Roland was also slowing down, going deeper and deeper into that mental junkbin of his to find riddles. Yet he did find them, and he refused to give up. As always.
Ever since he had begun teaching her to shoot, Susannah had felt a reluctant love for Roland of Gilead, a feeling that seemed a mixture of admiration, fear, and pity.
She thought she would never really like him (and that the Detta Walker part of her might always hate him for the way he had seized hold of her and dragged her, raving, into the sun), but her love was nonetheless strong. He had, after all, saved Eddie Dean’s life and soul; had rescued her beloved. She must love him for that if for nothing else. But she loved him even more, she suspected, for the way he would never, never give up. The word retreat didn’t seem to be in his vocabulary, even when he was discouraged … as he so clearly was now.
“Blaine, where may you find roads without carts, forests without trees, cities without houses?”
“ON A MAP.”
“You say true, sai. Next. I have a hundred legs but cannot stand, a long neck but no head; I eat the maid’s life. What am I?”
“A BROOM, GUNSLINGER. ANOTHER VARIATION ENDS, ‘I EASE THE
MAID’S LIFE.’ I LIKE YOURS BETTER.”
Roland ignored this. “Cannot be seen, cannot be felt, cannot be heard, cannot be smelt. It lies behind the stars and beneath the hills. Ends life and kills laughter.
What is it, Blaine?”
“THE DARK.”
“Thankee-sai, you speak true.”
The diminished right hand slid up the right cheek—the old fretful gesture—and the minute scratching sound produced by the callused pads of his fingers made Susannah shiver. Jake sat cross-legged on the floor, looking at the gunslinger with a kind of fierce intensity.
“This thing runs but cannot walk, sometimes sings but never talks. Lacks arms, has hands; lacks a head but has a face. What is it, Blaine?”
“A CLOCK.”
“Shit,” Jake whispered, lips compressing.
Susannah looked over at Eddie and felt a passing ripple of irritation. He seemed to have lost interest in the whole thing—had “zoned out,” in his weird 1980s slang.
She thought to throw an elbow into his side, wake him up a little, then remembered Roland shaking his head at her and didn’t. You wouldn’t know he was thinking, not from that slack expression on his face, but maybe he was.
If so, you better hurry it up a little, precious, she thought. The dot on the route map was still closer to Dasherville than Topeka, but it would reach the halfway point within the next fifteen minutes or so.
And still the match went on, Roland serving questions, Blaine sending the answers whistling right back at him, low over the net and out of reach.
What builds up castles, tears down mountains, makes some blind, helps others to see? SAND.
Thankee-sai.
What lives in winter, dies in summer, and grows with its roots upward? AN
ICICLE.
Blaine. you say true.
Man walks over; man walks under; in time of war he bums asunder? A BRIDGE.
Thankee-sai.
A seemingly endless parade of riddles marched past her, one after the other, until she lost all sense of their fun and playfulness. Had it been so in the days of Roland’s youth, she wondered, during the riddle contests of Wide Earth and Full Earth, when he and his friends (although she had an idea they hadn’t all been his friends, no, not by a long chalk) had vied for the Fair-Day goose? She guessed that the answer was probably yes. The winner had probably been the one who could stay fresh longest, keep his poor bludgeoned brains aerated somehow.
The killer was the way Blaine came back with the answer so damned promptly each time. No matter how hard the riddle might seem to her, Blaine served it right back to their side of the court, ka-slam.
“Blaine, what has eyes yet cannot see?”
“THERE ARE FOUR ANSWERS,” Blaine replied. “NEEDLES, STORMS, POTATOES, AND A TRUE LOVER.”
“Thankee-sai, Blaine, you speak—”
“LISTEN. ROLAND OF GILEAD. LISTEN, KA-TET”
Roland fell silent at once, his eyes narrowing, his head slightly cocked.
“YOU WILL SHORTLY HEAR MY ENGINES BEGIN TO CYCLE UP,” Blaine said. “WE ARE NOW EXACTLY SIXTY MINUTES OUT OF TOPEKA. AT
THIS POINT—”
“If we’ve been riding for seven hours or more, I grew up with the Brady Bunch,”
Jake said.
Susannah looked around apprehensively, expecting some new terror or small act of cruelty in response to Jake’s sarcasm, but Blaine only chuckled. When he spoke again, the voice of Humphrey Bogart had resurfaced.
“TIME’S DIFFERENT HERE, SHWEETHEART. YOU MUST KNOW THAT
BY NOW. BUT DON’T WORRY; THE FUNDAMENTAL THINGS APPLY
AS TIME GOES BY. WOULD I LIE TO YOU?”
“Yes,” Jake muttered.
That apparently struck Blame’s funny bone, because he began to laugh again—the mad, mechanical laughter that made Susannah think of funhouses in sleazy amusement parks and roadside carnivals. When the lights began to pulse in sync with the laughter, she shut her eyes and put her hands over her ears.
