want to but couldn’t help it. Her mouth dried up.
In that same low and somehow horrible tone of confidentiality, Mia said, “There were many
places where the old people tried to join magic and science together, but yon may be the only
one left.” She nodded toward the Dogan. “It was there that Walter took me, to make me mortal and take me out of Prim’s way forever.
“To make me like you.”
THIRTEEN
Mia didn’t know everything, but so far as Susannah could make out, Walter/Flagg had offered
the spirit later to be known as Mia the avatar of Faustian bargains. If she was willing to give up her nearly eternal but discorporate state and become a mortal woman, then she could become
pregnant and bear a child. Walter was honest with her about how little she would actually be
getting for all she’d be giving up. The baby wouldn’t grow as normal babies did — as Baby
Michael had done before Mia’s unseen but worshipful eyes —and she might only have him for
seven years, but oh what wonderful years they could be!
Beyond this, Walter had been tactfully silent, allowing Mia to form her own pictures: how she
would nurse her baby and wash him, not neglecting the tender creases behind the knees and ears; how she would kiss him in the honeyspot between the unfledged wings of his shoulderblades;
how she would walk with him, holding both of his hands in both of hers as he toddled; how she
would read to him and point out Old Star and Old Mother in the sky and tell him the story of
how Rustie Sam stole the widow’s best loaf of bread; how she would hug him to her and bathe
his cheek with her grateful tears when he spoke his first word, which would, of course, be Mama.
Susannah listened to this rapturous account with a mixture of pity and cynicism. Certainly Walter had done one hell of a job selling the idea to her, and as ever, the best way to do that was to let the mark sell herself. He’d even proposed a properly Satanic period of proprietorship: seven years. Just sign on the dotted line, madam, and please don’t mind that whiff of brimstone; I just can’t seem to get the smell out of my clothes.
Susannah understood the deal and still had trouble swallowing it. This creature had given up
immortality for morning sickness, swollen and achy breasts, and, in the last six weeks of her
carry, the need to pee approximately every fifteen minutes. And wait, folks, there’s more! Two
and a half years of changing diapers soaked with piss and loaded with shit! Of getting up in the night as the kid howls with the pain of cutting his first tooth (and cheer up, Mom, only thirty-one to go). That first magic spit-up! That first heartwarming spray of urine across the bridge of your nose when the kid lets go as you’re changing his clout!
And yes, there would be magic. Even though she’d never had a child herself, Susannah knew
there would be magic even in the dirty diapers and the colic if the child were the result of a
loving union. But to have the child and then have him taken away from you just when it was
getting good, just as the child approached what most people agreed was the age of reason,
responsibility, and accountability? To then be swept over the Crimson King’s red horizon? That
was an awful idea. And was Mia so besotted by her impending motherhood that she didn’t realize
the little she had been promised was now being whittled away? Walter/Flagg had come to her in Fedic, Scenic Aftermath of the Red Death, and promised her seven years with her son. On the
telephone in the Plaza-Park, however, Richard Sayre had spoken of a mere five.
In any case, Mia had agreed to the dark man’s terms. And really, how much sport could there
have been in getting her to do that? She’d been made for motherhood, had arisen from the Prim with that imperative, had known it herself ever since seeing her first perfect human baby, the boy Michael. How could she have said no? Even if the offer had only been for three years, or for one, how? Might as well expect a long-time junkie to refuse a loaded spike when it was offered.
Mia had been taken into the Arc 16 Experimental Station. She’d been given a tour by the
smiling, sarcastic (and undoubtedly frightening) Walter, who sometimes called himself Walter of End-World and sometimes Walter of All-World. She’d seen the great room filled with beds,
awaiting the children who would come to fill them; at the head of each was a stainless-steel hood attached to a segmented steel hose. She did not like to think what the purpose of such equipment might be. She’d also been shown some of the passages under the Castle on the Abyss, and had
been in places where the smell of death was strong and suffocating. She —there had been a red
darkness and she —
“Were you mortal by then?” Susannah asked. “It sounds as though maybe you were.”
“I was on my way,” she said. “It was a process Walter called becoming. ”
“All right. Go on.”
But here Mia’s recollections were lost in a dark fugue —not todash, but far from pleasant. A
kind of amnesia, and it was red. A color Susannah had come to distrust. Had the pregnant woman’s transition from the world of the spirit to the world of the flesh — her trip to Mia —
been accomplished through some other kind of doorway? She herself didn’t seem to know. Only
that there had been a time of darkness — unconsciousness, she supposed — and then she had
awakened “. . . as you see me. Only not yet pregnant, of course.”
According to Walter, Mia could not actually make a baby, even as a mortal woman. Carry,
yes. Conceive, no. So it came to pass that one of the demon elementals had done a great service for the Crimson King, taking Roland’s seed as female and passing it on to Susannah as male. And there had been another reason, as well. Walter hadn’t mentioned it, but Mia had known.
“It’s the prophecy,” she said, looking into Fedic’s deserted and shadowless street. Across the way, a robot that looked like Andy of the Calla stood silent and rusting in front of the Fedic
Cafe, which promised GOOD MEELS CHEEP.
” ‘What prophecy?” Susannah asked.
” ‘He who ends the line of Eld shall conceive a child of incest with his sister or his daughter, and the child will be marked, by his red heel shall you know him. It is he who shall stop the
breath of the last warrior.’ ”
“Woman, I’m not Roland’s sister, or his daughter, either! You maybe didn’t notice a small but basic difference in the color of our hides, namely his being white and mine being black. ” But she thought she had a pretty good idea of what the prophecy meant, just the same. Families were
made in many ways. Blood was only one of them.
“Did he not tell you what dinh means?” Mia asked.
“Of course. It means leader. If he was in charge of a whole country instead of just three
scruffy-ass gunpuppies, it’d mean king.”
“Leader and king, you say true. Now, Susannah, will you tell me that such words aren’t just poor substitutes for another?”
Susannah made no reply.
Mia nodded as though she had, then winced when a fresh contraction struck. It passed, and she went on. “The sperm was Roland’s. I believe it may have been preserved somehow by the old
people’s science while the demon elemental turned itself inside out and made man from woman,
but that isn’t the important part. The important part is that it lived and found the rest of itself, as ordained by ka.”
“My egg.”
“Your egg.”
“When I was raped in the ring of stones.”
“Say true.”
Susannah sat, musing. Finally she looked up. “Seem to me that it’s what I said before. You didn’t like it then, not apt to like it now, but — girl, you just the baby-sitter.”
There was no rage this time. Mia only smiled. “Who went on having her periods, even when
she was being sick in the mornings? You did. And who’s got the full belly today? I do. If there was a baby-sitter, Susannah of New York, it was you.”
“How can that be? Do you know?”
Mia did.
FOURTEEN
The baby, Walter had told her, would be transmitted to Mia; sent to her cell by cell just as a fax is sent line by line.
Susannah opened her mouth to say she didn’t know what a fax was, then closed it again. She
understood the gist of what Mia was saying, and that was enough to fill her with a terrible combination of awe and rage. She had been pregnant. She was, in a real sense, pregnant right this minute. But the baby was being: