Incarnations of Immortality

by Anthony, Piers

  "Uh, yes. But what do I actually do, to—?"

  "Motion begets motion. You tilt the Hourglass toward the force you wish to negate. The greater the tilt, the greater the negation; right angles is full negation. But it's on a logarithmic scale, so the first part of the tilt provides comparatively little effect. Another protection against carelessness."

  Norton was coming to appreciate the qualities of the Hourglass even more. This thing had powers he had never dreamed of! He concentrated, willing the sand to turn yellow. In a moment it did. Then he tilted the Hourglass slightly away from him. Nothing happened.

  "You have to put it in gear, as it were," Satan said. "Yellow is neutral, maintaining what you had before, which was white. Here in your mansion all visitors share your mode, and the Hourglass assumes you are merely demonstrating sand colors. But when you go to yellow, then to an additional color, and then tilt, it knows you mean business."

  Norton concentrated, nudging the sand into a red tint. Then he paused. "Why is red best? Why not green, to match universal time precisely?"

  "Why, I hadn't thought of that," Satan said. "I suppose there could be a disadvantage to moving in space while phased in to the solid world."

  A disadvantage—such as smashing through a building while in the solid state! Norton knew he never wanted to travel on green. Meanwhile, sticking to his normal time seemed to make sense when he was learning. Satan was really being quite helpful. Maybe he was not as bad a sort as he had been painted.

  Norton tilted the Hourglass about five degrees.

  He shot forward like a cannonball. Quickly he reversed the tilt—and shot backward even faster. He righted the Hourglass and found himself falling through the air, from a great height above the planet.

  Evidently he had tilted too much. He had shot away from the surface of the Earth at a tangent, forward and then backward, leaving the ground behind. Ground? Since he had started from Purgatory—but he really didn't know where Purgatory was. Maybe it was near ground level, but part of another aspect of reality. Anyway, he had jumped right out of it. But why so much faster backward than forward, when he had tilted the Hourglass the same amount?

  Because he was tapping into different forces. The ones Satan had described were surely not the only ones—and, of course, since a number of them were not straight-line forces, such as Earth's revolution around the sun, they would be constantly changing his orientation to the major motion, that of the universal expansion. So tilting the Hourglass in a given direction would produce a different degree of motion each time. He would always have to be careful! Even with a logarithmic scale, he could find himself traveling too many miles per second.

  But now he had the Hourglass upright—and was plunging toward the ground increasingly rapidly. What was wrong?

  Then he cursed himself for a fool. Gravity was wrong! He had popped into the sky and righted the Hourglass, so it was no longer moving him—but gravity was another matter. What would happen when he landed?

  Well, he wasn't quite phased in to reality, so probably he would pass right through the ground without impact. That would leave him buried in rock, unable to see where he was going. As Satan had said, the Hourglass could not protect him from his own folly. He had to get moving—under control—before he lost control entirely.

  He tried to return to the mansion. He tilted the Hourglass slightly forward—and moved at a lesser velocity past the surface of the planet. But he did not seem to be getting closer to home, wherever that was. Actually, he would settle for a soft landing anywhere on the surface, where he could pause and take stock.

  He took a moment to ponder, despite his inclination to react wildly. He could avoid plopping into the surface at the speed given by gravity simply by jolting himself a few million miles from the planet—but that didn't seem wise. What should he breathe? Also, he wasn't sure he could get into deep space, because magic was a planetary phenomenon.

  He had set the sand on yellow, then tinted it pink. That should mean he was traveling forward in time, but not as fast as the normal Earth flow. He might be advancing at half the normal rate—did that make sense?—so each second of his matched only half a second of the world. Thus if he nullified the part of the spell that moved him along with the turning Earth, he might proceed, not at the thousand-or-so-mile-per-hour rate of rotation, but at half that, five hundred. Still a lot of velocity.

  But he had not tilted the Hourglass all the way, so should have tapped into only a small fraction of that motion, no more than forty or fifty miles per hour. That was not the case; he had actually moved at more like five thousand miles per hour. The Earth's rotation couldn't account for that!

