On a Pale Horse by Piers Anthony Page B

this clarified why driving was soeasy; there was an animal mind assisting it. Absent-minded people sometimes drove into trees, but that never happened to an absent-minded horseback rider, for the horse knew better. But it seemed strange to be riding
inside
a horse!
    This time he arrived in the parking lot of a big stadium. It was night, but floodlights illuminated the area, so that it almost seemed like day. Zane looked closely at the gems of the bracelet to see if there were a mistake, but the cat’s eye was large, the two dots juxtaposed on the grid, and the arrow pointed firmly to the stadium.
    “So be it,” Zane said. He got out and walked to the structure. The man behind the ticket window did not challenge him, taking him to be a functionary of the premises. He walked right on inside, following the arrow.
    The game was in session. It was professional pigskin, with banners proclaiming the teams: the Does
vs
. the Ewes. The ball was on the ninety-foot line of the Ewes, and the girls were mixing it up in a good old-fashioned hair-pull.
    The arrow pointed to the playing field. But there was no one in that section. The action was in the other half.
    Zane walked around the edge of the field with a certain difficulty, for the stadium thronged with people. The arrow on the gem shifted, orienting on a spot on the Does’ fifty-foot line. An empty spot.
    Had his gems malfunctioned? No—he realized immediately that his recycling of the time had caused him to arrive early; three minutes remained before the death was due. He would simply have to wait for it.
    Zane took a seat on the convenient bench near the hundred-and-fifty foot line. Several Ewes sat on it—big, husky, well-padded young women, attractive in a violent way, with generous endowments wherever he looked. The nearest one glanced at him, did a double take, then realized she had suffered a delusion and turned away. After all, no one saw Death sitting on the players’ bench at a pigskin game!
    The Does were pressing hard. They wore bright blue suits whose protective padding accented their female qualities enormously. To Zane it was really too much;even prize-winning milking goats lacked udders as massive as these appeared to be. Maybe he was too close; in times past, watching television, before his set was repossessed by the finance company, he had admired the pig proportions.
    The Doe quarterback snatched the skin and faded back for a throw. She heaved it forward just as two Ewes stampeded toward her. There was a flash as the spell on the ball fought off the blocking-spells and freed it to fly to its target. The receiver levitated at an angle, surprising the defender, who had evidently anticipated a bringdown-spell. The Doe caught the missile with a cry of glee, clutched it to her massive bosom, and cannonballed to the turf, plowing up a divot. It was a beautiful play, and the audience squealed.
    But there was a black flag. The referees, striped like skunks, consulted and concluded that an illegal spell had been cast, momentarily blinding the defending Ewe. The play was disallowed and a penalty assessed. Because the Does were in field-goal range, the Ewe captain chose magic rather than footage—the generation of an adverse wind. That would last two minutes and should be enough to foil the drive.
    The Does pressed on determinedly. Their fans in the crowd encouraged them. “Dose! Dose! Dose!” they bawled. Zane thought they were yelling for the team, until he saw the name of the quarterback on the marquee and realized that her initials were O.D. Naturally she was called the Dose. Now he remembered seeing her play, when he was alive and had his TV.
    O.D. took the skin and made an end run, skillfully fending off tacklers with a series of legal straightarm-spells. But as she crossed the scrimmage line at the near side of the field, someone caught her with a dishabille-spell. Suddenly she was naked, or at least visible. Zane realized that her uniform had been rendered