Song of Susannah

THIRTEEN

Mia didn’t know everything, but so far as Susannah could make out, Walter/Flagg had offered the spirit later to be known as Mia the avatar of Faustian bargains. If she was willing to give up her nearly eternal but discorporate state and become a mortal woman, then she could become pregnant and bear a child. Walter was honest with her about how little she would actually be getting for all she’d be giving up. The baby wouldn’t grow as normal babies did-as Baby Michael had done before Mia’s unseen but worshipful eyes-and she might only have him for seven years, but oh what wonderful years they could be!

Beyond this, Walter had been tactfully silent, allowing Mia to form her own pictures: how she would nurse her baby and wash him, not neglecting the tender creases behind the knees and ears; how she would kiss him in the honeyspot between the unfledged wings of his shoulderblades; how she would walk with him, holding both of his hands in both of hers as he toddled; how she would read to him and point out Old Star and Old Mother in the sky and tell him the story of how Rustie Sam stole the widow’s best loaf of bread; how she would hug him to her and bathe his cheek with her grateful tears when he spoke his first word, which would, of course, be Mama.

Susannah listened to this rapturous account with a mixture of pity and cynicism. Certainly Walter had done one hell of a job selling the idea to her, and as ever, the best way to do that was to let the mark sell herself. He’d even proposed a properly Satanic period of proprietorship: seven years. Just sign on the dotted line, madam, and please don’t mind that whiff of brimstone; I just can’t seem to get the smell out of my clothes.

Susannah understood the deal and still had trouble swallowing it. This creature had given up immortality for morning sickness, swollen and achy breasts, and, in the last six weeks of her carry, the need to pee approximately every fifteen minutes. And wait, folks, there’s more! Two and a half years of changing diapers soaked with piss and loaded with shit! Of getting up in the night as the kid howls with the pain of cutting his first tooth (and cheer up, Mom, only thirty-one to go). That first magic spit-up! That first heartwarming spray of urine across the bridge of your nose when the kid lets go as you’re changing his clout!

And yes, there would be magic. Even though she’d never had a child herself, Susannah knew there would be magic even in the dirty diapers and the colic if the child were the result of a loving union. But to have the child and then have him taken away from you just when it was getting good, just as the child approached what most people agreed was the age of reason, responsibility, and accountability? To then be swept over the Crimson King’s red horizon? That was an awful idea. And was Mia so besotted by her impending motherhood that she didn’t realize the little she had been promised was now being whittled away? Walter/Flagg had come to her in Fedic, Scenic Aftermath of the Red Death, and promised her seven years with her son. On the telephone in the Plaza-Park, however, Richard Sayre had spoken of a mere five.

In any case, Mia had agreed to the dark man’s terms. And really, how much sport could there have been in getting her to do that? She’d been made for motherhood, had arisen from the Prim with that imperative, had known it herself ever since seeing her first perfect human baby, the boy Michael. How could she have said no? Even if the offer had only been for three years, or for one, how? Might as well expect a long-time junkie to refuse a loaded spike when it was offered.

Mia had been taken into the Arc 16 Experimental Station. She’d been given a tour by the smiling, sarcastic (and undoubtedly frightening) Walter, who sometimes called himself Walter of End- World and sometimes Walter of All-World. She’d seen the great room filled with beds, awaiting the children who would come to fill them; at the head of each was a stainless-steel hood attached to a segmented steel hose. She did not like to think what the purpose of such equipment might be. She’d also been shown some of the passages under the Castle on the Abyss, and had been in places where the smell of death was strong and suffocating. She-there had been a red darkness and she-

“Were you mortal by then?” Susannah asked. “It sounds as though maybe you were.”

“I was on my way,” she said. “It was a process Walter called becoming.”

“All right. Go on.”

But here Mia’s recollections were lost in a dark fugue-not todash, but far from pleasant. A kind of amnesia, and it was red. A color Susannah had come to distrust. Had the pregnant woman’s transition from the world of the spirit to the world of the flesh-her trip to Mia-been accomplished through some other kind of doorway? She herself didn’t seem to know. Only that there had been a time of darkness-unconsciousness, she supposed-and then she had awakened “… as you see me. Only not yet pregnant, of course.”

According to Walter, Mia could not actually make a baby, even as a mortal woman. Carry, yes. Conceive, no. So it came to pass that one of the demon elementals had done a great service for the Crimson King, taking Roland’s seed as female and passing it on to Susannah as male. And there had been another reason, as well. Walter hadn’t mentioned it, but Mia had known.

