The images leapt at Pavlos, filling his brain with more information than he thought he could ever handle. He saw not through people’s eyes, but their hearts; and the cumulation of power coursed through him like a hot flux.
He reached out and caressed the pattern, and somehow he felt the individual threads, their textures, their will to fly.
His hand, unguided, passed over and held one thread, floating above the others. It was not his own, he could tell, but one with whom he felt a kindred current. He ran his fingernail along its side, and was surprised to find that the paint flaked off like a molted skin.
“Enough!” Atropos shook his shoulder. She had joined them at last, wearing a heavy shawl over her head.
“You have been sitting there, talking to yourself, for two sixtieths of the daylight. That’s all we can spare you. Get up, so we can move the loom back inside and begin our questioning!”
Pavlos blinked. Was that all the time it had been? It had felt like forever. So many things he had witnessed… things taking place in the world right now.
The cruelties were unchanged from those he had seen in the racks. They were larger, more subtle, perhaps… more indiscriminate. But the tapestry showed that the old evils were persistent.
Yet something was different. The pattern of the weave, certainly, was opening up, reflecting man’s new mobility.
But hidden in the opening was something else. Something Pavlos could not readily define, but which he was determined to protect.
He sighed. Well, at least he had kept the world free of their meddling for a few minutes. It was a good thought.
And now it was time to go.
Atropos stood nearby, holding what he supposed was his bobbin. Pavlos rose and bowed respectfully to Lachesis. “Thank you. I now know that it is the dye to blame. Your pattern is lovely.
Clotho, veiled like Atropos, snorted. But Lachesis smiled.
“With your permission,” he went on, “I would like to touch the weave one last time.
The eldest nodded even before Atropos could object.
He stepped up to the loom and ran his hand along the surface, right to left.
Five billion threads.
Atropos held her shears up next to his own thread. His hand approached hers.
The color of the threads guided him. One large spool held thread the color of spite, the other that of contempt. He grabbed those, ignoring the other two, and pulled.
The threads stretched as he leapt backward and, for an instant, he felt triumphant as Clotho and Atropos staggered.
But the tension held when he had pulled two meters taut. Try as he might, he could stretch no further.
Atropos regained her balance. Her nimbus became visible, a fiery dirty yellow. She hissed at him.
“You try to tweak our noses? Why, hero? You know you cannot harm the threads without a more powerful weapon than you have. One of your guns might, but you have none. So why do you ask for the mercy of my knife?”
She pondered for a moment.
“That’s it, isn’t it? You want to end your existence before we can question you! Clotho! Go and get your dyes! This one knows something. I shall enjoy tearing it out of him!”
Pavlos felt despair. His plan had failed and, worse, he didn’t doubt Clotho’s power to make him do whatever she wished.
Could he reach his own bobbin and cut it himself?
As if sensing his desperate thoughts, Atropos snorted her contempt and threw his thread down into the jumbled mass along the weave. Never in a century could he find it by himself.
Quickly, he looked about for an alternate plan. He saw the tholos, the small shrine by the great cedar, only a hundred meters away across the grassy meadow. Could he get inside and launch himself into the “other universe”…? It might be possible even to survive, to get help, as well as deny the Fates his mind.
Pavlos’s shoulders slumped. He remembered the size of the granite slab that blocked the doorway. By the time he moved it, if he could budge it at all, Clotho and Atropos could physically capture him.
Clotho approached, two bottles in her hand. An instinct he never knew he had told him the colors were Torment and Submission.
In an instant, he knew at last what a hero was. A hero died of no wound in the back. A hero was a gesture… a defiance. In moments he might be their willing slave, but now he had the Spark, and speech. “Cavernous shades! You dotard remnants of a wrong path taken! Know this! That you have kept the child restrained too long! That you have filled the world with woe too long! And you have taken undue liberties for ages too long without measure!”
The helm of Theseus rang with his extemporaneous words. He felt a return of the thrill he’d had on first seeing it. The power coursed through him, imagined as he knew it to be… imagined as the sense of rightness he could feel streaming to him from the tiny building behind him, under the giant cedar. He held the bobbins of Clotho and Atropos tightly, keeping the tension in their threads, like bowstrings. “This then, you devious crones! Know that your time is short! Your days are numbered! Yes, they are numbered in seconds!”
Atropos had stopped. She and Moira stared at him. Lachesis watched with a sober expression, eyes darting from him to her sisters and back.
But Clotho shifted her weight from foot to foot, apparently unamused and unimpressed. Her boredom was his end, he knew. There would be time for only a few more words.
Ah, good-bye, life. How sweet to die a hero! “Watch then, you degenerate and pathetic creatures of the past, as I, and all humanity, do curse your threads and, in so doing, seal your eventual doom!”
He meant it merely for show. A handwave that might or might not be a potent curse. Superstitious he knew them to be, at some deep level. Otherwise they would not be caught up in all of this allegorical rigmarole. Perhaps he could leave them with an uncertainty… a faint, nagging doubt that might keep them company in their cold evenings.
He plucked a horsehair from his helmet, and held it out. He brought its tip against one of the taut threads and said, “There is an end to all things, ladies. And your time is certainly long overdue.”
No one was more surprised than he when the tip of the horsehair erupted in flame. A slender column of actinic light appeared before Pavlos. It speared down from the sky to land with searing brilliance upon one of the threads.
The smell of ozone filled the air as the bolt of light hunted, wavered, then burned into the slender strand.
Atropos screamed, dropping her shears.
Her nimbus ballooned outward in a violent display of pain. Within it, she whirled and capered and finally spun about to run headlong toward the supposed safety of the temple.
Pavlos suddenly felt a twang, as the fury’s life thread parted! Her aura erupted as she was halfway to her destination, sending an explosion of sparks into the air. When they had fallen to earth, Atropos was gone.
“Zeus!” Clotho bellowed. She dropped her pigments and clawed at the sky.
“You’re dead!” she screamed. “I pulled you down myself! The Sky Tower is no more!”
The column of light hunted, then shifted toward the other thread, Clotho’s.
“A little farther south!” Pavlos cried out in English. “Steady, you fumble-thumbs Yankee! Steady!”