So this time something which might have been spoken was not, and the deus ex machina which might have descended to rescue a writer who had a date with a Dodge minivan on a latespring day in the year of ’99 remained where it was, high above the mortals who acted their parts below.
THREE
The nice thing about robots, in Susannah’s opinion, was that most of them didn’t hold grudges. Nigel told her that no one had been available to fix his visual equipment (although he might be able to do it himself, he said, given access to the right components, discs, and repair tutorials), so he had come back here, relying on the infrared, to pick up the remains of the shattered (and completely unneeded) incubator. He thanked her for her interest and introduced himself to her friends.
“Nice to meet you, Nige,” Eddie said, “but you’ll want to get started on those repairs, I kennit, so we won’t keep you.”
Eddie’s voice was pleasant and he’d reholstered his gun, but he kept his hand on the butt. In truth he was a little bit freaked by the resemblance Nigel bore to a certain messenger robot in the town of Calla Bryn Sturgis. That one hadheld a grudge.
“No, stay,” Roland said. “We may have chores for you, but for the time being I’d as soon you were quiet. Turned off, if it please you.” And if it doesn’t, his tone implied.
“Certainly, sai,” Nigel replied in his plummy British accent.
“You may reactivate me with the words Nigel, I need you.”
“Very good,” Roland said.
Nigel folded his scrawny (but undoubtedly powerful)
stainless-steel arms across his chest and went still.
“Came back to pick up the broken glass,” Eddie marveled.
“Maybe the Tet Corporation could sell em. Every housewife in America would want two-one for the house and one for the yard.”
“The less we’re involved with science, the better,” Susannah said darkly. In spite of her brief nap while leaning against the door between Fedic and New York, she looked haggard, done almost to death. “Look where it’s gotten this world.”
Roland nodded to Jake, who told of his and Pere Callahan’s adventures in the New York of 1999, beginning with the taxi that had almost hit Oy and ending with their two-man attack on the low men and the vampires in the dining room of the Dixie pig. He did not neglect to tell how they had disposed of Black Thirteen by putting it in a storage locker at the World Trade Center, where it would be safe until early June of 2002, and how they had found the turtle, which Susannah had dropped, like a message in a bottle, in the gutter outside the Dixie Pig.
“So brave,” Susannah said, and ruffled Jake’s hair. Then she bent to stroke Oy’s head. The bumbler stretched his long neck to maximize the caress, his eyes half-closed and a grin on his foxy little face. “So damned brave. Thankee-sai, Jake.”
“Thank Ake!” Oy agreed.
“If it hadn’t been for the turtle, they would have gotten us both.” Jake’s voice was steady, but he had gone pale. “As it was, the Pere… he…'Jake wiped away a tear with the heel of his hand and gazed at Roland. ’You used his voice to send me on. I heard you.”
“Aye, I had to,” the gunslinger agreed. “’Twas no more than what he wanted.”
Jake said, “The vampires didn’t get him. He used my Ruger before they could take his blood and change him into one of them. I don’t think they would’ve done that, anyway. They would have torn him apart and eaten him. They were mad.”
Roland was nodding.
“The last thing he sent-I think he said it out loud, although I’m not sure-it was…'Jake considered it. He was weeping freely now. “He said ’May you find your Tower, Roland, and breach it, and may you climb to the top.’ Then…'Jake made a little puffing sound between his pursed lips. “Gone. like a candle-flame. To whatever worlds there are.”
He fell silent. For several moments they all did, and the quiet had the feel of a deliberate thing. Then Eddie said, “All right, we’re back together again. What the hell do we do next?”
FOUR
Roland sat down with a grimace, then gave Eddie Dean a look which said-clearer than any words ever could have done-
Why do you try my patience?
“All right,” Eddie said, “it’s just a habit. Quit giving me the look.”
“What’s a habit, Eddie?”
Eddie thought of his final bruising, addictive year with Henry less frequently these days, but he thought of it now.
Only he didn’t like to say so, not because he was ashamed-
Eddie really thought he might be past that-but because he sensed the gunslinger’s growing impatience with Eddie’s explaining things in terms of his big brother. And maybe that was fair. Henry had been the defining, shaping force in Eddie’s life, okay. Just as Cort had been the defining, shaping force in Roland’s… but the gunslinger didn’t talk about his old teacher all the time.