“It’s the prophecy,” she said, looking into Fedic’s deserted and shadowless street. Across the way, a robot that looked like Andy of the Calla stood silent and rusting in front of the Fedic Cafe, which promised GOOD MEELS CHEEP.

“’What prophecy?” Susannah asked.

“’He who ends the line of Eld shall conceive a child of incest with his sister or his daughter, and the child will be marked, by his red heel shall you know him. It is he who shall stop the breath of the last warrior.’”

“Woman, I’m not Roland’s sister, or his daughter, either! You maybe didn’t notice a small but basic difference in the color of our hides, namely his being white and mine being black.” But she thought she had a pretty good idea of what the prophecy meant, just the same. Families were made in many ways. Blood was only one of them.

“Did he not tell you what dinh means?” Mia asked.

“Of course. It means leader. If he was in charge of a whole country instead of just three scruffy-ass gunpuppies, it’d mean king.”

“Leader and king, you say true. Now, Susannah, will you tell me that such words aren’t just poor substitutes for another?”

Susannah made no reply.

Mia nodded as though she had, then winced when a fresh contraction struck. It passed, and she went on. “The sperm was Roland’s. I believe it may have been preserved somehow by the old people’s science while the demon elemental turned itself inside out and made man from woman, but that isn’t the important part. The important part is that it lived and found the rest of itself, as ordained by ka.”

“My egg.”

“Your egg.”

“When I was raped in the ring of stones.”

“Say true.”

Susannah sat, musing. Finally she looked up. “Seem to me that it’s what I said before. You didn’t like it then, not apt to like it now, but-girl, you just the baby-sitter.”

There was no rage this time. Mia only smiled. “Who went on having her periods, even when she was being sick in the mornings? You did. And who’s got the full belly today? I do. If there was a baby-sitter, Susannah of New York, it was you.”

“How can that be? Do you know?”

Mia did.

FOURTEEN

The baby, Walter had told her, would be transmitted to Mia; sent to her cell by cell just as a fax is sent line by line.

Susannah opened her mouth to say she didn’t know what a fax was, then closed it again. She understood the gist of what Mia was saying, and that was enough to fill her with a terrible combination of awe and rage. She had been pregnant. She was, in a real sense, pregnant right this minute. But the baby was being:

(faxed)

sent to Mia. Was this a process that had started fast and slowed down, or started slow and speeded up? The latter, she thought, because as time passed she’d felt less pregnant instead of more. The little swelling in her belly had mostly flattened out again. And now she understood how both she and Mia could feel an equal attachment to the chap: it did, in fact, belong to both of them. Had been passed on like a… a blood transfusion.

Only when they want to take your blood and put it into someone else, they ask your permission. If they’re doctors, that is, and not one of Pere Callahan’s vampires. You’re a lot closer to one of those, Mia, aren’t you?

“Science or magic? “Susannah asked. “Which one was it that allowed you to steal my baby?”

Mia flushed a little at that, but when she turned to Susannah, she was able to meet Susannah’s eyes squarely. “I don’t know,” she said. “Likely a mixture of both. And don’t be so self-righteous! It’s in me, not you. It’s feeding off my bones and my blood, not yours.”

“So what? Do you think that changes anything? You stole it, with the help of some filthy magician.”

Mia shook her head vehemently, her hair a storm around her face.

“No?” Susannah asked. “Then how come you weren’t the one eating frogs out of the swamp and shoats out of the pen and God knows what other nasty things? How come you needed all that make-believe nonsense about the banquets in the castle, where you could pretend to be the one eating? In short, sugarpie, how come your chap’s nourishment had to go down my throat?”

“Because… because…” Mia’s eyes, Susannah saw, were filling with tears. “Because this is spoiled land! Blasted land! The place of the Red Death and the edge of the Discordia! I’d not feed my chap from here!”

It was a good answer, Susannah reckoned, but not the complete answer. And Mia knew it, too. Because Baby Michael, perfect Baby Michael, had been conceived here, had thrived here, had been thriving when Mia last saw him. And if she was so sure, why were those tears standing in her eyes?

“Mia, they’re lying to you about your chap.”

“You don’t know that, so don’t be hateful!”

“I do know it.” And she did. But there wasn’t proof, gods damn it! How did you prove a feeling, even one as strong as this?

“Flagg-Walter, if you like that better-he promised you seven years. Sayre says you can have five. What if they hand you a card, good for three years of child-rearing with stamp, when you get to this Dixie Pig? Gonna go with that, too?”

“That won’t happen! You’re as nasty as the other one! Shut up!”

“You got a nerve calling me nasty! Can’t wait to give birth to a child supposed to murder his Daddy.”