  So he was using one of the far more powerful forces—and might have to draw on it again to return. But gravity had drawn him closer to the ground, so he couldn't simply reverse his prior course without going through a segment of the globe. In short, he was probably in trouble regardless of what he tried, unless he froze time completely. But that wouldn't get him home either.

  "Sning!" he cried. "Can you help me?"

  Squeeze.

  "Can you tell me how to return safely?"

  Squeeze.

  What a relief! He was now within a mile or so of the ground and still plummeting. "Let's play hot and cold! Squeeze when I start to do the right thing!"

  He focused on the Hourglass and considered tilting it marginally toward. Sning squeezed. So he did tilt it, very slightly—and started to move forward. He increased the tilt, encouraged by Sning, until he was traveling downward at a forty-five-degree angle, his forward motion equal to his descending motion. This was an improvement, but not enough to prevent him from passing through the ground in short order.

  Should he tilt the Hourglass back the other way?

  Squeeze, squeeze. Sning was telling him no.

  What, then?

  Squeeze.

  "What do you mean, 'yes'?!" Norton demanded. "I don't know what to do!"

  Squeeze, squeeze.

  Approaching disaster, or at least discomfort, sharpened his thinking. "You mean I know what to do, if only I think of it?"

  Squeeze.

  "But what I need is to stop falling, and I don't have any control for that!"

  Squeeze, squeeze.

  "I do have a control? But I can't tilt the Hourglass up, unless I just lift it—"

  Squeeze.

  He was almost at the ground, sliding into a small cultured lake where tourists were fishing from magic carpets. He jerked the Hourglass up—shot up as if launched from a catapult. He wondered whether the tourists were staring, then realized they couldn't see him; he was not phased in to their time scale.

  Hastily he corrected and, after yo-yoing a few times, got himself stabilized about a mile up.

  So it was movement of the Hourglass, rather than tilt, that did it—when it was in the yellow mode and in gear. Satan had misled him. No—probably Satan hadn't known. He had seen the prior Chronos—now who would that be? Himself, hence?—tilt and move off, so thought that was the only way it was done. There might be a lot that the Prince of Evil did not know about the office and accouterments of Chronos, and it was best that Satan remain ignorant. All Satan's helpfulness might have been an effort to get to understand the workings of the Hourglass better, for no legitimate purpose.

  With his broadened control and Sning's guidance, Norton finally made it back to the place and moment he had started from. Satan remained sitting; to him only a minute or so had passed. Let him never know how precarious a ride Norton had taken!

  "So now you know how to do it," Satan said with a friendly smile. "No trouble at all, was it? Now you can take My minion to his interview."

  "I'm not sure—"

  "Oh, yes, of course! Silly of Me to forget! You want to see the nature of My coin. I said I was prepared to pay well and indeed I shall."

  "No, I—"

  "That's all right, Chronos. I will show it to you. It is an excursion to the aspect of the continuum you can't reach conve
niently alone—distant space."

  "Space?" Satan had him off balance again, perhaps intentionally. What was he up to now?

  "You control time, Chronos; that seems to overlap into space, but that is not strictly the case. You travel by standing still and permitting the world to pass by you in selected fashion. I can control space, for evil is everywhere. You can range to the ends of Eternity; I can range to the ends of the contemporary universe. This is what I offer you—travel in the universe, such as you have never known and can not know on your own. Let Me show you—a sample of what I offer in exchange for the token favor I ask. I am sure you will agree it is a bargain."

  A bargain? Travel far beyond Earth was impossible, since magic was associated only with solid matter, like gravity, but did not have the infinite range of gravity. Five thousand miles or so above Earth, there was no magic—not until a person stepped onto some other planet and drew on its magic. Satan himself would have to use a matter transmitter to visit Mars or Venus.

  Therefore this had to be an empty promise, a bluff.

  Norton decided to call Satan's bluff. "Yes, show me."

