Incarnations of Immortality

by Anthony, Piers

  "I need to clarify that," he said grimly. He understood why Luna had found this so difficult! "There was a girl who loved me—who said she did—but I wouldn't marry her, because she wasn't beautiful and because she was poor. I wanted to marry wealth. She—later I learned she committed suicide. That was the main friendship I gambled away—gambling on a richer one."

  "That's bad," Luna agreed. "Did you know she was going to kill herself?"

  "I never thought of it—until after the fact. Then I realized I should have seen it coming. I should have married her."

  "Though you didn't love her?"

  "She was a good girl! It would have been much better to marry her than to kill her!" But his Truthstone flickered, for he knew he had not really killed her.

  "We tend to assume more evil than is our due, after the fact," Luna said, spying that flicker. "You think she died because you didn't marry her—but that's no basis for marriage. Maybe the money you hoped for was just a pretext for you to turn off a relationship that you knew wouldn't have worked anyway."

  "I don't think so." But his Truthstone fluttered again. "I thought about it a lot, after. I decided I had not considered her feelings enough, only my own. I resolved not to be that way any more. I should have realized she was pregnant. If she had told me—"

  Luna smiled briefly. "Some girls don't. You would have done what you deemed to be right, but you didn't know. I wouldn't try to trap a man by telling him I was pregnant."

  "You wouldn't have needed to! But she really was!"

  Still, he appreciated the point. The girl had wanted his love, not his baby.

  It was her turn again. "I deceived my father. He thought I knew no creative magic myself."

  "You claim to be evil," Zane chided her. "You've done black magic and hidden it from your father, himself a black Magician. That's not much."

  "Apart from prostituting myself to a demon," she reminded him sharply.

  There was that. Zane found it very hard to accept the notion of her being intimate with a demon, but the Truthstone had confirmed her statement. "Why did you do that?"

  "To learn the black magic. My father wouldn't teach me, of course. He wanted to keep me clean. The man I respect most—and I deliberately deceived him! Now what do you have to beat that?"

  It was Zane's turn to breathe deeply. "I killed my mother."

  Now she gaped. "You can't mean that!"

  Zane held up his Truthstone, which remained dark. "I did it. Then I wasted my inheritance gambling, and tried to replace it by embezzlement." And now his Sinstone glowed more brightly than hers.

  "You have made your case," Luna said. "But I still have more total evil than you, because—"

  "Because you took some of your father's burden of evil," he said quickly. "He thought you were in balance, including his evil, but you're not. Where does that put you?"

  "Destined for Hell," she admitted. "Of course he didn't know about my other evil. He thought I was pristine, so a twenty-five percent share of evil from him would not imperil my status."

  "And, in fact, you are about seventy-five percent evil—or at least, that's what's charged against your soul," he said.

  "Close enough."

  "I'm surprised he didn't check your balance and catch you at it."

  Her smile was wan. "Men are easy to deceive."

  Zane studied her with new appreciation. "You seem pretty good to me."

  "Your Truthstone is glimmering," she advised him.

  So it was. "I guess that's a half-truth. You do seem good to me, but that business about the demon—" He paused, watching the stone. It was dim. "Wasn't there some other way to learn the magic you wanted? Study a book, or something?"

  "A book!" she exclaimed scathingly. "Black-magic texts are illegal!"

  "But you can find them on the black market."

  "My father would have known. Only black magic could counter his black magic, even to the limited extent of concealing this information from him."

  It would indeed require special measures to hide something from a magical grand master, Zane realized. So maybe she had required input from Hell. Still—

  "Why did you want black magic if your father said no? You always obeyed him in other things, didn't you?"

