They went up the wide wooden steps of Damli House, side by side.
Five
Two of the can-toi were waiting to escort the Master and his Security Chief downstairs.
Pimli reflected on how odd it was that everyone—Breakers and Algul Siento staff
alike—had come to call them “the low men.” Because it was Brautigan who coined the
phrase. “Speak of angels, hear the flutter of their wings,” Prentiss’s beloved Ma might have
said, and Pimli supposed that if there were true manimals in these final days of the true
world, then the can-toi would fill the bill much better than the taheen. If you saw them
without their weird living masks, you would have thought theywere taheen, with the heads
of rats. But unlike the true taheen, who regarded humes (less a few remarkable exceptions
such as Pimli himself) as an inferior race, the can-toi worshipped the human form as divine.
Did they wear the masks in worship? They were closemouthed on the subject, but Pimli
didn’t think so. He thought they believed they werebecoming human—which was why,
when they first put on their masks (these were living flesh, grown rather than made), they
took a hume name to go with their hume aspect. Pimli knew they believed they would
somehow replace human beings after the Fall…althoughhow they could believe such a
thing was entirely beyond him. There would be heaven after the Fall, that was obvious to
anyone who’d ever read the Book of Revelation…but Earth?
Somenew Earth, perhaps, but Pimli wasn’t even sure of that.
Two can-toi security guards, Beeman and Trelawney, stood at the end of the hall, guarding
the head of the stairs going down to the basement. To Pimli, all can-toi men, even those
with blond hair and skinny builds, looked weirdly like that actor from the forties and fifties, Clark Gable. They all seemed to have the same thick, sensual lips and batty ears. Then,
when you got very close, you could see the artificial wrinkles at the neck and behind the
ears, where their hume masks twirled into pigtails and ran into the hairy, toothy flesh that
was their reality (whether they accepted it or not). And there were the eyes. Hair
surrounded them, and if you looked closely, you could see that what you originally took
forsockets were, in fact, holes in those peculiar masks of living flesh. Sometimes you could
hear the masks themselves breathing, which Pimli found both weird and a little revolting.
“Hile,” said Beeman.
“Hile,” said Trelawney.
Pimli and Finli returned the greeting, they all fisted their foreheads, and then Pimli led the way downstairs. In the lower corridor, walking past the sign which readWE MUST ALL
WORK TOGETHER TO CREATE A FIRE-FREE ENVIRONMENT and another
readingALL HAIL THE CAN-TOI , Finli said, very low: “They areso odd.”
Pimli smiled and clapped him on the back. That was why he genuinely liked Finli o’ Tego: like Ike and Mike, they thought alike.
Six
Most of the Damli House basement was a large room jammed with equipment. Not all of
the stuff worked, and they had no use for some of the instruments that did (there was plenty
they didn’t even understand), but they were very familiar with the surveillance equipment
and the telemetry that measureddarks : units of expended psychic energy. The Breakers
were expressly forbidden from using their psychic abilities outside of The Study, and not
all of them could, anyway. Many were like men and women so severely toilet-trained that
they were unable to urinate without the visual stimuli that assured them that yes, they were
in the toilet, and yes, it was all right to let go. Others, like children who aren’t yet
completely toilet-trained, were unable to prevent the occasional psychic outburst. This
might amount to no more than giving someone they didn’t like a transient headache or
knocking over a bench on the Mall, but Pimli’s men kept careful track, and outbursts that
were deemed “on purpose” were punished, first offenses lightly, repeat offenses with
rapidly mounting severity. And, as Pimli liked to lecture to the newcomers (back in the
days when there hadbeen newcomers), “Be sure your sin will find you out.” Finli’s
scripture was even simpler:Telemetry doesn’t lie .
Today they found nothing but transient blips on the telemetry readouts. It was as
meaningless as a four-hour audio recording of some group’s farts and burps would have
been. The videotapes and the swing-guards’ daybooks likewise produced nothing of
interest.
