With a Tangled Skein

  “That, too,” Lachesis said. “But you will have no trouble there. A woman is not a single-purpose creature, and most purposes you are already prepared for. Our use of the distaff is merely more sophisticated than what you have known before.” And in her hand appeared a glowing distaff, the short staff on which thread or yarn was wrapped, “We have only to keep the skein orderly; it is the social aspect that can be difficult.”

  Difficult indeed. The idea of being with another man— another woman’s man—appalled her. Yet she could see that it did have to be a consequence of joining with other women, when there were not enough bodies to go around.

  “Suppose—I decline?”

  “My dear, we do not force anyone to join us! It may be different with a couple of the male Incarnations— though of course there is no law about that, only custom— but we women are more accommodating. If you elect to remain mortal, you will return to your prior life, and we will select another woman for the exchange. But I confess that we do like you, and not merely for your beauty; seldom does a mortal person have the courage to approach Thanatos as you did.”

  “I have no courage!” Niobe protested. “I had to do it!”

  “Oh? Why?”

  “To save my husband, the man I love!”

  “And for love you went literally into the fire. If that is not courage, it remains a quality we deeply respect.”

  “And it was all for nothing!”

  “Yes, it is an irony. We could not give you what you desired, then, and we offer you some of what you do not desire now. Yet there are compensations.”

  Niobe knew she would burst into tears again if they remained longer on the subject of what she had desired; she had to focus on new things. “Compensations?”

  “Immortality—as long as you choose. Power—as much as you can manage. Purpose—for you will spin the ultimate threads of man’s existence. We are Fate.”

  Niobe thought about returning to her former life—without Cedric. Then she thought of immortality, power, and purpose—and the opportunity to seek to settle her score with Satan. She would rather have had Cedric, but she really had no choice—as Chronos had known. She was destined to accept this role. “How do I join?”

  “Take my hand,” Lachesis said, extending it. Niobe took her hand. There was an odd sensation of flux. She felt simultaneous loss and gain. Then she saw that Lachesis had changed to the form of the young, pretty woman who had appeared momentarily in her Purgatory Abode.

  Their hands separated. “Farewell, Daphne,” Lachesis said. “And welcome, Niobe.”

  What? Niobe looked down at herself—and discovered she looked like Lachesis.

  Yes—you are with us now, Lachesis said silently to her. Your body has gone to Daphne—the former Clotho. Be silent; your day is coming, while hers is done.

  Niobe was silent. She watched and listened and felt, while Daphne turned about, verifying her new separateness, then faced them. “Farewell, old friends,” Daphne said, and her own eyes were bright with tears. “And thank you, Niobe. You have given me back my life.” She opened her arms, and Lachesis embraced her; this time there was no transfer of personality.

  Tell her she is welcome, Niobe thought, feeling an almost overwhelming surge of nostalgia. Her body changed to that other form—gone forever!

  You tell her, Lachesis replied. Something shifted—and Niobe was back in her own form. Except that two other minds were with her.

  She glanced in the cabin’s mirror—and there she was, as lovely as ever, standing beside Daphne. Fate had assumed her likeness!

  “You are welcome. Daphne,” Niobe said.

  Then, suddenly, she was crying uncontrollably. Daphne opened her arms to her, and they hugged each other, the tears streaming down both their faces.

  At last they pulled apart, looked at each other, two comely young women, smiled—and burst into tears again. For pity’s sake! the third mind in her body grumbled. That was, Niobe realized, Atropos, the oldest Aspect.

  Eventually Niobe and Daphne ran dry. “I can see you resemble me,” Niobe said tearfully. “I hope you have the very best of lives ahead of you.”

  “I surely do,” Daphne replied. “Fate pulled a thread.”

  They had to laugh at that. Then Niobe turned the body back to Lachesis, who turned it into the spider, and they climbed nimbly up the thread to the cabin ceiling, on through the ceiling, and up out of the steamship and into the sky, suddenly cruising with great velocity along a cable extending across the world. In a moment they slid into their web-home in Purgatory and resumed human form.

  “You will not need to learn the way things are by yourself,” Lachesis said. “We will guide you when you need it—and routine homelife is mostly my department anyway. But you will need to spin the threads.”

  First Lachesis introduced her to Atropos. The body assumed the form, and the old woman went to stand before the mirror so that Niobe could see her clearly through their eyes. Atropos was in her sixties physically, with iron-gray hair, deep wrinkles, and an overlarge nose; she looked like anybody’s grandmother. “I lived a routine life on a goat farm,” she said. “I helped my husband milk the goats and I cooked and washed and bore four children—one of them died of smallpox when he was eight— but my two girls and remaining son grew up and married and moved away. I felt put out when they made it on their own; I had, I confess, enjoyed running their lives. So I concentrated on my husband and made him sell the farm—the market for goat’s milk was declining as the big cow-dairies got established, though of course their milk could not compare in quality to what we produced—and invest the proceeds in a furniture factory. But we had been deceived about its prospects; it went bankrupt, and we lost our life savings. My husband took sick, got consumption, got pneumonia, and died broken-hearted, and I knew it was my fault; I should have left well enough alone. But meddling in other people’s lives was always my predilection, and when Fate came to me and asked whether I wanted a real chance to meddle—well, here I am! I’ve been at it fifteen years, and I’m satisfied. And, I trust, I am not ending people’s lives frivolously.”

