"Gently," Clotho cautioned him. "We are fairly high at the moment."
"Gently," Thanatos agreed. He reached up and touched a talon with a skeletal finger.
The bird shuddered—and so did the car. The roc had felt the touch of Death, and that was a touch no creature ignored. The roc spiraled down to the ground and set the car gently back on the road. Then it hastily departed.
Norton realized why caution had been advisable. Thanatos could have stunned or killed the big bird—but that would have led to a crash landing. So he had merely given warning—and the roc, recognizing a power more sinister than its own, had yielded.
But a new problem loomed. A cloud formed, and rain slanted down from it, turning rapidly to sleet and then snow. From the right puffed smoke and steam; then a vent opened and molten rock poured out. The lava was not moving rapidly, but it was hideously hot; the vegetation it touched burst instantly into flame. The snow, on the other side, was already piling so deep that the ear could not plow through it.
Clotho shook her head. "Ge." She sighed as if addressing a naughty child. "Mortis, follow my thread." She flicked a finger, and a thread flew out, passing through the windshield without touching it and extending in front of the car, glowing.
Mortis followed it. The thread wound through the slush melted by the lava, left the road, traveled along a ridge that held the lava temporarily at bay, and went across a narrow channel that concentrated the lava. The car speeded up to hurdle the ditch, then slued about to follow the curving thread toward the main mass of lava. This seemed hazardous indeed to Norton, particularly since the traction was treacherous and the visibility almost nil, but the thread of Fate knew exactly where to go. That, of course, was part of Fate's business—to know the intricacies of man's interaction with Nature. They threaded their way successfully between snow and lava, sometimes with each close enough to touch on either side from a window, sometimes pausing, then scooting forward, avoiding a minor avalanche, and emerged onto a firm, dry road. Fate had foiled Nature.
Then Norton experienced an urgent need to relieve himself. His gut knotted and his bladder swelled. "Uh, if we could stop a moment..." he said.
Luna fidgeted. "Ge again; we all feel it. No way to avoid it, and stopping won't relieve it. It's her specialty for intruders: instant flu." Her cheek seemed greenish.
Indeed, now Norton's stomach roiled. Beside him, Clotho looked seasick, and Thanatos seemed about as sick as a skeleton could be.
Clotho turned to him. "Your turn, Chronos."
Oh. Norton lifted the Hourglass, turned the sand blue, and willed the immediate region to be included in a short hop. There was a small jump, and the discomfort abated.
He had brought the car and occupants five minutes into the past, which was his future, before the illness commenced.
Clotho took a deep breath. "Thank you, Chronos. A girl doesn't like to look sick in public." She brought out a small mirror and checked her young and pretty face.
He had not violated the three-person rule, since he had not duplicated himself. Well, perhaps he had, because he had been phased in to real-world time. The others and the car would be duplicated for five minutes, but by the time the other carful of them caught up to this spot on the road, this car would be gone, and so there should be no problem. The other carful would fade out, leaving this one.
Or could the other carful have been retroactively erased? That would avoid the three-person problem. There was still a lot he did not understand about his office.
Now the mansion of the Green Mother Nature was before them. It seemed to be formed of vegetation, its thick wood alive and leafy, with a streamlet flowing from level to level in the manner of a fountain. Animals peeped from crannies—bunnies, wrens, lizards, and perhaps an elf or two. This was indeed the handiwork of the Earth Mother.
The car parked, they got out, and Mortis reconverted to equine form and set about grazing beside the mansion. Had they really been inside a horse all this time? Norton shook his head, filing the matter as another wonder to be pondered at leisure at such time as he was alone with a campfire. The four walked up to the entrance.
Gaea met them there. She was a stoutish woman of middle age with a crown of woven leaves and vines and a dress of leaves and pine needles; green was certainly her color. She seemed to Norton to possess an aura of competence and power; this was no innocuous creature.
If green was Nature's color, he reflected, then surely black was Thanatos', and white his own. But what would be Fate's color?
"We're in trouble, Ge," Clotho said without preamble. "Satan tricked Chronos into taking a demon back in time to eliminate Luna. That was partly balked by paradox, but there's a sleeper. I can't quite track it down."
Gaea glanced at Norton. "My apology for my error," she murmured.
No confusion there! She was referring to the problem with Oriene's baby. "Accepted," he said. He knew she had helped facilitate his present office as compensation for that error.
Gaea turned to Clotho. "Let me see it."
Clotho held out her hands, the network of threads between them. Gaea peered. "May I?" she asked.
"You may," Clotho replied.
Gaea made a little gesture with a hand near the threads. They changed—and the environment changed. The threads became curling green vines with sprouting leaves—and the five human figures in the mansion seemed to be standing in an enormous garden, existing on the scale of insects.
The vine-threads wove through the fabric of this new reality in an amazingly complex scheme. Everything seemed to relate, in some obvious or devious fashion, to everything else. Of course, that was the nature of reality, or the reality of nature, and of fate, and this manifestation was hardly surprising, since these were the very Incarnations of Nature and Fate.
Gaea walked along a vine. "Here it is," she said. "Here is where the threads were crossed."
