pokeberry popped. Mia stripped it and gobbled it, drizzling juice through a knowing grin.
“I had an idea you couldn’t read,” Susannah said. This was beside the point, but it was all she could think of to say. Her mind kept returning to the image of the baby; to those brilliant blue eyes. Gunslinger’s eyes.
“Aye, but I know my numbers, and when it comes to your mind, I read very well. Do you say
you don’t recall the sign in the hotel lobby? Will you tell me that?”
Of course she remembered. According to the sign, the Plaza-Park would be part of an organization called Sombra/North Central in just another month. And when she’d said Not in our world, of course she had been thinking of 1964 — the world of black-and-white television, absurdly bulky room-sized computers, and Alabama cops more than willing to sic the dogs on
black marchers for voting rights. Things had changed greatly in the intervening thirty-five years.
The Eurasian desk clerk’s combination TV and typewriter, for instance — how did Susannah
know that wasn’t a dipolar computer run by some form of slo-trans engine? She did not.
“Go on,” she told Mia.
Mia shrugged. “You doom yourselves, Susannah. You seem positively bent on it, and the root is always the same: your faith fails you, and you replace it with rational thought. But there is no love in thought, nothing that lasts in deduction, only death in rationalism.”
“What does this have to do with your chap?”
“I don’t know. There’s much I don’t know.” She raised a hand, forestalling Susannah before Susannah could speak. “And no, I’m not playing for time, or trying to lead you away from what you’d know; I’m speaking as my heart tells me. Would you hear or not?”
Susannah nodded. She’d hear this . . . for a little longer, at least. But if it didn’t turn back to the baby soon, she’d turn it back in that direction herself.
“The magic went away. Maerlyn retired to his cave in one world, the sword of Eld gave way
to the pistols of the gunslingers in another, and the magic went away. And across the arc of
years, great alchemists, great scientists, and great —what? — technicians, I think? Great men of thought, anyway, that’s what I mean, great men of deduction — these came together and created the machines which ran the Beams. They were great machines but they were mortal machines.
They replaced the magic with machines, do ya kennit, and now the machines are failing. In some worlds, great plagues have decimated whole populations.”
Susannah nodded. “We saw one of those,” she said quietly. “They called it the superflu.”
“The Crimson King’s Breakers are only hurrying along a process that’s already in train. The machines are going mad. You’ve seen this for yourself. The men believed there would always be
more men like them to make more machines. None of them foresaw what’s happened. This . . .
this universal exhaustion.”
“The world has moved on.”
“Aye, lady. It has. And left no one to replace the machines which hold up the last magic in creation, for the Prim has receded long since. The magic is gone and the machines are failing.
Soon enough the Dark Tower will fall. Perhaps there’ll be time for one splendid moment of uni-
versal rational thought before the darkness rules forever. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
“Won’t the Crimson King be destroyed, too, when the Tower falls? Him and all his crew? The guys with the bleeding holes in their foreheads?”
“He has been promised his own kingdom, where he’ll rule forever, tasting his own special
pleasures.” Distaste had crept into Mia’s voice. Fear, too, perhaps.
“Promised? Promised by whom? Who is more powerful than he?”
“Lady, I know not. Perhaps this is only what he has promised himself.” Mia shrugged. Her eyes wouldn’t quite meet Susannah’s.
“Can nothing prevent the fall of the Tower?”
“Not even your gunslinger friend hopes to prevent it,” Mia said, “only to slow it down by freeing the Breakers and —perhaps — slaying the Crimson King. Save it! Save it, O delight! Did he ever tell you that was his quest?”
Susannah considered this and shook her head. If Roland had ever said that, in so many words, she couldn’t remember. And she was sure she would have.
“No,” Mia went on, “for he won’t lie to his ka-tet unless he has to, ’tis his pride. What he wants of the Tower is only to see it.” Then she added, rather grudgingly: “Oh, perhaps to enter it, and climb to the room at the top, his ambition may strike so far. He may dream of standing on its
allure as we hunker on this one, and chant the names of his fallen comrades, and of his line all the way back to Arthur Eld. But save it? No, good lady! Only a return of the magic could possibly save it, and — as you yourself well know — your dinh deals only in lead.”
Never since crossing the worlds had Susannah heard Roland’s trade of hand cast in such a
paltry light. It made her feel sad and angry, but she hid her feelings as best she could.
“Tell me how your chap can be Roland’s son, for I would hear.”
“Aye, ’tis a good trick, but one the old people of River Crossing could have explained to you, I’ve no doubt.”
Susannah started at that. “How do you know so much of me?”
“Because you are possessed,” Mia said, “and I am your possessor, sure. I can look through any of your memories that I like. I can read what your eyes see. Now be quiet and listen if you would learn, for I sense our time has grown short.”
FOUR
This is what Susannah’s demon told her.
“There are six Beams, as you did say, but there are twelve Guardians, one for each end of each Beam. This — for we’re still on it — is the Beam of Shardik. Were you to go beyond the Tower,
it would become the Beam of Maturin, the great turtle upon whose shell the world rests.
“Similarly, there are but six demon elementals, one for each Beam. Below them is the whole invisible world, those creatures left behind on the beach of existence when the Prim receded.
There are speaking demons, demons of house which some call ghosts, ill-sick demons which
some — makers of machines and worshippers of the great false god rationality, if it does ya —
call disease. Many small demons but only six demon elementals. Yet as there are twelve
Guardians for the six Beams, there are twelve demon aspects, for each demon elemental is both male and female.”
Susannah began to see where this was going, and felt a sudden sinking in her guts. From the
naked bristle of rocks beyond the allure, in what Mia called the Discordia, there came a dry,
feverish cackle of laughter. This unseen humorist was joined by a second, a third, a fourth and fifth. Suddenly it seemed that the whole world was laughing at her. And perhaps with good
reason, for it was a good joke. But how could she have known?
As the hyenas — or whatever they were — cackled, she said: ‘You’re telling me that the
demon elementals are hermaphrodites. That’s why they’re sterile, because they’re both.”
“Aye. In the place of the Oracle, your dinh had intercourse with one of these demon
elementals in order to gain information, what’s called prophecy in the High Speech. He had no reason to think the Oracle was anything but a succubus, such as those that sometimes exist in the lonely places — ”
“Right,” Susannah said, “just a run-of-the-mill demon sexpot.”
“If you like,” Mia said, and this time when she offered Susannah a pokeberry, Susannah took it and began to roll it between her palms, warming the skin. She still wasn’t hungry, but her
mouth was dry. So dry.
“The demon took the gunslinger’s seed as female, and gave it back to you as male.”
“When we were in the speaking ring,” Susannah said dismally. She was remembering how the pouring rain had pounded against her upturned face, the sense of invisible hands on her
shoulders, and then the thing’s engorgement filling her up and at the same time seeming to tear her apart. The worst part had been the coldness of the enormous cock inside her. At the time,
she’d thought it was like being fucked by an icicle.
And how had she gotten through it? By summoning Detta, of course. By calling on the bitch,
victor in a hundred nasty little sex-skirmishes fought in the parking lots of two dozen roadhouses and county-line honky-tonks. Detta, who had trapped it —
“It tried to get away,” she told Mia. “Once it figured out it had its cock caught in a damn Chinese finger-puller, it tried to get away.”