On A Pale Horse (8 page)

Experimentally, he punched the lowermost button. Nothing happened. It depressed and sprang back without any specific point of resistance. Had it been disconnected? Not necessarily; a good stopwatch was protected from an accidental punching of the wrong button, as might occur when someone was distracted by a close finish in a race and aimed for the STOP button without looking. This should be the zeroing control, operative only when there was a fixed time registered, as would be the case after a race had been timed.

He punched the highest button. It clicked—and the red sweep hand stopped.

He studied the dial. There was no motion in either of the two miniature dials that showed hours and minutes. The sweep hand was frozen at twenty-three seconds after the minute. Before the minute, since it ran backward. But the third little dial continued to function; its hand moved briskly clockwise, telling off the seconds of ordinary time. So the stopwatch was stopped, but not time itself.

What did this mean? Since the stopwatch function governed the timing of the deaths of his clients, did this imply that a hold had been put on such deaths? That was hard to credit—but indeed his whole situation was hard to credit. Fate had mentioned a stoppage of deaths in the world until he, the new holder of the office, had commenced activity. And this did answer his question about appointments that occurred too close together. He might freeze one case while he handled the other.

And, of course, this gave him his chance to rest. He could simply turn off his job while he slept or ate or thought things out.

This was some watch! It did not merely time existing events, it coerced events to its timing.

Zane saw that he had only two minutes, in addition to the twenty-three seconds, until his next appointment, and the green gridstone showed this was halfway across the world. That was crowding it. He punched the zeroing button—and sure enough, the timing hands clicked back several minutes, providing him a full ten minutes. In that time, he knew, the Death mobile could take him anywhere on Earth.

What, then, was the hours dial for? It could register up to twelve, but if ten minutes was all he could reschedule, he would never need to read hours.

Zane decided to ponder that later. Right now he had to organize himself. He needed to figure out what to do with the baby soul, for one thing. He was not going to send it to Hell, and might not be authorized to send it to Heaven. Probably he should take it to Purgatory for expert designation. He assumed that if Heaven and Hell were literal, so was Purgatory—but where was it?

“There is so much I don't know!” he exclaimed.

“This, too, shall pass,” someone answered him.

Zane jumped. A man sat in the adjacent seat. He was perhaps fifty, with a mustache and goatee and piercing blue eyes. He held a small double cone in his hand.

“You must be immortal,” Zane said, after a moment of fevered thought.

“In a sense,” the man agreed. “I am another Incarnation, like Fate and Death.”

Zane studied him, suspecting that he should recognize the man, but he did not. “Who—?”

“I am Chronos, colloquially known as Time.” He tilted the cones, and fine sand sifted from one to the other. It was an hourglass.

“Time!” Zane exclaimed. “But you're young!” Only that was inaccurate. “At least, not old—”

“I am ageless,” Chronos corrected him. “I realize I have been depicted by ignorant artisans as ancient, but I prefer to operate in my prime.”

“Did I—the watch—?”

“Yes, Death, you summoned me. I am, of course, attuned to all manner of chronometry, especially that practiced by key figures. You signaled me by locking the countdown on ten minutes. Ordinarily Death either freezes the timer where it is or resets it to gain necessary travel time; to do both is a code. Naturally I came to see what you wished, as we Incarnations do try to accommodate one another. It is, after all, one firmament.”

“I didn't realize I was signaling you,” Zane said sheepishly. “I'm new at this. In fact, I hardly realized you existed as a person.”

“As a personification,” Chronos corrected him. “An Incarnation of an essential function of existence. Persons differ, but the role continues.”

“That's another thing it's hard to get used to—the notion that things like Death and Time are offices, not physical laws or whatever.”

“We are roles and offices and laws and more,” Chronos assured him. “We are also human beings, and that human quality is important.”

“I was just trying to find out how the watch worked. There doesn't seem to be any function for the hours dial.”