  Chapter 7 - BEM

  Satan gestured—and suddenly Norton was zooming out through space at an accelerating rate that left the planet Earth far behind in a moment, and then the sun itself. He was in deep space, light-hours from his home planet, heading toward the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, watching the stars streak by. He had no discomfort; he seemed to be magically protected, so that he felt pleasantly warm and could breathe; evidently the cloak was protecting him.

  He had called Satan's bluff—and it hadn't been a bluff! How was that possible? Had he misunderstood the limitations of magic? It certainly seemed so!

  There were moments of darkness as he passed through bands of galactic dust. Then he was in a channel of starless space, sliding along a glowing spiral arm of the galaxy, the individual stars shining along its curving length like jewels. He looked up and saw a globular cluster of stars passing overhead, a bright ball orbiting the center of the galaxy at right angles to the plane of the great disk of it. Then he curved up toward that cluster, departing the galactic plane, spiraling in. The tiny cluster swelled enormously, becoming a miniature galaxy-ball itself, with something like a hundred thousand closely packed stars. What a spectacle!

  As he came toward it, he decelerated. He entered it—but now it was evident how large it was—many light-years across, the stars thinning out at the edge, so that there really was a good deal of space between them. He coasted on in toward the center, where day was eternal and stars virtually rubbed elbows. He came at last to a magnificent space station shaped like a giant spooked wheel, with tiny spaceships docked around the rim. But as he slowed and came closer, he discovered that these ships were not small, but large; the scale of the station dwarfed them. They were of many types, some being as sleek as needles, others resembling Earthly battleships floating in space, complete with layered armor and projecting cannon, and still others resembling collections of saucers.

  It was to one of the needles Norton finally came. He phased through the hull in ghostly fashion and landed on a deck in what he took to be the control region. Windows or screens opened out to provide a panoramic view of the wheel station, the docked ships, and the myriad stars shining beyond.

  A spaceman got up from the pilot's seat. He was tall, lanky, blond, and handsome in a rugged prairie way; his legs bowed out slightly and he wore a blaster at his hip, bolstered for a rapid draw. He eyed Norton appraisingly, a stalk of timothy grass projecting from the comer of his mouth. "So you're my co-pilot," he drawled, his lips thinning. "You shore don't look like much, stranger! Any good with a blaster?"

  "No," Norton confessed. What had Satan gotten him into?

  "Ever blast any buggers?"

  "What?"

  "Bems."

  "Bems?"

  "You know—the Bug-Eyed-Monsters who're trying to take over the Glob. The Geniuses hired us to clean the Bems out of this sector of space. I lost my co on my last mission, but they said they'd send a replacement." He grinned boyishly and chewed on his timothy. "I was sorta hoping for a Femme."

  "Femme?"

  "Pardner, where you been? You don't know what a Femme is? A human woman, or reasonable facsimile thereof, maybe twenty years old, shaped like that sand dingus you're holding, hot-blooded and not too smart."

  "Oh. There must be a mistake. Not only am I not a—a young female—I also know next to nothing about spaceships or monsters or Geniuses."

  "A mistake for shore!" the spaceman agreed. He hawked disgustedly, looked about, found no spittoon, and finally swallowed it. "We'll get this here nonsense cleared pronto!" He strode to a communications console and punched buttons with his dirty thumb.

  A head appeared on the screen. The face was small and squeezed together, as if shoved aside by the hugely bulging braincase. The skull was hairless and traversed by purple veins and seemed almost to pulse with the overcapacity of gray matter it enclosed. This, surely, was a Genius—the end product of human evolution, virtually all mind and no body.

  "Yes?" the head whispered. It seemed the vocal cords, too, had been largely displaced by brain stuff.

  "Bat Dursten here, sir," the spaceman drawled. "My new co-pilot just moseyed in—but he says he don't know nothing about ships or blasters or Bems, and he shore don't look like much. Sending him—that musta been a glitch. I need a replacement pronto—maybe a nice li'l Femme."

  "There is no error, Dursten," the Genius whispered sibilantly. "Norton is to be your companion for this mission. He is competent."

  "But he's a greenhorn!" the spaceman protested. "Never even blasted a Bem!"

