As he swam, he made a spell. It was a quiet one that did not affect his form or his nature, and he hoped it went unnoticed. This was the critical stage; if the Incarnation caught on to where Parry was leading, or what the effect would be, or how to nullify it as Parry had just done, then all would be lost. But the Incarnation lacked experience in Hell; Parry was counting on that.
Abruptly he swam into a new tributary, one whose waters were not frozen. He intensified his spell, though the effort slowed him.
The Incarnation followed, his jaws opening. Once he caught hold. Parry would not be able to escape. They both knew that. This was the finale.
Then the Incarnation slowed, seeming dazed. He began to swim aimlessly. He moved to the side to nibble at a succulent bit of vegetation.
Was it a ruse? Or was it the finish? It would soon enough be evident.
Parry reversed, and swam downriver. There was no pursuit. He came to the River Kokytus needing no further modification for the cold. He swam all the way back down to the River Acheron before venturing to the shore and changing back to his human form.
He climbed to the bank. "I, Satan, reclaim My office," he proclaimed. He felt the power returning to him. He had been in time. He was once more the Incarnation of Evil.
He conjured himself to the center of Hell. Ozymandias looked up from his desk. "My Lord, You have returned," he said respectfully, as if it were a routine occurrence. "But if I may inquire—?"
"I led him into the River Lethe," Parry explained. "I used a spell to protect myself from its property of forgetfulness. It may be that he did not know that spell, or realize where he was."
"That may be," Ozymandias agreed. "Have You new orders, Satan?"
"Revert to My standing ones," Parry said. "Whatever damage the usurper has done, reverse it."
"As You wish." Then, slowly, Ozymandias smiled. He was glad to have the old order back.
Thanks to the help of Niobe and Nox, Parry was back in office. That was a considerable gratification—yet there was emptiness, too, for he knew that his change in circumstance could not restore to him his love. He had lost both Jolie and Orb; that had been understood when the other Incarnations helped him to recover. He had a mission to accomplish, and he would try his best, knowing the others would give no further quarter and expected none. But he would have traded it all for the other. Indeed, had traded it all for the other, one month ago.
After a busy day of reorganizing and reestablishing. Parry retired alone. He did not need sleep, but he hoped to obtain some anyway. Perhaps it would help dull the emptiness.
Then someone came to him. He realized immediately that it was an undamned soul, for it shone in a manner no damned soul could. How had it been admitted to Hell? The guardians should not have permitted it, and Ozymandias would never have authorized it. Only another Incarnation could—
The figure came close. It was a woman of shapely proportion. "Parry," she said.
What? He recognized that voice! Yet it was impossible.
She drew off her hood, showing her honey hair, and then her face. Her eyes were gray-green.
Parry stared, for a moment too amazed to speak.
"Yes, it is I," Jolie said. "I have returned to you, my love."
"But—I married another—I thought—"
Her expression changed. "Parry, you know that Gaea can never have a relationship with Satan, though she be technically married to him. That marriage must remain unconsummated, so that there is no question of undue influence. But there is no need for my marriage to you to be so. I love you as she does. Will you accept me back?"
He got up and enfolded her. "Oh, Jolie, yes! I thought you were forever lost. I do still love you—but I love her, too. If you can accept that—"
"I can accept that," she said, and kissed him.
For a moment his mind wandered, piecing out what had happened. Things fell abruptly together. Orb had taken the drop of blood containing Jolie's soul. Jolie could animate a living body, if given leave by the host of the body. There was only one person who would know that, and who would give that leave. One who loved him as Jolie did, and could not come to him. One whom he could never possess, because they were forever on opposite sides.
"But I can stay only the night," Jolie said. "And not every night. And it must be secret. A tryst others do not know about."
"A tryst," he agreed. "And—when you leave Me—if you would convey My thanks to the one whose body you borrow for what she—"
"She knows." For that time only the voice was that of an Incarnation. But the love in it was unchanged.
