy or the Imperial court. Instead, there was this granite-faced man with a shiny head and huge eyebrows who buttonholed me as the coffin was lowered into the hole—
“I’m his cousin,” I explained. “Only living relative.”
He considered me, as though I was a dangerous crack in the wall of his house. “You were close?"
I shook my head. “Hadn't seen him for years.”
He had that expression, the one that says, you're about to lie to me. “So you’ve got no idea where it all is.” “The manuscripts, you mean? The research notes?” “The money he stole.”
“No idea,” I lied. "Like I said, we weren’t close.”
“I never knew he had a cousin.”
“On my mother’s side,” I said. “Twice removed.”
ENVIRONMENT AND CIRCUMSTANCE; that’s what makes you what you are, not what’s inside. The shell, not the egg; the scar, not the wholesome flesh beneath. Take me, for shining example. I have, by universal consensus, the finest mind and the most beautiful soul that ever was. I’ve written the best plays and poems, the wisest and most perceptive philosophical tracts; I’m the greatest scientist of all time. My name—Saloninus, as though you needed to be told—will live forever. Nature (as I once put it) might stand up and say to all the world, this was a man.
Quite. And, given such rich and rare gifts, what did I do with them? To which I’m compelled to answer; apart from a few years when I lived quietly and comfortable on the proceeds of my ground-breaking formula for synthetic blue paint, nothing I care to dwell on. Lots of really bad stuff, mostly; thieving and swindling and issuing false coin (I was really good at that) with occasional lapses into the most deplorable kinds of violence. Not because I’m naturally bad and vicious—quite the opposite, since (as I convincingly proved in my Ethical Dialogues) beauty and virtue are essentially the same thing; therefore you can't create a substantial proportion of the beautiful things in the world, as I have, unless you’re fundamentally good. No, it was always bad luck, mostly not having any money. And bad luck is just a slovenly way of saying environment and circumstances. If you end up living in Poor Town, always one jump ahead of the authorities, a certain category of things are almost inevitably going to happen to you, all of them miserable. You can call it bad luck if you like, but I’m a scientist.
So; if you take the good man out of the bad place and put him in a good place, where he’s got loads of money and nobody knows who he used to be, you give him a chance to be himself; and that was precisely what I’d planned to do. Just one more little white lie, and everything would be just fine.
AT THE BANQUET I gave a little speech. We’re here today, I said, to lay to rest Saloninus, the greatest and most original thinker of our time. How will future generations remember him, I wonder? As a scientist—discoverer of the circulation of the blood and the three laws of motion, the man who cured mountain fever and saved countless lives on three continents? Or as a philosopher, probably the greatest there’s ever been, author of the Analects, the Ideal Republic and Beyond Good and Evil? As the man who invented the optical telescope, synthetic blue dye, truly functional indoor sanitation and a so far untested but entirely viable flying machine? As a playwright and composer—I give you six words that say it all. Lycas and Thrasimene. The Sixth Symphony. How can we truly say that Saloninus is dead when he lives on in every aspect of our daily lives? Half of the expressions we use in our everyday speech are quotations from his plays; and every time we flush a water closet or put on a blue shirt, we honour Saloninus the inventor. To say that a man like that could ever truly die is to anticipate a day when the human race itself will cease to exist—
I looked up and saw a row of blank faces. Not interested. Ah well.
For three days after the funeral, I was aware of deliberately inconspicuous men following me wherever I went. I’m used to that, of course, so I didn’t go anywhere.
JUST AS WELL that I’d had the opportunities and the foresight to provide for myself during my lifetime, like a loving and dutiful father, so that my afterlife would be entirely different. Poverty, necessity and envy would no longer be the hammer and anvil between which I’d be shaped, and my basically good character wouldn’t be warped and subverted into dishonesty and crime. All the sacrifices I’d made when I was alive, just so that I could have a better life after I was gone.
A few words in passing about honesty. It could be argued that the modest sum I bequeathed to myself had not been honestly come by. Fair enough. Now consider the truly inconceivable amount of wealth I’ve generated in my lifetime, none of which ever came my way. The bestselling book of all time, the Analects; I got sixty stuivers for it from a bookseller in Calyx, just enough to pay my arrears of rent on a damp rabbit-hutch up sixteen flights of stairs. For the plays I got an average of eighty stuivers each; less for the symphonies, and I never actually got the money for the Ninth, because the promoter went bust just before the premiere. True, I did actually get paid for inventing blue paint, but everything else—either someone else got the rights for a pittance, or I had to leave the jurisdiction in a hurry, and so couldn’t hang around to argue my case in the civil courts. Now I ask you, is that fair? Is that honest?
