Enough of this nickel and dime stuff."

The star pulled itself slowly from the stone and drifted toward the door to the apartment. There was no doubt about it: the star lost energy with each use. Probably it needed a set time to recharge its magic, like several hours or a day. That, too, was inconvenient but of course, all he needed was to find one real treasure. That would be worth a week of slow questing. Then the gem could have as long a rest as it needed.

The star drifted up against the door and hesitated. Zane opened the door and let it out. At least the six legged light bug didn't zoom away, out of sight; that could have made it useless, for it would be as lost as the coin it identified. But the spell did seem to be underpowered. He had now been at it twenty minutes, and had only fifteen cents to show for it. Plus the penny he had found at the shop. That would hardly make a dent in his overdue rent.

The star sank to the floor of the hall. There, embedded in the packed dirt, was a battered and weathered penny. Zane pried it up, and the star wended its way tiredly to the stone Zane carried. Some fortune!

Zane returned to his apartment and considered. The Wealthstone performed but so far at strictly penny ante level. At the present rate, he could labor all night for a mere dollar or two in change and the star was obviously too tired to go the night.

The Wealthstone worked but now he perceived certain inherent limits. It always went to the nearest unattached money, of whatever denomination, and the vast majority of lost money was of the picayune category. No doubt if there were a five thousand dollar gold piece near, the star would find it but none was near, while there were endless pennies. People simply did not let a heavy gold piece fall into a crack and be lost, though they did let pennies go. So while it was true that the Wealthstone could find thousands of dollars, this was like the gold in sea water; it cost more in time and effort to recover that one part per million than it was worth.

Zane's eye traveled around the room. It was cluttered with his photographic equipment. He had artistic aspirations and the nefarious artistic temperament, but lacked the talent to make it as a painter or sculptor, so had gone into photography instead. He could appreciate art when he saw it, and the camera enabled him to capture the incidental art of the environment. The trouble was, there was not much in the city of Kilvarough that was worthwhile that hadn't already been photographed. Even the ghost Molly Malone had been pictured many times; it was not true that a ghost could not be photographed, and she loved to pose if she happened to perceive the camera. She could even be heard on occasion, singing her traditional song, especially the line, "Where the girls are so pretty." But she was not as popular a subject as she might have been, owing to her special property. Zane had discovered a photographic variant, however, that had enabled him to eke out a living for a while. This was the Kirlian technique, magically augmented. But certain problems in the market had turned him off this, and recently his luck had expired. Without expensive new equipment, he was out of business. That was part of what had sent him aloft to the cloud mall, using his last dollar to rent the flying carpet. One had to visit these floaters when they anch.o.r.ed near, because they were liable to drift away without notice if the local police got too snoopy.

Now he was hungry, without food in the apartment, and required to move out within a day. He had nowhere to go. He had to have money and he greatly feared he couldn't get enough.

He tried the Wealthstone again. "Go!" he urged it. "Find me wealth beyond my fondest dreams!"

The star heaved itself up, faltered, and collapsed back onto the stone. It was too p.o.o.ped to perform.

And what would it find if it did get moving? Probably more pennies. Zane faced the fact that he had thrown away the chance of a lifetime, for wonderful and rich romance, for this mess o' pottage. He had in fact.been cheated, though the gem had not technically been misrepresented, so he had no recourse. The shop's proprietor had used him for his own profit, taking Zane's one chance away forever. After all, even without the Lovestone, he might have encountered Angelica...

Fool! Fool! he chided himself savagely.

He paced around the room, tasting ashes, seeking some way out of his situation. He found none. Once he had made his deep blunder of pa.s.sing up the Lovestone, his ruinous course had been fixed. If only he hadn't been so set on wealth, to the exclusion of all else. But he had always been an impulsive, wrongheaded idiot, doing what he thought was right at the time and regretting it too late. His whole life had been grinding inexorably to this dead end; he saw that now. If he somehow found enough loose change to pay his back rent, he still would lack the resources to make a decent living and still would not have a lovely girl to love.

That was the crux of it! Angelica slated for him, but squandered away. In retrospect he found himself scrambling into love with her, his emotion based on wrongheaded hopes and wishes and knew she was the type who only loved once, and that her gift had been bestowed irrevocably on another man. Zane might live on, but he would never have Angelica, not even if the conniving shop proprietor were to drop dead this moment. So what point was there in going on?

He looked at the defunct stone again. Now it seemed drab indeed, its colors muddy, its imperfections gross. It was, he realized abruptly, as ugly as his conscience. It was virtually worthless and so was he.

