On a Pale Horse (3 page)

“Try another direction,” the proprietor said. “The stone is not responding.” Yes, he was nervous now.

Zane reversed again, retracing his steps. He passed the Mess o’ Pottage shop and the one beyond: a paperback bookstore. “It’s still not glowing,” he reported.

“Let me consider,” the proprietor said, pausing in front of a display of SCIENTIFIC MAGIC texts. “Where were you going?”

“Nowhere but up and down this street,” Zane said wryly. “Trying to get a glimmer from this inert stone of yours.”

“That’s the problem. You need to be going somewhere. Your romance is not in this street. She is wherever you intended to go when you first held the Lovestone.”

“I was going home,” Zane said, bemused. “I doubt romance awaits me there. I live alone in a slum.”

“Then go home.”

“With your precious stone?”

“Certainly—on loan. I’ll be with you. We shall exchange the Wealthstone for the Lovestone when the contact is made.”

Zane shrugged. “As you wish.” He now doubted that anything would come of this, but his curiosity remained engaged, and of course he did want the Wealthstone. He reversed direction again and walked down the street toward the agency where he had left his rented carpet after flying up to this shopping mall, which was magically suspended high above Kilvarough.

The stone glowed.

So it was true! He was headed for romance!

The proprietor lingered for a moment by the bookstore window, where he pretended to be interested in the current issue of the Satanistic journal BRIMSTONE QUARTERLY, then followed.

They passed the arcade again, where the kids were now playing sexy space-fiction records. Zane had once had an offer to do photography for the dust jacket illustration of such items, but had turned it down, though he needed the money. He simply had not wanted to prostitute what little genuine talent he had.

Now they moved by a sweet-smelling bakery shop. Sudden hunger caught Zane, for he had not eaten in some time. Being broke had that effect. He glanced in the window
of the MELON PASTIES shop, noting its mascot of a voluptuous woman made of candy, with sugared melons in the appropriate place, covered by decorative pastry pasties. Displayed inside were doughnuts, cakes, eclairs, breads, cookies, pies, cream horns, Danish pastries, and pastry art: confections in the shapes and colors of leaves, flowers, human figures, cars, and ships. All of it looked and smelled more than good enough to eat.

“Keep moving,” the proprietor murmured, coming up behind him.

Zane tore himself away from the window and its stomach-luring odors. Once he had the Wealthstone, he would return here and buy out the place and gorge himself sick as a dog!

Now a bank of fog rolled in. The mall was camouflaged as a cumulus cloud, anchored high above the city of Kilvarough. The fog generators were aimed outward, but playful breezes wafted some mist inward. It had a pleasant flower scent.

They reached the carpet agency, flying its carpet-shaped banner with the motto YOU ARE THERE NOW. Zane showed his round-trip ticket to the bored agent, and the man hauled down his carpet from a storage cubby. It was worn and faded, and dust squeezed out of its pores, but it was all he could afford. The Mess o’ Pottage proprietor rented another carpet, a much larger, newer, brighter one, with comfortable anchored cushions. They carried the rolls to the exit bay, spread out the carpets, sat down on them cross-legged, fastened their seat belts, and gave the go-signals.

The carpets took off. The proprietor’s moved smoothly, cushioned by air, but Zane’s jerked a bit before getting into the hang of its propulsive spell. He hated that; suppose it pooped out in mid-air? He controlled its flight by minute shifts of his body; a tilt to right or left sent the carpet flying that way, while a lean forward or back sent it diving or ascending. Verbal commands caused it to change velocity, but he settled for the standard gear, afraid the spell would not be reliable if he pushed it. Anyway, there was other traffic, and it was easiest to keep the going pace.

Zane had always enjoyed carpeting, but could not afford to maintain his own carpet, or even to rent one often. It cost a lot to maintain a good carpet, and the expense-per-mile kept rising. Inflation affected everyone uncomfortably, as it was intended to; it was, of course, a work of Satan, who campaigned perpetually and often halfway successfully to make Hell seem better than Earth.