  She winced. This betrayal of her father was evidently an extremely sensitive matter to her. "It always fascinated me. I knew the power my father had, and I wanted—" She broke off, for her Truthstone was glimmering. "Oh, fudge! I should have set that stone down." She took another breath. "I was afraid for my father. Some of those minions of Hell—they frightened me. I don't mean little child-bugaboo-type frights; these things were truly, fundamentally evil and they had such power, such malign awareness—you really can't appreciate such horror unless you find it near. I knew they regarded my father as a rare prize, and though I also knew he was smarter than they, still he was riding the tiger. I didn't want to see my father damned, and I knew he would be, but there was no way I could help him unless I learned more about his business. So I learned all I could, legitimately—and some of the things in the legitimate, unexpurgated texts gave me screaming nightmares—then finally I had to move on into—you know, and the only coin I had to offer was—you know." This time her stone was quiescent.

  Zane considered. "I think I could get to like you pretty well. I know I'm nothing special, but—well, can we set another date?"

  She seemed surprised. "Date?"

  "Go out for a walk, or to eat—a pretext for being together, for talking some more."

  "You can have what you want right now," she said, her voice sharpening. "You don't have to clothe it in romance."

  "I don't think so."

  "It's true! Try me. After the demon, nothing you want will be so bad."

  Zane cringed inside to think of her opinion of the needs of men. She really had not had much experience in this regard, and no doubt thought of the demon as nothing more than an exaggerated man. "I want your respect."

  She tilted her head, peering at him quizzically. "My what?"

  "Your respect. You have mine. Your father was right; you are a good person. I don't care how the sin ledger stands. There seem to be a number of artificial standards of good and evil that don't really relate to true merit or demerit. Maybe the official system of classification has failed to keep up with the changing nature of our society. You haven't done anything I consider really wrong, except—well, even the demon, if you only did it to help your father—and you did help your father, because without your help he would have gone directly to Hell without passing Purgatory. So it was more like a sacrifice."

  "A virgin sacrifice," she agreed, glancing at Zane with a new appraisal. "It's the only type that kind accepts. It was horrible."

  "So I suppose after that, no ordinary man represents a threat to you. Certainly I don't. But a woman who would do that to protect her father—I'd just like to know you better, that's all."

  "Yet you killed your mother," she pointed out. "What do you care about anyone's parent?"

  "I cared about her," he said, somewhat stiffly. "But she was dying anyway, and in pain, and she knew it was hopeless; when she asked me to—I just had to do it, that's all, even though I knew it was a crime and a sin that would damn me. It wasn't right to let her suffer any longer."

  Luna's eyes narrowed. "Just what happened?"

  "Oh, you wouldn't care to hear—"

  "Yes, I would."

  Zane closed his eyes, suffering in retrospect. "She was in the hospital, and her hair was falling out and her skin turning rough like that of a lizard, and there were tubes and wires and things going into her and coming out of her in a continuous violation of her body, and different colored fluids bubbling, and gauges pulsing with every breath she took and every beat other heart, so that any stranger passing by could read at a glance the most intimate secrets of her functioning. She would have died long since, from mortification as much as physical failure, but the artificial heart and kidney and stomach wouldn't let her. She ha
d periods of disorientation, and these were getting longer. I think sometimes she hallucinated. But on occasion she was lucid, and that was when the horror of it was clear.

  "One time when I was visiting and she saw the nurses were away, she whispered to me the truth. She was hurting physically and mentally and emotionally, she felt degraded by all the paraphernalia, and she just wanted to die before she ran down her estate entirely with the medical bills, so I would have something to inherit. I didn't tell her that all the money was already gone and that the debt was mounting horrendously; even her life insurance would hardly cover it. She begged me to make them let her die so she could be in peace at last. She had come to hate life. She was in such misery and so urgent about it that I promised. Then she lapsed into more hallucinations—I think she was reliving something that happened a long time ago, in her childhood—and talked of picking flowers and getting stung by a bee—and I had to go. I knew the doctors would never let her die in peace; it was part of their code to make a patient suffer as long as humanly possible. So I bought a penny curse—it was all I could afford—and set it on the heart machine where it wouldn't be seen and left. Two hours later I had the call: she was dead because of equipment failure.

