Song of Susannah

was delighted. She would gladly swap those white legs, strong though they might be, for a little peace of mind.

A little peace in her mind.

NINETEEN

“She’s coming around,” someone growled. The one with the bulldog face, Susannah thought. Not that it mattered; underneath they all looked like humanoid rats with fur growing out of their bone-crusty flesh.

“Good deal.” That was Sayre, walking behind them. She looked around and saw that her entourage consisted of six low men, Hawkman, and a trio of vampires. The low men wore pistols in docker’s clutches… only she supposed that in this world you had to call them shoulder holsters. When in Rome, dear, do ya as the Romans do. Two of the vampires had bahs, the crossbow weapon of the Callas. The third was carrying a bitterly buzzing electric sword of the sort the Wolves had wielded.

Ten-to-one odds, Susannah thought coolly. Not good… but it could be worse.

Can you-Mia’s voice, from somewhere inside.

Shut up, Susannah told her. Talking’s done.

Ahead, on the door they were approaching, she saw this:

NORTH CENTRAL POSITRONICS, LTD.

NewYork/Fedic

Maximum Security

VERBAL ENTRY CODE REQUIRED

It was familiar, and Susannah instantly knew why. She’d seen a sign similar to this during her one brief visit to Fedic. Fedic, where the real Mia-the being who had assumed mortality in what might be history’s worst bargain-was imprisoned.

When they reached it, Sayre pushed past her on Hawkman’s side. He leaned toward the door and spoke something guttural deep in his throat, some alien word Susannah never could have pronounced herself. It doesn’t matter, Mia whispered. Ican say it, and if I need to, I can teach you another that you can say. But now… Susannah, I’m sorry for everything. Fare you well.

The door to the Arc 16 Experimental Station in Fedic came open. Susannah could hear a ragged humming sound and could smell ozone. No magic powered this door between the worlds; this was the work of the old people, and failing. Those who’d made it had lost their faith in magic, had given up their belief in the Tower. In the place of magic was this buzzing, dying thing. This stupid mortal thing. And beyond it she saw a great room filled with beds. Hundreds of them.

It’s where they operate on the children. Where they take from them whatever it is the Breakers need.

Now only one of the beds was occupied. Standing at its foot was a woman with one of those terrible rat’s heads. A nurse, perhaps. Beside her was a human-Susannah didn’t think he was a vampire but couldn’t be sure, as the view through the door was as wavery as the air over an incinerator. He looked up and saw them.

“Hurry!” he shouted. “Move your freight! We have to connect them and finish it, or she’ll die! They both will!” The doctor-surely no one but a doctor could have mustered such ill-tempered arrogance in the presence of Richard P. Sayre-made impatient beckoning gestures. “Get her in here! You’re late, goddam you!”

Sayre pushed her rudely through the door. She heard a humming deep in her head, and a brief jangle of todash chimes: She looked down but was too late; Mia’s borrowed legs were already gone and she went sprawling to the floor before Hawkman and Bulldog could come through behind her and catch her.

She braced on her elbows and looked up, aware that, for the first time in God knew how long-probably since she’d been raped in the circle of stones-she belonged only to herself. Mia was gone.

Then, as if to prove this wasn’t so, Susannah’s troublesome and newly departed guest let out a scream. Susannah added her own cry-the pain was now too huge for silence-and for a moment their voices sang of the baby’s imminence in perfect harmony.

“Christ,” said one of Susannah’s guards-whether vampire or low man she didn’t know. “Are my ears bleeding? They feel like they must be-”

“Pick her up, Haber!” Sayre snarled. “Jey! Grab hold! Get her off the floor, for your fathers’ sakes!”

Bulldog and Hawkman-or Haber and Jey, if you liked that better-grabbed her beneath the arms and quickly carried her down the aisle of the ward that way, past the rows of empty beds.

Mia turned toward Susannah and managed a weak, exhausted smile. Her face was wet with sweat and her hair was plastered to her flushed skin.

“Well-met… and ill,” she managed.

“Push the next bed over!” the doctor shouted. “Hurry up, gods damn you! Why are you so Christing slow?”

Two of the low men who’d accompanied Susannah from the Dixie Pig bent over the nearest empty bed and shoved it next to Mia’s while Haber and Jey continued to hold her up between them. There was something on the bed that looked like a cross between a hair-dryer and the sort of space helmet you saw in the old Flash Gordon serials. Susannah didn’t much care for the look of it. It had a brain-sucking look.

The rathead nurse, meanwhile, was bending between her patient’s splayed legs and peering under the hiked-up hospital gown Mia now wore. She patted Mia’s right knee with a plump hand and made a mewling sound. It was almost surely meant to comfort, but Susannah shuddered.