Sure enough, the thought brought the reality: a Satanic roadsign series, each sign staked to a small, stationary cloud: SEE THIS OUTFIT? DON’T YOU SCOFF! YOU KNOW WHERE SHE TAKES IT OFF! What followed was a life-size billboard painting of a truly statuesque young woman in the process of disrobing. In the corner were the two little red devil trademark figures, Dee & Dee, male and female, complete with cute miniature pitchforks. The male was peeking up under the model’s skirt and remarking in small print, “You can’t touch
that
in Heaven!” Then came the final sign, the signature, HELLFIRE, written in lifelike flames.

Zane shook his head. Satan had the most proficient publicity department extant, but only a fool would believe the advertising. Anyone who went to Hell would feel the flames for real, and the devils and pitchforks would not be cute. Yet the media campaign was so pervasive, intense, and clever—and appealed so aptly to man’s baser instincts—that it was hard to keep the true nature of Hell in mind. Zane himself would have liked to see the remainder of the disrobing and knew it would never occur in pristine Heaven, where all thoughts were pure. Hell did have something going for it.

The carpets cleared the environs of the cloud-mall, following the buoyed channel that spiraled down toward Kilvarough. A number of other carpets were traveling the channel, as the day was getting late. Several helicopters were flying in their own channel to the side, and farther away a lucky person was riding a winged horse.

Well, when he had control of the Wealthstone, Zane might see about purchasing his own horse. He had ridden horses many times, but only the mundane kind that ran on land. He understood that the principle of riding was similar for the winged variety, except that there were
additional commands to direct them in flight. But while a good landbound horse could be had for under a thousand dollars, and a sea-horse for perhaps five thousand, air-horses began at ten thousand and required special maintenance, since no ordinary paddock could hold them. In fact, they—

The carpet ahead of him faltered. At the same time, the Lovestone flashed brilliantly. Zane had to brake suddenly to prevent his carpet from rear-ending the one ahead. “Hey, what the—?” he grunted.

He saw that a young woman was riding the other carpet and he did not think much of female riders. They tended to change their minds without adequate warning, as in this case, and that was dangerous in mid-air.

The woman’s carpet wrinkled, sagging under her weight. It began to drop. She screamed in terror. Suddenly Zane realized what was the matter: the spell had failed! It shouldn’t have, as this was a truly elegant, expensive carpet, but quality control had been deteriorating everywhere recently.

His eye was momentarily distracted by the blue light before him. The Lovestone was shining like a miniature star.

“Mine!” the Pottage proprietor cried. His carpet launched forward as the girl’s carpet collapsed. The man reached out and caught the girl neatly by her slender waist, wrestling her aboard his own vehicle.

Zane, half-stunned by the event, followed the other carpet. Now he saw how comely the girl was, with flowing fair hair and a remarkable figure. She could almost have posed for the Hellfire ad, except that there was no trace of salaciousness in her aspect. He saw how she clung to her rescuer, her maidenly bosom heaving as she sobbed with reaction. He saw how elegant her apparel was; she wore an expensive magic-mink coat, and a diamond necklace sparkled about her creamy neck.

And he saw how the Lovestone faded to dull-dark blue. That girl had been his prospective romance—and was no longer. He had traded her away for the Wealthstone.

The two carpets continued down the spiral channel to the carpetport in the center of the city. There Zane and
the proprietor turned in their carpets, and faced each other. “Meet Angelica,” the proprietor said proudly, showing off the lovely girl. Obviously their acquaintance had blossomed during the brief flight down. The man had saved her life, and she was the kind to be duly grateful. “She is the heiress to the Twinklestar fortune. She has invited me to her downtown penthouse for a snack of caviar and nectar. So we’d better exchange stones now and call it even.” He held out the Wealthstone.

There was nothing Zane could do except trade stones. The deal had been honored. The Lovestone glowed brightly again as the other man took it; he had found his romance, outwitting fate. The Wealthstone, in contrast, was huge and dull and ugly, with the star hardly showing.

Zane could not repress the feeling that he had made a colossal error. He should have mortgaged his whole life to buy the Lovestone—for evidently this heiress-girl Angelica had the resources and willingness to pay off such a debt offhandedly, and was a very fine creature in her own right. Love
and
wealth: he could have had it all.