He kissed her once more, knowing that he had been doubly blessed. He would never be lonely again.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
I expect to address three types of readers in this novel. One is the person who has not read the prior five novels in this series, and perhaps has not heard of me before. For that one I need to have a story that stands pretty much by itself and is not confusing. Since this novel refers back to many episodes covered in the prior novels, shown from other viewpoints, this means I must cover those scenes adequately so that there are not gaps. I have tried to do that. Another type of reader is the one who has read some of the prior volumes but not recently; that one needs refreshment of key elements without undue repetition. I have tried to do that too. The third reader is the one who saved up all the prior volumes and has just read them rapidly in order, hitting this one fully primed with all the details fresh. For that one I should avoid repetition, because it would be wasting his time. That proved to be impossible to do. So I did what I deem to be the next best thing: I show those scenes from a fresh viewpoint, and evoke new interpretations of their significance. I realize that critics, who seem to exist on wormwood, will castigate me for supposedly running out of inspiration and copying from myself, but I hope that my real readers will bear with me on the necessary and often difficult compromises I have made. The mortal realm is rife with compromise.
This is the sixth and penultimate Incarnations of Immortality novel. The subject of the final one, And Eternity, may be surmised, but its approach will differ. I had originally planned on just five, but realized as I worked through them that the story was not going to be complete, so extended it. I have already been accused of doing it just for the money. Well, it is true there is money involved, and a pretty penny too; it is also true that I earn my living by my writing, and would go broke if I did not get paid for it. I am not sure why a writer should be condemned for making money when others are not. The question should be whether the money is made in a licit and socially positive manner. I remind readers of Samuel Johnson's remark on the subject: "No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money."
As I have mentioned in prior Notes, I have no belief in the supernatural. These novels are unabashed fantasy. Some of you have written to object to my atheism. I do not treat such letters kindly, because I am not an atheist. I am an agnostic: one who has not come to a conclusion about the validity of the existing theories of Deity and Afterlife. I regard them as unproven, and I feel free to represent them in my fiction in whatever manner is condusive to the narration of an entertaining and sometimes thought-provoking story. In short, I am having fun, and I hope that my readers are too.
But as I have also mentioned, there seems to be suspicious coincidence occurring as I write these novels. #1 concerned Death, and death impinged on my life. #2 related to Time, and I had my worst time-squeeze of recent years. #3 was about Fate, and I described the devious route that brought me to this series. #4 was War, and warlike matters intruded, even threatening the publication of the novel. #5 was Nature, and I felt that impact too. This one is Evil, and hang on, because the curse is still viable.
You might assume that Satan would not be pleased by an expose of his nature, since he uses deceit to forward his cause. Therefore Satan would do his best to interfere with the writing of a novel like this. This seems to have been the case, because I encountered a horrendous sequence of interferences. Some we
re funny; some were tragic. Let me see if I can cover this without becoming tedious.
Circumstances of a unique nature caused me to sign contracts for eight new fantasy novels at a time when I had intended to be working in science fiction, horror and a major historical project. The SF and horror had to be postponed, to my regret, but I refused to do that with the historical effort. So I undertook to catch up on the fantasy, and the historical, and certain other projects (a collaborative novel, a rework of an old unpublished novel, and some stories) in the course of three years. With the computer it is feasible, but I knew I would have to step right along.
Step along I did. This is actually the fifth novel I'm completing in this calendar year, which, along with the stories, mean about 600,000 words aggregate. That's as much as I've ever done in a single year, and more than I hope to do in any future year, because I am jammed up against the limit of what I can do without compromising the standards I maintain. There are those who assume that a prolific writer must be a hack: that is, one who churns out anything he can sell, just to keep the pot boiling. Perhaps some writers are; I am not. I care about every project I'm in, and I have changed publishers more than once when their editors interfered unduly with my text. I do not claim to be the best writer extant, merely one who is doing the best he can with his talent, situation and creative/ethical needs. I don't like to be crowded in my writing.
