The Big Score by K. J. Parker

Author:K. J. Parker [Parker, K. J.]
Language: deu
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

“OF COURSE YOU need me,” she told me. “It just won’t work otherwise."

It’s all a matter, she explained as to an imbecile, of authenticity. You’re dead, she pointed out. A freshly-written manuscript, with the ink barely dry, would naturally be taken as a forgery, a blatant attempt to cash in on the latest collecting craze—

“But it’d be genuine,” I said.

“Being genuine doesn’t matter,” she said patiently. “You can be as genuine as a new-laid egg and people will just laugh at you. You’ve got to look genuine.”

“Ah."

“That’s different. That takes a lot of work.”

She knows what she’s talking about, trust me. So I paid attention.

In order to look genuine, she said, a thing’s got to be just right. It’s got to be written on the right paper in the right ink, with the right amount of fraying and discoloration, with the right number of spelling mistakes, crossings out, illegible words, whatever. It’s got to be—well, right. And right, in this context, means it’s got to be what people expect it to be.

“But I’ve only been dead, what, nine months. So it doesn’t have to be very old—”

She shook her head, and I realised I was being stupid. “It’s got to look like the other manuscripts,” she said, “the ones that are proved to be genuine, because their provenances are above suspicion. Otherwise the buyers won’t want to take the risk.”

“But surely,” I said, “the actual play. The words themselves.”

Uh-huh. “You don’t understand,” she said. “The thing of it is, Saloninus is a genius, everybody knows that, but nobody really knows why. Or how, rather. Nobody knows how he does it, or else they’d all be doing it themselves. But about a million people have tried to write like him—”

“Excuse me, but what’s with the third person?”

She scowled at me. “It’s easier for me, with you sitting there. A million people have tried to write like him but they can’t quite do it. It’s that indefinable something.”

“My point exactly."

“No, you’re being stupid, you don’t get it. Nobody else can quite do it, but about a million people can get very close. It’s a tiny margin, thin as a razor, but so’s the difference between being alive and being dead. And nobody’s going to bet two million angels on their ability to assess a tiny margin. They say, this reads like Saloninus, but what if I'm wrong? What if I’m too stupid to tell the difference? So instead they go by the handwriting and the age of the paper and the composition of the ink, and most of all by the provenance. Which,” she added with a sunrise grin, “is why you need me.”

The penny dropped. I once calculated that a falling object accelerates by a fixed ratio of thirty-two feet per second per second; so, the further it falls, the harder it hits when it lands. This penny must’ve fallen a very long way.

“Oh,” I said.

“Exactly. I sold that silly poem of yours and they bought it because everybody knows we used to be lovers—”

“But we—”

"Everybody knows,” she repeated firmly.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.