  But doesn’t Death—Thanatos—end people’s lives? Niobe asked in thought. She couldn’t talk aloud when she didn’t have the body.

  “Thanatos sees to it that the souls of those who die go to their proper appointments—Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory. He must judge the balance of good and evil in each soul, and tend to the difficult cases personally. But I determine when each life shall end; I cut the threads.”

  You cut the thread of Cedric’s life?

  “I had to. He had arranged to take the place of the thread I was supposed to cut short, so I had no choice. I do not have complete autonomy, especially when there are changes in the existing tapestry. I do not act capriciously. I must operate within parameters so that no thread extends beyond its proper position, or ends too soon. Otherwise the tapestry would be distorted.”

  But why any thread? Niobe demanded. Why not let good folk live?

  Atropos formed a weary smile. “Child, that is a common fallacy of mortals. They assume that Death is the enemy and that everything would be all right if only they could live forever. It’s just not true; the old must pass that the young may come into being. None of us would exist today if our elders had not made place for us. So each thread of life is given its appropriate term, some being longer than others, and each must end as it begins, according to the pattern of the tapestry. I simply tailor the individual threads for the good of the whole tapestry, facilitating the greatest good. It is not for any single thread to decide its own place in the tapestry! It would be disaster to live forever!”

  What about the Incarnations? Niobe still felt guilty that she should have such a future reserved for her, while Cedric, the one with the most promise, had been cut short.

  “The Incarnations are immortal, but not forever,” Atropos explained patiently. “We maintain our lives without aging, as long as we hold our offices—but we do not hold them for all time. We have va
riable terms. Your predecessor, Daphne, served for twenty-six years, doubling her mortal life—until she spied a situation that was too tempting to resist. She found a good man—there’s much to be said for a good man!—and he needed a good woman he would not otherwise obtain—and she simply had to have him. So she has left the office. Now she will age normally, until I or my successor cuts her thread, and she will move on to the Afterlife. Similarly, the other Incarnations change office, all in their own fashions. Thanatos dies when he becomes careless and is slain by his successor; Chronos assumes office as an adult and lives backward until the hour of his birth or conception—I have never quite been certain which—”

  Backward? This was confirmation of what she had suspected. How can he associate with others?

  “When you want to talk, here in the Abode, just take over the mouth,” Atropos advised. “When we are in the company of others, we maintain separation of identities, but we can relax here at home. But to address your question: Chronos controls time. He can reverse himself in order to converse with others, or he can reverse them to align with him, for brief periods. At any rate, immortality is not perfection, and we Incarnations do eventually become bored or tired, and so we leave office. Only in mortality can the true guts of existence be experienced. Theoretically one of us might continue forever, but it has never happened, except in the case of God and Satan, and I’m not entirely sure about Satan.”

  The old woman seemed to have the answers. Things did seem to make sense—but still Niobe could not accept the necessity other husband’s death. “Would it have hurt the Tapestry so much,” she asked, discovering that she could indeed assume control of the mouth without the rest of the body, when Atropos permitted, “if Cedric had lived?”

  Atropos shifted to Lachesis. “That is my department, Niobe,” she said. “I measure the threads of life, which means I determine their approximate length and placement. I don’t actually weave the tapestry—it is far too complex for any individual mind to compass—but I set the threads according to the pattern and see that they are properly integrated. Mortals tend to blame Fate for their failings and fail to credit Fate for their successes, which is annoying, but actually my options are limited. The overall pattern is determined by the interactive compromise between God and Satan—the macrocosmic balance between Good and Evil—and we other Incarnations simply implement it to the best of our ability. Certainly there would have been no harm if your beloved man had lived; he was supposed to live. Then we were forced to substitute your thread for his—and then to eliminate that too, for you are no longer listed among the mortals, though they are not aware of your departure. Let me show you.”

  Lachesis gestured, and the mirror clouded, then opened onto an awesome scene. It was a phenomenal pattern in glowing colors, a Tapestry as wide as the world, with threads in their myriads like stars in the nocturnal welkin, forming a pattern of such marvelous intricacy as to baffle the mind of the beholder. Niobe had never seen a tapestry as magnificent as this; she simply stared, entranced.

  “Your thread, and Cedric’s, are approximately here,” Lachesis said, using the distaff to point to one section, which expanded obligingly to show a better definition. It was like descending to Earth from Purgatory, watching the continents expand until they lost their cohesion, only this was not land but the enormous and splendid Tapestry of human existence. The line of color that Lachesis indicated became a mighty river of threads, and these continued to be magnified until at last the individual threads showed like cables, each in its separate region. “To this side is the future, and to this side the past,” Lachesis continued. “The present is the precise center of the image; as you can see, it is moving.”

  Indeed, the cables seemed to be traveling toward the “Past” side, so that the center drifted steadily toward the future without actually moving. The Tapestry was like a river flowing by. Niobe had to blink and blink again to avoid being mesmerized—but this was futile because at this moment Lachesis had the body and control of the eyes.