“Stop it, Blaine! Stop it!”
“BEG PARDON, MA’AM,” drawled the aw-shucks voice of Jimmy Stewart.
“AH’M RIGHT SORRY IF I RUINT YOUR EARS WITH MY RISABILITY.”
“Ruin this,” Jake said, and hoisted his middle finger at the route-map.
Susannah expected Eddie to laugh—you could count on him to be amused by vulgarity at any time of the day or night, she would have said—but Eddie only continued looking down at his lap, his forehead creased, his eyes vacant, his mouth hung slightly agape. He looked a little too much like the village idiot for comfort, Susannah thought, and again had to restrain herself from throwing an elbow into his side to get that doltish look off his face. She wouldn’t restrain herself for much longer; if they were going to die at the end of Blaine’s run, she wanted Eddie’s arms around her when it happened, Eddie’s eyes on her, Eddie’s mind with hers.
But for now, better let him be.
“AT THIS POINT,” Blaine resumed in his normal voice, “I INTEND TO BEGIN
WHAT I LIKE TO THINK OF AS MY KAMIKAZE RUN. THIS WILL
QUICKLY DRAIN MY BATTERIES, BUT I THINK THE TIME FOR
CONSERVATION HAS PASSED, DON’T YOU? WHEN I STRIKE THE
TRANSTEEL PIERS AT THE END OF THE TRACK, I SHOULD BE
TRAVELLING AT BETTER THAN NINE HUNDRED MILES AN
HOUR—FIVE HUNDRED AND THIRTY IN WHEELS, THAT IS. SEE YOU
LATER, ALLIGATOR, AFTER AWHILE, CROCODILE, DON’T FORGET TO
WRITE. I TELL YOU THIS IN THE SPIRIT OF FAIR PLAY, MY
INTERESTING NEW FRIENDS. IF YOU HAVE BEEN SAVING YOUR BEST
RIDDLES FOR LAST, YOU MIGHT DO WELL TO POSE THEM TO ME
NOW.”
The unmistakable greed in Blaine’s voice—its naked desire to hear and solve their best riddles before it killed them—made Susannah feel tired and old.
“I might not have time even so to pose you all my very best ones,” Roland said in a casual, considering tone of voice. “That would be a shame, wouldn’t it?”
A pause ensued—brief, but more of a hesitation than the computer had accorded any of Roland’s riddles—and then Blaine chuckled. Susannah hated the sound of its mad laughter, but there was a cynical weariness in this chuckle that chilled her even more deeply. Perhaps because it was almost sane.
“GOOD, GUNSLINGER. A VALIANT EFFORT. BUT YOU ARE NOT
SCHEHERAZADE, NOR DO WE HAVE A THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS
IN WHICH TO HOLD PALAVER.”
“I don’t understand you. I know not this Scheherazade.”
“NO MATTER. SUSANNAH CAN FILL YOU IN, IF YOU REALLY WANT
TO KNOW. PERHAPS EVEN EDDIE. THE POINT, ROLAND, IS THAT I’LL
NOT BE DRAWN ON BY THE PROMISE OF MORE RIDDLES. WE VIE FOR
THE GOOSE. COME TOPEKA, IT SHALL BE AWARDED, ONE WAY OR
ANOTHER. DO YOU UNDERSTAND THAT?”
Once more the diminished hand went up Roland’s cheek; once more Susannah heard the minute rasp of his fingers against the wiry stubble of his beard.
“We play for keeps. No one cries off.”
“CORRECT. NO ONE CRIES OFF.”
“All right, Blaine, we play for keeps and no one cries off. Here’s the next.”
“AS ALWAYS, I AWAIT IT WITH PLEASURE.”
Roland looked down at Jake. “Be ready with yours, Jake; I’m almost at the end of mine.”
Jake nodded.
Beneath them, the mono’s slo-trans engines continued to cycle up-mat beat-beat-beat which Susannah did not so much hear as feel in the hinges of her jaw, the hollows of her temples, the pulse-points of her wrists.
It’s not going to happen unless there’s a stumper in Jake’s book, she thought.
Roland can’t pose Blame, and I think he knows it. I think he knew it an hour ago.
“Blame, I occur once in a minute, twice in every moment, but not once in a hundred thousand years. What am I?”
And so the contest would continue, Susannah realized, Roland asking and Blaine answering with his increasingly terrible lack of hesitation, like an all-seeing, all-knowing god. Susannah sat with her cold hands clasped in her lap and watched the glowing dot draw nigh Topeka, the place where all rail service ended, the place where the path of their ka-tet would end in the clearing. She thought about the Hounds of the Falls, how they had jutted from the thundering white billows below the dark and starshot sky; she thought of their eyes.