Mine is a multifaceted character and I can't credibly deny that a lot of those facets are less than admirable. I became a crook when I was young, impressionable and broke, was forced to carry on being crooked by circumstances beyond my control, and sort of stuck like it thereafter. Another thing I'm forced to admit is that the intelligence, creativity, let’s use the word, genius I exhibit in other areas of endeavour hasn’t really manifested itself to any marked extent in my criminal activities. The most I can say is, I’ve made a lot of money and I’ve never done time. But I’ve jumped out of a lot of windows and left a lot of towns and cities in a hurry, mostly leaving my ill-gotten gains behind. My biographer says that ninety-six per cent of the money that passed through my hands in my lifetime was dishonestly obtained. Don’t know where he came by that figure, but it sounds about right. So; big deal. I am (to quote me; King Minax, act three, scene one) a man more sinned against than sinning, and surely that counts for something.
Or does it? I could argue it conclusively either way, if you paid me for my time. In the absence of financial incentives, I’d say I don’t know and I don’t really care. All I know for sure is that from time to time I’ve found myself in dire straits, penniless and on the run, always because of something I did in the last country, or the one before that, and under those oppressive circumstances I’ve been forced to do things—steal things—that a flawlessly honest man would’ve left alone. It didn’t help that I’m so smart, and honest people are, in comparison, so very stupid.
ONE OF THE problems with being dishonest is that you’re forced to spend much of your life in the company of very bad people. This isn't as negative as it sounds until you reach the point when you have no choice but to trust them. And then, surprise surprise, they let you down.
“What do you mean,” I said, “he’s not here?”
She looked at me. She’d been beautiful once, but twenty years of being married to him had scoured her down to bare rock. "He’s not here,” she said.
"Then where is he?”
“Don’t know.”
“When will he be back?”
“Don’t know.”
She was lying, naturally. I could tell, because I saw her brace herself for the slap across the face, the fingers round the neck; I’d rough her up a little and then she’d tell me the second lie, which would send me racing off somewhere while she and he quietly packed up and left town, with all my money. My inheritance, from myself.
“Don’t give me that,” I pleaded. "Listen, here’s the deal. We’ll split it, fifty-fifty. That way, you and he will have enough to live on for the rest of your lives, and you won’t have to spend every second of every day looking over your shoulder. It's got to be worth it to you. You can’t put a price on peace of mind.”
Not a flicker. “I’ll tell him,” she said. “When I see him.”
“When might that be?”
“Don’t know.”
“Fine,” I said. “I trusted him. We’ve been through hell together. I saved him from the gallows, did he ever tell you that?”
“Yes.”
“The hell with it,” I sa
“Less than that, probably.”
I winced. I’d worked hard for that money. Some of it—about 0.0I%—was every penny I ever earned from writing The Consolation of Philosophy, Philemon and Arcite and The Principles of Mathematics. The rest was the haul from the United Sword Blade Bank, where we got in through the roof using a practical application of my discovery of the square on the hypotenuse. Still, it’s only money—’twas mine (quoting me again), ’tis his, and shall be slave to thousands. Besides, there was always the other stash.
To reach it meant nine days walk up the Great East Road, in dead men’s shoes; scratch that, worse than dead men’s shoes because I’d been buried in my only decent pair, assuming I’d only have a short stroll across the city before inheriting a small fortune. After two days on the road, with nothing to eat except nettles and nothing to drink but rainwater from ditches, I was starting to think mournful thoughts about the two gold angels I’d caused to be laid on my eyes to pay the ferryman, a superstition I’ve never ever believed in, but you feel the need to do these things properly, don’t you, especially when it's for yourself. Two gold angels currently lying in a hole in the ground, when they could be paying my fare to Erech, first class, wine with my dinner. Only a halfwit puts respect for the dead above the needs of the living, particularly when they’re both him.
Erech is a miserable place, too hot in summer, freezing cold in winter, and the rest of the year it rains. They make a ridiculous amount of money there growing flax, and a substantial part of the flax-grower’s craft consists of leaving the loathsome stuff lying around in heaps until it starts to rot. The resulting perfume hits you just before you get to the Angel of Resilience (assuming you’re coming in on the Military Road, from the west) and you don’t really get used to it for another seven miles, by which point you’re in the outer suburbs. Of course, long-term residents just look at you blankly and say, what smell?
I'd have stopped off at the Angel to rest up and cut the dust if I’d had any money and if I hadn’t been barred for life for lewd behaviour (only I was dead now, so presumably that no longer applied); instead I pressed on, hoping to get to the Silver Rose monastery before they locked the gates for the night. But I cleverly put my foot in a rabbit-hole and sprained my ankle, which meant another night out in God’s clean fresh air, leading to pneumonia. I ended up in the Silver Rose after all; I woke up in the infirmary, looking into the pale blue eyes of a tiny, impossibly ancient monk, who told me I nearly died three times, but he’d prayed for me and now I’d be fine. To which I think I muttered something like, I can’t die, I’m dead already, which the monk quite reasonably attributed to me being off my head with fever. Later that day he came back and told me that he’d gone to all that trouble because every human life is precious, even one as pointless and inconsequential as mine. I thanked him and asked him when I could leave. Soon as you like, he told me; I’d served my purpose, enabling him to achieve divine merit by saving my life through prayer, and now I was no further use to him and taking up valuable space.