  Lachesis indicated two cables in the near past. They converged from different parts of the Tapestry and linked, twining about each other. “Your marriage to Cedric,” Lachesis said. The two continued on, separating a little to show when he went to college, and touching again when she visited him there. There was a sparkle at one point, and Niobe blushed in her mind when she realized that was their first lovemaking, a significant point in their relationship. Then, after a bit, a new thread started, tied in to theirs: Junior’s conception or birth. Then the two major threads exchanged places, and Cedric’s ended. There was his death—in lieu of hers.

  Finally her thread separated from Junior’s and faded out. It was not cut off; it just became obscure. Her assumption of the Aspect of Clotho. Its texture changed: Daphne. Niobe’s mortal flesh had not left the world, only her spirit.

  “So you see, the Tapestry now has one thread where there were two,” Lachesis concluded. “And that one differs. We have tied it in in such a way that no one who does not inspect this region closely will realize that any change occurred. But the Tapestry as a whole is basically unchanged, no cohesion lost.”

  “But Cedric—”

  “Incarnations do not make policy. We conjecture that Satan anticipated your assumption of the Aspect and sought to prevent it. In that he failed—but there generally is a cost when one foils the Prince of Evil.”

  “Then Satan can force mortals out before their time?”

  Lachesis sighed. “Niobe, our firmament is not perfect. God and Satan made a Covenant of old that neither would interfere with the operations of mortal humanity. The idea is that each soul is given its chance in life, to make of it what it will, and those who prove they deserve to be in Heaven then go there, and those who deserve to be in Hell go there. All of mortal existence is merely the proving ground for the classification of souls, which is one reason why eternal mortal life cannot be permitted: it would clog the Tapestry and interfere with its function. But there was one loophole.”

  Lachesis turned away from the mirror and went to the Abode’s kitchen to fix a meal. Niobe was half afraid that the larder of this spider’s den would contain some huge, juicy fly for consumption, but the food was normal. She realized that Fate, unlike some of the Incarnations, did not have a household staff. As a woman—or three women—Fate preferred to do for herself. Niobe approved.

  “God, as the Incarnation of Good, naturally does what is right; He honors the Covenant,” Lachesis continued as she worked. “Satan, being the Incarnation of Evil, naturally does what is wrong; he cheats. So Satan is constantly interfering in the affairs of mortals, yanking the threads about, generating no end of mischief. We other Incarnations, who are supposed to be neutral, must thus oppose Satan, just to get our jobs done. So the answer to your question is: Satan shouldn’t take out mortals before their time, but he does. We try to prevent this—but your own case is an example of the problems we encounter. It is no easy thing to deal with determined evil, as we all know to our cost. I am sorry; we would have saved you and your husband if we could, but Satan has agents in the Purgatory Administration office, and he has absolutely no scruples. Your husband’s death is a miscarriage of what was supposed to be—but it happened.”

  And with that Niobe had to be grudgingly satisfied. It strengthened her resolve to make Satan pay. Somehow.

  —5—

  VOID

  It took a few days for Niobe to get into the routine. She learned how to travel on threads she flung out magically at will so that she could slide quickly to any portion of the globe. These were travel-threads, not the same as the threads of life; they appeared when needed and vanished when done. She learned how to generate the “Read Only” threads between her fingers for spot checks on individual lives, though she could obtain only a fraction of the definition that Lachesis could; it was a skill that went with the Aspect and experience. She learned how to change into spider form for special occasions. As Fate, she had an affinity for the web weavers, and
no spider would protest her presence in its web or her intrusion onto its hunting ground. In fact, spiderwebs were convenient landing places when she traveled; she could slip to one much faster as an arachnid, then change to human form for whatever task required her attention.

  She gained confidence: she might appear to be a weak woman, but an invisible net of web surrounded her, making her invulnerable to any mortal attack. She learned where the Purgatory Administration Building was, and who the key personnel were. These were not Incarnations, but lost souls—people whose balance between good and evil was so exactly even that they could not be relegated to either supernatural realm. They seemed like ordinary folk, which of course they were, and quite solid, which they were not. They were really ghosts, able to act only here in Purgatory. And she learned to spin souls.

  But first she had to fetch the raw stuff of souls, and that was no easy task. “It’s in the Void,” Lachesis explained.

  “The Void?”

  “In the beginning, the earth was without form and void. God created the world from the stuff of the Void, and reality as we know it came into being. But not all of the Void was used. What remains of it occurs at the edge of Purgatory, and no one can go there except you.”

  “Me?”

  “As Clotho. Not even we two other Aspects of Fate can go there; we become tuned out. This is the one journey you must make alone.”

  “But I’m so new here! I know so little about any of this! I can’t—”

  “There is no one else,” Lachesis said. “Do not be unduly concerned; it is not a dangerous trip. It is merely a unique one.”

  She had to do it; it was a duty of the office. But she dreaded it. Her nightmare visions of what was to happen at the water oak had proved to be well-founded; now she hesitated to go into any truly challenging situation alone.