must have been many long years gettin this far. Hate to think how many, so I do. I’m gonna
say it’d take you six days to get out of the White Lands, maybe seven—”
“Do you call these lands Empathica?” Susannah asked.
He blinked, then gave her a puzzled look. “Why no, ma’am—I’ve never heard this part of
creation called anything but the White Lands.”
The puzzled look was bogus. She was almost sure of it. Old Joe Collins, cheery as Father
Christmas in a children’s play, had just lied to her. She wasn’t sure why, and before she
could pursue it, Roland asked sharply: “Would you let that go for now? Would you, for
your father’s sake?”
“Yes, Roland,” she said meekly. “Of course.”
Roland turned back to Joe, still holding Susannah on his hip.
“Might take you as long as nine days, I guess,” Joe said, scratching his chin, “for that road can be plenty slippery, especially after Bill packs down the snow, but you can’t get him to
stop. He’s got his orders to follow. Hisprogrammin, he calls it.” The old man saw Roland
getting ready to speak and raised his hand. “Nay, nay, I’m not drawrin it out to irritate cher, sir or sai or whichever you prefer—it’s just that I’m not much used to cump’ny.
“Once you get down b’low the snowline it must be another ten or twelve days a-walkin,
but ain’t no need in the world to walk unless you fancy it. There’s another one of those Positronics huts down there with any number a’ wheelie vehicles parked inside. Like
golf-carts, they are. The bat’tries are all dead, natcherly—flat as yer hat—but there’s a
gennie there, too, Honda just like mine, and it was a-workin the last time I was down there,
for Bill keeps things in trim as much as he can. If you could charge up one of those
wheelies, why that’d cut your time down to four days at most. So here’s what I think: if you
had to hoof it the whole way, it might take you as long as nineteen days. If you can go the
last leg in one o’ them hummers—that’s what I call em, hummers, for that’s the sound they
make when they’re runnin—I should say ten days. Maybe eleven.”
The room fell silent. The wind gusted, throwing snow against the side of the cottage, and
Susannah once more marked how it sounded almost like a human cry. A trick of the angles
and eaves, no doubt.
“Less than three weeks, even if we had to walk,” Roland said. He reached out toward the
Polaroid photograph of the dusky stone tower standing against the sunset sky, but did not
quite touch it. It was as if, Susannah thought, he were afraid to touch it. “After all the years and all the miles.”
Not to mention the gallons of spilled blood,Susannah thought, but she would not have said
this even if the two of them had been alone. There was no need to; he knew how much
blood had been spilled as well as she did. But there was something off-key here. Off-key or
downright wrong. And the gunslinger didnot seem to knowthat .
Sympathy was to respect the feelings of another. Empathy was to actuallyshare those
feelings. Why would folks call any land Empathica?
And why would this pleasant old man lie about it?
“Tell me something, Joe Collins,” Roland said.
“Aye, gunslinger, if I can.”
“Have you been right upto it? Laid your hand on the stone of it?”
The old man looked at first to see if Roland was joshing him. When he was sure that
wasn’t the case, he looked shocked. “No,” he said, and for the first time sounded as
American as Susannah herself. “That pitcher’s as close as I dared go. The edge of the
rosefield. I’m gonna say two, two hundred and fifty yards away. What the robot’d call five
hundred arcs o’ the wheel.”
Roland nodded. “And why not?”
“Because I thought to go closer might kill me, but I wouldn’t be able to stop. The voices
would draw me on. So I thought then, and so I do think, even today.”
Seven
After dinner—surely the finest meal Susannah had had since being hijacked into this other
world, and possibly the best in her entire life—the sore on her face burst wide open. It was
Joe Collins’s fault, in a way, but even later, when they had much to hold against the only
inhabitant of Odd’s Lane, she did not blame him for that. It was the last thing he would
have wanted, surely.
He served chicken, roasted to a turn and especially tasty after all the venison. With it, Joe brought to table mashed potatoes with gravy, cranberry jelly sliced into thick red discs,
green peas (“Only canned, say sorry,” he told them), and a dish of little boiled onions
bathing in sweet canned milk. There was also eggnog. Roland and Susannah drank it with
childish greed, although both passed on “the teensy piss o’ rum.” Oy had his own dinner;
Joe fixed a plate of chicken and potatoes for him and then set it on the floor by the stove.
Oy made quick work of it and then lay in the doorway between the kitchen and the
combination living room/dining room, licking his chops to get every taste of giblet gravy
out of his whiskers while watching the humes with his ears up.
“I couldn’t eat dessert so don’t ask me,” Susannah said when she’d finished cleaning her
plate for the second time, sop-ping up the remains of the gravy with a piece of bread. “I’m
not sure I can even get down from this chair.”
“Well, that’s all right,” Joe said, looking disappointed, “maybe later. I’ve got a chocolate
pudding and a butterscotch one.”
Roland raised his napkin to muffle a belch and then said, “I could eat a dab of both, I
think.”
“Well, come to that, maybe I could, too,” Susannah allowed. How many eons since she’d
tasted butterscotch?
When they were done with the pudding, Susannah offered to help with the cleaning-up but
Joe waved her away, saying he’d just put the pots and plates in the dishwasher to rinse and
then run “the whole happy bunch of em” later. He seemed spryer to her as he and Roland
went back and forth into the kitchen, less dependent on the stick. Susannah guessed that the
little piss o’ rum (or maybe several of them, adding up to one large piss by the end of the
meal) might have had something to do with it.
He poured coffee and the three of them (four, counting Oy) sat down in the living room.
Outside it was growing dark and the wind was screaming louder than ever.Mordred’s out
there someplace, hunkered down in a snow-hollow or a grove of trees, she thought, and
once again had to stifle pity for him. It would have been easier if she hadn’t known that,
murderous or not, he must still be a child.
“Tell us how you came to be here, Joe,” Roland invited.
Joe grinned. “That’s a hair-raising story,” he said, “but if you really want to hear it, I guess I don’t mind tellin it.” The grin mellowed to a wistful smile. “It’s nice, havin folks to talk to for a little bit. Lippy does all right at listenin, but she never says nuffink back.”
He’d started off trying to be a teacher, Joe said, but quickly discovered that life wasn’t for him. He liked the kids—loved them, in fact—but hated all the administrative bullshit and
the way the system seemed set up to make sure no square pegs escaped the relentless
rounding process. He quit teaching after only three years and went into show business.
“Did you sing or dance?” Roland wanted to know.
“Neither one,” Joe replied. “I gave em the old stand-up.”
“Stand-up?”
“He means he was a comedian,” Susannah said. “He told jokes.”
“Correct!” Joe said brightly. “Some folks actually thought they were funny, too. Course,
they were the minority.”
He got an agent whose previous enterprise, a discount men’s clothing store, had gone
bankrupt. One thing led to another, he said, and onegig led to another, too. Eventually he
found himself working second- and third-rate nightclubs from coast to coast, driving a
battered but reliable old Ford pickup truck and going where Shantz, his agent, sent him. He
almost never worked the weekends; on the weekends, even the third-rate clubs wanted to
book rock-and-roll bands.
This was in the late sixties and early seventies, and there’d been no shortage of what Joe
called “current events material”: hippies and yippies, bra-burners and Black Panthers,
movie-stars, and, as always, politics—but he said he had been more of a traditional
joke-oriented comedian. Let Mort Sahl and George Carlin do the current-events shtick if
they wanted it; he’d stick toSpeaking of my mother-in-law andThey say our Polish friends