On a Pale Horse (8 page)

Something glimmered in his mind, almost like a memory from a prior existence. Zane reached around the soul, his arm crumpling it slightly in passing, and punched open the dashboard compartment. Sure enough, inside it were several more gemstones. He had gone from paucity to plethora when he assumed this office!

Two stones were gently flashing. Zane drew them out. They were more cabochons, half-rounded—polished hemispheres. One was a dull brown, the other a dull yellow. He set their flat faces together, and the two formed a sphere, a little like the dark and light faces of the moon. Perhaps they were moonstones. They were a matched set—but what was their purpose?

He let the stones separate and brought the brown one near the spread soul. The stone flickered as if hungry. He
slid it across the surface of the soul, and it flickered whenever it crossed a dark patch.

Aha! Zane brought the yellow stone near. It flickered as it passed the light portions.

If dark equated with evil and light with good, he had here his analytic mechanism. One stone responded to each aspect of the soul. He could perform the magic analysis scientifically. But how was the final balance to be ascertained?

Maybe the stones gained weight as they absorbed the readings from the soul. Was there a set of scales?

He checked in the compartment, but found no scales. Well, maybe the mechanism would become apparent at the right moment. He really did not have time to ponder at length.

Zane passed the brown gem across the length of the edge of the soul, then down a swath just in from the edge. The dark items flashed into the stone. Where he ran over a portion already covered, there was no response; the gem only picked up any given sin once. As it did so, it gradually darkened, but did not seem heavier in Zane’s hand. Of course, the change might be too small for him to detect.

By the time he had covered the whole soul, the stone was almost black. There was certainly a lot of guilt and sin on this ledger. Zane wondered what the details were, but had no way to learn them. The client had had a mixed life before cancer brought him down; perhaps that was all Death needed to know.

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
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 hyperdrive 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 re-entered 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-storey modernistic condominiums, through—not around—a ragged brown mountain range, past a village that filled in a valley with white, plaster-sided 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 hyperdrive 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 Deathmobile, 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, corners 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 direct 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 Deathmobile 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.

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