Zane slapped his open hand against his thigh as if trying to punish himself and felt the pistol in his pocket, the one he had taken from the robber.

He drew it out. He was not conversant with firearms, but this one seemed simple enough. It had a clip of several bullets in the handle, and one of them had been fired from the chamber. An automatic mechanism had set a new bullet in the chamber; he had no doubt that a pull on the trigger would make the weapon fire again. He could put the muzzle to his head, and Now he remembered the first gem he had considered the Deathstone. It had signaled his demise in a few hours. Those hours had pa.s.sed. The Lovestone had proved itself, so he had no further reason to doubt the Deathstone. Even the Wealthstone worked, in its fashion. He was fated soon to depart this life.

Zane lifted the gun. Why not? His life might as well end efficiently, instead of being dragged out in the gutters

HOUSE CALLS.

The door opened again. This time a woman of middle age entered. Zane had never seen her before. She glanced approvingly at the fallen figure. "Excellent," she murmured.

Zane wrenched his horrified gaze to her. "1 killed Death!" he exclaimed.

"Indeed you did. You shall now a.s.sume his office." "I what?" Zane was having trouble regaining mental equilibrium.

"You are the new Death," she said patiently. "This is the way it is done. He who kills Death becomes Death." "Punishment..." Zane said, trying to make sense of this.

"Not at all. This is not murder in the normal sense.

After all, it was him or you. Self defense. But you are committed to take his place and to do the best job you can."

"But I don't know how to "

"You will learn on the job. We all do. Certain enchantments will imbue you, to facilitate your performance and stabilize you, but the real motivation must be yours." She stooped to strip Death's black cloak from his body. "Help me, please; we do not have excessive time and we don't want to get blood on the uniform."

"Who are you?" Zane demanded, getting half a grip on himself despite the overwhelming unreality of the scene.

"At the moment I am Lachesis. You can see I am of middle age without much s.e.x appeal." She was quite correct; her face had the lines of solid maturity, and her hair was nondescript under a tight bun. She was comfortably overweight, but moved efficiently. "I determine the length of the threads. Now lift his body; I don't want to tear the cloak."

Distastefully, Zane put his hands on Death's corpse and lifted. "Who is Lachesis? What threads? What are you doing here?"

She sighed as she worked the cloak off the body. "I suppose you do deserve some minimal explanation. Very well; you keep working, and I will tell you some of what you need to know. Not all of it, for some secrets are reserved to me, just as some, you will discover, are reserved to you. Lachesis is the middle aspect of Fate. She "

"Pate?"

"You will not leam very much if you insist on interrupting," she said with some asperity.

"Sorry," Zane mumbled. This felt unreal!

"Now get his shoes. They're invulnerable to heat, cold, penetration, radiation, et cetera, just as is the cloak. You must always be properly garbed when making a collection, or you become vulnerable. It is essential that you not be vulnerable. Your predecessor here was careless; had he closed his hood across his face, the bullet would not have harmed him. See that you are more careful; you will have greater need to be on guard than he did."

"But "

"I believe that interjection const.i.tutes an interruption."

Zane was silent. There was an eerie power about this woman that had nothing to do with her appearance. She could be the mother of any rebellious teenager.

"I am Fate, with three aspects," she continued after just enough of a pause to verify her command of the situation. "I determine the threads of the tapestry of life. I am here to ensure that you change roles expeditiously. It is very important that you perform better as Death than you have as a living person, and I believe you do have the potential. Now stand up so I can fit the cloak to you."

Zane stood, and she set the cloak on his shoulders. It was not heavy, but it carried a peculiar ma.s.s. She had spoken of magic; this item of apparel reeked of it. "Yes, it is close enough. Go ahead and don the shoes; and don't forget the gloves. The shoes will, among other things, enable you to walk on water. Your rounds must not be balked by mundane trifles."

"But this is preposterous!" Zane protested. "I was about to kill myself and now I'm a murderer!"

"Certainly. I had to measure your thread very carefully. Technically, your life just ended; see, Death's body will be taken for yours." She turned over the body, and Zane saw that it looked uncomfortably familiar. It now resembled his own with a bullet hole in the face. "You will fill the ofRce until you, too, grow careless and permit a client to turn on you."

"Or until I die of old age," Zane said, not really believing any of this.

"Old age will never come to you. Neither will death, if you perform well. If you ask the average person what he most desires, he will answer, 'Never to die.' That is, of course, an absolutely foolish wish; in due time you will be better able to appreciate the importance of dying. It is not the right to live, but the right to die that is most important."

