"Anthony, Piers- Incarnations of Immortality 1- On a Pale Horse" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anthony Piers)

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 mass. 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 office 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 God 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 assumed 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 call 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 pass. 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 Death person 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 Wealth stone on the table beside it. "Oh, I see you have a junkstone. You use it to produce dimes for telephones?"