Bearing an Hourglass (21 page)

“Yes, that must be it. I spent a day there, all told, and returned here. Anyway, Satan wants a favor, and—”

“Don’t trust Satan!” Clotho said. “He is the most sinister and devious of the Incarnations! He is always concocting mischief.”

“I don’t plan to take anything he tells me at face value. But he has been helpful, so I will at least give him a hearing.”

“Well, leave me out of it,” Clotho said. “I suppose we all have to learn about Satan in our own fashions. Now—let’s get to work. Do you know how to use your Hourglass to read individual threads?”

“Not yet,” Norton admitted.

“Well, you were good enough at it yesterday, so I know you’ll catch on readily.” She proceeded to teach him how to orient on the particular life-thread of a person, and how to fix on the exact place that thread had to be started, kinked, and cut. He was interested, but he kept being distracted by her peek-a-boo display that served as a backdrop for the threads as she held them up between her hands, and feared he seemed inattentive at times.

The start of each thread was a mortal birth, each kink was a key event in that life, and the cut end marked the termination of that life. These were only the special lives, Clotho explained; his staff and hers did most of the routine planning. Norton found it confusing at first, but soon he had the Hourglass ticking off indications rapidly. Each
minuscule grain of sand, it seemed, was something like a mortal life, matching each of Fate’s fine threads.

He glanced at his Hourglass with new appreciation. All those fine grains of sand—all of humanity, represented in this one instrument! Each single grain too small to perceive by itself, yet of total significance for its person. Did the cosmos care about any single grain of life-sand? About when or where it flowed, or the satisfaction of its tiny existence?

After several hours, Clotho paused and stretched, flexing the peek-a-boo. “All work and no play,” she said and moved into his arms.

Startled, Norton froze. “Is something wrong?” he asked.

“Oh, haven’t we done this before, in your scheme?” she asked. “I keep forgetting—you’re coming from the other direction. This is new to you, isn’t it?”

“Everything is new to me,” he agreed.

“Well, I think this is the time to begin, then, because in the recent past we have—” She paused. “But why should I spoil it for you by my memories? Come on, I’ll lead you through.”

“Through what?”

“Silly boy! Why do you think I came as Clotho? I am the young man’s—”

“Oh. You—Lachesis—did say something about—”

She cut him off with a kiss. She was a most attractive woman in this guise, but his painful memory of Orlene remained, and he wasn’t ready for this. He drew away. “I hardly know you!” he protested.

She laughed, unrebuffed. “With any other person, I’d say you were joking! But that’s all in your future, isn’t it? Very well—what do you think is holding you back?”

Norton pondered. “I don’t suppose you’d care to believe anything about my not being a casual sort of person?”

She laughed merrily. “You? You forget that I measured your thread before you assumed this office! You’re fully casual with women!”

“You know me too well!” he agreed ruefully. He kept allowing himself to be deceived by appearances, when by
now he ought to know better. Clotho had those deep eyes of Fate and she was no young or innocent damsel. No, indeed! She was an Incarnation, with all the subtle power that implied. “But all that stopped when I met Orlene. She was the first true love I experienced, and—”

“Oh, yes, of course—that’s still fresh in your mind! How silly of me to forget! It is my position to help you get over that so you can focus without reservation on your office. Very well—we’ll take time off to go see your mortal woman.”

“We?”

“Well, you could take me with you if you chose; it’s in your magical power to do so. But I agree: for this, you’d better go alone.” She fished in her dark hair and drew forth a single strand. “Here is Orlene’s thread. Truncated, as you can see; only a third as long as it should have been. You can, of course, restore the full length, if you wish. The powers of the Incarnations are great, but none are absolute where they overlap those of other Incarnations. Orient your Glass on this, and you’ll find her anywhere you choose.”

Norton had been learning the technique of thread orientation. He touched the Hourglass to the thread, then willed the sand blue.

The mansion vanished. He was zooming along the thread as if riding a cablecar. Events of the world rushed past, glimpsed momentarily.
Slow
, he thought, and progress eased, the glimpses becoming longer.