I allowed three months for Evil: OctOgre, NoRemember and DisMember, 1986. I started on schedule. But as it happened, I had gotten crowded in my computer, so was expanding my system's capacity. I doubled its memory to 512 K, and its storage to 20 MB. Don't worry about the figures if you are not into computers; just accept that they are solid ones in the middle range of such things. But we discovered that my operating system could not address either of these new totals. I could not use much more than I had before—unless I changed operating systems.
Back in the fourth novel of this series I discussed the two major operating systems this computer can use. One I likened to an old retired seaman, Captain Manager, known colloquially as CP/M, who maintained a sixteen-storey (as he spells it) apartment building, each floor of which could house a nice apartment complex. He called the occupants "users" and provided well for their individual tastes, as long as they paid their rentals. The other I likened to a somewhat prim lady, Ms Dos, also called MS-DOS, who distrusted apartment buildings and preferred to maintain an intricate garden through which passed many paths. People could reside along these paths, each having his own personal access and directory of his flowers. I happened to be with the Captain, and did not try Ms Dos because she lacked a feature I liked, called MAINT, that made file housekeeping easy.
But now it was tune to make the change, because while the Captain had not renovated his building in years and refused to cater to my need for greater memory and storage, Ms Dos promised to be more accommodating. So, not without trepidation, I moved out of my comfortable apartments on the lower floors and went to the Garden. My wife and daughters, satisfied with the building, remained on their upper storeys; they had no large files to process. Thus I left my family behind, though my wife did keep a certain eye on me from the window. Ms Dos, though prim by day, seems young and healthy; you never can tell.
But you don't just step from one operating system to another. Ms Dos and the Captain hardly recognized each other's programs. I had to get new software to function in the Garden. That proved to be more complicated than anticipated, and it was one of the things that slowed progress on this novel. For this is my first novel on DOS, and all the tribulations of learning occurred here.
Remember how I had to go to Finland for my keyboard, because I use a modified Dvorak that could not be generated on my American keyboard? I moved to the Finnish keyboard and reconfigured that, thanks to my wife's expertise. Well, I got Smartkey for DOS, but when I invoked the Finnish keyboard it glitched. I had to strike each key twice to make it register. My wife had no such problem. It turned out, after trial and error, that this is a phenomenon that occurs only in DOS, with the Finnish keyboard, with Smartkey. Eliminate any one of those three, and things are normal. I don't know why this effect exists, and doubt that anyone else does; I'm the only one ornery enough to go to Finland just to get my capital V's and W's. "You know," I told my wife, "the Swedish keyboard is identical to the Finnish keyboard, except for some markings on the surfaces of the physical keys that would have no bearing on this. But, just in case—'' And would you believe, the interference was gone on the Swedish keyboard. Everything worked perfectly. Thus I moved from Finland to Sweden, as well as from CP/M to MS-DOS.
I still needed a word-processing program for DOS. I liked the one I had in CP/M, Edward, that enabled me to call up as many as fourteen different files at once, and allowed me to put my functions wherever I wished. I refused to give up those features. So I hired the proprietor to customize Edward for me in MS-DOS. It cost about a thousand dollars, and there were a number of glitches to debug, but I got it. I was on my way in DOS!
Now a diversion; don't worry, it does, deviously, connect.
At the end of OctOgre I attended the local science fiction convention, NECRONOMICON, as a Guest of Honor. I had been there three years before, and this time their other GOH was Fred Pohl, a leading figure in the genre. So I arranged to interview him for an audience, and really looked forward to it, because I had some most provocative questions to which I knew he had excellent answers. But Satan struck: Fred's wife had a heart attack, and Fred had to cancel just one week before the convention. Thus the disappointed fans had to settle for just me. Oh, they were nice enough about it, but it was too bad.