“Don’t just stand there with your thumbs up your butts, you idiots!” the doctor cried. He was a stoutish man with brown eyes, flushed cheeks, and black hair swept back against his skull, where each track of the comb seemed as wide as a gutter. He wore a lab-coat of white nylon over a tweed suit. His scarlet cravat had an eye figured into it. This sigul did not surprise Susannah in the slightest.

“We wait your word,” said Jey, the Hawkman. He spoke in a queer, inhuman monotone, as unpleasant as the rat-head nurse’s mewl but perfectly understandable.

“You shouldn’t need my word!” the doctor snapped. He flapped his hands in a Gallic gesture of disgust. “Didn’t your mothers have any children that lived?”

“I-” Haber began, but the doc went right over him. He was on a roll.

“How long have we been waiting for this, hmmm? How many times have we rehearsed the procedure? Why must you be so fucking stupid, so Christing slow? Put her down on the b-”

Sayre moved with a speed Susannah wasn’t sure even Roland could have equaled. At one moment he was standing beside Haber, the low man with the bulldog face. At the next he’d battened on the doctor, digging his chin into the doc’s shoulder and grabbing his arm, twisting it high behind his back.

The doc’s expression of petulant fury vanished in a heartbeat, and he began to scream in a childish, breaking treble. Spit spilled over his lower lip and the crotch of his tweed trousers darkened as his urine let go.

“Stop!” he howled. “I’m no good to you if you break my arm! Oh stop, that HURRRTS!”

“If I sh’d break your arm, Scowther, I’d just drag some other pill-pusher in off the street to finish this, and kill him later. Why not? It’s a woman having a baby, not brain-surgery, for Gan’s sake!”

Yet he relaxed his hold a little bit. Scowther sobbed and wriggled and moaned as breathlessly as someone having sexual intercourse in a hot climate.

“And when it was done and you had no part in it.”

Sayre continued, “I’d feed you to them.” He gestured with his chin.

Susannah looked that way and saw that the aisle from the door to the bed where Mia lay was now covered with the bugs she’d glimpsed in the Dixie Pig. Their knowing, greedy eyes were fixed on the plump doctor. Their mandibles clicked.

“What… sai, what must I do?”

“Cry my pardon.”

“C-Cry pardon!”

“And now these others, for ye’ve insulted them as well, so you have.”

“Sirs, I… I… c-cry-”

“Doctor!” the rathead nurse broke in. Her speaking voice was thick but understandable. She was still bent between Mia’s legs. “The baby’s crowning!”

Sayre let go of Scowther’s arm. “Go on, Dr. Scowther. Do your duty. Deliver the child.” Sayre bent forward and stroked Mia’s cheek with extraordinary solicitude. “Be of good cheer and good hope, lady-sai,” he said. “Some of your dreams may yet come true.”

She looked up at him with a tired gratitude that wrung Susannah’s heart. Don’t believe him, his lies are endless, she tried to send, but for the nonce their contact was broken.

She was tossed like a sack of grain onto the bed which had been pushed next to Mia’s. She was unable to struggle as one of the hoods was fitted over her head; another labor pain had gripped her, and once again the two women shrieked together.

Susannah could hear Sayre and the others murmuring. From below and behind them, she could also hear the unpleasant clittering of the bugs. Inside the helmet, round metal protuberances pressed against her temples, almost hard enough to hurt.

Suddenly a pleasant female voice said, “Welcome to the world of North Central Positronics, part of the Sombra Group! ’sombra, where progress never stops!’ Stand by for up-link.”

A loud humming began. At first it was in Susannah’s ears, but then she could feel it boring in on both sides. She visualized a pair of glowing bullets moving toward each other.

Dimly, as if from the other side of the room instead of right next to her, she heard Mia scream, “Oh no, don’t, that hurts!”

The left hum and the right hum joined in the center of Susannah’s brain, creating a piercing telepathic tone that would destroy her ability to think if it kept up for long. It was excruciating, but she kept her lips shut tight. She would not scream. Let them see the tears oozing out from beneath her closed lids, but she was a gunslinger and they would not make her scream.

After what seemed an eternity, the hum cut out.

Susannah had a moment or two in which to enjoy the blessed silence in her head, and then the next labor pain struck, this one very low down in her belly and with the force of a typhoon. With this pain she did allow herself to scream. Because it was different, somehow; to scream with the baby’s coming was an honor.

She turned her head and saw a similar steel hood had been fitted over Mia’s sweaty black hair. The segmented steel hoses from the two helmets were connected in the middle. These were the