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(Jake! Jake, do you hear me, kiddo? If you hear, answer your big sis!)
Nothing. Not even that rattle of distant gunfire. He was out of. . .
Then, a single word-was it a word?
(wimeweh)
More important, was it Jake?
She didn't know for sure, but she thought yes. And the word seemed familiar to her, somehow.
Susannah gathered her concentration, meaning to call louder this time, and then a queer idea came to her, one too strong to be called intuition. Jake was trying to be quiet. He was. . . hiding? Maybe getting ready to spring an ambush? The idea sounded crazy, but maybe his blood was up, too. She didn't know, but thought he'd either sent her that one odd word
(wimeweh)
on purpose, or it had slipped out. Either way, it might be better to let him roll his own oats for awhile.
"I say, I have been blinded by gunfire!" the robot insisted.
Its voice was still loud, but had dropped to a range at least approaching normal. "I can't see a bloody thing and I have this incubator-"
"Drop it," Susannah said.
"But-"
"Drop it, Chumley. "
"I beg pawdon, madam, but my name is Nigel the Butler and I really can't-"
Susannah had been hauling herself closer during this little exchange-you didn't forget the old means of locomotion just because you'd been granted a brief vacation with legs, she was discovering-and read both the name and the serial number stamped on the robot's chrome-steel midsection.
"Nigel DNK 45932, drop that fucking glass box, say thankya!"
The robot (DOMESTIC was stamped just below its serial number) dropped the incubator and then whimpered when it shattered at its steel feet.
Susannah worked her way over to Nigel, and found she had to conquer a moment's fear before reaching up and taking one three-fingered steel hand. She needed to remind herself that this wasn't Andy from Calla Bryn Sturgis, nor could Nigel know about Andy. The butler-robot might or might not be sophisticated enough to crave revenge-certainly Andy had been-but you couldn't crave what you didn't know about.
She hoped.
"Nigel, pick me up. "
There was a whine of servomotors as the robot bent.
"No, hon, you have to come forward a litde bit. There's broken glass where you are. "
"Pawdon, madam, but I'm blind. I believe it was you who shot my eyes out. "
Oh. That.
"Well," she said, hoping her tone of irritation would disguise the fear beneath, "I can't very well get you new ones if you don't pick me up, can I? Now get a wiggle on, may it do ya.
Time's wasting. "
Nigel stepped forward, crushing broken glass beneath its teet, and came to the sound of her voice. Susannah controlled the urge to cringe back, but once the Domestic Robot had set its grip on her, its touch was quite gentle. It lifted her into its arms.
"Now take me to the door. "
Madam, beg pawdon but there are many doors in Sixteen.
More still beneath the castle. "
Susannah couldn't help being curious. "How many?"
A brief pause. "I should say five hundred and ninety-five are currently operational. " She immediately noticed that fiveninety-five added up to nineteen. Added up to chassit.
"Do you mind giving me a carry to the one I came through before the shooting started?" Susannah pointed toward the far end of the room.
"No, madam, I don't mind at all, but I'm sorry to tell you that it will do you no good," Nigel said in his plummy voice.
"That door, NEW YORK #7/FEDIC, is one-way. " A pause. Relays clicking in the steel dome of its head. "Also, it burned out after its last use. It has, as you might say, gone to the clearing at the end of the path. "
"Oh, that's just wonderfull" Susannah cried, but realized she wasn't exactly surprised by Nigel's news. She remembered the ragged humming sound she'd heard it makingjust before Sayre had pushed her rudely through it, remembered thinking, even in her distress, that it was a dying thing. And yes, it had died. "Just wonderful!"
"I sense you are distressed, madam. "
"You're goddamned right I'm distressed! Bad enough the damned thing only opened one-way! Now it's shut down completely!"
"Except for the default," Nigel agreed.
"Default? What do you mean, default?"
"That would be NEW YORK #9/FEDIC," Nigel told her. "At one time there were over thirty one-way New York-to-Fedic ports, but I believe #9 is the only one that remains. All commands pertaining to NEW YORK #7/FEDIC will now have defaulted to #9. "
Chassit, she thought. . . almost prayed. He's talking about chassit, I think. Oh God, I hope he is.
"Do you mean passwords and such, Nigel?"
"Why, yes, madam. "
"Take me to Door #9. "
"As you wish. "
Nigel began to move rapidly up the aisle between the hundreds of empty beds, their taut white sheets gleaming under the brilliant overhead lamps. Susannah's imagination momentarily populated this room with screaming, frightened children, freshly arrived from Calla Bryn Sturgis, maybe from the neighboring Callas, as well. She saw not just a single rathead nurse but battalions of them, eager to clamp the helmets over the heads of the kidnapped children and start the process that. . . that did what? Ruined them in some way. Sucked the intelligence out of their heads and knocked their growth-hormones out of whack and ruined them forever. Susannah supposed that at first they would be cheered up to hear such a pleasant voice in their heads, a voice welcoming them to the wonderful world of North Central Positronics and the Sombra Group. Their crying would stop, their eyes fill with hope. Perhaps, they would think the nurses in their white uniforms were good in spite of their hairy, scary faces and yellow fangs. As good as the voice of the nice lady.
Then the hum would begin, quickly building in volume as it moved toward the middle of their heads, and this room would again fill with their frightened screams-
"Madam? Are you all right?"
"Yes. Why do you ask, Nigel?"