At that convention my daughter Penny and I had the pleasure of taking Andre Norton and her associate Ingrid Zeirhut to lunch. Penny and I and Ingrid are vegetarians; Andre loves cats and I hate cats (but cats love me), so it was interesting, especially when we shared a panel later.
I was on several panels, and on one of them was Lois Wickstrom, co-editor of a small press magazine, PANDORA. I thought nothing of it until in casual conversation I learned that she was the other local writer who uses the Dvorak keyboard. Immediately we were comparing notes. I'm on the DEC Rainbow computer; she is on an IBM compatible. I had a program that enabled me to call up fourteen files; hers called up twenty-four files, with windows between them. I could move my functions around; so could she, and also modify their operations. Well, now! I had just paid a thousand dollars to adapt mine to DOS, and it seemed hers was better at four hundred dollars. True, hers had a feature I didn't like, batch formatting, that requires you to plug in many codes that change the text about before printing, but it was also one of the most powerful and versatile word-processing programs extant. Satan had timed it with infernal cunning, waiting until just after I had gotten what I wanted before dangling a new program before me.
Her program was Final Word II, put out by Mark of the Unicorn. In my letter ordering it, I said, "It is the wrong reason to make a purchase, I know, but I am intrigued by the name of your company. You see, I am a fantasy novelist with whole herds of unicorns in my fiction..." Their response was to bounce back our check, because they were changing their name to eradicate the Unicorn. What a slap in the face! Satan just couldn't resist that fillip. (And here I thought that unicorns were a protected species.)
So this may be my first novel in MS-DOS and my last with Edward. But I shall remain with Ms Dos, because she has succeeded in seducing me away from the Captain. Ms Dos comes on like a cranky old bat; she even has files suffixed ".bat" to run her errands. Every time you start her up, you have to check in with the exact date and time, a nuisance the Captain did not require. You have to type in a "Path" or she refuses to provide service to your distant sites. When you want to print something she always asks whether you mean it, the first time, and you have to agree that yes, it is the printer you want to use. She's like an old-fashioned schoolmarm: everything has to be exactly her way. But if you are willing to abide by her rules, she will do a lot for y
ou. More than the Captain will, if you want the scandalous truth.
I see my wife is getting suspicious, so I'd better give a for-instance or two. One is that most of the software outfits have gravitated to Ms Dos. The Captain changes his clothing seldom if ever, while Ms Dos is very attentive to software. Thus the companies just naturally do more business with her. This means that if you want something like, for instance, a sophisticated interactive spelling program, you will find maybe two or three old ones moldering on the Captain's shelf, but dozens of fancy new ones on Ms Dos's shelves. I had to go to customizing to get the kind of word-processing program I wanted in CP/M, and realized just too late that that wasn't necessary in MS-DOS. Another is those .bat files: these are little programs you type up yourself, saying do this, do that, and then do the other. Then when you summon a bat (it is actually short for "batch"), it flies in on its leathery wings and does the job for you. There is even a vampire bat that invokes itself when you start up, and it takes care of the nuisance about the date and time and path, and anything else you want, right through setting you up with your daily program and files. In short, you can automate, and no longer be bothered with the mundane details.
But learning all the nuances, and adapting to the new ways—that does take time. My work was correspondingly slowed. It was fun learning Ms Dos's intimate little secrets, but I really would have been moving faster with the old familiar Captain. Satan knew that, and kept feeding me new distractions when I threatened to start getting ahead on the novel. For example, I obtained some freeware programs in DOS. Freeware or shareware are programs that you don't have to buy, except sometimes to pay the cost of the disk on which they come, but if you find them useful you may send money anyway; it's the decent thing to do. One was a MAINT program for DOS, so that I could handle my files as readily as I could in CP/M. Another was a Squeeze program that—no, don't get ahead of me, Ms Dos isn't that friendly—enables you to squish files down to about half size for more efficient storage, and to unsqueeze at need. Another was a program to translate files back and forth between MS-DOS and CP/M; that could be handy in our divided family. Nice enough stuff—but my novel was dragging.