“It records your schedule backlog,” Chronos said easily. “You have recycled your next client by seven minutes and thirty-seven seconds; you have also placed the entire program on hold. This is, of course, your prerogative; you are Death. You can even halt the passage of all time by pulling out the center button. But if you maintain the hold more than half an hour, it will register on the hours dial as a tardy schedule that needs to be made up. If you run more than twelve hours late, overflowing the capacity of the watch, there will be an investigation by the authorities at Purgatory that could damage your performance rating.”

“Oh? What happens to me if my rating is bad?”

“That counts as evil on your soul, shifting your balance toward Hell. Of course, you are in perfect balance during your initiation period; every officeholder needs time for trial and error. But when that passes, and at such time as you give up the office, for whatever reason, a negative rating could make your soul most uncomfortable.”

Zane was getting it straight. He held the office of Death, but he remained alive, and the account of his soul was yet to be settled. “My predecessor—where did his soul go?”

“He had done an adequate job, generally; I'm sure he found his way to Heaven, which is the last refuge of adequacy.”

That made Zane feel easier. “And if I do a good job, I will go to Heaven, too—when the time comes?”

“If it comes. You should. Since you commence the office balanced, and performance is fairly straightforward, it should not be difficult for you to improve your position.”

“How do you know my soul is balanced?”

“If it were not, Death would not have had to come for you individually—”

Zane laughed. “You know, I never thought of that! My good and evil were even, so when I tried to suicide, I had to be collected by Death himself. And if I hadn't seen Death arriving, I would be dead now!”

“It is an unusual situation,” Chronos agreed. “But at the same time normal. Each Death assassinates his predecessor, thereby burdening his own soul with more evil, but postponing his own reckoning indefinitely. I hardly envy your system.”

“Your system differs?”

“Certainly. Each office has its own mechanism of transmittal, some gentler than others. But all of us work together as required, treating one another's offices with due respect. I feel indebted to the prior Death, who did me a favor on occasion, and regret that it was necessary for him to leave the office. Now I will facilitate things for his successor, as he would have wished.”

“He doesn't hate me?” Zane asked, bemused.

“There is no hate in Heaven.”

“But I murdered him!”

“And you will be murdered by your successor. Do you hate him?”

“Hate my successor? I don't even know him!”

“Your predecessor did not know you. Otherwise he would have been more careful.”

Zane changed the subject. “I have just taken a baby. It is perfectly balanced, a uniform shade of gray. I don't know how it can have so much evil on its soul, so well integrated, or what I should do with the soul. Can you advise me?”

“I can clarify the matter. The baby is probably the child of incest or rape, so carries the burden of intensified Original Sin. Such children, conceived in evil, do not commence life with a clean slate.”

“Original Sin!” Zane exclaimed. “I thought that was a discredited doctrine!”

“Hardly. It may not be valid in non-Christian parts of the world, but it is certainly operative here. Belief is fundamental to existence, and guilt is very important to religion; so guilt does carry across the generations.”

“I don't like that!” Zane protested. “A baby has no free will, especially before it's born. It can't choose the circumstances of its conception. It can't sin.”

“Unfortunately, you do not determine the system; you only implement it. All of us have objections to aspects of it, but our powers are limited.”

“And I don't know where to take the baby soul. I don't know how to get to Purgatory, assuming that is the proper place.”

Chronos laughed. “It is the proper place, and it is simple enough for you to reach. You reside there.”

“I do?”

“When not actively pursuing souls. You have a fine Death house, a mansion in the sky.”

“Well, I've never seen it,” Zane said, nettled. “How do I—?”

“You ride your fine pale horse there.”

“My pale horse?”

“Death rides a pale horse. Surely you were aware of that. Mortis is always with you.”

“Of course I know about Death's traditional steed! But I don't know where any such horse is!”

Chronos smiled indulgently. “You know where; you don't know what.” He patted the dash panel. “This is Mortis.”

“The car?” Zane was baffled. “I know its plate says MORTIS. But it's a machine!”

“Press this button.” Chronos indicated one on the dash that Zane hadn't noticed before. It had an embossed motif of a chess piece—the knight, the image of the head of a horse.

