Jane smiled. Nodded. Wondered what in God’s name was going on now.
“You were watching his hands,” Susy said, and laughed. Jane joined in. “I was watching what happened to his shirt when he bent over to get his bag. He’s got enough stuff under
there to stock a Woolworth’s notions counter. Only I don’t think he’s carrying the kind of
stuff you can buy at Woolworth’s.”
Jane threw back her head and laughed again, feeling like a puppet. “How do we handle it?”
Susy had five years’ senior- ity on her, and Jane, who only a minute ago had felt she had the
situation under some desperate kind of control, now only felt glad to have Susy beside her.
“Wedon’t. Tell the Captain while we’re taxiing in. The Captain speaks to customs. Your
friend there gets in line like everyone else, except then he gets pulled out of line by some men who escort him to a little room. It’s going to be the first in a very long succession of
little rooms for him, I think.”
“Jesus.” Jane was smiling, but chills, alternately hot and cold, were racing through her.
She hit the pop-release on her harness when the reverse thrusters began to wind down,
handed the Thermos to Susy, then got up and rapped on the cockpit door.
Not a terrorist but a drug-smuggler. Thank God for small favors. Yet in a way she hated it.
He had been cute.
Not much, but a little.
8
He still doesn’t see,the gunslinger thought with anger and dawning desperation. Gods!
Eddie had bent to get the papers he needed for the ritual, and when he looked up the army
woman was staring at him, her eyes bulging, her cheeks as white as the paper things on the
backs of the seats. The silver tube with the red top, which he had at first taken for some
kind of canteen, was apparently a weapon. She was holding it up between her breasts now.
Roland thought that in a moment or two she would either throw it or spin off the red top and
shoot him with it.
Then she relaxed and buckled her harness even though the thump told both the gunslinger
and the prisoner the aircarriage had already landed. She turned to the army woman she was
sitting with and said something. The other woman laughed and nodded, but if that was a
real laugh, the gun-slinger thought, he was a river-toad.
The gunslinger wondered how the man whose mind had become temporary home for the
gunslinger’s own ka, could be so stupid. Some of it was what he was putting into his body, of course . . . one of this world’s versions of devil-weed. Some, but not all. He was not soft
and unobservant like the others, but in time he might be.
They are as they are because they live in the light,the gunslinger thought suddenly. That
light of civilization you were taught to adore above all other things. They live in a world which has not moved on.
If this was what people became in such a world, Roland was not sure he didn’t prefer the
dark. “That was before the world moved on,” people said in his own world, and it was
always said in tones of bereft sadness . . . but it was, perhaps, sadness without thought,
without consideration.
She thought I/ he—meant to grab a weapon when I/he— bent down to get the papers.
When she saw the papers she relaxed and did what everyone else did before the carriage
came down to the ground again. Now she and her friend are talking and laughing but their
faces—her face especially, the face of the woman with the metal tube—are not right. They
are talking, all right, but they are onlypretending to laugh. . . and that is because what they are talking about is I/ him.
The air-carriage was now moving along what seemed a long concrete road, one of many.
Mostly he watched the women, but from the edges of his vision the gunslinger could see
other air-carriages moving here and there along other roads. Some lumbered; some moved
with incredible speed, not like carriages at all but like projectiles fired from guns or
cannons, preparing to leap into the air. As desperate as his own situation had become, part
of him wanted very much to come forward and turn his head so he could see these vehicles
as they leaped into the sky. They were man-made but every bit as fabulous as the stories of
the Grand Featherex which had supposedly once lived in the distant (and probably
mythical) kingdom of Garlan— more fabulous, perhaps, simply because these were
man-made.
The woman who had brought him the popkin unfas- tened her harness (this less than a
minute since she had fas- tened it) and went forward to a small door. That’s where the driver sits, the gunslinger thought, but when the door was opened and she stepped in he saw it
apparently took three drivers to operate the air-carriage, and even the brief glimpse he was
afforded of what seemed like a million dials and levers and lights made him understand
why.
The prisoner was looking at all but seeing nothing—Cort would have first sneered, then
driven him through the nearest wall. The prisoner’s mind was completely occupied with
grabbing the bag under the seat and his light jacket from the overhead bin . . . and facing the
ordeal of the ritual.
The prisoner saw nothing; the gunslinger saw every- thing.
The woman thought him a thief or a madman. He—or perhaps it was I, yes, that’s likely
enough—did something tomake her think that. She changed her mind, and then the other
woman changed it back . . . only now I think they know what’sreally wrong. They know he’s
going to try to profane the ritual.
Then, in a thunderclap, he saw the rest of his problem. First, it wasn’t just a matter of
taking the bags into his world as he had the coin; the coin hadn’t been stuck to the prisoner’s body with the glue-string the prisoner had wrapped around and around his upper body to
hold the bags tight to his skin. This glue-string was only part of his problem. The prisoner
hadn’t missed the temporary disappearance of one coin among many, but when he realized
that whatever it was he had risked his life for was suddenly gone, he was surely going to
raise the racks . . . and what then?
It was more than possible that the prisoner would begin to behave in a manner so irrational
that it would get him locked away in gaol as quickly as being caught in the act of
profanation. The loss would be bad enough; for the bags under his arms to simply melt
away to nothing would proba- bly make him think he really had gone mad.
The air-carriage, ox-like now that it was on the ground, labored its way through a left turn.
The gunslinger realized that he had no time for the luxury of further thought. He had to do
more than come forward; he must make contact with Eddie Dean.
Right now.
9
Eddie tucked his declaration card and passport in his breast pocket. The steel wire was
now turning steadily around his guts, sinking in deeper and deeper, making his nerves
spark and sizzle. And suddenly a voice spoke in his head.
Not a thought; a voice.
Listen to me, fellow. Listen carefully. And if you would remain safe, let your face show
nothing which might further rouse the suspicions of those army women. God knows they’re
suspicious enough already.
Eddie first thought he was still wearing the airline earphones and picking up some weird
transmission from the cockpit. But the airline headphones had been picked up five minutes
ago.
His second thought was that someone was standing beside him and talking. He almost
snapped his head to the left, but that was absurd. Like it or not, the raw truth was that the
voice had come from inside his head.
Maybe he was receiving some sort of transmission—AM, FM, or VHF on the fillings in
his teeth. He had heard of such th—
Straighten up, maggot! They’re suspicious enough with- out you looking as if you’ve gone
crazy!
Eddie sat up fast, as if he had been whacked. That voice wasn’t Henry’s, but it was so much
like Henry’s when they had been just a couple of kids growing up in the Projects, Henry
eight years older, the sister who had been between them now only a ghost of memory;
Selina had been struck and killed by a car when Eddie was two and Henry ten. That rasping
tone of command came out whenever Henry saw him doing some- thing that might end
with Eddie occupying a pine box long before his time … as Selina had.
What in the blue fuck is going on here?