On A Pale Horse (27 page)

One of the miners turned his head. The pupils of his eyes were enormous as they tried to see—and, of course, Zane became apparent, magically. “Don't look now,” the man murmured, “but I think we're about to cash in our green stamps.”

Of course the other looked and saw. The caped skull!

“That's Death!”

“Yes,” Zane said. “I have come for one of you.” You've come for us both,“ the first miner said. ”We've only got air for an hour, maybe less."

Zane glanced at his watch. “Less,” he said.

“God, I don't want to die!” the second miner said.

“But I knew when I heard the cave-in start that it was hopeless. We were living on borrowed time anyway, with all the safety violations the company wouldn't fix. If I'd been smart, I'da gotten out of this business!”

“Where would you have gone?” the first miner asked.

The other sighed. “Nowhere. I'm fooling myself; this is the only job I can handle.” He looked again at Zane. “How much time?”

“Nine minutes,” Zane replied.

“Time enough to shrive me.”

“What?”

“Confess me. You know, my religion, final rites. I never was a good churchman, but I want to go to Heaven!”

The second miner laughed harshly. “I know I'm not going there!”

Zane brought the Sinstone near. “You are bound for Heaven,” he told the first. “You are in doubt,” he told the second. “That is why I must take your soul personally.”

“In doubt? What does that mean?”

“Your soul is balanced between good and evil, so it is uncertain whether you will go to Heaven or to Hell, or abide awhile in Purgatory.”

The man laughed. “That's a relief!”

“A relief?”

“As long as I do go to one place or another. I don't care if it's Hell. I know I deserve it. I've cheated on my wife, stolen from the government—you name it, I've done it, and I'm ready to pay.”

“You don't fear Hell?”

“Only one thing I fear, and that is being in a cramped box like this, with the air running out and me helpless—for eternity. For an hour I can stand it, but not forever. I don't care what else happens to me, as long as it isn't that.”

“I care!” the first miner said. “I'm so scared, I'm near gibbering!”

Zane considered. He realized that the dying needed someone to hold their hands, not to shun them. It was hard enough for any person to relate to the unrelatable. Zane had to try to help. “I came for the one in balance, but I think the other needs my service more.”

“Sure, help him,” the balanced client said. “I won't say I like dying, but I can handle it, I guess. I knew the odds when I signed up for this job. Maybe I'll like Hell.”

Zane sat beside the other. “How can I help you?”

“Shrive me, I told you; that will help some.”

“But I'm no priest; I'm not even of your religion.”

“You are Death; you'll do!”

That must be true. “Then I will listen and judge—but I know already your sin is not great.”

“One thing,” the man said, troubled. “One thing's haunted me for decades. My mother—”

“Your mother!” Zane said, feeling a familiar shock.

“I think I killed her. I—” The miner paused. “Are you all right, Death? You look pale, even for you.”

“I understand about killing mothers,” Zane said.

“That's good. She—I was just a teenager when—well, she was in this wing of the hospital, and—”

“I understand,” Zane repeated. He reached out and took the man's hand. He knew his own gloved fingers felt like bare bones, but the miner did not shy away.

“She had cancer, and I knew she was in pain, but—”

Zane squeezed his hand. Reassured, the miner continued: “I visited her, and one day she asked me to step outside the room and read what it said on the—you know, above the door, what kind of word it was. So I went out and looked, and there was something written there, but I couldn't read it. It was in Latin, I think. I went back and told her that, and she asked whether it was—she spelled it out, letter by letter, and you know, she was right, that's what it was. So I agreed that was it, wondering how she had known it, and she thanked me. I thought she was pleased.”

The miner took a shuddering breath. “And next morning she was dead. The doctor said she seemed just to have given up and died in the night. No one knew why, because she had been fighting so hard to live before. But I—I checked into it and found out that that word in Latin I had spelled for her—it meant incurable. I had told her there was no hope, and so she quit trying. I guess I killed her.”

“But you didn't know!” Zane protested.

