“Don’t believe everything the Father of Lies tells you, you credulous slut,” Satan said.
“I resign from this institution! I’ll do your bidding no more!”
“It is academic. You are fired. You never were much use anyway.”
“Oh!” Mira exclaimed. She wheeled about and proceeded on up the stairs with Gaea.
Satan contemplated Niobe. His eyes were like small red fires and his horns steamed. “So now you have nullified the last of the four, you meddling frump,” he said. “You think you have won.”
“Evil is never truly defeated,” Niobe said grimly.
“This time you haven’t even started!” he said, his body smoking. Niobe raised the lorgnette, but Satan was unchanged. He was appearing in his true form. “You haven’t saved your precious United Nations.”
“Out with it, you old rascal,” Niobe said. “You set this up.”
“I set up four threads for Fate to unravel,” Satan said. “Now you have used up your time on them, and cannot stop the delivery of the bomb tomorrow.”
“But who’s going to carry it?” Niobe asked. “I have a hundred other carriers. Did you think only four could do it?”
“But the Purgatory Computer—”
“Listed hundreds for you.”
“It listed only four!”
“What you perceived was only four, old canine,” Satan said. He gestured, and the image of a computer screen appeared in the air beside him. On it were the four names. “You supposed that was the real presentation.”
Niobe struck her forehead with the heel of her hand. “Illusion! In Purgatory!” Of course it was in Satan’s power to distort the spoken and printed material the computer worked with; an illusion was a form of lie, and the lie was his specialty.
Gaea would have known, Atropos thought. But she wasn’t there.
Satan’s illusions are everywhere, Clotho agreed.
“The penalty of being a novice,” Niobe muttered.
“Had you realized how many there were,” Satan said, “you would have known that individual effort would never work. You would have found a more general way, such as alerting the UN security police, who would have set up psychic sensors to prevent any such thing from getting through.”
“I feel very stupid,” Niobe said ruefully.
“You’re not stupid, merely inexperienced,” Satan said. “The stupidity was in your predecessor trio, who allowed a change of all Three Aspects in the same week. I had really expected better from them.”
The pig! Clotho thought vehemently. He set it up!
Niobe sighed. “It’s not too late. We can still alert the UN.”
“Maybe,” Satan said. “It’s a chance. But why take it? I can offer you a better deal.”
“You’re not to be trusted!” Niobe said.
“Don’t depend on trust,” Satan said. “Depend on common sense. If I bomb the UN, there will be a very pretty tangle of Fate’s threads, leading to much disruption in the world. But no one can know exactly where that disruption will lead. Sometimes what seems good turns out evil in the long run, like the Catholic Inquisition or the Nazi SS cadre. Sometimes what seems evil turns out good, like the Black Plague.”
“The Black Plague!” Niobe exclaimed. “What good did that do?”
“It alleviated the European population pressure, decimated the labor force, and so paved the way for the end of the feudal system,” Satan said. “You can’t keep workers in peonage when there are so few that their value is great.”
Niobe suspected that Gaea’s predecessors had had their own reasons for spawning the Black Plague. But it was an interesting notion. “What’s your point?”
“The point is that this whole UN business is a gamble,” Satan said. “It might cost Me more than it is worth. Only a fool gambles when he doesn’t have to.”
“Many people are gambling on your gaming floor!”
“I rest My case. You do not see Me at the tables.”
“What’s your pitch, Satan?” she asked gruffly.
“You want to avoid a big stink. I want merely a small, harmless shift in one of Fate’s threads. It seems to Me that we might reasonably deal.”
“I won’t deal with Evil!” Niobe cried.
“Suit yourself,” Satan said. “Be sure to hold your nose as you pass the UN complex tomorrow—not that it will do much good.”
He had her there. “What deal are you proffering?”
“I will cancel the stink in exchange for a simple, shift in employment in one person. No harm done to her, no evil on her soul, just an inconsequential change.”
“If it’s inconsequential, why do you want it?” Niobe demanded.
