The Alchemists

a short story

Two years ago, I wrote a short story called "The Alchemists."

Long ago, in the land of Dheghyo'om, there lived a Smith.

In those days, the office of Smith was a holy one. Every day, he tramped the sere hills beyond the stockade, pricking his fingertips on thorn trees, seeking the feathers of the birds of the air and the most precious stones of the earth. Every night, he combined these in fire.

The aim of the Smith was to distill value in its purest form, to reduce to its essence all that made men strive and grasp. What united gold, salt, and the resin of the thorn tree? What of the smoke rising up from the sacrificed bull? The admiring nod of a man or the smile of a woman? These, the Smith would bottle.

Salt bottled easily, he found, and resin would dissolve in wine. Gold, though, refused to give itself up; not to water, wine, nor cold oil. Burning oil, though a great expense, could melt gold. Like lead and tin, the metal would cool and re-solidify purer than it had begun.

Salt forgotten (and cattle and women as well) the Smith worked to enlarge his olive-oil crucibles and sweat more shining value from the ore.

Thus worked the Smith until the day he was summoned to the tower of the Gwre'egys. What was this, asked the Gwre'egys of Dheghyo'om. What was this he heard about transforming rocks into gold?

Never mind what made men strive; the Gwre'egys had a problem. The Karstapanti horsemen he had hired to protect the land of Dheghyo'om were demanding payment.

The Chief Guard of the Gwre'egys, who was offended by the smells coming off the Smith, clacked his spear-butt against the ground. Did His Majesty not see the danger in transforming rocks into gold? Word of this new wealth would get out. It would attract the attention of the barbarian hordes. The Chief Guard advised that the Smith be buried alive.

The Gwre'egys pondered mightily and decided on a compromise. Twelve days and twelve nights the Smith would have, and as much oil as he needed. If the Smith could not produce gold such as to satisfy the Karstapanti, then he would be buried alive. Thus spoke the Gwre'egys.

The Smith set to feverish work, screaming at his slaves to build more kilns of brick, stuff them with wood, douse the wood with oil, and fan the flames as if their lives depended on it. Black smoke rose, red flame blossomed, and yellow gold wept from rock.

There was so much more, the Smith saw, that he could do. Some sort of air-pumping apparatus was needed, and what if he used charcoal instead of wood and oil? At high enough temperatures, copper bled from rock. What about iron? But the Smith had no time. He raised his hands and voice to the smoke of his forges, praying to the Sky to save him from the Earth. Let the Gwre'egys find patience.

The Smith's prayers were misguided. As little patience as had the Gwre'egys of Dheghyo'om, the un-paid Karstapanti had less. On the fourth day, while the Smith was considering how bagpipes might be adapted into billows, the horsemen attacked. Howling warriors pulled down the stockades, stormed the settlement, killed the Gwre'egys and his Chief Guard, and stole everything that could fit into a chariot.

The Smith, a rather small man, found himself bundled off as well, to live out his life as a slave in the far-off plains of Karstapant. There, he tutored the sons and grandsons of barbarian chieftains until his death.

***

Thus it was that horse-rich Karstapant, armed with the craft of high-temperature forging, grew into the hub of an empire. Neighboring peoples gave up their gold to the Karstapanti horsemen, who used that gold to pay more horsemen to conquer more neighbors. For a time, the Man-Protecting Wras of Karstapant ruled all the land bounded by four seas.

Eventually, however, the time came when Karstapant's bronze-spiked armies could find no more gold to steal. The output of the mines was falling, and no new ones had been discovered in any neighboring land. The swift-wheeled horsemen needed their pay.

The Wras of Karstapant, beloved by the Sky-Father, summoned his court Alchemist. With flashing eyes he questioned the craftsman: how progressed the project of transmutation? If other metals – lead, say – could be changed into gold, that would solve a lot of problems.

The Alchemist bowed low and with sorrow confessed that thus far, his efforts had produced nothing but alloys. Electrum had some interesting properties, as had amalgam of mercury. Others resembled gold, but had not its virtue. And while they were on the subject, could the Alchemist request from His Majesty another consignment of tin?

The court of the Wras listened. The Armorer and the Treasurer whispered to each other, as well as the High Priest of the Sky-Father stood, crimson-robed, false-in-his-rage. Gold was the symbol of the sun, and there was but one sun in the sky, one father in the heavens! One Wras on earth! The Alchemist should be boiled in one of his crucibles for his treasonous blasphemy.

The far-eyed Wras considered this. He had to be careful with the new religion. He wearied of paying for mercury and lead that were never transmuted into anything. Tin was very expensive, as well. With a nod of his head and a flick of his ring-bearing hand, the Wras consigned the Alchemist into the care of the Priest.

No crucible large enough could be found to boil the Alchemist, so instead he was tortured until he went mad.

While this was going on, the Armorer set about arming those loyal to him out of the Alchemist's stores of bronze. The Treasurer, for his part, embarked on a project to debase Karstapant's currency as much as possible. Zeal-filled, bronze-armed, and with their purses full of useless money, the people revolted.

The High Priest took control during the resulting chaos and laid the foundations of a church that stretched all the way across the sea to Pontomorina. There, far from pillaging mobs and chronic lead poisoning, a tradition of scholarly monasticism evolved. For centuries the monks copied out the things the Alchemist had said under torture.

***

Later, in the Republic of Pontomorina, there lived a Chemist. As a boy in monastery school, he had learned how to read and do arithmetic, how to blow his own glass tubes and thread his own screws, amalgamate gold and dissolve it in aqua regia. Just lately, he had succeeded in distilling a new elemental substance from his own urine.