  "The hospital thought it was at fault and offered to settle out of court, and I let them think that, because it eased the medical bill considerably. But I knew I had killed my mother and that my soul was damned. I tried to pay off the remaining bill by gambling, hoping to multiply the money I was supposed to use for those debts, but I lost it all and tried to steal from my employer to gamble into enough to square everything, but I was caught, so I lost my job and had still more sin on my soul and debts on my account. I skipped town, went to Kilvarough, set up a new identity, and sort of scraped along for several years with my guilt and grief, still hoping for some source of money to square things, hoping maybe to marry money, until this other business—"

  He stopped. "I think I've said too much."

  Luna was watching him intently. "That Truthstone never flickered."

  "Why should it?" Zane asked, glancing at the gem in his hand. "This is the gutter of my life. I have had nightmares about it, until the dreams become more real than reality, and I try to wash off the blood on my arm or to blind myself so I can no longer see my mother's face as she died."

  "But you weren't there when she died!"

  "In my dreams I was there." Zane rubbed his arm, feeling the blood again, the horrible dream-blood.

  "Your mother—it was a mercy killing."

  "Killing is a sin. I know that now; I knew it then. All else is rationalization."

  "That's not the way you were judging me a moment ago."

  "Why should I judge you? I hardly know you."

  Luna set down her stones, then took his stones and put them away. "I think you have earned the privilege of making my acquaintance, Zane. Come this way."

  She showed him into what appeared to be an artist's studio. There were a number of professional paintings and several half-finished ones on easels. The subjects were ordinary people, places, and things—but the treatment was extraordinary. Each outline was fuzzed by a faint wash of color, as if each person stood within his own private fog. "What do you make of this?" Luna asked.

  Zane felt a growing excitement as he gazed at the paintings. "These are yours?"

  "My father wanted me to be an artist," she said.

  "Now I know why he brought me to you!"

  Again she cocked her head, prettily. "Why?"

  "He surely knew my interest! You said he must have researched me and known a lot about me. And he arranged to die, at half-and-half, when I was Death. He could have lived longer if he had wanted to, couldn't he?"

  "Yes," she agreed. "He told me the timing was important, but he wouldn't say why."

  "To summon me, not the prior Death! Because I have artistic aspirations. I am an aural photographer—or was, or tried to be, before I became Death. I really didn't have the proper equipment. That's why I needed money right then—but that's another dull story."

  "You recognize my theme?" she asked, brightening.

  "Of course I recognize it! I've been photographing auras all my life! Most people can't see them, but I can, with my equipment, and now I know you can. Your paintings are beautiful! I never was able to get the full effect on film. When I tried to sell my pictures, the best offers I got were from the porn publishers, because my technique fuzzed out the clothing of women, but that wasn't the point at all."

  "Not the point at all," she concurred. "But this still doesn't add up. If my father knew about you, he could have invited you to visit, or simply conjured you here, and dosed you with a spell of amnesia if not satisfied. He hardly needed to die."

  Zane's revelation collapsed. "That's right! But he must have had some reason."

  "He must have," she agreed soberly. "He was a most intelligent and sensible man. There is obviously more here than we know."

  "You—you said you have gone into black magic. Could you find out?"

  Luna considered. "I have learned to use many of the stones my father crafted. Some do enable the user to ascertain the motives of others. But black magic is the power of Satan, and Satan knows when any of it is used. I don't want his baleful eye on me unless there is no other way."

  "Don't you have any white-magic stones?"

  "The beatific eye of God is on white magic. I'm not sure I want that gaze either. Not when I'm investigating my father, whose Eternal fate remains uncertain."

  "What's the difference, really? Isn't magic the same, whether it's black or white?"

  "The power is the same, but the aspect differs. Magic is like magnetism, with a white pole and a black pole. If you orient on the white pole, you are aligning with God; the black pole draws you to Satan."