  "He will suffice," the Genius insisted, the veins in his forehead turning deeper purple.

  "Gol-dang it, sir—" Dursten started rebelliously.

  But something strange was happening. The Genius was staring with his two bloodshot orbs intently at Dursten—and the spaceman's hair was lifting as if drawn by an unseen hand. Smoke began to curl from it, and his timothy wilted.

  Dursten felt the heat. "Ow!" he yelled as he slapped at his hair, spitting out the grass. "Okay, okay, sir; he's the one! We'll make do somehow."

  "I rather thought you would see it my way," the Genius said, smiling with his little pursed mouth as he faded off screen.

  "What happened?" Norton asked, amazed at this interchange. He could see a dark patch where the man's hair had frizzed.

  "Aw, he used his psi on me," Dursten said, rubbing out the last of the heat. "They do that when they get riled."

  "Psi?"

  "Don't you know nothing? All the Geniuses got psi power. They can't do nothing with their spindly li'l bodies, so they do it with their hotshot brains. That one tagged me with telekinesis and pyro. Just his way o' making his point. I'm stuck with you."

  "He lifted your hair and burned it—by sheer mind power?"

  "That's what I said, Nort."

  "But he wasn't even present! He must be somewhere else on the Wheel."

  "Somewhere else in the Glob, you mean. Geniuses don't never risk their hides in space. Distance don't matter none to them; if a Genius can see you, he can tag you. If he'd been really mad at me, he'da stopped my heart."

  "If the Geniuses can do that, why do they hire mercenaries?" Norton asked. "They should be able to stop the hearts of the Bems themselves."

  Bat Dursten sighed. "You really are a greenhorn! Okay, since I'm stuck with you, reckon I'd better fill you in on the scene so you'll be able to cover my flank. The Geniuses share the Glob—that's this star cluster here—with the alien Bems. Things have been quiet for a century or two, but now the Bems are getting grabby. They rustled several human planets, raped the women, ate the men, and did mean things to the kids. They're trying to take over the whole dang Glob! Naturally the Geniuses don't like that—but Geniuses won't never leave their plush cells deep in their planets for nothing. So they've got to hire more regressive types of human critters like us. They pay p
retty well, and I reckon it's a good cause, so we're for hire. Me, I sorta like blasting Bems anyway; wouldn't want none o' them to get fresh with my sister, for shore! But Bems are immune to the Genius psi, so we got to use old-fashioned weapons. Which is okay by me; real men don't use psi. We're massing for a big battle now; we're going to raid a Bem planet and give them buggers a taste o' their own snake oil."

  Norton was getting the picture, but still had trouble with an aspect of it. "The Bems—if they're really bugeyed monsters, their metabolism must be quite different from ours."

  "That's for shore!" the spaceman agreed readily. "They're a cross atween bugs and cuttlefish, with huge eyes all over and tentacles and slime dripping. Real yucky!"

  "Then how could they have any sexual interest in human women? Surely the women would be as repulsive to the Bems as the Bems are to the women."

  Dursten scratched his tousled head. "Now that there's a puzzle, now I think on it. But it's a fact that Bems always chase Femmes, 'specially the luscious ones in bikinis. We got a lot o' pictures o' that, so we know it's so. If it wasn't for us noble spacers to rescue them dolls, there'd be no luscious ones left." He paused thoughtfully. "Strangest thing, though—some gals seem 'most as worried 'bout us as them."

  "There's no accounting for taste," Norton said. "I suppose if you want the girls for similar purposes—"

  He was interrupted by a siren wail. Red lights flashed on the control panel.

  "Yow, that there's the campaign alert," Dursten said. "Get your butt into that there co-pilot's seat, Nort. It'll just have to be on-the-job training. I shore hope you're a fast study."

  Norton got into the seat. Automatic safety clamps fastened him down. Dursten hit the castoff switch, and the ship dropped off its anchorage on the Wheel.

  "Watch it, now. I'm throwing her into null-gee for maneuvering," the spaceman warned. The weight left Norton; only the seat restraints kept him from floating away.