“Inconsequential to you; important to Me. This woman is to go into politics soon. I would prefer to have one of My own in the office she seeks. Most politicians are corrupt anyway, so it hardly matters to you. I promised this minion—well, never mind. The point is, it’s something I’m willing to trade for. Are you interested?”
“I don’t trust this,” Niobe said.
Still, let’s see how it looks, Atropos thought. We don’t want to hit the UN tangle if we can avoid it.
“Who is this person?”
“A young woman, hardly more than a girl, of no consequence, really.”
“So you say. Name the woman.”
“Oh, she’s named Moon, or some such,” Satan said carelessly. “It hardly matters.”
“How do you expect me to adjust her thread if you don’t tell me exactly who she is?” Niobe demanded, aware that she was sliding toward agreement.
He’s up to something, Atropos thought. I wish Gaea had stayed; she’s one savvy lady!
Satan paused, touching his beard as he concentrated. “She’s actually the child of a former Incarnation, so maybe she had delusions of grandeur. Name’s—let me see—Kaftan.”
Niobe stiffened. It was Luna he was trying to eliminate—the one the prophecy said was destined to be the savior of man! Now it was clear that this whole UN tangle was merely a false issue, intended to make his supposedly offhand compromise seem worthwhile. In fact, the manner he had arranged to have all three Aspects of Fate change together now made sense. All three of the prior Aspects would have known about Luna, so they had had to be eliminated. Satan was playing a very long-range game!
But she would play along, just to get a better picture of his intent before she balked it. The three prior Aspects had chosen her to return because they had known Satan was plotting something devious; they had chosen better than they knew! But she wanted to be certain she knew the whole plot.
“There must be several women with that surname,” Niobe said, feigning perplexity. “What’s her lineage?”
“Oh, not much. One of My minions spotted her some time back. Two girls who look like twins, but a generation apart. I want the one who’s descended from the former Incarnation. The one with the darker hair.”
Again Niobe stiffened. Had Satan made a mistake? Her granddaughter Luna was destined to save man; Niobe’s daughter Orb was destined to become an Incarnation, if the prophecy was correct. Of course Satan was a busy entity; he probably hadn’t paid much attention to Niobe’s mortal affairs. Obviously he did not recognize her now. For the first time she blessed the loss of her youthful beauty! Perhaps the demon who had sneaked into the Hall of the Mountain King and activated the thief defense had confused the two girls—easy enough to do!—and reported Luna as the buckwheat-honey girl, and Satan had never thought to verify the identification. Luna was in fact the clover-honey girl, slightly lighter in hair hue. “You find this unreasonable?” Satan asked, noting her silence.
Niobe sighed. “Gaea told me not to trust you. You’re up to something.”
“My dear associate, there is no call to trust Me! You can handle it yourself! Simply give Me your word that if no bomb goes off at the UN, you will modify the girl’s thread to shunt her away from politics.”
Niobe tried to decide whether Satan was confused, or had some d
ouble devious plot in mind. “No harm will come to the girl?”
“I promise never to harm the girl whose thread you change,” Satan said magnanimously.
“But your promise is worthless!”
“That is true. I am the Father of Lies,” he agreed with pride. “But My word is sacred when properly given.”
“How is it properly given?”
“In blood, of course.”
“You have blood?”
He laughed. “Of course I have blood! I’m an Incarnation, like you!”
Niobe remembered. In her prior Incarnation she had learned things about the other Incarnations, and one of them was this: that Satan’s blood did bind him, and that the word of one Incarnation to another was inviolate. In this particular case, she could trust even the Father of Lies.
“Then we shall swear on blood,” she decided.
Are you crazy, woman? Atropos demanded, like a conscience. That’s your flesh and blood you’re sacrificing in that girl!
And the salvation of man, Clotho added. The two of them had picked up the information from Niobe’s strong conscious thoughts.
