Song of Susannah

What is it to me, one way or the other?”

Susannah looked around. When she faced in toward the center of the castle-what she supposed was the courtyard-she caught an aroma of ancient rot. Mia saw her wrinkle her nose and smiled.

“Aye, they’re long gone, and the machines the later ones left behind are mostly stilled, but the smell of their dying lingers, doesn’t it? The smell of death always does. Ask your friend the gunslinger, the true gunslinger. He knows, for he’s dealt his share of it. He is responsible for much, Susannah of New York. The guilt of worlds hangs around his neck like a rotting corpse. Yet he’s gone far enough with his dry and lusty determination to finally draw the eyes of the great. He will be destroyed, aye, and all those who stand with him. I carry his doom in my own belly, and I care not.” Her chin jutted forward in the starlight. Beneath the serape her breasts heaved… and, Susannah saw, her belly curved. In this world, at least, Mia was very clearly pregnant. Ready to burst, in fact.

“Ask your questions, have at me,” Mia said. “Just remember, we exist in the other world, too, the one where we’re bound together. We’re lying on a bed in the inn, as if asleep… but we don’t sleep, do we, Susannah? Nay. And when the telephone rings, when my friends call, we leave this place and go to them. If your questions have been asked and answered, fine. If not, that’s also fine. Ask. Or… are you not a gunslinger?” Her lips curved in a disdainful smile. Susannah thought she was pert, yes, pert indeed. Especially for someone who wouldn’t be able to find her way from Forty- sixth Street to Forty-seventh in the world they had to go back to. “So shoot! I should say.”

Susannah looked once more into the darkened, broken well that was the castle’s soft center, where lay its keeps and lists, its barbicans and murder holes, its God-knew-what. She had taken a course in medieval history and knew some of the terms, but that had been long ago. Surely there was a banqueting hall somewhere down there, one that she herself had supplied with food, at least for awhile. But her catering days were done. If Mia tried to push her too hard or too far, she’d find that out for herself.

Meantime, she thought she’d start with something relatively easy.

“If this is the Castle on the Abyss,” she said, “where’s the Abyss? I don’t see anything out that way except for a minefield of rocks. And that red glow on the horizon.”

Mia, her shoulder-length black hair flying out behind her (not a bit of kink in that hair, as there was in Susannah’s; Mia’s was like silk), pointed across the inner chasm below them to the far wall, where the towers rose and the allure continued its curve.

“This is the inner keep,” she said. “Beyond it is the village of Fedic, now deserted, all dead of the Red Death a thousand years ago and more. Beyond that-”

“The Red Death?” Susannah asked, startled (also frightened in spite of herself). “Poe’s Red Death? Like in the story?” And why not? Hadn’t they already wandered into- and then back out of-L. Frank Baum’s Oz? What came next? The White Rabbit and the Red Queen?

“Lady, I know not. All I can tell you is that beyond the deserted village is the outer wall, and beyond the outer wall is a great crack in the earth filled with monsters that cozen, diddle, increase, and plot to escape. Once there was a bridge across, but it fell long ago. ’In the time before counting,’ as ’tis said. They’re horrors that might drive an ordinary man or woman mad at a glance.”

She favored Susannah with a glance of her own. A decidedly satiric one.

“But not a gunslinger. Surely not one such as thee.”

“Why do you mock me?” Susannah asked quietly.

Mia looked startled, then grim. “Was it my idea to come here? To stand in this miserable cold where the King’s Eye dirties the horizon and sullies the very cheek of the moon with its filthy light? Nay, lady! ’Twas you, so harry me not with your tongue!”

Susannah could have responded that it hadn’t been her idea to catch preg with a demon’s baby in the first place, but this would be a terrible time to get into one of those yes-you-did, no-I-didn’t squabbles.

“I wasn’t scolding,” Susannah said, “only asking.”

Mia made an impatient shooing gesture with her hand as if to say Don’t split hairs, and half-turned away. Under her breath she said, “I didn’t go to Morehouse or no house. And in any case I’ll bear my chap, do you hear? Whichever way the cards fall. Bear him and feed him!”

All at once Susannah understood a great deal. Mia mocked because she was afraid. In spite of all she knew, so much of her was Susannah.

I didn’t go to Morehouse or no house, for instance; that was from Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison. When Mia had bought into Susannah, she had purchased at least two personalities for the price of one. It was Mia, after all, who’d brought Detta out of retirement (or perhaps deep hibernation), and it was Detta who was particularly fond of that line, which expressed so much of the Negro’s deep-held disdain for and suspicion of what was sometimes called “the finer post-war Negro education.” Not to Morehouse or no house; I know what I know, in other words, I heard it through the grapevine, I got it on the earie, dearie, I picked it up on the jungle telegraph.

“Mia,” she said now. “Whose chap is it besides yours? What demon was his father, do you know?”

Mia grinned. It wasn’t a grin Susannah liked. There was too much Detta in it; too much laughing, bitter knowledge. “Aye, lady, I know. And you’re right. It was a demon got him on you, a very great demon indeed, say true! A human one! It had to have been so, for know you that true demons, those left on the shore of these worlds which spin around the Tower when the Prim receded, are sterile. And for a very good reason.”

