Wielding a Red Sword

by Piers Anthony

  "This much is true," Gaea said. "The woman wanted to be with you, Mars, so at the hearing she petitioned for a body among the mortals. There are some few soul-dead bodies, so I made one available to her. I did not realize that Satan had an involvement in this. I think she had in mind a surprise for you."

  "I—I never dreamed—" Mym said, amazed.

  "And here she is," Satan said, gesturing.

  A woman appeared. Her appearance was not that of Ligeia, but she approached Mym as if she knew him. He put out his hand and touched her, and knew immediately that it was her soul. Now the body began to assume some of the traits of her former one, as her personality animated it. She was young and comely, and her love for him was manifest.

  "But it seems she did not realize that you had made a deal with the demoness," Satan said.

  Ligeia gazed at Mym with hurt questioning.

  Satan, with uncanny insight, had brought about the confrontation Mym least desired. To have his lost love abruptly returned to him—after he had made the pact with the demoness! What was he to do now?

  "But of course your choice is clear," Satan said. "You did not know that your true love was returning to you. Therefore any arrangement you made with the demoness is null and void. I will take her off your hands." He raised one arm, pointing a finger at Lila.

  "No," Mym said.

  Satan arched an eyebrow. "No? You intercede for this soulless slut? That does not become you. Mars."

  "I accepted her help," Mym said with difficulty. "I agreed to accept her as my concubine. I can not go back on my word."

  "And so you reject your true love, who gave up her place in Heaven itself only to be with you?" Satan made a gesture of dismissal. "You would not do that. Mars."

  "What are you bargaining for?" Mym demanded.

  "All I ask is that you allow the world lo stand, Mars. As you can see, if it is destroyed now, your re-mortal girlfriend will have made her gesture for nothing. She will be returned forthwith to Heaven, and you will be left with the demoness. For I do not believe that you will be bound for Heaven after you have treated the mortal realm so."

  The notion of losing Ligeia a second time, after her phenomenal sacrifice to be with him, appalled Mym. But if he backed off now, Satan would have his way with Earth.

  "And you have no need to be concerned about this bit of nothing," Satan said. "I will eliminate her memory of you and put her to another assignment. That will leave your situation clear."

  It was still a sort of betrayal of the creature who had helped him, Mym realized. He had given his word.

  "I want nothing from you but your agreement to abate your plot against the mortal realm," Mym said. "Otherwise I will destroy it. What happens with the women is incidental."

  Satan shrugged. "You have My agreement," he said. "You have won this showdown. Mars."

  Mym almost gaped. Victory—just like that?

  "And I will take care of this minor business for you, as a gesture of amity," Satan said. He turned again to Lila.

  Ligeia moved suddenly to throw her arms about the demoness. "Leave her alone!" she cried.

  "Do not be concerned," Satan told her. "This is for your own good. Mars needs no concubine when he has you."

  "You understand nothing about the ways of princes," Ligeia said. "Mym gave his word. She did her part."

  Satan looked at Mym. "Does this make any sense to you, Mars? Why should the woman you love want competition from a demoness?"

  Why, indeed! Mym did not know what to think. He looked at the other Incarnations, but all of them were mute. It seemed that he had a decision to make.

  There was something about this that he didn't understand. It was as if this were far more important than just a decision about a demoness whose presence had become an embarrassment. But what was the significance? He had won, hadn't he? Why should he concern himself over such a trifle as the existence of a demoness whom all parties knew had never expected to survive beyond this point?

  A trifle? Why, then, was Satan taking the matter so seriously?

  Pay attention even to trifles. So said Five Rings.

  He focused his whole attention on that question—and, slowly, it came to him.

  "You shall not have Lila," Mym said firmly.

  The demoness turned her head to look at him, surprised. Ligeia remained holding her.

  "Because your friend has a soft heart?" Satan asked. "That will not change the nature of a demoness! Believe me, you will be better off without the spawn of Hell in your household."