“I should have known. I should have—”

“Then you did her a favor,” Zane said. “The others were hiding the truth from her, keeping her alive and in pain. You released her from doubt.” He was speaking for himself as much as for the miner. “There is no sin on your soul for that.”

“No, I shouldn't have let her know!”

“Would it have been right to preserve her life by a lie?” Zane asked. “Would your soul have been cleaner then?”

“It wasn't my place to—”

“Come off it!” the other miner said. “You were guilty of ignorance. Nothing else. I wouldn't have known what those Latin words were either.”

“How would you know?” the first one snapped. “You weren't there!”

“I guess not,” the second miner admitted wryly. “I don't even know who my mother was.”

The first miner paused, set back. “There is that,” he conceded. Somehow it seemed that in making that technical concession, he was also accepting the human point. At least he had known his mother and cared about her.

“Now, I'm no philosopher,” the second said. “I'm a sinner from way back. But maybe if I'd had a mother like yours, a good woman, I would have turned out better. So take it from one who hasn't any right to say it: you should remember your mother, not with guilt or grief, but with gratitude—for the pleasure she gave you while she lived, for the way she steered you toward Heaven instead of Hell.”

“For a sinner, you've got quite an insight! But if I could only have helped her live longer—”

“Longer in a box with the air turning bad?” the other asked.

“No, I agree,” Zane said. “It was time to end it. These things are scheduled in ways no mortal comprehends. She knew that, though you did not. If there had been a chance for survival, she might have been willing to fight on through, for the sake of her family, for the things she had to do on Earth. But there wasn't, so it was best that she not torture herself any longer. She put aside life as you would put aside a piece of equipment going bad, and she went out of the gloom of the depths of the mine and on up to the brightness of Heaven.”

“I don't know.” The man was breathing shallowly now, not finding enough oxygen in the air. He seemed to be more sensitive to this deprivation than his companion was. Zane had no problem; evidently his magic helped him this way, too. He was still discovering things about his office.

“You will join her there,” Zane concluded. “There in Heaven. She will thank you herself.” The miner did not answer, so Zane released his hand and turned to the other, his true client. “Are you sure there is nothing I can do for you?”

The man considered. “You know, I'm a cynic, but I guess I do sort of crave some meaning in life, or at least some understanding. There's this song going 'round in my head, and it sort of grabs me, and I think it means something, but I don't know what.”

“I'm not expert at meaning,” Zane said. “But I can try. What is the song?”

“I don't know the title or anything. It's just, I guess it's an old whaling song. Maybe I have whaling blood in my veins. It goes—what I can remember—goes like this: ...and the whale gave a flunder with its tail, and the boat capsized, and I lost my darling man, and he'll never, never sail again. Great God! And he'll never sail again. It's that 'Great God!' that gets me. I don't give a damn about God, never did, but I feel it, and I don't know why.”

Zane suspected the man cared more about God than he thought, but did not make an issue of that. “It's an exclamation,” he said, intrigued by the fragment. There was indeed feeling in it, as of a wildly grieving widow crying out in pain.

“It's a protest. Great God! Why did this have to happen? For a sunken ship, or a mine cave-in. Great God!”

“Great God!” the first miner echoed. “But why is a song about whaling bothering me now, when I'm buried in this stinking hole?” the second miner demanded.

“It must have special associations for you,” Zane said. “I'm not equipped to interpret—”

“Clear enough to me,” the first miner said. “Drown in the depths of the sea, suffocate in the depths of the earth, and your wife grieves.”

“Yeah, maybe she will,” the second said, brightening. “But I don't think that's it. It's as if there's a message, if only I could get it.” He snapped his fingers as if trying to call the message forth, and the sound echoed in the recesses of the mine. “Look, Death, you want to do something, tell me a story about that song. Anything, just to make it make some sense.” This, then, was the client's last request. Both men were gasping now, and time was short.