It was in that year that a letter came to the Chemist, sealed with the tower-and-ship symbol of the Brogont. Not having been born yesterday, the Chemist replied that this summons honored him as he had never been honored before, but unfortunately he was indisposed with the plague and could not see the Brogont this week. The Chemist then set about packing as much of his equipment could fit on an express mail coach.

The Brogont's guard raided the Chemist's workshop that night before he could escape.

A week later, the Brogont donned his curly wig of office and had the Chemist hauled before his throne. "What is this idiocy about urine?" he asked, much to the amusement of the court. "How exactly does that aid the project of transmutation?"

The Chemist explained that alloying was no longer enough. The currency had been debased so far and for so long that people now preferred to use promissory notes instead. The Brongontine bank no longer controlled the supply of money, and who knew what would happen when someone demanded gold in exchange for their paper.

The Brogont leaned across his desk. "Are you not our loyal subject, Chemist? Are you not aware of your duty to the Wig? No other project may take precedence over transmutation."

The Chemist had not spent the last week in vain. Before the Brogont's gavel could come down, his explanation tumbled from his lips.

"Your highness, my humblest apologies at my failure in transmutation. Alas, my only achievement has been to dissolve gold out of rock using aqua regia."

The Brogont's smile was noble and radiant. He'd known any problem could be solved by the application of the right pressures. "Excellent. Do that then."

He banged his gavel and ordered that the Chemist be sent to the gold mines on the border of the Man Moot. If significant gold had not been extracted in the span of one year, the Chemist would be publicly flogged and his property seized etc. etc…case dismissed.

The Minister of Finance listened to all of this, coldly furious. An influx of gold would upset his careful plans vis-à-vis paper money. Not to mention the fact that if the currency of Pontomorina got hard all of a sudden, all the other kingdoms on the coast would demand repayment of their loans.

While the Chemist was up on the Man Moot border, the Minister of Finance spread rumors about him. Heresy, treason, sexual perversions. It was the sex that did it.

Suspected of a liaison with a Mootish spy, the Chemist found his mountain workshop raided three months early.

"You fools!" he screamed, "don't you know how close I am to cracking stoichiometry?"

The Chemist was hauled away, babbling about ratios of hydrogen and oxygen, while one of the gendarme officers, under orders from the Minister of Finance, lit a match and flung it into the depths of the workshop.

The explosion was felt as far away as the All Thing of Man Moot. Mootish spies, who really had been all over Pontomorina, brought the secrets of acid-leach mining and atomic weight to the All Thing, which outlawed the knowledge. Anyone found dabbling in chemistry was exiled to the transcontinental penal colonies. These, in the fullness of time, accumulated enough gold and gunpowder to rebel.

***

Eventually, the Transcontinental Mammithan Federation found itself in a pickle. The Executive Council had borrowed heavily to pay for its last war, and they needed cash. In secret, the Council launched a program to split the atoms of lighter elements and recombine them into heavier, more valuable ones.

Not secret enough. A Physicist working on the Precious Heavy Element Reactor wrote a letter to his friend and lover, who happened to be an Economist, asking what would happen if, hypothetically, gold could be created with electricity. The Economist replied that electricity would then become the basis of the currency, which would be stupid.

The Economist was one of the new breed, and wanted the Council to float the Mammithan currency entirely free of any physical backing. Could the physicist imagine all the gold now lying about uselessly in bank vaults? Should the same thing be done with nuclear reactors? Surely there was a better use for them.

This correspondence continued, growing more heated until, like a too-heavy element, themselves, the couple broke up. Pretending he was not in rage, the economist wrote a letter to the editor. This letter sparked a debate, which scared voters, who voted in a new government, which abandoned the Precious Heavy Element project, threw the Economist and Chemist into jail for sedition and sodomy, and started a new war.

During the war, atomic fission proved pivotal.

***

In the post-war years, hegemons rose, grew, and fractured. Oaths and supply chains broke, and pressure increased. It was only a matter of time until an Information Scientist organized a conference to solve the problem of rare earth metals.

"Rare Earth Metals," read her grant proposal, "are necessary for the construction of the computational and electrical infrastructure that form the basis of our ideological hegemony. Increasingly, this hegemony is threatened by contrary Opinion Blocs with better access to REMs and rapidly expanding influence on the Noosphere. With a supply of REMs assured, we can cement our Bloc's ability to generate ideology at higher volume than our competitors. Then, at last, our enemies will admit that they are wrong."

The grant was approved, and the race was on to grab new precious metals. The asteroid belt looked promising.

The public mostly ignored the news about space elevators and orbital power stations. They were more interested in competitive tattooing. That is, until young Opinion-Broker saw an opportunity to make her career. She wrote a sarcastic post about asteroid mining on the Noosphere: "hold together!" it said paired with a photograph of a gaping abdominal wound. This meant that without ideological enemies, there would be no need for opinion-brokers. Other opinion-brokers found this argument very persuasive.

In the vicious debate that followed, lives were derailed, deaths were threatened, and the Opinion-Broker who started the furor made an absolute fortune. Meanwhile, The Information Scientist who had organized the space-mining initiative was accused of harboring impure opinions, and the Noosphere turned upon her. Alone and without patronage, she became depressed. The medications that prevented her suicide made her content to do nothing. Till the end of her life, the Information Scientist never made another discovery, nor organized so much as a session of table-top role-playing.

***

That Ideological Bloc did indeed crumble with time, and the Noosphere was ritualized and forgotten like other kings before. Using sophisticated thought-engines, social scientists at last found a way to create fellow-feeling among people without the need for an enemy to define themselves against. Love without hate became possible, and much suffering was avoided.

And through it all the hunger for gold persisted, as did the people who promised to create it. Just give us twenty more years, they said, and by the way, have you noticed what else we've discovered?