  The Father of Lies could hardly have spoken more direct truth! Therefore Mym rejected it.

  Mym turned to the Clock. He raised the Sword. The seconds resumed their tickoff.

  "This is crazy!" Satan protested. "You risk the whole world for this damned bit of ether?"

  The sweep-hand passed ten seconds to midnight. Now the hint of the wailing of the world could be heard, as the anguish of the dread finale approached. Missiles rose from their silos, ready for launching. Monstrous destructive spells were being chanted.

  Satan turned to the other Incarnations. "Can't you see, Mars is crazy!" he cried. "All this, for a creature who is beyond damnation!"

  But no one responded. The others had yielded the decision to Mars. Five seconds, four, three. The wailing swelled into the final keening.

  Satan vanished. He had defaulted.

  The sweep-hand stopped at one second to midnight.

  Lila stared at Mym. "But why?" she asked. "You did not owe me this! You know my nature and you do not love me. You had already fulfilled your bargain."

  Mym lowered the Sword. The hands of the Doomsday Clock resumed their motion—in the other direction. They retreated slowly from midnight, then accelerated as the forces that had incited violence faded. They passed thirty seconds and kept moving.

  "I did what I realized I had to do," Mym said.

  "My memory has changed," Chronos remarked. "Satan has been defeated. Soon I will forget that alternate reality I knew before; I did not live through it, now."

  "But you had your victory!" Lila persisted. "And I was—am—now a liability to you."

  "No," Ligeia told her. "As a princess, I know that a prince needs concubines, and it is better to have them known and subservient. He will use you when I am indisposed. And you made it possible for him to find me and for him to find the way to face Satan down. We would not let you be abolished for that. Quite apart from the fact that the word of a prince is inviolate, not to be sullied or compromised, no matter what the cost."

  "But to risk the whole world in war—merely because you interceded—"

  "No," Mym said.

  Now Ligeia was surprised. "No?"

  "I love you, Li," Mym said. "And I owe Lila. But I did not do this for either of you, or to sustain my word."

  "But that does not make sense, then!" Ligeia protested.

  "I'm not sure whether I can explain," Mym said. "The key I perceived is from the book Five Rings. It has taught me the Way of Strategy. It advises me that, if I am trying to follow the Way and allow myself to diverge even a little, then this will later become a greater divergence, and I will lose the Way. I feel this is most especially true when dealing with the Incarnation of Evil himself. I must not diverge even the most trifling amount from the Way, lest I lose all. But it is hard to make that plain to those who have not been studying that book."

  "I believe I understand," Luna said. "This matter is larger than any single person or any single episode. Satan is an insidious corruptor who never rests and he is most dangerous in seeming defeat, as all of us know. It is his specialty to proffer a large reward for a very small compromise, for his resources are infinite. But he who accepts the first compromise has made a precedent, and it then becomes easier to accept the next, and the next, until at last Satan has after all won. Only by refusing any compromise at all, no matter how grotesquely uneven the stakes seem to be, can a person be proof against the insidious devices of the Master of Evil. Mars has refuse
d that first compromise, and thus shown Satan that he is not to be corrupted. This, more than the threat of the holocaust, is the true measure of his victory."

  Mym met Luna's gaze, nodding. She did understand! And now he understood how it was that she could be at the center of this titanic struggle between Good and Evil. When the time came for the critical decision to be made, Luna would be there, and would understand, and would have the courage to do what had to be done.

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  Part I: Technical

  Remember, this Note is a somewhat separate entry that need not be read to appreciate the novel. In life, the author's mundane existence tends to influence the fiction he writes; in fantasy, his fiction may influence his mundane existence. In my case, there can be alarming interactions and feedbacks, both ways. As I believe I have remarked before, I have absolutely no belief in the supernatural; therefore it plagues me incessantly, as if trying to force me to change my attitude.