“Excellent,” Satan said. He held up his hand, and Niobe drew a needle from a reserve in her clothing and pricked his thumb so that a drop of blood welled out. Then she did the same for her own hand. The blood of Incarnations could not be shed by anyone, mortal or immortal, without consent, except perhaps in the case of Thanatos’ change of office. Satan had agreed to have his blood shed, and so had she—for this occasion only.
“An oath between Incarnations,” Niobe said. “Sealed in blood. You will spare the UN and respect the life of that woman, and I will adjust the thread of the life of the darker-haired descendent of Niobe Kaftan so that she never enters politics.”
“An oath, agreed,” Satan said. They shook their bloodied hands.
“I hope it’s worth it,” Niobe muttered, worrying what mischief Satan might try to do to Orb, despite his oath. There were ways to make a person miserable without doing actual harm. Yet the language was broad and the term “respect” covered a lot—especially considering the relevance of the prophecy. This oath was merely a step in the implementation of that prophecy. She was not completely easy about it, but thought she had done right in a difficult situation.
“It is for Me,” Satan said. “Considering that the matter is academic anyway.”
“Academic?”
“Chronos, curse his backward hide, acted on his own, and warned the UN security police about the bomb. They are installing psychic shields already.”
“You knew that?” she demanded, outraged. “You cheated!”
“Hardly. I agreed to spare the UN, and Niobe’s nonpolitical offspring. They will be spared.” Then Satan did a double-take. “How did you know that name ‘Niobe’? I never uttered it.”
“Satan, it is my business to know. The threads—”
But he was already making the connection. “You—I thought you looked faintly familiar! You are Niobe—once Clotho!”
Niobe shrugged. “Now I am Lachesis. But I will see that my mortal daughter Orb never enters politics. An oath is an oath.”
“Orb? I meant Luna!”
“Oh, is the matter academic?” she asked sweetly. “I swore to keep my darker-haired descendent free of politics.”
Satan considered. “You came back—to deceive Me!”
“Close enough.” Niobe shrugged. “Had you specified that it was Luna whom you—”
She expected an explosion, but Satan only nodded. “Sometimes the Father of Deceit is hoist with his own petard. I congratulate you, Niobe, on an excellent counterploy.”
“That is a compliment indeed, coming from you.”
“But now I know you, and I shall not be deceived again. There are other ways.” He vanished.
Niobe was not reassured. That had been too easy. Yet how else could she have played it? She extended a thread and slid toward home.
—14—
BRIBE
Back in the Abode, they rested, then returned to the routine. They had indeed foiled Satan, for the UN was not bombed. Perhaps, as Satan had claimed, the matter was academic—but only because Chronos had been alerted by their reaction and joined in himself. Since he lived backward, his subsequent action would have occurred before their conversation, but—well, that problem had been dealt with. Niobe’s daughter and granddaughter would continue their lives unobstructed; the existing course of their threads was unchanged.
What a stroke of luck it had been that Niobe had returned as Lachesis to deal with this particular matter! No one else would have known about the two fair moons, and been able to divert Satan’s thrust into a harmless channel.
Yet was it coincidence—or was there a deeper current of Fate that transcended the efforts even of the Incarnations? If so, what was the origin of that current?
“God,” Atropos said.
There it was. God honored the Covenant by not interfering in the affairs of mortals, while Satan chronically cheated. Evidently Satan had not signed that one in blood. But if God guided the larger pattern, all of Satan’s machinations would became—academic.
Was her return merely part of God’s will—or was it true coincidence?
“We’ll never know, for sure,” Clotho said.
With that, Niobe had to be satisfied.
Niobe now worked with Chronos more than she had as Clotho. True, she had had a long-term backward affair with the earlier Chronos, but that had been on a different level. She suspected, by the way this Chronos glanced at this Clotho, that there would be something of the sort again, but not for some time, and perhaps not with this particular Clotho. The youngest Aspect of Fate seemed to be a magnet for male attentions, whoever and whenever. But the main business was between Chronos and Lachesis. Only he could locate the specific chronology for the complex interactions of the threads. His staff and Fate’s staff coordinated the great majority of events competently enough, but there was a constant development of situations that required the attention of the Incarnations themselves.