Zane had to try to honor the man's wish, even if he bungled the attempt. He thought for a moment, then started to talk—and what he said surprised him. "There was a young female whale named Wilda. She roamed the oceans of the world, happy in the company of her kind, and when she came of age she thought she would mate as the other whale cows did and bear a cub and bring it up. But then the hunters came, in their huge boats, and they speared her father and her mother and her bull friend and hauled them out of the water so that nothing was left but their blood and dreadful fragments of their bodies that the sharks congregated to consume. Wilda escaped, for she had learned magic; she changed her form so she resembled a trashfish and swam away.

"She grieved, singing her whale song of loss and pain, but she was angry, too, and confused. Why should these little creatures from land, called men, come to slay whales who had never harmed them? It seemed to make no sense. She realized that she had no hope of dealing with the problem when she didn't understand the motive of the enemy. So Wilda changed herself into human form and walked to the fishing village where the whalers lived.

"Some human folk laughed at her, for she was naked and innocent of their ways. But a young man named Hank took her into his home, for she was also beautiful. Hank lived with his widowed mother, and the two of them clothed her and taught her the tongue of their kind, and she learned quickly, for she was an intelligent whale and really wanted to know the nature of this strange species. She learned that Hank was a whaler, who went out periodically to hunt whales, for that was how he earned his living. Here on land, food was not free for the taking; people could not simply swim about and open their mouths and catch and swallow succulent squid; and when it grew cold they could not blithely migrate south to warmer waters, for travel was complicated on land. A human person had to work and get gold, and he used this gold to buy all the necessities that life on land required.

"Now Wilda understood. There was no personal animosity here; the men folk had a more pressing lifestyle than the whale folk, which compelled them to acts they might not otherwise have considered, and they did not regard the whale folk as sapient creatures. Perhaps if the men folk were made to understand about the culture and feelings of the whales, things would change and the dreadful killing would stop. She tried to explain to Hank, but he thought she was joking. After all, his father had been killed by the flunder of the tail of a whale, so that his grieving mother had had to bring him up alone. Great God! How could he feel for the whales? He asked Wilda to marry him, for he needed a woman and he believed her to be his gift from Heaven.

"This made things very difficult for Wilda, for she had come to love him, though he was not of her species. So she brought him to the edge of the sea and walked into the water and returned to her natural form, believing that once he had seen her as the whale cow she was, he would be revolted. But he cried for her to come back and apologized for not believing her before and promised he would never kill another whale. She had, after all, persuaded him, and his love surmounted his awareness other nature.

“But now she was a creature of the sea again, and the call of the sea was strong. How could she leave the brine forever and be dry? And she spied another whale, a bull who was handsome and strong. She thought she might mate with him, but he told her he was really a squid, who had assumed the form of her kind in order to learn why the whales preyed on the squids, who did not harm the whales. Wilda was amazed and chagrined, for she had never thought of these creatures as having feelings or being sapient. How could she return to devouring squid? Yet she realized that death was a chain of eat and be eaten, with no justice to it except need, power, and chance, and that in this respect her species was no different from the human species or the squid species. It was all a matter of viewpoint. So she apologized to the squid, returned to land, resumed her girl form, and married Hank, her problem resolved.”

“And perhaps,” Zane concluded, “if we men had a similar insight into the larger pattern of our existence, we, too, would accept the natural order, though at times it is painful for us, especially when we die prematurely.”

He stopped, waiting for some response from the miners. But too much of the oxygen had been exhausted, and the men were unconscious. Zane took his client's soul and returned to Mortis, uncertain whether he had done the right thing.

Now he had another concern. Someone he knew was being taken out of turn, and he was not as acquiescent about her fate as Wilda had been about that of her family. But how could he gain the comprehension he needed?

Nature had spoken of patterns of thinking. The first was the linear path -----, the generally straightforward mode. Would that do him any good?

What was the straightforward way to gain understanding? To do as Wilda had done, and ask someone who had the information. Who was that? Who else but the Purgatory computer!

He stopped in at Purgatory once he had caught up with his case load. “I want to consult the records,” he told the information girl.