On A Pale Horse

  He passed the yellow stone across the soul in the same fashion. As it picked up the good aspects, it brightened, until at the end it shone like the brightest moon.

  Now what? Certainly the stones had changed, taking the measure of this soul—but which one had changed more? The dark one certainly seemed heavier than the light one; did that mean that evil predominated in this soul? Yet the light stone had seemed to become lighter as it proceeded, as if the good in it were buoyant. Maybe the trick was to ascertain which gem had changed more. Was there more sink to the dark stone, or more lift to the not so bright one? Where was the balance, when the two were averaged?

  Then he had it. He put the two stones together. They clung to each other, as if magnetically attached, and the line of their cleavage writhed into the configuration of the Oriental Yin-Yang or the Occidental baseball. They were merged.

  He let go of the ball. It hovered in mid-air, in almost perfect balance. What was this soul's destiny?

  Then, slowly, it rose. The balance was marginally in favor of Heaven. Zane let his breath out; he had been more nervous about this than he had realized. He had been in doubt about both the technique of analysis and the destination of the nice gentleman he had talked with.

  Nice? The man couldn't have been too nice, or he would not have had so much evil on his soul!

  The gem ball nudged gently against the ceiling of the car. Zane did not let it go outside; with the car windows closed, the ball was not going anywhere. He needed to send the soul itself to Heaven. But how?

  He fished in the compartment again. He found a roll of transparent tape and two packages of balls. The balls were of distinctly differing densities. Some were pith and threatened to float away; others were lead, quite heavy.

  Now it came clear. Zane refolded the soul into a compact mass, bound it together by a loop of tape, and affixed a buoyant pithball. Then he opened the car window and released it. It floated up into the starry sky and in a moment was lost to view.

  He hoped the package arrived safely in Heaven. This seemed an unconscionably primitive way to transport a commodity as precious as a soul. Surely it should be possible, in a world possessing magic carpets and luxury airplanes, to transport a soul more safely and efficiently than by such means. But, of course, this was his predecessor's method; maybe Zane would be able to update it when he learned more about the office.

  The merged stones fell apart, their original dull colors returning. That job was finished. He returned them to the dashboard compartment.

  The Deathwatch was counting down past ten minutes. He had used up his spare time and had to move.

  Zane oriented the car and touched the hyper drive button. This time the wrenching was longer. He looked out the window. He was passing across water. He was proceeding east across the ocean, according to the compass he now spotted on the dash. He left the night and reentered day, realizing that it had been evening when he started this business, and late afternoon when he had taken his first client in Anchorage, and evening again in Firebird for his second. The world continued its turning regardless of his business, and he was zipping in and out of day.

  In a moment, land loomed. The car swooped up to it, slowing, then rolled across a brief beach, through a development of twenty-story modernistic condominiums, through—not around—a ragged brown mountain range, past a village that filled in a valley with white, plastersided houses, through an olive orchard, past grazing horses, and to an open field.

  He was now near his client. He wasn't sure why the hyper drive never delivered him precisely to the target; perhaps long-distance accuracy was not great. More likely it was to preserve the anonymity of Death's approach; it would be hard for people to ignore a car that abruptly materialized on the site of an accident. Magic did have its limitations, so it was best not to push it too far.

  He used the eye and arrow to close in on the target and arrived with a good minute to spare. He was at a decrepit farmhouse amidst languishing fields. This was a poverty-stricken family.

  He opened the door and walked in. He wondered whether he should have knocked, but concluded that no one would care to answer Death at the door. It was dawn here; he could hear the members of the family screaming at each other as they blundered sleepily about, getting organized in the chill house. His left ear picked up the translated words, for, of course, this was not Zane's own language. The people were grumbling about the cold morning, the inadequacy of food for breakfast, and a rat that skittered across the floor.

  Zane's gems guided him to the bedroom. The woman was there, sitting on the bed, an expression of discomfort on her face as she struggled to don heavy, opaque stockings. One leg was raised, the knee bent, so that he had an intimate view of her thighs. He was shocked to see that they were almost covered by a flaming rash. Indeed, the woman looked sick; her face was flushed, her hair straggly and tangled. Her teeth, as she grimaced, were discolored, perhaps rotting. This was a young, fairly shapely woman, but her bad health made her unappealing. Her eyes were so deeply shadowed, it was as if they had been blacked by violence. Then Zane realized that there had been violence; she had bruises and scrapes all over her body where flesh showed.

  Perhaps death would, in fact, be a boon to her. She was obviously living in misery.

  But the arrow did not point to the woman. It pointed to the crib on the far side of the room where a small baby lay huddled.

  A baby? How could he take a baby?

  Zane walked past the woman, who paid him no attention, and stood over the crib. The baby had scuffled off its inadequate blanket during the night and lay, exposed and damp, face down, its skin bluish. It was, he realized, about to suffer a crib death.

  But what of the fifty-fifty rule that governed his clients? Most people died and were separated from their souls without his direct help. Only those who so cluttered their souls with evil as to be in doubt of salvation required the personal service of Death. Almost by definition, a baby was innocent; therefore its freed soul should float blithely to Heaven. A baby was not yet, as Fate had quoted, the captain of its soul, and Heaven still lay about it.

  Yet there was no question this was his client. The baby was fading fast. It was time. Zane reached down and hooked out the small soul.

  The baby's mother, intent on her laborious dressing, never noticed. Zane walked past her, carrying the soul, and left the house. He felt ill.

  In the Death mobile, he used the stones to analyze the little soul. The pattern was strange, because it was not a pattern at all; the soul was uniformly gray. Experience had not yet caused it to be variegated.

  The verdict of the combined stones was neutral; the gem ball hovered in place like the moon it resembled, neither rising nor falling.

  How could this be? What evil had this little boy done? What evil could he have done, confined to his crib, completely dependent on his sick mother?

  Zane had no answer. He folded the soul neatly and put it in the bag.

  The Deathwatch was counting down yet again. Was there no end to this? When did he get some rest, some time to think things out?

  He knew the answer. Deaths occurred all the time, and the small percentage that required special attention continued, too. At some point he would have two difficult cases happen at the same moment, on opposite sides of the globe. What would he do then?

  Zane was beginning to understand how a person performing the office of Death could grow careless, as his predecessor had done. When things got rushed, comers had to be cut, or the job would not get done. What happened to a Death who got too far behind?

  He looked at the watch more carefully. It had three buttons on the side. This was a stopwatch, a chronograph, of course, though its timer did run backward. He had seen the type before. One button would be used to start and stop timing; another to zero the total; and the shorter middle one to set the regular time and calendar features when necessary.

  But this watch ran itself, magically, responding to input he did not know about. Maybe it had a direc
t line to Heaven or Hell or wherever the allocation of souls was determined. Fate probably had a hand in it, as she measured her threads. He didn't time events; events timed him. Why, then, were the extra buttons necessary? What did they control?

  He thought of punching a button. Then he hesitated; it could be dangerous to play with something he did not understand. Yet how else was he to learn? He had lived his life and almost died his death in an impetuous manner; he might as well be consistent.

  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.

  Chapter 3 - EWES AND DOES

  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 it
s 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.