The others crowded close. Norton saw that a tiny stem, something like a section of fine straw, had been moved, so that it crossed the main vine in a slightly different place. The change hardly seemed significant.
Clotho concentrated—and the vines expanded, until the large vine seemed to be the diameter of the height of a man and the small stem was three inches through. "I will analyze the small one," Gaea said. "That one's dead, but I believe it holds the key." She gestured. A glow formed about the small vine and the place from which it had been moved. Colored light radiated from that region, separating into prismatic components, bathing them all in rainbow hues.
"There," Gaea said, pointing to a dark band amidst the colored light. "The spectrograph shows it. Contamination."
"Dangerous?" Clotho asked.
Gaea frowned. "No. It's cyanide, but that was there before the interference. It has been chemically nullified, so that its effect on a human being would be minimal. A few hours of queasiness, no more."
"Why should Satan act to nullify an existing poison?" Thanatos asked.
Clotho inspected the larger vine. "Oops," she said. "Now at last I fathom it. What an insidious plot!"
Gaea looked at her expectantly. "You had slated a poisoning?"
"Not exactly," Clotho said. "Here, Lachesis can explain it better." She shifted to middle-aged form. "I do not slate people for doom any more than Thanatos kills them," Lachesis said. "I merely weave the threads in necessary patterns. Some mortals must prosper and some must decline, and there is no guaranteed personal justice in this. My concern is not for individuals, but for the pattern as a whole. In this case, a certain older man of indifferent qualities had to be woven out in order to make way for a young woman of superior qualities. So—he was accidentally poisoned, mostly by his own carelessness. He swallowed a pill contaminated by cyanide and died at the age of sixty-two. It was small loss for the world, though he was politically prominent."
"Cyanide," Luna said thoughtfully. "I remember—"
"The same," Lachesis agreed.
"I don't understand," Norton said.
Lachesi
s faced him. "This remains in your future—but you do need to know now. The senior Senator from Luna's state died in office, so a special election was scheduled. Luna ran for that office with the support of the Forces of Good and won. This is the office she now holds."
"Luna is a Senator?" Norton asked, surprised. He might have heard about it before, but it hadn't sunk in.
"And an excellent one," Thanatos said with a certain possessive pride. "At the moment, the Senate isn't in session, so she's not in the news, but normally she is. She was first elected eight years ago and is now well established with a firm base of support. She may one day become our first female President."
"I haven't decided to run yet!" Luna protested, embarrassed.
Norton was embarrassed too. He had been so much out of touch with contemporary affairs that he had never heard of Senator Kaftan during his ordinary life.
"But after you balk Satan in that critical showdown, you will be the front runner," Lachesis said. "I see it in the threads."
No wonder Satan didn't like Luna! A powerful female political figure, allied with the Incarnations themselves, possessed of a legacy of magic from her Magician father—she would be in an excellent position to balk any political ploy the Prince of Evil tried! Obviously he had something in mind and needed her out of office so she couldn't interfere. "Then the demon I took back in time—"
"Went and nullified the contaminated capsule that the original Senator was destined to take," Lachesis concluded. "So when he takes it, he won't die and will remain in office, and there will be no special election for Luna to win. She will remain a lesser officeholder and not become a Senator, and will not be in a position to foil him politically at the critical moment."
Subtle indeed! "But couldn't she win the office in a normal election?"
"Against an incumbent? No chance! The Senator has to be dead before giving up his seat." Lachesis grimaced. "And even if she did manage to oust him, it wouldn't be the same. Taking office four years later, she wouldn't have the same seniority. That's important for key committees and influence—especially the committee chairmanship that will give her the specific authority she needs. No, Luna has to win that seat when she did—which means we have to restore that capsule before the Senator takes it."
"But this is murder!" Norton cried, aghast.
"We do deal in life and death," Gaea said, with a significant glance at Thanatos.
"But in their proper pattern," Lachesis said. "Is it really murder to restore the events of the past to their original settings?"
Norton was confused and unhappy. "To poison a person knowingly—"
"Have you any notion," Lachesis asked grimly, "how many people will knowingly be poisoned—and tortured, murdered, and literally damned to Hell—if the minions of Satan win political power on Earth?"
"No," Norton said.
"With political power, Satan can and will make the worship of God a crime punishable by torture until recantation. Thus all those who are not good enough or strong enough to resist such torture—and that is the majority—will become worshipers of Satan, and the balance of power will shift to Him. He will have His way with both Life and Afterlife, and there will be no reprieve from Evil. On that day, the death of one corrupt Senator will not even be noticed, for Good itself will be dead."
"But—you are saying the end justifies the means!" Norton was still deeply troubled. "If we do evil in the name of good—"
"Why don't you step into Hell and see what Satan's power is like?" Gaea asked him. Her eyes were like blue skies with roiling clouds in the background.
"I can do that? Visit Hell?"
"You are an Incarnation. You can do what you choose. Even Satan can not deny you that."