“Then how-”

“Your dinh is the father of my chap,” Mia said. “Roland of Gilead, aye, he. Steven Deschain finally has his grandson, although he lies rotten in his grave and knows it not.”

Susannah was goggling at her, unmindful of the cold wind rushing out of the Discordia wilderness. “Roland…? It can’t be! He was beside me when the demon was in me, he was pulling Jake through from the house on Dutch Hill and fucking was the last thing on his mind…” She trailed off, thinking of the baby she’d seen in the Dogan. Thinking of those eyes. Those blue bombardier’s eyes. No. No, I refuse to believe it.

“All the same, Roland is his father,” Mia insisted. “And when the chap comes, I shall name him from your own mind, Susannah of New York; from what you learned at the same time you learned of merlons and courtyards and trebouchets and barbicans. Why not? ’Tis a good name, and fair.”

Professor Murray’s Introduction to Medieval History, that’s what she’s talking about.

“I will name him Mordred,” said she. “He’ll grow quickly, my darling boy, quicker than human, after his demon nature. He’ll grow strong. The avatar of every gunslinger that ever was. And so, like the Mordred of your tale, will he slay his father.”

And with that, Mia, daughter of none, raised her arms to the star-shot sky and screamed, although whether in sorrow, terror, or joy, Susannah could not tell.

TWO

“Hunker,” Mia said. “I have this.”

From beneath her serape she produced a bundle of grapes and a paper sack filled with orange pokeberries as swollen as her belly. Where, Susannah wondered, had the fruit come from? Was their shared body sleepwalking back in the Plaza-Park Hotel? Had there perhaps been a fruit basket she hadn’t noticed? Or were these the fruits of pure imagination?

Not that it mattered. Any appetite she might have had was gone, robbed by Mia’s claim. The fact that it was impossible somehow only added to the monstrosity of the idea.

And she couldn’t stop thinking of the baby she’d seen in utero on one of those TV screens. Those blue eyes.

No. It can’t be, do you hear? It cannot be!

The wind coming through the notches between the merlons was chilling her to the bone. She swung off the seat of the cart and settled herself against the allure wall beside Mia, listening to the wind’s constant whine and looking up at the alien stars.

Mia was cramming her mouth with grapes. Juice ran from one corner of her mouth while she spat seeds from the other corner with the rapidity of machine-gun bullets. She swallowed, wiped her chin, and said: “It can. It can be. And more: it is. Are you still glad you came, Susannah of New York, or do you wish you’d left your curiosity unsatisfied?”

“If I’m gonna have a baby I didn’t hump for, I’m gonna know everything about that baby that I can. Do you understand that?”

Mia blinked at the deliberate crudity, then nodded. “If you like.”

“Tell me how it can be Roland’s. And if you want me to believe anything you tell me, you better start by making me believe this.”

Mia dug her fingernails into the skin of a pokeberry, stripped it away in one quick gesture, and ate the fruit down greedily. She considered opening another, then simply rolled it between her palms (those disconcertingly white palms), warming it. After enough of this, Susannah knew, the fruit would split its skin on its own. Then she began.

THREE

“How many Beams do there be, Susannah of New York?”

“Six,” Susannah said. “At least, there were. I guess now there are only two that-”

Mia waved a hand impatiently, as if to say Don’t waste my time. “Six, aye. And when the Beams were created out of that greater Discordia, the soup of creation some (including the Manni) call the Over and some call the Prim, what made them?”

“I don’t know,” Susannah said. “Was it God, do you think?”

“Perhaps there is a God, but the Beams rose from the Prim on the airs of magic, Susannah, the true magic which passed long ago. Was it God that made magic, or was it magic that made God? I know not. It’s a question for philosophers, and mothering’s my job. But once upon a time all was Discordia and from it, strong and all crossing at a single unifying point, came the six Beams. There was magic to hold them steady for eternity, but when the magic left from all there is but the Dark Tower, which some have called Can Calyx, the Hall of Resumption, men despaired. When the Age of Magic passed, the Age of Machines came.”

“North Central Positronics,” Susannah murmured. “Dipolar computers. Slo-trans engines.” She paused. “Blaine the Mono. But not in our world.”

“No? Do you say your world is exempt? What about the sign in the hotel lobby?” The pokeberry popped. Mia stripped it and gobbled it, drizzling juice through a knowing grin.

“I had an idea you couldn’t read,” Susannah said. This was beside the point, but it was all she could think of to say. Her mind kept returning to the image of the baby; to those brilliant blue eyes. Gunslinger’s eyes.

“Aye, but I know my numbers, and when it comes to your mind, I read very well. Do you say you don’t recall the sign in the hotel lobby? Will you tell me that?”

Of course she remembered. According to the sign, the Plaza-Park would be part of an organization called Sombra/North Central in just another month. And when she’d said Not in our world, of course she had been thinking of 1964-the world of black-and-white television, absurdly bulky room-sized computers, and Alabama cops more than willing to sic the dogs on black marchers for voting rights. Things had changed greatly in the intervening thirty-five years. The Eurasian desk clerk’s combination TV and typewriter, for instance-how did Susannah know that wasn’t a dipolar computer run by some form of slo-trans engine? She did not.