  "Then why doesn't everyone stick to white magic?"

  "Only good people can do that. Evil people relate more to the black pole. It's—this is not exact, of course, as the science of magic is as complex as the magic of electronics—it's like traveling past a mountain. The white pole is at the apex, and it is an exhilarating height, but it takes a lot of work and few missteps to ascend to it. The black pole is at the nadir, and it is easy to walk downhill; sometimes you can just sit down and slide or roll and, if you fall, you can get there very fast indeed. If you don't pay attention to where you're going, you'll tend to go down, because it is the course of least resistance. Since the average person has only the vaguest notion where he is going and tends to shut out awareness of the consequence of evil, he inevitably drifts downward. There is much more space at the base of the mountain than at the peak! Even those of us who know the situation can find ourselves in difficulty, as you did when you had to use bad means to do something good for your mother. When I became evil, white magic lost its effectiveness, while black magic became proportionately stronger. Remember the magnetic poles: the closer you get to one, the more strongly it attracts. So it is much harder for an evil person to become good than for a good person to stay good. Now I can accomplish much more through the black."

  "But if black magic draws you to Satan—"

  "Precisely. Evil facilitates evil, accelerating the slide. I don't dare use any more black magic, if I want to achieve eventual salvation. I'm almost too deep already."

  "So you can't use magic to find out what your father really wanted."

  "I already know that—to introduce the two of us to each other. I don't know why."

  Zane nodded agreement. "It's a puzzle. Let's meet again; maybe we can figure it out."

  She smiled. "Yes. I think we understand each other better now. We have plumbed the depths of each other's evil and not been repelled."

  How true that was! Zane had told no one before of his guilty secret of murder and he was sure Luna had not let any other person know hers. As it had turned out, there was a certain similarity in those secrets, for each of them had descended into evil in order to help a respected parent. No, there would not be condemnation
from either. That, and the aural art, showed affinity between them. Still, it did not seem to warrant the extraordinary measure the Magician had taken in sacrificing his own life.

  Zane turned to leave. "I need to get back to my business."

  She looked up at him, her gray eyes seeming larger and brighter than before, like moons. But it was no longer her physical beauty he saw so much as the character of a person who had sacrificed herself for a parent. "Yes, of course. Life is art, and your art is now in your office. When do you wish to visit again?"

  "I'm hardly aware of the calendar now. I can't tell how crowded my schedule will be. Does it have to be a set date?"

  "Naturally not! Come when you can. I will be here."

  She glided close and kissed him.

  Zane found himself in the Death mobile, driving out of town, before he was able to focus on the significance of that abrupt act. He had held his emotion in abeyance during their discussion, uncertain whether he would be seeing Luna again. She was, after all, hardly the type of woman Angelica was—well, no, he had to qualify that, for now Angelica was misty in memory, while Luna was preternaturally clear, as if outlined by some Divine retouching pen. And if Luna was no pristine creature, she certainly had more character than he suspected the other woman had.

  Luna's very impurities matched his. How could a soiled, sullied person like him expect to win the love of an angel? Only a fallen angel could be within his grasp! Luna's artistry attracted him, for it was exactly the talent he had tried to evoke in himself without sufficient success—and her abrupt kiss had stunned him, because now she knew him for what he was—a man who had gambled and embezzled and killed his mother—yet found him worthy of this mark of favor. True, she had offered him more than that, and he could have used the Love stone to compel her feeling as well as her physical cooperation, but he had never been one to seek the favor of a woman under duress. He wanted to be loved for himself alone, unworthy as he knew himself to be, and the significance of the kiss was the suggestion that this was possible. Still, that business with the demon—he had heard horrendous things about the sexual appetites of demons and the uses to which they put acquiescent or unacquiescent girls. Especially pretty girls. Some were no longer pretty, after the demons finished with them. To fall into the power of a demon was to be ravaged in more than the physical sense. Luna had not suffered loss of beauty, however.