  The theme of this novel is war, with its related aspects of violence and distress and wasted effort and sacrifice of life. I do not like war; naturally it fascinates me in the fashion of a snake with its prey. When I wrote of Death, death impinged on my life; when I wrote of Time, time was my problem; when I wrote of Fate I felt obliged to explain how deviously fate had brought me to this pass. Now I am writing of War, and of course I shall now describe the manner that violence touched my life at this time.

  But first news of a more technical nature. If you happen to be one who is sick of hearing about how yet another innocent soul has computerized, and his joys and horrors thereof, skip this section and go on to Part II of the Note, because here is more of the same, only worse.

  I have been among the last major holdouts against the computer age and have taken a certain pride in writing my manuscripts with a pencil on paper—sometimes on the back of someone else's discarded computer paper, read what delightful irony you will—and typing them on a manual Olympia, and still outperforming the great majority of computerized writers. Fancy machinery does not a writer make. But then they stopped making good manual typewriters, and mine was ten years old, with ten million words on it, about due for replacement. So, perforce, I surveyed the situation. I discovered that they don't make a Dvorak disk for the print-wheel typewriters, and the element typewriters are too limited for my needs. So I decided to go all the way to the twentieth century and computerize.

  Of course I had qualms. I tend to trust most that which is least complicated, and a computer is hellishly more complicated than pencil and paper. Could I compose on the machine? I concluded that I probably could, because I was able to compose fiction on the typewriter sixteen years earlier, before my newbom daughter converted me to pencil. (She was hyperactive, so I had to be constantly mobile to keep her out of mischief. The typewriter wasn't mobile. Yes, I was the one who took care of her; my wife was out earning our living, in those days.) After all, it is my mind that generates my fiction, and it matters little by what route that fiction is expressed: verbally, penciled, or typed. The computer is a different creature than the typewriter, but why should my fingers care what happens after they have performed at the keyboard? So I rationalized and hoped.

  There was one problem: that modified Dvorak keyboard I use. I converted to Dvorak before the computer industry did, so I use the original version, not the bastardized computer version, and of course I added my lower-case quote marks, making my version unique to me. Several years ago when I surveyed the situation, I found that no computer was able or willing to provide me with this option, though it should have been the easiest thing for them to do. I would have had to do it on my own, and there I ran into the catch-22 that I could not hire a specialist to modify my computer without violating the patent, and the complexities of designing my own conversion program were such that it wasn't worth it.

  But by this time, the market for home computers was beginning to get saturated, so that companies were somewhat more interested in accommodating the needs of the buyer; and technology had progressed. Companies like Apple and Wang had Dvorak as an option, but for complex but valid reasons I elected to do business with neither. (I could say ten times as much about computers as I am saying here; let's just say that I did my homework in this as in other things, and the decisions I have made were not frivolous.) A commercial program existed that would make all the keys programmable. That is, with this program I could change 5 to 0 and D to E and F to U, and all the other exchanges required for my keyboard. I would be happy to say, "F to U"; my problem had been solved. I proceeded to look for the most versatile and reliable computer system on the market, because I work hard and do not like to be balked by equipment failure.

  I will spare you the story of our search and of the fits and starts once I got my computer; it seems that just about every writer who has ever computerized has written an article on it, and I refer you to any of those articles for that story. I shall just touch on a few aspects that made my experience different from the norm. It seems I don't do much of anything in the normal way, which is one reason you are reading this material. (We understand each other, don't we, you and I?) (The prior parenthetical note does not apply to reviewers.)

  For hardware we bought the DEC Rainbow 100+. That's a heavy-duty home system with enough memory (256 Kilobytes) to handle my needs, enough storage (10 MegaBytes) for several novels, and the best designed keyboard on the market. For software we got SmartKey to redefine the keyboard so that I could have it exactly the way I wanted it. And PTP—Professional Text Processor—for the word processing. With twenty-two little macros for my special needs.