“Satisfied, sai?” Finli asked, and something in his voice caused Pimli to swing around and
look at him sharply.
“Areyou? ”
Finli o’ Tego sighed. At times like this Pimli wished that either Finli were hume or that he
himself were truly taheen. The problem was Finli’s inexpressive black eyes. They were
almost the shoebutton eyes of a Raggedy Andy doll, and there was simply no way to read
them. Unless, maybe, you were another taheen.
“I haven’t felt right for weeks now,” Finli said at last. “I drink too much graf to put myself asleep, then drag myself through the day, biting people’s heads off. Part of it’s the loss of communications since the last Beam went—”
“You know that was inevitable—”
“Yes, of course I know. What I’m saying is that I’m trying to find rational reasons to
explain irrational feelings, and that’s never a good sign.”
On the far wall was a picture of Niagara Falls. Some can-toi guard had turned it upside
down. The low men considered turning pictures upside down the absolute height of humor.
Pimli had no idea why. But in the end, who gave a shit?I know how to do my facking job,
he thought, re-hanging Niagara Falls rightside up.I know how to do that, and nothing else
matters, tell God and the Man Jesus thank ya.
“We always knew things were going to get wacky at the end,” Finli said, “so I tell myself
that’s all this is. This…you know…”
“This feeling you have,” the former Paul Prentiss supplied. Then he grinned and laid his
right forefinger over a circle made by his left thumb and index finger. This was a taheen
gesture which meantI tell you the truth . “Thisirrational feeling.”
“Yar. Certainly I know that the Bleeding Lion hasn’t reappeared in the north, nor do I
believe that the sun’s cooling from the inside. I’ve heard tales of the Red King’s madness
and that the Dan-Tete has come to take his place, and all I can say is ‘I’ll believe it when I see it.’ Same with this wonderful news about how a gunslinger-man’s come out of the west
to save the Tower, as the old tales and songs predict. Bullshit, every bit of it.”
Pimli clapped him on the shoulder. “Does my heart good to hear you say so!”
It did, too. Finli o’ Tego had done a hell of a job during his tenure as Head. His security
cadre had had to kill half a dozen Breakers over the years—all of them homesick fools
trying to escape—and two others had been lobotomized, but Ted Brautigan was the only
one who’d actually made it “under the fence” (this phrase Pimli had picked up from a film
calledStalag 17 ), and they had reeled him back in, by God. The can-toi took the credit, and
the Security Chief let them, but Pimli knew the truth: it was Finli who’d choreographed
each move, from beginning to end.
“But it might be more than just nerves, this feeling of mine,” Finli continued. “Ido believe
that sometimes folk can have bona fide intuitions.” He laughed. “How could one not
believe that, in a place as lousy with precogs and postcogs as this one?”
“But no teleports,” Pimli said. “Right?”
Teleportation was the one so-called wild talent of which all the Devar staff was afraid, and
with good reason. There was no end to the sort of havoc a teleport could wreak. Bringing in
about four acres of outer space, for instance, and creating a vacuum-induced hurricane.
Fortunately there was a simple test to isolate that particular talent (easy to administer,
although the equipment necessary was another leftover of the old people and none of them
knew how long it would continue to work) and a simple procedure (also left behind by the
old ones) for shorting out such dangerous organic circuits. Dr. Gangli was able to take care
of potential teleports in under two minutes. “So simple it makes a vasectomy look like
brain-surgery,” he’d said once.
“Absa-fackin-lutely no teleports,” was what Finli said now, and led Prentiss to an
instrument console that looked eerily like Susannah Dean’s visualization of her Dogan. He
pointed at two dials marked in the henscratch of the old people (marks similar to those on the Unfound Door). The needle of each dial lay flat against theO mark on the left. When
Finli tapped them with his furry thumbs, they jumped a little and then fell back.
“We don’t know exactly what these dials were actually meant to measure,” he said, “but