moment was lost to view.
He hoped the package arrived safely in Heaven. This seemed an unconscionably primitive way to transport a commodity as precious as a soul. Surely it should be possible, in a world possessing magic carpets and luxury airplanes, to transport a soul more safely and efficiently than by such means. But, of course, this was his predecessor's method; maybe Zane would be able to update it when he learned more about the office.
The merged stones fell apart, their original dull colors returning. That job was finished. He returned them to the dashboard compartment.
The Deathwatch was counting down past ten minutes. He had used up his spare time and had to move.
Zane oriented the car and touched the hyper drive button. This time the wrenching was longer. He looked out the window. He was passing across water. He was proceeding east across the ocean, according to the compass he now spotted on the dash. He left the night and reentered day, realizing that it had been evening when he started this business, and late afternoon when he had taken his first client in Anchorage, and evening again in Firebird for his second. The world continued its turning regardless of his business, and he was zipping in and out of day.
In a moment, land loomed. The car swooped up to it, slowing, then rolled across a brief beach, through a development of twenty-story modernistic condominiums, through — not around — a ragged brown mountain range, past a village that filled in a valley with white, plastersided houses, through an olive orchard, past grazing horses, and to an open field.
He was now near his client. He wasn't sure why the hyper drive never delivered him precisely to the target; perhaps long-distance accuracy was not great. More likely it was to preserve the anonymity of Death's approach; it would be hard for people to ignore a car that abruptly materialized on the site of an accident. Magic did have its limitations, so it was best not to push it too far.
He used the eye and arrow to close in on the target and arrived with a good minute to spare. He was at a decrepit farmhouse amidst languishing fields. This was a poverty-stricken family.
He opened the door and walked in. He wondered whether he should have knocked, but concluded that no one would care to answer Death at the door. It was dawn here; he could hear the members of the family screaming at each other as they blundered sleepily about, getting organized in the chill house. His left ear picked up the translated words, for, of course, this was not Zane's own language. The people were grumbling about the cold morning, the inadequacy of food for breakfast, and a rat that skittered across the floor.
Zane's gems guided him to the bedroom. The woman was there, sitting on the bed, an expression of discomfort on her face as she struggled to don heavy, opaque stockings. One leg was raised, the knee bent, so that he had an intimate view of her thighs. He was shocked to see that they were almost covered by a flaming rash. Indeed, the woman looked sick; her face was flushed, her hair straggly and tangled. Her teeth, as she grimaced, were discolored, perhaps rotting. This was a young, fairly shapely woman, but her bad health made her unappealing. Her eyes were so deeply shadowed, it was as if they had been blacked by violence. Then Zane realized that there had been violence; she had bruises and scrapes all over her body where flesh showed.
Perhaps death would, in fact, be a boon to her. She was obviously living in misery.
But the arrow did not point to the woman. It pointed to the crib on the far side of the room where a small baby lay huddled.
A baby? How could he take a baby?
Zane walked past the woman, who paid him no attention, and stood over the crib. The baby had scuffled off its inadequate blanket during the night and lay, exposed and damp, face down, its skin bluish. It was, he realized, about to suffer a crib death.
But what of the fifty-fifty rule that governed his clients? Most people died and were separated from their souls without his direct help. Only those who so cluttered their souls with evil as to be in doubt of salvation required the personal service of Death. Almost by definition, a baby was innocent; therefore its freed soul should float blithely to Heaven. A baby was not yet, as Fate had quoted, the captain of its soul, and Heaven still lay about it.
Yet there was no question this was his client. The baby was fading fast. It was time. Zane reached down and hooked out the small soul.
The baby's mother, intent on her laborious dressing, never noticed. Zane walked past her, carrying the soul, and left the house. He felt ill.
In the Death mobile, he used the stones to analyze the little soul. The pattern was strange, because it was not a pattern at all; the soul was uniformly gray. Experience had not yet caused it to be variegated.
The verdict of the combined stones was neutral; the gem ball hovered in place like the moon it resembled, neither rising nor falling.
How could this be? What evil had this little boy done? What evil could he have done, confined to his crib, completely dependent on his sick mother?
Zane had no answer. He folded the soul neatly and put it in the bag.
The Deathwatch was counting down yet again. Was there no end to this? When did he get some rest, some time to think things out?
He knew the answer. Deaths occurred all the time, and the small percentage that required special attention continued, too. At some point he would have two difficult cases happen at the same moment, on opposite sides of the globe. What would he do then?
Zane was beginning to understand how a person performing the office of Death could grow careless, as his predecessor had done. When things got rushed, corners had to be cut, or the job would not get done. What happened to a Death who got too far behind?
He looked at the watch more carefully. It had three buttons on the side. This was a stopwatch, a chronograph, of course, though its timer did run backward. He had seen the type before. One button would be used to start and stop timing; another to zero the total; and the shorter middle one to set the regular time and calendar features when necessary.
But this watch ran itself, magically, responding to input he did not know about. Maybe it had a direct line to Heaven or Hell or wherever the allocation of souls was determined. Fate probably had a hand in it, as she measured her threads. He didn't time events; events timed him. Why, then, were the extra buttons necessary? What did they control?
He thought of punching a button. Then he hesitated; it could be dangerous to play with something he did not understand. Yet how else was he to learn? He had lived his life and almost died his death in an impetuous manner; he might as well be consistent.
Experimentally, he punched the lowermost button. Nothing happened. It depressed and sprang back without any specific point of resistance. Had it been disconnected? Not necessarily; a good stopwatch was protected from an accidental punching of the wrong button, as might occur when someone was distracted by a close finish in a race and aimed for the STOP button without looking. This should be the zeroing control, operative only when there was a fixed time registered, as would be the case after a race had been timed.
He punched the highest button. It clicked — and the red sweep hand stopped.
He studied the dial. There was no motion in either of the two miniature dials that showed hours and minutes. The sweep hand was frozen at twenty-three seconds after the minute. Before the minute, since it ran backward. But the third little dial continued to function; its hand moved briskly clockwise, telling off the seconds of ordinary time. So the stopwatch was stopped, but not time itself.
What did this mean? Since the stopwatch function governed the timing of the deaths of his clients, did this imply that a hold had been put on such deaths? That was hard to credit — but indeed his whole situation was hard to credit. Fate had mentioned a stoppage of deaths in the world until he, the new holder of the office, had commenced activity. And this did answer his question about appointments that occurred too close together. He might freeze one case while he handled the other.
And, of course, this gave him his chance to rest. He could simply turn off his job while he slept or ate or thought things out.
This was some watch! It did not merely time existing events, it coerced events to its timing.
Zane saw that he had only two minutes, in addition to the twenty-three seconds, until his next appointment, and the green gridstone showed this was halfway across the world. That was crowding it. He punched the zeroing button — and sure enough, the timing hands clicked back several minutes, providing him a full ten minutes. In that time, he knew, the Death mobile could take him anywhere on Earth.