"I don't see "

"What is life, except an ongoing instinct for survival? Nature uses that instinct to make us perform; otherwise we would all relax, and the species would disappear. Nature is a cruel green mother. The survival instinct is a goad, not a privilege."

"But if I don't age "

"Time holds all supernatural agents, especially the several Incarnations, in abeyance. You will live until you die, however many days, years, or centuries that may be, but you will never change from your present physical age." She guided him to his wall mirror.

"Supernatural agents?" Zane was grasping at peripherals, being as yet unable to get to the nucleus of this situation. "Incarnations?"

"Death, Time, Fate, War, Nature," she said. "The major field agents operating between G.o.d and Satan, answerable to neither. If any of us were scheduled to die like mortal folk, we would have to be concerned for the disposition of our souls, and that's a conflict of interest. No, we are immortal, as we have to be, accountable to neither superpower. But we do have to do our jobs, or things become complicated."

"Our jobs," Zane repeated weakly. "I'm no killer. At least I wasn't, until this "

Fate glanced at him penetratingly, and suddenly he knew she knew about his mother. He felt cold, and the guilt rose up in him again. But Fate did not raise that matter. "Of course not," she agreed, eying the body on the floor. "This was a mismanaged suicide. Death does not kill; Death merely takes the souls of those who are dying, the problematical ones, lest they be lost and wander forever inchoate."

Now Zane found something concrete to argue. "There are five billion people in the world! A hundred million or so die each year. Death would have to take several each second, scattered across the globe. That's impossible!"

"Not impossible, but perhaps unfeasible," she said. "Look in the mirror, please."

Zane looked. The death's head gaped back at him, encased in its hood. Hits hands in the gloves were skeletal, and his ankles above the shoes were fleshless bones. He had a.s.sumed the visage of Death.

"You are, of course, invisible to most people when in uniform," Fate said. "Clients can perceive you, and those who are close to them emotionally, and the truly religious people, but the rest will overlook you unless you cali attention to yourself."

"But the mirror reflects my image as that of Death! People will faint!"

"Perhaps I misspoke myself. You are not physically invisible; you are socially invisible. People see you, but do not recognize your significance, and forget you once you pa.s.s. But when you remove the uniform, your powers fade. You are then vulnerable; you can age and be touched and hurt. So don't step out of character without reason."

"Why would Death want to step out?"

She formed an obscure little smile. "It does get dull socializing with your own kind exclusively. I am said to be attractive in my Clotho aspect " She became abruptly young and lovely, a striking figure of a woman with hair so light in color it seemed to shine and with skin like alabaster, but her eyes remained disturbingly knowing. "Yet I would not hold your interest for centuries, perhaps not even decades. So we must dally on occasion with mortals."

Zane wondered how many decades or centuries it would take to get bored with a woman who looked like that. It was an intriguing thought, but in a moment he returned to his prior concern. "How can a single Deathperson take several people each second? Hundreds of people must have died just while we've been talking here! I didn't collect their souls and I don't think this person did." He indicated the defunct Death.

"I see I will have to explain in greater detail." Fate shifted back to her middle aged aspect and sat down in Zane's best chair. Her eye caught the Wealthstone on the table beside it. "Oh, I see you have ajunkstone. You use it to produce dimes for telephones?"

"Something like that," Zane admitted sheepishly.

"I've seen them before. The stone is dirt grade ruby from India, imported wholesale and sold in five thousand carat lots for fifty cents a carat. It's technically corundum, but too poor a quality to hold a decent spell. I understand some idiots are deluded into paying gem grade prices for individual stones."

"True," Zane agreed, drawing the Deathhood close about his face so his flush would not show.

"Still, as a cheap novelty item, it's not bad. Once in a while a stone like this will take a better spell and locate dollar bills. But it's axiomatic that such a rock will never produce the value paid for it."

Zane thought again, painfully, of the beautiful, rich, romantic Angelica. "True."

"Well, you won't need money now, unless you spend a lot of time out of uniform and get hungry. Better to acquire a small cornucopia and use it for such occasions. Your job should keep you too busy for that, until you develop proficiency."

"I still don't see how "

"Oh, yes, I was about to explain. Only a small percentage of people need Death's personal attention. The vast majority handle the transition themselves though, of course, this is via the extended ambience of Death's will."

"Death's will?"

"Oh, my, you are a novice! Let me see, I need an a.n.a.logy. You know how your body goes on breathing when you're not paying attention, even when you're sleeping? It's a bit like that. Death's power is immediate and personal, but it is also distant and impersonal. When Death attends to a client personally, it is like consciously breathing; when Death merely permits a soul to depart its host unattended, that is like your autonomic system, the automatic functioning of your body. But when you die, these functions cease, both the conscious and the unconscious. When Death dies, all deaths in the world cease, until the new Death commences the office. The former Death, for example, is not really dead yet; his soul remains pinned in his body. He can not die until you act, though his body will never again be animate. That is why it is so important that the transition be facilitated. Imagine the havoc if no one ever died!"

