Bearing an Hourglass

by Piers Anthony

  The chance of a lifetime—that was what Gawain had told Norton himself, when broaching the matter of the office of Time. But what chance would Satan offer anyone? "Why should you do a good turn for any mortal?"

  "As I mentioned, sir, I do believe in order. My office can not function without order. This mortal man's good fortune will contribute to a lifetime of order in that aspect of reality."

  Norton shook his head. "You will have to do better than that, Satan! You must have a dozen other ways to promote order on Earth, without traveling in time to help any one person. Why do a favor for a mortal?"

  "Well, Chronos, you are in a position to verify it directly. I will give you the coordinates so you can go there alone and see that this man will suffer no ill, only good, as a result of My minion's intercession. Only when you are completely satisfied on that score need you actually conduct My minion there. That is fair enough, isn't it?"

  Grudgingly, Norton nodded. "But I don't know how to travel precisely in time yet. I mean, to a particular point in human events. Lachesis took me on one trip, but we had her threads for guidance."

  "I will be glad to assist you in this," Satan said. "I have only the friendliest possible intent. You have merely to select on the calendar the specific date and hour and to will your Hourglass blue, with a preset stop at that spot. That is a fine supernatural instrument; it will obey you implicitly. Once there in time, you must negotiate the geographical distance."

  "By walking? That will limit my effectiveness."

  "Chronos, you are the Incarnation of Time. That means you have a certain practical control of space, too, for time and space are linked. You can travel anywhere on Earth you wish and to the colonized planets, too."

  Norton shook his head. "I don't see how, unless you mean by using conventional transport facilities."

  "I am here to show you how. Simply take the Hourglass—"

  "No. I don't want to travel with you."

  Satan took no offense. "No need, My dear associate. I will explain the technique to you so you can practice yourself. First I must clarify the underlying theory."

  "That would be appreciated," Norton said grudgingly. He wanted to be away from Satan, but he did need this information.

  "Motion, like evil, is everywhere," Satan said in a somewhat didactic manner. "The Earth spins about her axis with a surface velocity of close to a thousand miles an hour at the equator, which translates to about sixteen miles per minute or a quarter mile per second. That might seem to be a fairly formidable velocity."

  "Faster than I can run," Norton agreed. "I am aware that this rotation causes day and night. But what—"

  "Yet it is dwarfed by other aspects of motion. The Earth also revolves around the sun at a velocity of approximately eighteen and a half miles per second."

  "Causing the seasons and the year," Norton said. "But how does this relate—?"

  "But our sun, too, is moving, for our Milky Way Galaxy is rotating, and so the sun is carried around that galactic axis at the rate of about a hundred and fifty miles per second. Just as Earth's motion about the sun is about seventy-five times as rapid as the motion of a spot on Earth's surface about Earth's own axis, the velocity of galactic rotation is about eight times as great as that. Yet even this is relatively insignificant. The known universe is expanding, so all matter is in motion with respect to Galactic Rest. In that sense, we are traveling at approximately half the speed of light, or ninety thousand miles per second. Impressive, isn't it?"

  "Yes," Norton agreed. "But I still fail to see the relevance to my situation."

  "Peace, comrade; I am coming to that. The point is that, though you and I appear to be at rest at the moment, we are in fact subject to numerous and potent vectors of motion. It is a complex scheme we exist in! And since motion is a function of time as well as of space—"

  "Hey!" Norton interrupted. "If I move in time without moving in space, I'll drift right off the face of the Earth! If I travel into the past a single hour, the Earth, as part of the moving galaxy in the expanding universe, will have moved ninety thousand miles every second, or—"

  "Half a light-hour, or three hundred and twenty-four million miles, or the distance from Earth to Jupiter," Satan finished heartily. "Yes, indeed, Chronos, you would be lost in a moment, literally."

  "But since I live backward, I should be totally out of phase! Because I'm going back to a time when Earth was far elsewhere from where it is now, but I'm the only one going back there, not the Earth itself! And when I jump to another time—"

  "Relax, Chronos," Satan said. "Your very existence is safeguarded by the formidable magic of the Hourglass. It counters all the motions of the universe and maintains you in exactly the same location with respect to Earth's surface, regardless of how you use it. Without that protection, it is true, you would perish the instant you traveled in time, for you would in effect be flung deep into the core of the planet or out into the vacuum of space. That Hourglass remains with you and protects you from all mischief, its ambience forming your cloak." He smiled engagingly. "It even protects you from My mischief."

  "Can that be true?" Norton asked, dazed.

  "Naturally anything I tell you is suspect. But I seldom concern Myself with trivial or obvious lies; they are neither artistic nor productive, and so are not worth My effort. Ask your serpent ring. That is not one of My demons."

  So Satan knew about Sning! "Does the Hourglass really protect me from evil?" Norton asked the little snake.

  Squeeze.

  He liked the Hourglass better! "And it can help move me in space as well as in time?"

  Squeeze.

  "Indubitably, Chronos," Satan said smoothly. "All you have to do is use it to void certain aspects of the motion alignment-spell. Then you will move—or rather, fail to move, while the universe moves past you. With a little practice, you will be able to travel anywhere on Earth at the rate of many miles per second. But do try it cautiously; the Hourglass can protect you from any exterior malaise, but only to a limited extent from your own folly."

  "Folly?"

  "When you void part of its magic, you reduce its power to protect you. You could indeed get lost."

  Excellent warning! Norton had already experienced one careless jaunt into the distant past. Couple that with a voiding of its protection—could he have gotten himself eaten by a dinosaur? No, for he had never been solid, outside his allotted term of office. But inside his term, there might have been more trouble. Yes, he would have to be very careful, and Satan's warning was extremely well taken. Still, he did need to learn how to use the powers of the Hourglass. "How do I nullify any of it?"

  "Simply set the sand on yellow, then nudge it toward blue or red—red is best—so you're differing from normal time only slightly. Actually, I believe you can do it on your own backward time, but it is better to orient on Earth-normal when you're learning, so as to minimize the effect. That way you are dealing only with Earth's present motions, rather than with the added complication of Earth's past or future motions."

  "Uh, yes," Norton agreed, laboring to grasp this. If Earth was presently flinging outward from the universal center at half the speed of light, and he voided the protective spell while moving forward in time, he could multiply the effect and jump in space at several times the speed of light. He did not want to risk that! "Why yellow?"

  "That is the nullification mode. You wouldn't want it to happen while you were in another mode; you might travel in space by accident, disastrously. So you must make a very conscious effort, which is another protection for you. But you can get the other modes once you are in yellow."

  "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 appreci
ate 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 conveniently 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 r
ange 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.