It was Orlene’s life he was following, backward. Her individual motions were too rapid for him to focus on, but her surroundings had more staying power. A building she had spent time in—perhaps a school—abruptly vanished. It had been unconstructed, and she moved on to a lesser school, more crowded. Trees around her home slowly shrank, their foliage flickering on and off through the seasons, the deciduous trees becoming suddenly clothed in bright leaves which then faded to green and eventually sucked back into the twigs and branches. The lawn grass kept jumping high, then smoothing down till
nearly bald, then being mowed high again. The house became brightly painted, then abruptly turned dull.

He brought himself to a random halt. He was in a school class, looking at a girl about ten years old. The scene was strange; in a moment he realized this was because he was viewing it backward. He had halted himself, not time, and now was living normally, for him. No one here was aware of him—but if he changed to match the world’s time flow, he would become visible, disrupting the scene, so he let it be.

This was evidently a cooking class, with the teacher demonstrating how to bake a pie by using pyro-magic. Under her reversed guidance, the demonstration pie proceeded from brown to gold and on into pasty white. Norton watched the young Orlene, a pretty girl even at this age. Alas, she was not paying full attention, but was whispering with a female companion in girlish fashion. Her pie would probably be botched.

He turned the sand red and moved a few years into this Orlene’s future, then watched her backward again. This time she was lying on her bed at home, in jeans and a man’s shirt—what was there about men’s shirts that caused girls to prefer them to their own?—chatting into her holophone. It was a boy in the image, tousle-haired, animated, obviously full of the enthusiasm of the moment. Orlene was now about fifteen, and was assuming much of her adult beauty; he recognized some of her little mannerisms, as yet unperfected. He felt a surge of nostalgia; this girl was in the visible process of becoming the woman he had loved.

He moved three more years along her life, to her age eighteen. Now she was playing squash with a young man. It was a game that brought the active players into close proximity, since they shared the court as they slammed the ball against the wall, and therefore seemed to be popular for mixed couples. The man was obviously beating her, but the motions of her body as she strove for points were beautiful. The ball rebounded and flew at her, and she swung her racket backward to intersect it, whereupon
it flew back from her while she wore a look of expectant concentration. Orlene had matured into a healthy, lovely young woman, and it was sweetly painful for Norton to look at her. Those limbs, that torso, that face with the backward-flying hair—he had known them all intimately, in her present future. Those lips—he had kissed them, years hence. Orlene—he would love her and loved her still.

He followed her through to the beginning of the game, when she was fresh, clean, unglowing, and ready for anything. She bade hello to her opponent-date and strode backward away from him to the female changing room. Norton hesitated, then decided not to pursue her there; he knew what her body was like, but this was inappropriate peeking.

He was not doing this just to be a voyeur. He wanted to rescue the woman he loved from her dreadful fate. Now he knew he could do it; his experience in rescuing himself from the Bem in the Glob had proved that. He was immune from paradox; he could change his own past and those of others without nullifying his present. He did not intend to abuse this power, but he did intend to spare her.

Where was the best place to act?
When
was best? Probably before he, Norton, had met her, so he would not have to interfere openly with himself. Would this nullify his association with her? Yes, surely it would—but that would be replaced by a new association, a better one. In fact, he could void the whole ghost marriage and marry her himself.

But first he had better make sure of his power. He wanted to interact with her in a noncritical period of her life, not to change anything, just to be sure he knew what he was doing. This was no ordinary person; this was Orlene!

He moved back along the thread to her childhood, to the time when she was seven years old, on her summer vacation after her first year of formal school. Now she was not using a holophone, because that instrument had
not yet been commercially developed; the old sonic ones were still extant. Anyway, she was too young for social interchanges with interested boys; she was a wild-honey-haired spirit, running through one of the early city rooftop parks. The trees were still in big pots, and ramparts showed; true wilderness was a thing of future parks. A lot of the bad old pollution and messiness remained in the world; soon the political climate would change, greatly facilitating improvement, but it had not happened at this moment.