"I don't know. If people lived forever "

"I haven't time to argue foolishness!" she snapped. "Just be satisfied that the first soul you personally attend to will free all the rest to depart naturally, on their private schedules, as my threads have dictated. Up to half an hour can be tolerated; I have arranged for this. But beyond that, there will be one atrocious tangle."

"What souls do I does Death have to attend to personally? I really don't understand "

"It relates to the nature of souls and the balance within each soul of good and evil. Every good thought and deed lightens the burden, and every bad deed or thought weights it down. A newborn infant, generally, is about as close as we come to true innocence; only when self discretion comes can evil be indulged in. As William Henley put it: It matters not how strait the gate. How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul. So the younger the person is at death, the more likely his soul is to remain innocent, and to float to Heaven when released. As William Wordsworth put it: Not in entire forgetfulness. And not in utter nakedness. But trailing clouds of glory do we come From G.o.d, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy! With age and self discretion, the evil tends to acc.u.mulate, weighting the soul, until the balance is negative. Such souls plummet like lead sinkers when released. But a few souls are in balance, with equal freighting of good and evil; these have no dominant affiliation and tend to cling to their familiar housing. These are the ones who need a.s.sistance,"

"That's what Death does!" Zane exclaimed, catching on at last. "Collects ambiguous souls!"

"And sorts them out carefully, determining their proper destination," Fate concluded. "Those few that are in perfect balance must be delivered to Purgatory for professional treatment."

"This is really to be my job?" Zane asked. "To collect balanced souls?"

"And to facilitate the progress of all the others," Fate agreed. "It really is. You may find it difficult at first, but it is certainly better than the alternative." She glanced at the virtually dead Death.

Zane shuddered. "But why was I chosen to fil! this office? I'm completely unqualified! Or is it pure chance?"

Fate stood. "1 prefer to answer that at another time. I must not keep you from your appointed rounds any longer."

"But I don't even know how to locate my my clients!"

"There should be an instruction manual somewhere. Mortis will help you."

"Who is Mortis?"

She looked about. "Oh, I almost forget. You had better take the accouterments; I'm not sure how they work, but you'll need them."

"Accouterments?"

"The jewelry. The magic devices."

"My Wealthstone? I don't see "

"Not thatjunkstone. Leave everything of your former life here as it is. Especially the star. Sapphire is no good for wealth divination at its best, and this one's inferior. Leave your watch, too, and any rings you have. You are through with living." She walked toward the door.

"But I have so much to learn!" Zane cried plaintively.

"Then get to it. Death," she said, closing the door behind her. Zane looked desperately about, seeking some better hold on reality. How could he be Death? He had never even imagined anything like this!

He saw something flashing. It was a solid watch on the wrist of the dead Death that would hardly be in keeping with the corpse of Zane, who had been too broke to redeem his p.a.w.ned watch. This was surely an'accouterment. He bent, with a certain distaste, to remove it, then put it on his own wrist. It was heavy, a good four ounces, but fitted comfortably, as though sized for him, and the flashing stopped. Evidently the watch had merely been calling attention to itself so that it would not be overlooked; it went with the office. It was, of course, dead black: a mechanical, self winding instrument that seemed dull but expensive.

Why would Death use a mechanical watch, of whatever quality, instead of a sophisticated electronic one, or a miniature magical sundial? Zane couldn't answer that at the moment. Maybe the last Death officeholder had been of a conservative bent. He might have lived for centuries before getting careless and failed to keep up with the times.

Odd, Zane thought, that he felt no special remorse for the person he had killed. His initial shock at the act was wearing off, so that what remained was mostly horror that there had been a killing, as if he had just watched a singularly brutal murder on television. Maybe this developing indifference was because, to him. Death remained an "it" rather than a human being. But he, Zane, was now that "it."

He spied another flash. It was from an ear ornament, almost concealed because Death's left ear lay against the 36 On A Pale Horse floor. Surely he was meant to take this, too; it was one of the items of jewelry Fate had mentioned. He nerved himself for another contact with the dead flesh and got the gem removed. It was an earring, with a red garnet cabochon, rounded on one side, flat on the other, shining prettily.

The thing was designed to fit a pierced ear, and Zane's ear was whole. He hesitated, then put the gem in his voluminous cloak pocket.