held it up to blue eyes that had started that day as brown as the hands. Susannah saw the date — –
June 1st, 1999 — and marveled over it. Not twenty years or even thirty, but thirty-five. Until this moment she hadn’t realized how little she’d thought of the world’s chances to survive so long.
The contemporaries she’d known in her old life — fellow students, civil rights advocates, drink-
ing buddies, and folk-music aficionados — would now be edging into late middle age. Some were undoubtedly dead.
Enough, Mia said, and tossed the newspaper back into the trash barrel, where it curled into its former rolled shape. She brushed as much dirt as she could from the soles of her bare feet
(because of the dirt, Susannah did not notice they had changed color) and then put on the stolen shoes. They were a little tight, and with no socks she supposed they’d give her blisters if she had to walk very far, but —
What do you care, right? Susannah asked her. Ain’t your feet. And knew as soon as she’d said it (for this was a form of talking; what Roland called palaver) that she might be wrong about that.
Certainly her own feet, those which had marched obediently through life below the body of
Odetta Holmes (and sometimes Detta Walker), were long gone, rotting or — more likely —
burned in some municipal incinerator.
But she did not notice the change in color. Except later she’d think: You noticed, all right.
Noticed it and blocked it right out. Because too much is too much.
Before she could pursue the question, as much philosophical as it was physical, of whose feet
she now wore, another labor pain struck her. It cramped her stomach and turned it to stone even as it loosened her thighs. For the first time she felt the dismaying and terrifying need to push.
You have to stop it! Mia cried. Woman, you have to! For the chap’s sake, and for ours, too!
Yes, all right, but how?
Close your eyes, Susannah told her.
What? Didn’t you hear me? You’ve got to —
I heard you, Susannah said. Close your eyes.
The park disappeared. The world went dark. She was a black woman, still young and
undoubtedly beautiful, sitting on a park bench beside a fountain and a metal turtle with a wet and gleaming metal shell. She might have been meditating on this warm late-spring afternoon in the
year of 1999.
I’m going away for a little while now, Susannah said. I’ll be back. In the meantime, sit where you are. Sit quiet. Don’t move. The pain should draw back again, but even if it doesn’t at first, sit still. Moving around will only make it worse. Do you understand me?
Mia might be frightened, and she was certainly determined to have her way, but she wasn’t
dumb. She asked only a single question.
Where are you going?
Back to the Dogan, Susannah said. My Dogan. The one inside.
TWO
The building Jake had found on the far side of the River Whye was some sort of ancient
communications-and-surveillance post. The boy had described it to them in some detail, but he
still might not have recognized Susannah’s imagined version of it, which was based on a
technology which had been far out of date only thirteen years later, when Jake had left New York for Mid-World. In Susannah’s when, Lyndon Johnson had been President and color TV was still
a curiosity. Computers were huge things that filled whole buildings. Yet Susannah had visited
the city of Lud and seen some of the wonders there, and so Jake might have recognized the place where he had hidden from Ben Slightman and Andy the Messenger Robot, after all.
Certainly he would have recognized the dusty linoleum floor, with its checkerboard pattern of
black and red squares, and the rolling chairs along consoles filled with blinking lights and
glowing dials. And he would have recognized the skeleton in the corner, grinning above the frayed collar of its ancient uniform shirt.
She crossed the room and sat in one of the chairs. Above her, black-and-white TV screens
showed dozens of pictures. Some were of Calla Bryn Sturgis (the town common, Callahan’s
church, the general store, the road leading east out of town). Some were still pictures like studio photographs: one of Roland, one of a smiling Jake holding Oy in his arms, and one — she could
hardly bear to look at it — of Eddie with his hat tipped back cowpoke-style and his whittling
knife in one hand.
Another monitor showed the slim black woman sitting on the bench beside the turtle, knees
together, hands folded in her lap, eyes closed, a pair of stolen shoes on her feet. She now had three bags: the one she’d stolen from the woman on Second Avenue, the rush sack with the
sharpened Orizas in it . . . and a bowling bag. This one was a faded red, and there was something with square corners inside it. A box. Looking at it in the TV screen made Susannah feel angry —
betrayed — but she didn’t know why.
The bag was pink on the other side, she thought. It changed color when we crossed, but only a little.
The woman’s face on the black-and-white screen above the control board grimaced. Susannah
felt an echo of the pain Mia was experiencing, only faint and distant.
Got to stop that. And quick.
The question still remained: how?
The way you did on the other side. While she was horsing her freight up to that cave just as fast as she damn could.
But that seemed a long time ago now, in another life. And why not? It had been another life, another world, and if she ever hoped to get back there, she had to help right now. So what had
she done?
You used this stuff, that’s what you did. It’s only in your head, anyway — what Professor Overmeyer called ” a visualization technique” back in Psych One. Close your eyes.
Susannah did so. Now both sets of eyes were closed, the physical ones that Mia controlled in
New York and the ones in her mind.
Visualize.
She did. Or tried.
Open.
She opened her eyes. Now on the panel in front of her there were two large dials and a single
toggle-switch where before there had been rheostats and flashing lights. The dials looked to be made of Bakelite, like the oven-dials on her mother’s stove back in the house where Susannah
had grown up. She supposed there was no surprise there; all you imagined, no matter how wild it might seem, was no more than a disguised version of what you already knew.
The dial on her left was labeled emotional temp. The markings on it ran from 32 to 212 (32 in
blue; 212 in bright red). It was currently set at 160. The dial in the middle was marked LABOR
FORCE. The numbers around its face went from 0 to 10, and it was currently turned to 9. The
label under the toggle-switch simply read CHAP, and there were only two settings: AWAKE and
ASLEEP. It was currently set to AWAKE.
Susannah looked up and saw one of the screens was now showing a baby in utero. It was a boy. A beautiful boy. His tiny penis floated like a strand of kelp below the lazy curl of his umbilical cord. His eyes were open, and although the rest of the image was black and white,
those eyes were a piercing blue. The chap’s gaze seemed to go right through her.
They’re Roland’s eyes, she thought, feeling stupid with wonder. How can that be?
It couldn’t, of course. All this was nothing but the work of her own imagination, a
visualization technique. But if so, why would she imagine Roland’s blue eyes? Why not Eddie’s
hazel ones? Why not her husband’s hazel eyes?
No time for that now. Do what you have to do.
She reached out to EMOTIONAL TEMP with her lower lip caught between her teeth (on the
monitor showing the park bench, Mia also began biting her lower lip). She hesitated, then dialed it back to 72, exactly as if it was a thermostat. And wasn’t it?
Calm immediately filled her. She relaxed in her chair and let her lip escape the grip of her
teeth. On the park monitor, the black woman did the same. All right, so far, so good.
She hesitated for a moment with her hand not quite touching the LABOR FORCE dial, then
moved on to CHAP instead. She flipped the toggle from AWAKE to ASLEEP. The baby’s eyes
closed immediately. Susannah found this something of a relief. Those blue eyes were
disconcerting.
All right, back to LABOR FORCE. Susannah thought this was the important one, what Eddie
would call the Big Casino. She took hold of the old-fashioned dial, applied a little experimental force, and was not exactly surprised to find the clunky thing dully resistant in its socket. It didn’t want to turn.