Jim Baen's Universe-Vol 2 Num 3

by Jim Baen's Universe! staff

  What I did briefly spot was a small black machine that looked like a cross between a Dustbuster and a Pocket Fisherman. It was labeled soul snatcher 3000, in silver letters on its side. And before it, too, was consumed in the inferno, I saw a devil or imp desperately grabbing what souls it could get, cursing me like a drunken souler.

  * * *

  "You didn't get my dough back, huh?" Growser whined, when I roused him off his toilet in the morning, explained all that had happened after he'd taken out the trash.

  "It burned with the warehouse," I told him again. "And I thought you might be worried about losing your soul?"

  Growser sat back down on his throne, doing me at least that one small favor. "Nah, that's no big deal. In my line of work, I'm probably better off without it. 'Sides, it got what was comin' to it, right?"

  I couldn't argue with that.

  He grinned, pointed a finger through me. "And so did the thief—this Dr. Franks or whatever!" He scratched his blue-shaded chin, wondering, no doubt, if he could pick up the pieces of the broken racket. "What 'xactly was the good Doc up to, anyways?"

  "Down to, is more like it," I responded. "He was doing the Devil's work, I think. Or at least, he was inadvertently pitchforking for the guy in the red suit. By laundering dirty, dead souls with live, clean ones, he was tipping the balance here on Earth to your side of the flame, Growser."

  Growser scratched a body part not his chin. "I just wish that twenty grand hadn't gone up in smoke, is all. See, part of that money was your fee, McCaffrey."

  I let him hork up a laugh, then hit him where it hurts. "That's all right, Growser. I dropped by the IRS office before I came here. Had a little chat with my auditor about that twenty grand of yours. Did you know there's a reward for turning in tax cheats? He's got some questions for you—seeing how your bank statements and tax returns always register goose eggs."

  Growser jumped to his feet, parts of him flapping other than his lips. "That kinda double cross is gonna come back to haunt you, McCaffrey!" he blared.

  "You want to know the best part?" I asked sweetly. "I don't have to haunt you anymore." That stopped him.

  "What'cha mean?"

  "The boys on the other side have decided that the IRS can haunt you better than I ever could."

  I floated away with a smile on my pale puss. Sure, I still had to hang around till I paid off the rest of my tax bill, plus interest and penalties, but at least I wouldn't be spending my nights burning the midnight coil, shrieking my head off at what was left of Growser.

  * * *

  Palm Sunday

  Written by Ian Watson

  Illustrated by Alexander Gabriel

  Today was Saturday, and tomorrow would be Palm Sunday, when most people would gather in Grand Square to party, then all hold the palms of their hands up to the sky in celebration of life.

  As Saturday dawn was approaching, Rootha left Pool's house. She and Pool had made love, then they had talked for at least an hour, lying together. Several times Rootha and Pool would say exactly the same thing at the same moment, so deep was their communion. Then they made love all over again—before sleeping for three hours, him holding her.

  Three hours asleep was time enough for a person's hands to close up and for the patterns of the palms to reshape themselves, for a new fortune to impress itself on the flesh.

  Once the sunlight was bright enough, the little cabins of the palm-readers along Riverfront and in Grand Square would open for business. New day, new fortune! Maybe merely a fortune similar to the day before. Business people especially would want their palms interpreted.

  Dawn was in the east, violet and lilac, but the full moon still shone through dispersing streamers of raincloud, glinting upon puddles where the street's flagstones tilted. Thus Rootha could avoid soaking her shoes and the hem of her long gown. Joho, her husband, probably wouldn't return on the early steamferry from the capital, but you could never be sure. Don't arouse suspicions.

  Yawning before sunset might seem suspicious too. Should she try to catch some extra sleep? Or should she stay awake to visit a teller? The teller might see a change in her destiny. How unfair to stay bound to Joho because he'd lent her parents so much money, when Pool was so perfect for her and she for him—like hand in glove, like glove on hand. When she first met Pool, going to his shop for a glove fitting, Rootha and he had fitted astonishingly. Both knew immediately.

  The scent of nightblooms drifted from gardens as Rootha hurried through the deserted streets to a home that wasn't her true home. Joho's business was buying raw gemstones from the hills to the north, and cutting them. Usually he took his cut gems once a month to the capital on the coast. So only once a month, for some hours by night, could Rootha be her real self.

  She must not resent her dad for his financial failure. Never. Never must she hint at her own sacrifice.

  A few hours earlier Pool had told her, not for the first time, "We'll be together in a future life. Next time, we'll meet each other soon. It's destined because we're so like twins, you and I, like separate halves of the same person. And even in this life, who knows what may happen?"

  Such as the ferryboat sinking and Joho drowning? Rootha didn't wish to curse her husband, for then she would feel even more guilt.

  * * *

  Later, as Rootha headed for Riverfront, now wearing brown boots and a violet gown, her coal-black hair pinned-up, a carriage overtook her. Fine lady going to have her hand read. Should I invite the mayor to my party, or not since I don't like him much? Should I wear green or gold? Decisions, decisions.