Norton considered—and found that he did not need to visit Hell to know that Satan was evil. He did not like killing, but it was true that the ethics of his revising the past were problematical. Was he guilty of murder if he did not set about revising history to eliminate every death that had occurred during his projected term of office? If he decided to let history stand as it was, deaths included, was it right to allow Satan to make the decision about which person should be spared by a spot revision? Viewed that way, the sacrifice of the Senator seemed to be the lesser of evils. He did not like becoming the instrument of the Senator's demise, but he preferred that to the evil Satan would generate if the Senator lived. It seemed he had to choose among flawed means to achieve the smallest total evil for the society, cutting one thread for the benefit of the majority. He had to respect the judgment of the other Incarnations, who had been in office longer than he had and who had had more experience with the machinations of Satan. "No, I will help you to restore the original past. I will take you back to when the demon changed—" He broke off, remembering the three-person barrier. "Except you tell me I can't go back there, having been there once before as Chronos."
"There is a way," Gaea said. "But it is not easy."
"None of this is easy," Norton said.
"None of it is," Gaea agreed. "You can not return directly to that time. But you can return to a spot on the timeline that is no closer than your elapsed personal time, and anchor yourself then, and—"
"Wait! Wait! I'm hopelessly confused! No closer than what?"
Luna came and took his hand. "You are new in office, however long we have known you in it. We keep forgetting, because you have been so knowledgeable in our past. I will explain, while they narrow down the precise coordinates of the demon's interference." She guided him to another huge vine, and they sat down on its resilient surface. She had a remarkably compelling presence and a quiet air of authority and she was, despite her age, a beautiful woman. Norton could understand how Death himself loved her.
"Time is objective," Luna said, "and subjective. It passes in the world and it passes for you—and though your normal course is opposite to that of the world, time is equally real for both of you. When you live a day, the world lives a day, and this ratio holds regardless of direction. So, since it has been about six hours from when you loosed Satan's minion on Earth, in terms of your life, the same amount of time has passed on Earth since the change. You can no more return to a spot within that six hours than you can duplicate yourself; it is an aspect of the same limit."
Norton shook his head. "It almost seems to make sense when you say it."
She smiled. "Almost! It will make more sense to you as you mature in office."
"Nonetheless, I can't accept all of it."
"What can't you accept?"
"First, I can duplicate myself; I have already done so more than once. So—"
"Duplicate once, yes; it is the second duplication that is the barrier."
"Yes. But since my original life counts as one, and my present backward life as another—"
"Did we say that? That was a misunderstanding. Your prior, mortal life is excluded. Only your present Incarnation relates. You have no further connection with your mortal existence; that is one reason you are immune from any paradox involving it. So your normal backward course is one, and your jump to our past is another."
"But I have doubled up, and interfered with my prior Chronos self—in fact, once I rescued my prior self from destruction."
She pursed her lips. "That's interesting! But it does not violate the three-person rule. It does not matter whether your doubles are together or far apart; you can not conveniently go triple."
He nodded. "Yes, I see how it applies now. But the other thing is this business of six hours. It has been a lot longer than that since—"
"I calculated it," Lachesis called, overhearing him. "Your time in Satan's frame doesn't count for this, only your time in this one. You slept for three hours, talked with Satan for half an hour, and spoke with me for an hour and a half before we realized the problem and went to join the other Incarnations an hour ago. Six hours total."
"I see," Norton said, surprised at the accuracy of her assessment. But, of course, she was Fate, the Mistress of the Threads of Li
fe; this was her business.
"At the moment," Luna said gently, "it is enough for you to know that these six hours are barred to you by direct effort, but that you can penetrate them by an extraordinary measure."
"I land seven hours later and—what?"
"And turn back the clock," she said. "You must reverse time and take the whole world with you. That will put you in the same category as you were—would be—will be, for you—when you live through that period as Chronos. You will pre-empt that period."
"You mean, by that device I'll actually erase whatever I was doing in my normal course then?"
"We believe so. There is a risk, if that normal course covers something important, but Lachesis sees no problem in her threads. Perhaps that period has never happened for you, because of your pre-emption, so nothing is lost."
Norton's head was spinning again. "How do you know my so-called normal Chronos self will go?" he asked. "Maybe I'll actually be tripling myself. That's theoretically possible, isn't it?"
"I suppose it is," she agreed with a certain reservation. "There may be an infinite progression, like a picture within a picture, or mirrors facing each other. But it is convenient for us to call it the three-person limit. Our understanding is more restricted than yours will be; perhaps we understand only part of your nature. At any rate, we are reasonably certain that if you reverse time for the world, for those six or seven hours, you will be able to reach the moment the demon acted, despite your prior trip there, and to nullify the demon just before it acts. Then you can relax, with the world returned to its original course, the damage undone—and protected by the same three-person limit that at the moment is causing us so much difficulty. Reversing Satan's ploy."
"But what, when—?"
"When you come to that period in your normal life? I believe you will simply jump over it, having already lived it preemptively. The three-person limit should not harm you, but merely cause you that inconvenience—if we judge it correctly."
"It seems reasonable enough to me," he said. "Thank you. Senator—"
"Luna."
"Luna. Now I think I know what I'm doing."
Incarnations of Immortality Page 56