Piers Anthony - On a Pale Horse

"You have not answered," Zane said.

The man grimaced. "Damn it, you are putting my toes to the fire! Yes, my own death does frighten me. But I know that is merely my instinct of self-preservation manifesting, my body's effort to survive. Subjectively, I do fear extinction, because instinct is irrational. Objectively, I do not. I have no terror of the nonexistence before I was conceived; why should I fear the nonexistence after I die? So I have overridden the foible of the flesh and am proceeding to my end."

"Wouldn't you be relieved to discover that life continues on the spiritual plane?"

"No! I do not want life to continue in any form! What uncertainties or tortures might I experience there? What tedium, existing for eternity with no reprieve in another person's sterile conception of Heaven? No, my life is the only game, and the game has soured, and I want nothing more than to be able to lay it aside when its convenience is over. Oblivion is the greatest gift I can look forward to, and Heaven itself would be Hell to me if that gift were denied."

"I hope you find it," Zane said, shaken by this unusual view. A man who actually insisted on oblivion!

"I hope so, too." Now the atheist was fading rapidly. The loss of blood was affecting his consciousness and soon he would faint.

"A man's death is the most private part of his life," Zane said. "You have the right to die as you wish."

"That's correct." The voice was slow and faint. "Nobody's business but mine."

"Yet shouldn't you be concerned about the meaning of your life, about your place in the greater scheme of things? Before you throw away your one chance to improve — "

"Why the hell should I care about improvement when I don't believe in Heaven or Hell?" the atheist demanded weakly.

"Yet you assume that your own relief is all that matters," Zane said. "What of those you love, who remain in life? Those who love you, and who will find your body here, a horror to them. They will still suffer. Don't you owe them anything?"

But the atheist was too far gone. He had lost consciousness and no longer cared who else might suffer, if he ever had cared. In due course he died.

Zane reached in and drew out his soul. It was a typical mottled thing, good and evil spotting it in a complex mosaic. He started to fold it — and the soul disintegrated, falling apart into nothingness.

The atheist had his wish. He really had not believed, and so the Afterlife had been unable to hold him. He was beyond the reach of God or Satan. That did seem best.

It was best — but was it right? The atheist had not seemed to care about anyone except himself — and in that uncaring, perhaps had rendered his own existence meaningless.

Zane rejoined Mortis. "I think that man was half-right," he said. "He is better off out of the game — but the game may not be better off without him. A man should not exist for himself alone. Life made an investment in him, and that investment was not paid off." But Zane wasn't sure.

His timer was going again. He oriented on the next client, wondering how he was going to account for the soul that disintegrated. The Purgatory News Center would have a ball with that one. He visualized the headline: THE FISH THAT GOT AWAY.

He arrived at a hospital. That was not unusual; the terminally sick tended to congregate there, and he had made a number of similar collections all over the world. But he still didn't like hospitals very well, because of his lingering guilt relating to his mother.

At the edge of the parking lot was an ad, for once not Satanic. SHEEPSHEAD HORN O' PLENTY — MORE FRUIT THAN BRANDS X, Y, AND Z HORNS. Just the thing to buy for a hospitalized person recovering from stomach surgery.

Zane felt worse when he saw his client. It was an old woman, and she was embedded in a mass of lines and burbling devices. Some sort of bellows forced her to breathe rhythmically, and monitors clicked and bleeped to signal her heartbeat, digestion, and state of consciousness. Her blood coursed through the tubes of a dialysis machine. A nurse checked the equipment regularly, going on to the others in the ward. There were five other patients here, all similarly equipped.

The client's hospital gown was draped awkwardly, as such things seemed to be designed to do, so that embarrassing portions other wasted anatomy showed. She was in pain, Zane could see, though half-zonked on therapeutic drugs. She was overdue to die; only the relentlessly life-sustaining things enclosing her frail body prevented her from doing so.

Deja vu! His mother, all over again, Zane approached. She spied him, and her bloodshot eyes tracked him erratically. The tubes running into her nose prevented her from turning her head conveniently, and the machine set up a clangor of protest when she tried to shift her body.

"Be at ease, lady," Zane said. "I have come to take you away from this." She issued a weak hiss of a laugh. "Nothing can take me away," she gasped, spittle dribbling from her mouth. "They will not let me go. All my pleading is in vain. I may rot in this contraption, but I will still be alive."

"I am Death. I may not be denied."

She peered more closely at him. "Why, so you are! I thought you looked familiar. I would gladly go with you — but they won't give me the visa."

Zane smiled. "It is your right to make the transformation. That right can not be abridged." He reached into her body and caught her soul.

It didn't come. The woman keened weakly with new agony until he let the soul go. It snapped back into place, and she relaxed.

"You see!" she whispered. "They have anchored me in life, though it isn't worth it. You can't take me, Death!"

Zane looked at his watch. It was fifteen seconds past time. The woman really was being held beyond her destiny.

"Let me consider," Zane said, disgruntled. He walked down the ward, glancing at the other patients. He saw now that the details of their apparatus differed, but all were caught beyond their natural spans and all were similarly resigned to their fate. They might have no joy in life, but they would not be released from it one second before the machines gave out. This was one efficient hospital; there were no slip-ups.

"I see you. Death," someone murmured nearby.

Zane looked. It was a male patient in the adjacent rig. Unlike some of the others, this one was fully alert.

"I can't take her soul while that equipment functions," Zane said, wondering why he was bothering to explain to a nonclient.

The old man shook his head, causing his own apparatus to protest. "Never thought I'd see the day when Death was denied. That leaves taxes as the only certainty." He essayed a feeble laugh that made his dials quiver and alarmed the nurse on duty, who thought he was suffering a seizure.

She seemed unaware of Zane.

After a moment, the man spoke again. "If it was me, Death, know what I'd do?"

"That old woman, my client," Zane said. "She reminds me of my mother." And what a mass of guilt lay there, tying into his conscience like the lines of the hospital machines.

"She's somebody's mother," the man agreed. "It's her son who pays for all this foolery. Thinks he's doing her a favor, making her live beyond her time or will. If he really loved her, he'd let her go."

"Doesn't he love her?" Zane had killed his own mother because he loved her, but then had doubted.

"Maybe he thinks so. But he's really just getting even. He's a mean man, and she brought him into this world, and I guess he just never forgave her for that. So he won't let her leave."

Something snapped. "Death shall not be denied!" Zane said. He marched back to his client's section. He found switches on the equipment and clicked them off.

"Oops!" The nurse was on it immediately, as the machinery bleeped alarm. She turned the switches on again.