  Rootha gazed at the new lines on her own right hand. She had read a pamphlet arguing that the moon and the sun and the world and the stars all pulled at people's mutable palms, just as the moon pulled tides. Nonsense! For if that was so, everybody in the same town ought to show almost identical lines. The science of reading palms was very complex. Apprentice tellers took three years to master the subject. In the past, centuries had gone into understanding the shiftings of destiny.

  As she walked, she fiddled with her bronze binding band. The weld was almost seamless. After the ceremony, a young cousin had asked her, "Does it hurt, the soldering?" Of course not. Brides mustn't scream or whimper. A thin pad, slid between wrist and band, blocked almost all the heat. If only she could wrench the band from her wrist, and undo all her union with Joho.

  Beyond the curving low-walled esplanade of Riverside the river was very wide and slow, almost a lake. Fishermen were out in their boats, lines baited. Aha, one man scooped up a big squirming catch in his hand-net. First of the day. He hallooed, knifed the fish loose from the hook, swung the net around and around his head—then hurled the fish towards the nearest boat, where another fisherman caught it in his hand-net. With a halloo, that man sent the fish onward. Halloo-halloo rang across the water as the tossed catch went this way and that till one man overreached and fell in. Merrily all the fisherman flourished an open hand. Lucky in its escape, unlucky in its wounded mouth, the fish would be swimming away, gasping water.

  Rootha was drowning, living with Joho, now that she knew Pool existed. He was her air.

  How was Pool not infuriated with jealousy? He was remarkable, unique, like no other man. True, Pool knew that Joho was very unlikely to give Rootha a child. Though lately Joho had been suggesting adoption. An adopted infant in the house would be an emotional responsibility, and Rootha's emotions were focused elsewhere. Rootha told her husband she only wanted a baby from out of her own body, not from someone else's. So she must bear Joho upon her often while he tried and tried, always in vain.

  The fine lady's carriage stood by a vermilion cabin decorated with white palm-prints set at different angles. All of the thirty or so cabins beckoned differently. People tended to favor the same teller, consequently two or three people were waiting outside most cabins, none as yet outside a few. Rootha headed for one of the latter, which was blue with silver stars. She preferred variety and a certain anonymity. All tellers were sworn to s
ecrecy. The punishment for telling tales outside the booth was drowning in a sack. But suppose a teller spied the exact details of her affair! What then?

  This teller was a chubby, freckled woman gowned in grey. Charts of hand-lines covered all the wall space that wasn't window curtained by lace. Seating herself on the tripod stool, Rootha paid a little-silver coin, then placed both her hands, knuckles down, in the grooves on the telling table.

  Scrutiny, and scribbling of symbols.

  Much was insignificant, but finally the woman said, "You'll find out about otherlife today."

  "You mean I'm going to die?"

  Was Joho about to discover and kill her? If she died, when the news reached Pool would he kill himself, to join her immediately in rebirth?

  "No, I believe you should visit a temple."

  Well, a temple concerned itself with the migrations of the eternal soul. As regards temples, usually Rootha only attended special festivals where Pool would also be. Of course she couldn't approach Pool then, not with Joho accompanying her, yet at least she and Pool could glimpse one another, which was both comforting and taunting. Might today's destiny bring her a sense of an otherlife with Pool? People from early middle-age onward often experienced sensations from their previous lives. Never visions, only sensations. Rootha had tried to capture some, but hadn't succeeded. She was still too young.

  * * *

  The teller hadn't said which temple to visit, so Rootha went to the purplebrick temple close to her home which wasn't a true home. Usually a number of templegoers would be staring past candles at the twisting reflection of flames in warped circular mirrors mounted on tripods, to cause a trance of atunement. Unusually, this morning, a bearded young speaker was holding forth, compelling a lot of attention.

  "What," the speaker was saying, "if our otherlives do not progess from the past through the present to the future, the way we assume? What if your immediately previous life occurred in what, to us, is the future? What if your very next life will occur in what, to us, is the past?"

  His hand made a zigzag gesture, high up and low down—then it chopped low in a series of waves.

  "What if several successive lives are lived in our past, yet in an opposite sequence to events in history? What if we do indeed advance towards perfection—however, our perfect life has already occurred previously?"

  What he said was so utterly new and provocative. This explained why he was speaking so early in the day! Rootha could have wept. To think that she and Pool would be together in a future life, which would therefore be a perfect life, had been such a consolation. To hear that this perfect life of being with her twin soul might already have happened—and might even be the reason why they had recognized each other immediately the year before!—that was horrible. She had nothing to look forward to.

  "No!" she cried out. "It can't be!"

  As if her outburst was a signal, other listeners also began to shout no and out and leave.

  A senior speaker intervened, holding up his wrinkled palms for peace.

  "Even though this young man's wrong, we should at least hear him, not try to drown him with our voices!"

  "No!" shrieked Rootha, covering her ears, cursing today's destiny written on her hand.

  The senior speaker addressed the bearded man. "Does it matter if our different lives aren't chronological? We still live all of them!"