The girl was drawing with loving possessiveness on the proprietor’s arm, and she was all soft and eager in her new emotion. “Must go,” the Mess o’ Pottage man said, delivering to Zane a kind of salute. Then they were gone, walking toward the chauffeured limousine that awaited them.

Zane stood watching the elegant contours of the girl’s backside, experiencing an awful, helpless regret. What kind of fool had he been, to throw away romance untried? Somehow he knew he would never again have an opportunity like this. Such things occurred only once in a lifetime, if that often, and he had thrown his chance away. A kind of grief suffused him, like that for a cruelly dead lover.

Well, it was hardly the first time he had blundered disastrously! His soul was weighted with evil he should have avoided, and his life blighted with foolish error. At least he possessed the Wealthstone, and with proper management he would soon be a rich man, able to attract and hold whatever type of woman he craved, or to buy a compliant female android or a luscious magical nymph.
He didn’t need Angelica! He had to believe that, for it was his only present buffer against overwhelming despair.

Zane knew himself to be a headstrong young idiot with delusions of artistry and literacy, whose good impulses were too often mismanaged into liabilities. Thus he had lost his dear mother, and his loving girlfriend long ago, and had sunk himself in debt. Good intentions were not enough; they had to be rationally implemented.

He could not even afford the fare for the subway home. He had the penny from his shoe, but that was not enough. He had the Wealthstone, but he refused to use it here on the darkening street; some criminal would mug him for it. Zane stuck his hands deep in his pockets, clasping the stone out of sight, and walked toward the dingy quarter where his sleazy apartment lurked.

Walking was a good time for thinking; it took a person’s mind off the drudgery of the feet. But Zane’s thoughts were not uplifting. Here he was, in the ultimate age of magic and science, where jet planes vied with flying carpets, and he was traveling afoot, without the benefit of either.

Magic had always existed, of course, as had science, however limited the benefits of either might be for those who were broke. But it hadn’t been until the time of Newton that the basic principles of the twin disciplines had been seriously explored. Newton had made great strides in formulating the fundamental laws of science in his early years, contributing more than perhaps any other man. In his later years he had performed similarly for magic.

But for reasons not clear to Zane—he had never been an apt scholar—greater progress had been made at first in science. Only recently had the enormous explosion in applied magic come. Of course, neither science nor magic had affected history much until the past century, as there had been a popular prejudice against both, but science had broken out first. Now, however, the rapidly increasing sophistication of magic had brought back supposedly extinct monsters of many types, especially dragons. Whether science or magic would win out in the end was anybody’s guess.

A fine drizzle developed, perhaps condensation from the cloud-mall above: not enough moisture to clean air or street, just enough to turn the dust to grease and make his footing treacherous. Cars skidded through stoplights, narrowly avoiding collisions; probably only the mandatory anti-wreck charms saved their fenders from harm.

Now it was dusk. The street had gradually become deserted. No one walked through this section of town at this hour if he could avoid it. The buildings were old, and age had weathered them from their original technicolor to their present monochrome. This region had come to be known as Ghosttown, and at twilight sometimes the ghost appeared. But it was best not to look, because—

In fact, there she was now. Zane heard the wooden wheel of the wheelbarrow first, and stepped into a grimy doorway alcove so as not to disturb the apparition. A person could see the ghost, and even photograph her, but if the ghost saw the person—

Molly Malone came down the street, her wheelbarrow piled with shellfish. She was a sweet-faced young woman, pretty despite her ragged garments and heavy clogs. Women thought spiked heels and nylon stockings made their legs pretty, but legs like Molly’s needed no such enhancements. “Cockles and mussels!” she cried sweetly. “Alive! Alive O!”

Zane smiled, his black mood lightening somewhat. The shellfish might be alive, but surely Molly was not. Her ghost had been conjured from Ireland a century ago to honor Kilvarough, though this city had no seacoast. It had been a publicity stunt that soon palled; ghosts were a dime a dozen. The city fathers had not then been aware of this ghost’s special property. But the conjuration-spell had never been canceled, so Molly still wheeled her wheelbarrow through the streets of Kilvarough when conditions were right.

“This is a stickup,” a gruff voice called.