“Thank you, Father,” I said. “If ever I’m rich, I won’t forget what you’ve done."
“Bless you, my son,” he said. “But I’m not holding my breath.”
In the grounds of the Silver Rose there’s a ruined chapel. It’s about a thousand years old; the shattered arches are clearly late Mannerist, and when I first went there you could still pick out faint traces of what must have been unbearably lovely frescoes in the Rose Curtain style, though the sheep have rubbed them all away now. The chapel was built to house the tomb of Cassius Cascianus, the second-greatest (guess who’s the greatest) alchemist of all time. I’d chosen the tomb to hide my reserve stash in partly as a gesture of respect to my brother scientist, partly because I know for a fact that nobody ever goes there, because they think Cassius sold his soul to the devil—which I know for a fact isn’t true, for what it’s worth. They’re getting Cassius mixed up with another great alchemist, who did just that. One of my more interesting adventures. Tell you about it some time.
I was almost right. Very, very few people ever went there. Quite probably just me and one other, and him only once, with a sledgehammer and a crowbar. He’d made a real mess, whoever he was; he’d cracked the lid, which I’d been at great pains to lift and slide away, and bashed a hole in the side, which meant the rain had got in and reduced the mortal remains of the Father of Science into stinking grey porridge. Desecrating a tomb, for crying out loud. Some people have no respect.
THEY DO SAY you can’t take it with you.
Still, I have to admit, it was one of those low spots, when you can’t seem to see your way forward. I guess I allowed anger to cloud my judgement, which is never a good thing. The thought that some thief, some criminal, had coolly helped himself to what I’d spent the best years of my life accumulating, bit by painful bit—grave-robbing, I ask you, stealing from a dead man, how low can you get? I never did anything like that. If only he’d left some clue, I’d have been after him like a shot. But he’d been careful, left no sign or trace. I remember sitting there in the brick-dust, with the sludgy residues of Cassius Cascianus smeared up my arms to the elbows, thinking; all for nothing, all that work, all that pain. An entire life, rich in adventure, achievement and acclaim, and absolutely nothing to show for it.
Also the distressing knowledge that I'd burnt my bridges. True, being me had grown increasingly uncomfortable over the years—it’s a big world, but not nearly as big as they’d have you believe, and ever since I published The Pathology of War fifteen years ago, there’s ever so much more peace and friendly co-operation between nations, which means among other things quicker and easier extradition, so nowhere’s really safe any more and it’s all my own stupid fault. Even so; when I was alive, there was always some far-flung godforsaken place I could go, hole up in a garret somewhere, write a book or a play, earn a little bit of money, though never enough; always some rustic grand duke willing to keep me in bread and cheese in return for linking his name with the greatest genius who ever lived. Now that I was dead, however—
The Silver Rose gets its name from the spectacular altar piece donated to the monks by Amalrich III (praised by many as the ultimate triumph of Formalist art, though I always reckoned it was gaudy and just a trifle vulgar) which used to adorn the Inner Triclinium before somebody stole it and broke it up for scrap. Not something I’m proud of, but if they couldn’t be bothered to keep it secure, they didn’t deserve to have it; their pathetic approach to security had cost me everything I had in the world, so I reckon they owed me. It took me nearly a whole night to saw the bloody thing up into sections small enough to carry, and I only got a fraction of its bullion value from a thoroughly dishonest silversmith in Old Town who tried to make me believe it was only sixty-seven parts fine.
It was a good reason for leaving Erech, at any rate, and at least I could afford a ride on the stage as far as Numa, where I forged an Imperial travel warrant that got me a berth on a cotton freighter as far as Beloisa. Cotton ships don’t move very fast—they don’t have to—so I had a bit of time to think.
What I should have been thinking about was what I was going to do next. Instead, I allowed myself to be distracted into contemplation of the question of evil, a topic which I keep coming back to, even though I thought I’d settled it once and for all in Act 2 of Carausio and Reflections On The Abyss. Apparently not. So I thought about it some more, in the light of my recent experiences, and realised that I was gradually drifting towards a whole new set of conclusions. I remember sitting on deck with my back to the mast and my feet up on a coil of rope, struggling with the realisation that the resolution I thought I’d found ten years earlier, in the magnificently argued third section of Human, All Too Human, was actually just plain wrong. I’d contrived to talk myself into believing it, but once you set aside the eloquence and the passion and the sheer poetry of the argument, there was a gaping hole in the hypothesis, bigger than the hole in Cassius’ tomb, and look what happened to him.