“Asking questions when I already know the answer,” Eddie said.
“And what’s the answer this time?”
“We’re going to backtrack to Thunderclap before we go on to the Tower. We’re either going to kill the Breakers or set them free. Whatever it takes to make the Beams safe. We’ll kill Walter, or Flagg, or whatever he’s calling himself. Because he’s the field marshal, isn’t he?”
“He was,” Roland agreed, “but now a new player has come on the scene.” He looked at the robot. “Nigel, I need you.”
Nigel unfolded his arms and raised his head. “How may I serve?”
“By getting me something to write with. Is there such?”
“Pens, pencils, and chalk in the Supervisor’s cubicle at the far end of the Extraction Room, sai. Or so there was, the last time I had occasion to be there.”
“The Extraction Room,” Roland mused, studying the serried ranks of beds. “Do you call it so?”
“Yes, sai.” And then, almost timidly: “Vocal elisions and fricatives suggest that you’re angry. Is that the case?”
“They brought children here by the hundreds and thousands-healthy ones, for the most part, from a world where too many are still born twisted- and sucked away their minds.
Why would I be angry?”
“Sai, I’m sure I don’t know,” Nigel said. He was, perhaps, repenting his decision to come back here. “But I had no part in the extraction procedures, I assure you. I am in charge of domestic services, including maintenance.”
“Bring me a pencil and a piece of chalk.”
“Sai, you won’t destroy me, will you? It was Dr. Scowther who was in charge of the extractions over the last twelve or fourteen years, and Dr. Scowther is dead. This lady-sai shot him, and with his own gun.” There was a touch of reproach in Nigel’s voice, which was quite expressive within its narrow range.
Roland only repeated: “Bring me a pencil and a piece of chalk, and do itjin-jin.”
Nigel went off on his errand.
“When yovi say a new player, you mean the baby,” Susannah said.
“Certainly. He has two fathers, that bah-bo.”
Susannah nodded. She was thinking about the tale Mia had told her during their todash visit to the abandoned town of Fedic-abandoned, that was, except for the likes of Sayre and Scowther and the marauding Wolves. Two women, one white and one black, one pregnant and one not, sitting in chairs outside the Gin-Puppy Saloon. There Mia had told Eddie Dean’s wife a great deal-more than either of them had known, perhaps.
That’s where they changed me, Mia had told her, “they” presumably meaning Scowther and a team of other doctors. Plus magicians? Folk like the Manni, only gone over to the other side? Maybe. Who could say? In the Extraction Room she’d been made mortal. Then, with Roland’s sperm already in her, something else had happened. Mia didn’t remember much about that part, only a red darkness. Susannah wondered now if the Crimson King had come to her in person, mounting her with its huge and ancient spider’s body, or if its unspeakable sperm had been transported somehow to mix with Roland’s. In either case, the baby grew into the loathsome hybrid Susannah had seen: not a werewolf but a -were-spider. And now it was out there, somewhere. Or perhaps it was here, watching them even as they palavered and Nigel returned with various writing implements.
Yes, she thought. It’s watching us. And hating us… but not equally. Mostly it’s Roland the dan-tete hates. Its first father.
She shivered.
“Mordred means to kill you, Roland,” she said. “That’s its job. What it was made for. To end you, and your quest, and the Tower.”
“Yes,” Roland said, “and to rule in his father’s place. For the Crimson King is old, and I have come more and more to believe that he is imprisoned, somehow. If that’s so, then he’s no longer our real enemy.”
“Will we go to his castle on the other side of the Discordia?”
Jake asked. It was the first time he’d spoken in half an hour.
“We will, won’t we?”
“I think so, yes,” Roland said. “Le Casse Roi Russe, the old legends call it. We’ll go there ka-tet and slay what lives there.”
“Let it be so,” Eddie said. “By God, let that be so.”
“Aye,” Roland agreed. “But our first job is the Breakers. The Beamquake we felt in Calla Bryn Sturgis, just before we came here, suggests that
