He’s not meant to go, either. Not him, not Oy, not me. But what is to become of us, then?
She didn’t know, but she was queerly unworried about it. Ka would tell. Ka, and her dreams.
FOUR
An hour later the three humes, die bumbler, and Bill the robot stood clustered around a cut-down wagon diat looked like a slighdy larger version of Ho Fat’s Luxury Taxi. The wheels were tall but thin, and spun like a dream. Even when it was full,
Susannah thought, it would be like pulling a feadier. At least while Roland was fresh. Pulling it uphill would undoubtedly rob him of his energy after awhile, but as they ate the food they were carrying, Ho Fat II would grow lighter still… and she diought diere wouldn’t be many hills, anyway. They had come to the open lands, the prairie-lands; all the snow- and tree-covered ridges were behind them. Bill had provided her widi an electric runabout that was more scooter than golf-cart. Her days of being dragged along behind (“like a busted tailpipe”) were done.
“If you’ll give me another half an hour, I can smooth this off,” Bill said, running a three-fingered steel hand along the edge where he had cut off the front half of the small wagon that was now Ho Fat II.
“We say thankya, but it won’t be necessary,” Roland said.
“We’ll lay a couple of hides over it, just so.”
He’s impatient to be off, Susannah thought, and after all this time, why wouldn’t be be? I’m anxious to be off, myself.
“Well, if you say so, let it be so,” Bill said, sounding unhappy about it. “I suppose I just hate to see you go. When will I see humes again?”
None of them answered that. They didn’t know.
“There’s a mighty loud horn on the roof,” Bill said, pointing at the Federal. “I don’t know what sort of trouble it was meant to signal-radiation leaks, mayhap, or some sort of attack-but I do know the sound of it will carry across a hundred wheels at least. More, if the wind’s blowing in the right direction. If I should see the fellow you think is following you, or if such motion-sensors as still work pick him up, I’ll set it off. Perhaps you’ll hear.”
“Thank you,” Roland said.
“Were you to drive, you could outrun him easily,” Bill pointed out. ’You’d reach the Tower and never have to see him.”
“That’s true enough,” Roland said, but he showed absolutely no sign of changing his mind, and Susannah was glad.
“What will you do about the one you call his Red Father, if he really does command Can’-Ka No Rey?”
Roland shook his head, although he had discussed this probability with Susannah. He thought they might be able to circle the Tower from a distance and come then to its base from a direction that was blind to the balcony on which the Crimson King was trapped. Then they could work their way around to the door beneath him. They wouldn’t know if that was possible until they could actually see the Tower and the lay of the land, of course.
“Well, there’ll be water if God wills it,” said the robot formerly known as Stuttering Bill, “or so the old people did say.
And mayhap I’ll see you again, in the clearing at the end of the path, if nowhere else. If robots are allowed to go there. I hope it’s so, for there’s many I’ve known that I’d see again.”
He sounded so forlorn that Susannah went to him and raised her arms to be picked up, not thinking about the absurdity of wanting to hug a robot. But he did and she did-quite fervendy, too. Bill made up for the malicious Andy, back in Calla Bryn Sturgis, and was worth hugging for diat, if nothing else. As his arms closed around her, it occurred to Susannah that Bill could break her in two with those titanium-steel arms if he wanted to. But he didn’t. He was gentle.
“Long days and pleasant nights, Bill,” she said. “May you do well, and we all say so.”
“Thank you, madam,” he said and put her down. “I say thudda-thank, diumma-thank, thukka-” Wheep! And he struck his head, producing a bright clang. “I say thank ya kindly.” He paused. “I did fix the stutter, say true, but as I may have told you,
I am not entirely without emotions.”
FIVE
Patrick surprised them both by walking for almost four hours beside Susannah’s electric scooter before tiring and climbing into Ho Fat II. They listened for the horn warning them that Bill had seen Mordred (or that the instruments in the Federal had detected him), but did not hear i t… and the wind was blowing their way. By sunset, they had left the last of the snow. The land continued to flatten out, casting their shadows long before them.
When they finally stopped for the night, Roland gathered enough brush for a fire and Patrick, who had dozed off, woke up long enough to eat an enormous meal of Vienna sausage and baked beans. (Susannah, watching the beans disappear into Patrick’s tongueless mouth, reminded herself to spread her hides upwind of him when she finally laid down her weary head.) She and Oy also ate heartily, but Roland hardly touched his own food.
When dinner was done, Patrick took up his pad to draw, frowned at his pencil, and then held out a hand to Susannah.
She knew what he wanted, and took the glass canning jar from the litde bag of personals she kept slung over her shoulder. She held onto this because there was only the one pencil sharpener, and she was afraid that Patrick might lose it. Of course Roland could sharpen the Eberhard-Fabers with his knife, but it would change the quality of the points somewhat. She tipped the jar, spilling erasers and paperclips and the required object into her cupped palm. Then she handed it to Patrick, who sharpened his pencil with a few quick twists, handed it back, and immediately fell to his work. For a moment Susannah looked at the pink erasers and wondered again why Dandelo had bothered to cut them off. As a way of teasing the boy? If so, it hadn’t worked.
Later in life, perhaps, when die sublime connections between his brain and his fingers rusted a little (when the small but undeniably brilliant world of his talent had moved on), he might require erasers. For now even his mistakes continued to be inspirations.
He didn’t draw long. When Susannah saw him nodding over his pad in the orange glare of the fading sunset, she took it from his unprotesting fingers, bedded him down in the back of the cart (propped level with the front end on a convenient boulder jutting from the ground), covered him with hides, and kissed his cheek.
Sleepily, Patrick reached up and touched the sore below her own cheek. She winced, then held steady at his gende touch.
The sore had clotted over again, but it throbbed painfully.
Even smiling hurt her these days. The hand fell away and Patrick slept.
The stars had come out. Roland was looking raptly up at them.
“What do you see?” she asked him.
“What do you see?” he asked in turn.
She looked at the brightening celestial landscape. “Well,”
she said, “there’s Old Star and Old Mother, but they seem to have moved west. And that there-oh my goodness!” She placed her hands on his stubbly cheeks (he never seemed to grow an actual beard, only a bristly scruff) and turned it. “That wasn’t there back when we left from the Western Sea, I know it wasn’t. That one’s in our world, Roland-we call it the Big Dipper!”
He nodded. “And once, according to the oldest books in my father’s library, it was in the sky of our world, as well. Lydia’s Dipper, it was called. And now here it is again.” He turned to her, smiling. “Another sign of life and renewal. How the Crimson King must hate to look up from his entrapment and see it riding the sky again!”
SIX
Not long after, Susannah slept. And dreamed.
SEVEN
She’s in Central Park again, under a bright gray sky from which the first few snowflakes are once more drifting; carolers nearby are singing not “Silent Night” or “What Child Is This “but the Rice Song: “Rice be a green-o, See what we seen-o, Seen-o the green-o, Come-comecommala!”
She takes off her cap, afraid it will have changed somehow, but it still says MERRY CHRISTMAS! and
(no twins here)
she is comforted.
She looks around and there stand Eddie and Jake, grinning at her.
Their heads are bare; she has gotten their hats. She has combined their hats.
Eddie is wearing a sweatshirt that says I DRINK NOZZ-A-LA!
Jake is wearing one that says I DRIVE THE TAKURO SPIRIT!
None of this is precisely new. What she sees behind them, standing near a carriage-path leading back to Fifth Avenue, most certainly is. It’s a door about six and a half feet high, and made of solid ironwood, from the look of it. The doorknob’s of solid gold, andfiligtved with a shape the lady gunslinger finally recognizes: two crossed pencils.