She was with a party of children, but strayed from them, skipped happily down a bypath, and got lost. Worried, she gazed at the several bifurcations of the paved path, unsure which to take. Norton, having traveled past her immediate future, knew that she would be lost for a good thirty-five minutes, an eternity at that age, and be in tears before a park attendant rescued her from bewilderment and brought her back to her party. This was the appropriate time to approach her.

He tuned in to the beginning of her isolation and turned the sand green. Now he was in phase with her.

“Hello, Orlene,” he said gently. He was a grown man and she was a child, but he felt almost shy.

She stopped her nervous ambulation and turned quickly to face him. “Oh—I didn’t see you!” she exclaimed. “Who are you, mister, in that funny dress?”

He was wearing the white robe of his office, of course. “I am—” He hesitated; he hadn’t thought this through. He couldn’t tell her he was Chronos; she would hardly understand. Neither could he tell her he was her future lover. “A friend.”

“Can you tell me how to get back?”

“I’ll try. I think it’s this way.” He gestured toward the correct path, and they walked along it.

“How did you know my name?” Orlene asked brightly.

“I’ve seen you in school.”

“Oh, you’re a teacher!” she exclaimed, as if it were the most important thing in the world.

“Well—” But she was already skipping ahead, her piggy-braids flouncing.

I love her even as a child
, he thought, surprised and somewhat awed at the extent of his own commitment. He had been, as Clotho had chided him, free with women; this one had chained his soul. He followed after, trying to think of suitable comments to make or questions to ask.

Then Orlene made a glad little cry. “There they are!” She ran to join her group.

The adult guide turned at the sound of her voice. Norton hastily shifted sand and faded out of contemporary view. Orlene was all right; she was an innocent child. She had been spared a bad half hour. He was glad he had been able to do her that small service. But adults were another matter. They would ask the wrong questions.

So his dialogue with Orlene had amounted to nothing. There had been no meaningful personal interaction.

No, not entirely true. She would probably forget the stranger in the white dress, but he had discovered the extent of his captivity. Now he knew he needed to rehearse himself better for questions. It had been a good practice session.

Should he go back those few minutes in time and replay it, trying to effect a more personal contact? He decided not to. He had verified what he wanted to; he could interact with her without wreaking havoc or generating paradox. Now he could proceed with confidence to change her life significantly.

He moved back and forth along her life-thread, sampling it here and there, zeroing in on the appropriate region. He traced, somewhat erratically, her life up to the point at which the family of Gawain the Ghost had contacted her and made her the offer she could not refuse. There had been other men in her young life—Norton spied on these passing relationships with a certain voyeuristic jealousy, though he knew from his own prior experience that she had been a virgin bride. Orlene had been looking for Mister Right and had not been able to choose among those who were handsome and stupid, smart but poor, or rich but degenerate. She, like any sensible girl, wanted perfection
in a man, and it was hard to come by. Thus she was the perfect candidate for the ghost marriage: attractive, intelligent, pristine, and reasonably ambitious for security and creature comfort.

There was a period of about three months before Gawain’s family came, when Orlene had no romantic attachment. This was ideal for Norton’s purpose.

He located a day when she was home watching a dull holo rerun and phased in. He knew the young woman of twenty would not be even fractionally as accepting as the girl of seven had been, so he planned his approach more carefully. But he planned no deception; that would be the wrong way to start a relationship as important as this.

He knew she was alone today; that was a major reason he selected this time. Her father was away on a business trip, and her mother was on a shopping spree. So Orlene was minding the house. There would be a good six hours, if he managed it correctly—and if he did not, he would wind it back and try again. That was one huge advantage of his present office: he could replay scenes to correct errors. Of course, he would have to undergo the discomfort of reversing himself also, because he did not want several copies of himself competing for her attention. But with luck he would not make any bad errors, and would not have to run his own line backward for more than a minute or so at a time.