The Devil You Know by K. J. Parker

Author:K. J. Parker
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2016-02-29T23:00:00+00:00

My blood can’t run cold because I have no blood. Just as well.

I’m permitted to do small, unobtrusive acts of goodness. Well, strictly speaking I’m not, but a blind eye is generally turned when I give small sums of money to struggling artists and street musicians, when I’m off duty, because such acts of kindness are trivial and without lasting consequences. It’s one of the small perks I get for having to spend my life in the field, among humans. But there’s a world of difference between that and taking a decision that could—who am I trying to kid; that will inevitably lead to the ideal society, the race of superior human beings. He was quite right, of course. He hadn’t said anything about female companionship, for the artists or the cutthroats. That had been my idea.

He doesn’t like people talking about it, but Saloninus once wrote an opera. He needed the money, is his excuse. I have no reason to disbelieve and not forgive.

In the culminating scene (it’s actually quite good, for opera) the intellectual sort-of-chorus character who’s been watching the drama unfold congratulates the protagonist; how wonderful, he says, your luck’s turned out to be. Look, there are your enemies, slaughtering each other for something you already discarded.

Just thought I’d mention that, as an insight into the way his mind worked.

I had two options. I could report what I’d done to my superiors and throw myself on their mercy.

Exactly. So I did the other thing. I kept quiet about it, did nothing, stood idly by and allowed the disaster to unfold. There was, after all, the very real chance that nobody would ever figure out that it had been my fault. Great nations and ideal societies do emerge from time to time, after all; by accident, by chance, through the agency of natural evolution. The examples my artist friend had mentioned, for instance; Aelia was nobody’s fault, and neither was the old Empire—and besides, once they’d passed their zenith and fallen into decadence and decay they were no problem to anyone—very good for business, in fact, from our perspective. And our lot may be all-seeing and all-knowing, but that’s a long way removed from all-understanding. There was even the remote possibility that the founding of the New Mysia wasn’t my fault or an accident but in fact part of some grand overarching plan by our opposite numbers in the organisation, which I simply didn’t know about—and that’s what you get for being out of the office most of the time and never reading the memos.

But I couldn’t help wondering. Was that what he’d been up to, or was it something else? Could he have foreseen that I’d have exceeded my discretion to that small, disastrous extent? Am I that predictable? Was he that devious?

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