  "And how many is all?" came the reply. "Our souls are twisted in time like a knot, or like a tangled serpent sucking its own tail. Perfection must be followed by imperfection, again and again endlessly—otherwise our souls would stop existing because they would have reached their culmination. What else," shouted the young man, "can come after perfection—except imperfection? Without this"—and his hands gyrated—"this cycle of repetitions, the soul could not be eternal!"

  So even if Rootha gained Pool, she would lose him again! Distraught, Rootha couldn't bear to hear more. She rushed to the nearest mirror, thrust her hand quickly through the candle flame, pressed her palm against the mirror itself. Distorted reflections and twisted light dazzled her. She pressed harder, as if to push her hand right through the thick glass into an otherlife where Pool might catch her by the hand.

  And the mirror toppled, and the candlestick too, and Rootha's unbalanced body followed, as the mirror broke into pieces beneath her and the candle extinguished itself. Already strong hands were lifting Rootha swiftly. For a moment she imagined those hands were Pool's.

  "Pardon, lady!" A rough unfamiliar voice. Of a burly man. One of the templegoers. He smelled of fish.

  "Can you stand on your own?"

  When she nodded, the fisherman—or fishmonger—released her. The senior speaker was beside her now.

  "I'm sorry," Rootha gasped. "Pay . . . the damage."

  "You cut your hand," was all he said.

  She stared at blood on her palm, and without thinking, like some animal she licked her wound. Salty the taste, like tears.

  * * *

  When Rootha left the temple, her little cut already staunched, a severe-looking greying woman—her neighbour, in fact, Lola Caprizon—followed and said to her, "You're very faithful. Your husband should be proud of you."

  For a terrible moment Rootha thought that her neighbour had noticed her rare nocturnal excursions to be with Pool whenever Joho went away. But no; Lola Caprizon was referring to faith in otherlife as taught in temples.

  "That certainly shut him up," Rootha's neighbour said with a grim satisfaction. "He ought to be sewn in a sack and thrown in the river for fate to decide, sink or float."

  * * *

  When Rootha woke beside Joho on the morning of Palm Sunday and went to the window, her right palm looked more intricate than ever before. Her left palm seemed much as usual.

  As a teenager, Rootha had played the thumb-drums well enough to belong to a trio of drummer-women who performed at bondings and fates and even at the Palm Sunday festival. That was where Joho had first seen her and become enamored.

  When she was younger, Rootha had even thought that drumming might be her whole life—the beat of the heart, the pulse of the blood—but presently passion for Joho prevailed. And within a few years that passion faded, just as she herself faded in Joho's shadow. She ought to have waited! Yet how could she ever have predicted Pool's existence? It was only a little over two years since he arrived here from the capital and set up shop.

  Joho stirred and yawned loudly and stretched himself. He hauled himself upright, the weighty presence in her life, to which were attached the weight of her father too, and her mother.

  "Today's our day," he said.

  Rootha turned away from the window.

  "How do you mean?"

  "The day I first saw you. Can't you remember? You were drumming."

  "Oh yes. Of course. Joho, I'll have my palms read before the festival starts."

  "To decide how you'll dress? I'd have thought the purple gown."

  Oh yes, she thought bitterly, to decide how I'll dress as your wife. However, she smiled.

  "Probably the purple, but even so! And you?"

  "My brocade suit, of course."

  "I meant about visiting the teller."

  "No need of that," said Joho. "Reed saw my hands before my trip. That's enough."

  Joho always patronised the same elderly teller in Grand Square. Reed knows me like the front of my hand, Joho often said.

  "Besides, we aren't made of money," Rootha's husband added. No doubt an allusion to his father-in-bond. Joho was like that. A heavy presence. Pool was an absence, ever present in her mind.

  * * *

  This time on Riverside, Rootha visited a yellow cabin decorated with bird emblems in blue and white. The teller was a short thin man with a beak of a nose.

  "Never seen the like before!" he exclaimed as he gazed at her right palm. "I do declare it's more a map than a destiny. Lady, may I possibly copy it? Some inking on your palm, then press upon paper. Wash off easily."

  Rootha tried to
make her refusal lighthearted. Yet he was right. How could she not have realised? A map was on her hand. Instead of the lines of life and heart and head, and the islands and squares of restriction or protection, of escape or frustration, and the crosses of irritation, and the bars and arches all with their interplaying meanings: instead of these, a map.

  "What's more, I swear it's like a map of this city, but at the same time it's not this city exactly. A bit different, as if say a fire burned parts, then they get rebuilt in a different way."

  She thought of the candle flame.

  "Mayn't I copy it merely to study?"

  Rootha shook her head and closed her right hand, shutting within it her day's destiny.

  * * *

  Guiding herself by her right palm, almost in a trance Rootha walked in the direction corresponding to where Pool's house should be. Presently she noticed a marble building she had never seen before. Then another. Fashions had altered. Women wore shorter robes and fanciful feathered hats. Lips were painted in many shades of red. A few people glanced at her curiously—as well they might at someone holding out her hand constantly as she walked along.