Zane pressed the button—and found himself astride a magnificent stallion. The hide of the horse was as pale as bleached bone, his mane was like flexible silver, and his hooves were like stainless steel. He lifted his great equine head, perked his ears forward, and snorted a snort of pale vapor.

Zane had daydreamed of owning a flying horse. Now he knew his dream had been amply fulfilled. This horse had no wings, but he could go anywhere!

“Anything else you need to know?” Chronos inquired wryly. He was seated behind Zane now.

“There must be volumes of information I need to acquire,” Zane said, awed by the transformation of car to animal. He had known magic and science were allied, but had never seen anything like this before. He felt the warm, powerful muscles of the horse beneath him and was as thrilled as any child. “Somehow it doesn't seem important at the moment.”

“The moment is frozen, in a certain respect,” Chronos reminded him. He dismounted. “I will leave you now.” The hourglass in his hand flashed, and he vanished.

“Time flies,” Zane muttered. He shook off the mood and patted the horse. “You and I will get along just fine, I know. But I haven't had much experience riding, so I suppose I had better use your car form for routine city calls. Unless we should go to Purgatory now—”

The stallion issued a snort of negation. Zane decided the horse knew best, so he did not argue the case.

He looked at the saddle and discovered a button on it. “Is this what turns you back into the pale sedan?” he inquired, touching it.

Abruptly he was back in the car. Good enough! He would have more to say to Mortis the horse, much more, in due course. But now duty called. He punched the START button on the Deathwatch, noting that half an hour how registered on the hours dial; he would have to make up that time. At least he was getting to understand the system.

He oriented the Death mobile and put it in hyper drive. Animal to machine—amazing but convenient! Was the horse a robot, or was the car alive? He would have to inquire later. At least this clarified why driving was so easy; there was an animal mind assisting it. Absent-minded people sometimes drove into trees, but that never happened to an absent-minded horseback rider, for the horse knew better. But it seemed strange to be riding inside a horse!

This time he arrived in the parking lot of a big stadium. It was night, but floodlights illuminated the area, so that it almost seemed like day. Zane looked closely at the gems of the bracelet to see if there were a mistake, but the cat's eye was large, the two dots juxtaposed on the grid, and the arrow pointed firmly to the stadium.

“So be it,” Zane said. He got out and walked to the structure. The man behind the ticket window did not challenge him, taking him to be a functionary of the premises. He walked right on inside, following the arrow.

The game was in session. It was professional pigskin, with banners proclaiming the teams: the Does vs. the Ewes. The ball was on the ninety-foot line of the Ewes, and the girls were mixing it up in a good old-fashioned hair-pull.

The arrow pointed to the playing field. But there was no one in that section. The action was in the other half.

Zane walked around the edge of the field with a certain difficulty, for the stadium thronged with people. The arrow on the gem shifted, orienting on a spot on the Does' fifty-foot line. An empty spot.

Had his gems malfunctioned? No—he realized immediately that his recycling of the time had caused him to arrive early; three minutes remained before the death was due. He would simply have to wait for it.

Zane took a seat on the convenient bench near the hundred-and-fifty foot line. Several Ewes sat on it—big, husky, well-padded young women, attractive in a violent way, with generous endowments wherever he looked. The nearest one glanced at him, did a double take, then realized she had suffered a delusion and turned away. After all, no one saw Death sitting on the players' bench at a pigskin game!

The Does were pressing hard. They wore bright blue suits whose protective padding accented their female qualities enormously. To Zane it was really too much; even prize-winning milking goats lacked udders as massive as these appeared to be. Maybe he was too close; in times past, watching television, before his set was repossessed by the finance company, he had admired the pig proportions.

The Doe quarterback snatched the skin and faded back for a throw. She heaved it forward just as two Ewes stampeded toward her. There was a flash as the spell on the ball fought off the blocking-spells and freed it to fly to its target. The receiver levitated at an angle, surprising the defender, who had evidently anticipated a bringdown spell. The Doe caught the missile with a cry of glee, clutched it to her massive bosom, and cannonballed to the turf, plowing up a divot. It was a beautiful play, and the audience squealed.