  Oh, I see I'll have to clarify this a bit. Very well: the hardware is the stuff you can see—the keyboard, monitor, disk drive, printer, cables and such. It has a masculine aspect; you can manhandle it about, with caution. The software is the programming, or the instructions that make the hardware operate so it doesn't just sit there and ignore you. It has a feminine aspect; you can't manhandle it because it will vacate the premises if you do. The firmware is what contains the software, naturally. "I dreamed I ran a computer in my maiden firm ware." In this case, what is called floppy disks. Yes, they are round and firm, and you can use two of them simultaneously, and no, they really don't sag.

  The macros are keys that are programmed to do special tasks that would otherwise take a number of keystrokes. For example, it normally requires five keystrokes for me to save my material to the hard disk, where it won't be lost if the power fails and shuts down the system, and twice that many if I want to mark my place and find it again after the save. My macro does it with a single stroke, returning me to my place and setting a little » symbol in the margin so I know it's been done. Also, because I switched over from pencil, I brought my little arrows with me: ----> to indicate the resumption of my text after a bracket note (you learned about those brackets in On a Pale Horse—one reader wrote to tell me that this device had solved his problem with that dread malady. Writer's Block); ----> to indicate the resumption of the main bracket note after a parenthetical interruption (oh, yes, I have notes within notes, as my disorderly ongoing streamof-consciousness runs the rapids of my creativity); and a vertical down-arrow to show that there is a long interruption in the text, so when editing I can skip down to the next page or so to find the resumption arrow.

  The pencil is more versatile in this respect than the typewriter, but the computer is able to keep pace with the pencil, a fact that goes far to endear it to me. That vertical arrow requires twenty-two strokes, several of which are multi-key—two or three fingers striking simultaneously. That's a real pain to assemble by hand, but one stroke of the macro does it all.

  But here: to show you how it works in practice, I shall not edit out the brackets and arrows of the second and third paragraphs following this one. No, I did not set those brackets up just for you; it happened just the way it is presented. But what I did do was insert this explanation ahead of it (which is one of the convenient things a computer can do for a writer: in
sert material without retyping the prior text) because otherwise those interruptions and arrows would be pretty confusing. So this paragraph is faked up, but not what follows. (I always try to be fair to my readers, even the unworthy ones.) Several prior bracket-notes relating to mysterious phone calls that interrupted my typing of this Note have been edited out, however.

  But there was another problem. The original keyboard had the period and comma on both upper and lower case, as many typewriters do. Some bright character in the hardware division had elected to save effort by having a default on those keys, so that only the lower-case characters got through to the screen. Thus when a capital period or capital comma was typed, the lower-case one was actually represented. Who would ever know the difference?

  (Editor's Note: The following two paragraphs are indented to permit setting Author's symbols. Author does not indent, but sets these beyond the margin, but this is not feasible in the case of book margins. This is a purely mechanical device and has no other significance.)

  Well, I knew the difference. Because [callback at 4:15 saying that they have a major problem with the line and asking me not to use the phone for another day. I told the man I could not distinguish between a legitimate request and a practical joke, so I would phone the company and inquire. He said fine, and he would call back in twenty minutes. So I called—and the operator pointed out (UPS delivery, three parcels—I didn't hear the truck, but heard the dogs barking) that we are served by United Telephone, not Southwestern Bell, so they would not be calling us about any local line problem. She agreed that it sounded like a practical joke. Good enough; I doubt that I will hear from that guy again.] in my changed layout, those keys are where my W and V are. So when I typed those capitals, I actually got them uncapped. DEC—Digital Equipment Co.—didn't know any solution to that problem, and neither did SmartKey. How can you get around a default when it is built in to the keyboard? (Later we realized the explanation might be simpler: SmartKey simply translates one symbol to another, not caring how the first symbol is generated. Because a capital period is the same as a lower-case period, SmartKey translates both the same way.)