It was during one such session that Chronos mentioned another thing that alerted her. “Periodically Satan has opportunity to free a few demons from Hell,” he remarked. “I don’t know what governs this, and it happens infrequently, but when a demon is freed, there is always mischief in the mortal realm.”
“Even the spirit of a demon is bad,” Niobe agreed.
“Ah, then you know the nature of the problem! I remember when I had to run the world backward to eliminate—but of course that hasn’t happened yet, for you. But it seems that such an occasion is about to happen again—has already happened, in your frame. I suspect it behooves us to verify exactly what mischief is being done, this time.”
“Can’t you tell, from your past?”
“That’s the odd thing. There doesn’t seem to be any effect. Yet Satan never lets such an opportunity pass unfulfilled.”
“No mischief?” she asked. “That is suspicious! What mischief could Satan do that you would not be aware of?”
“Something of limited scope,” he said. “Or something subtle.”
“If it’s too limited or subtle to affect the balance of good and evil in the world, it’s too limited to be worth his while,” Niobe said. “I’m sure he wouldn’t waste a valuable demon on anything genuinely minor.” She remembered the various demonic attacks on her own family. “There has to be something.”
“Perhaps something that manifests after my term began,” Chronos said. “That way I would not know of it. Satan is adept at sleepers.”
“Yes! Luna is supposed to be the salvation of man some time in the future, perhaps twenty years hence. Satan has enormous cunning and patience; he can afford to wait, to nullify your perception. There must be something the demon does now that will show up then.”
“He has done that sort of thing,” Chronos agreed. “Never that long-term, in my experience, but of course I foiled the shorter-term efforts. With difficulty, I confess. It
was quite wearing; if it hadn’t been for your support and Clotho’s—I mean this one’s successor—I might have given up.”
Niobe chose to ignore the remark about Clotho’s successor, and hoped Clotho had not picked it up; none of them wanted to know the times of their departures from office, voluntary as they might be. “That must be it. What could a demon do today, that wouldn’t take effect for twenty years? A time bomb?”
“Such devices are notoriously unreliable. More likely it would be some kind of change in personnel somewhere, so that someone would not be available to do something to oppose Satan in that time.”
“We have pretty well safeguarded Luna,” Niobe said. “So I don’t think the demon can touch her. She’s the only truly critical person I know of.”
“At one point, Satan sent a demon to nullify the accidental poisoning of the senator she replaced, so that—”
“Wait, wait, Chronos! You’re talking of the future! I wish you wouldn’t do that. Just speak in generalities, if you please.”
“Sorry. My point is that if Satan can affect people Luna interacts with, he can affect her indirectly. If she is to be pivotal in a political sense, the change of other personnel might transfer the pivot to another person.”
“Now I understand. You say she’s to become a senator?”
“Yes, if you don’t mind that information. A good one.”
“So the Senate is the likely arena for—whatever it is?”
“I would say so.”
“Then I’d-better check potential changes in the makeup of the Senate. I’m learning how to read the threads better, so I should be able to do this more efficiently than I did for the stink-bomb carriers. Did I thank you for your effort there?”
“Stink bomb? Oh, there was something in an alternate reality. The UN?”
“That’s right—if I thanked you last month, you wouldn’t know it now!”
“I’m sure you did what was proper—and I will too.”
“Well, thank you anyway—for that and this.”
She left the mansion and, as usual, took time out before returning to her Abode, so as not to meet her self of the immediate past; that was always unsettling. She had done it on occasion by prearrangement during the time of the child-Chronos, and that had been interesting, but she was too busy for that sort of thing now. She slid her thread down to pay a brief call on Luna, just to advise her of the current situation. She hadn’t seen the young woman since assuming the Aspect of Lachesis, so it really was time.
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