"I believe you shivered. "
"Never mind. Just get me to the door to New York, the one that still works. "
SIX
Once they left the infirmary, Nigel bore her rapidly down first one corridor and then another. They came to escalators that looked as if they had been frozen in place for centuries. Halfway down one of them, a steel ball on legs flashed its amber eyes at Nigel and cried, "Hmop! Hmvp!" Nigel responded "Howp, hmvp!"
in return and then said to Susannah (in the confidential tone certain gossipy people adopt when discussing Those Who Are Unfortunate), "He's a Mech Foreman and has been stuck there tor over eight hundred years-fried boards, I imagine. Poor soul! But he still tries to do his best. "
Twice Nigel asked
her if she believed his eyes could be replaced. The first time Susannah told him she didn't know.
The second time-feeling a little sorry for him (definitely him now, not it)-she asked what he thought.
"I think my days of service are nearly over," he said, and then added something that made her arms tingle with gooseflesh:
"O Discordia!"
The Diem Brothers are dead, she thought, remembering-had it been a dream? a vision? a glimpse of her Tower?-something from her time with Mia. Or had it been her time in Oxford, Mississippi? Or both? Papa Doc Duvalier is dead. Christa McAuliffe is dead. Stephen King is dead, popular writer killed while taking afternoon walk, O Discordia, O lost!
But who was Stephen King? Who was Christa McAuliffe, for that matter?
Once they passed a low man who had been present at the birth of Mia's monster. He lay curled on a dusty corridor floor like a human shrimp with his gun in one hand and a hole in his head. Susannah thought he'd committed suicide. In a way, she supposed that made sense. Because things had gone wrong, hadn't they? And unless Mia's baby found its way to where it belonged on its own, Big Red Daddy was going to be mad.
Might be mad even if Mordred somehow found his way home.
His other father. For this was a world of twins and mirror images, and Susannah now understood more about what she'd seen than she really wanted to. Mordred too was a twin, a Jekyll-and-Hyde creature with two selves, and he-or it-had the faces of two fathers to remember.
They came upon a number of other corpses; all looked like suicides to Susannah. She asked Nigel if he could tell-by their smells, or something-but he claimed he could not.
"How many are still here, do you think?" she asked. Her blood had had time to cool a litde, and now she felt nervous.
"Not many, madam. I believe that most have moved on.
Very likely to the Derva. "
"What's the Derva?"
Nigel said he was dreadfully sorry, but that information was restricted and could be accessed only with the proper password.
Susannah tried chassit, but it was no good. Neither was nineteen or, her final try, ninety-nine. She supposed she'd have to be content with just knowing most of them were gone.
Nigel turned left, into a new corridor with doors on both sides. She got him to stop long enough to try one of them, but there was nothing of particular note inside. It was an office, and long-abandoned, judging by the thick fall of dust. She was interested to see a poster of madly jitterbugging teenagers on one wall. Beneath it, in large blue letters, was this:
SflY, VOU COOL CRTS fillD BOPPIIV KITTIES!
I ROCKED fiTTHE HOP WITH fllflll FREED!
ClEUElflllD, OHIO, OCTOBER 1954
Susannah was pretty sure that the performer on stage was Richard Penniman. Club-crawling folkies such as herself affected disdain for anyone who rocked harder than Phil Ochs, but Suze had always had a soft spot in her heart for Little Richard; good golly, Miss Molly, you sure like to ball. She guessed it was a Detta thing.
Did these people once upon a time use their doors to vacation in various tuheres and whens of their choice? Did they use the power of the Beams to turn certain levels of the Tower into tourist attractions?
She asked Nigel, who told her he was sure he did not know.
Nigel still sounded sad about the loss of his eyes.
Finally they came into an echoing rotunda with doors marching all around its mighty circumference. The marble tiles on the floor were laid in a black-and-white checkerboard pattern Susannah remembered from certain troubled dreams m which Mia had fed her chap. Above, high and high, constellations of electric stars winked in a blue firmament that was now showing plenty of cracks. This place reminded her of the Cradle of Lud, and even more strongly of Grand Central Station.
Somewhere in the walls, air-conditioners or -exchangers ran rustily. The smell in the air was weirdly familiar, and after a short struggle, Susannah identified it: Comet Cleanser. They sponsored The Price Is Right, which she sometimes watched on TV if she happened to be home in the morning. "I'm Don Pardo, now please welcome your host, Mr. Bill Cullen. " Susannah felt a moment of vertigo and closed her eyes.
Bill Cullen is dead. Don Pardo is dead. Martin Luther King is dead, shot down in Memphis. Rule Discordia!
O Christ, those voices, would they never stop?
She opened her eyes and saw doors marked SHANGHAI/FEDIC and BOMBAY/FEDIC and one marked DALLAS (NOVEMBER 1963)/FEDIC. Others were written in runes that meant nothing to her. At last Nigel stopped in front of one she recognized.
NORTH CENTRAL TO3ITR0MCS, LTD.
. . . New librk/Fedic Maximum Security All of this Susannah recognized from the other side, but below VERBAL ENTRY CODE REQUIRED was this message, flashing ominous red:
. . . W9 FINAL DEFAULT. . .
SEVEN
"What would you like to do next, madam?" Nigel asked.
"Set me down, sugarpie. "
She had time to wonder what her response would be if I
Nigel declined to do so, but he didn't even hesitate. She walk-hopped-scuttled to the door in her old way and put her hands on it. Beneath them she felt a texture that was neither wood nor metal. She thought she could hear a very faint hum. She considered trying chassit-her version of Ali Baba's Open, sesame-I and didn't bother. There wasn't even a doorknob. One-way meant one-way, she reckoned; no kidding around.
(JAKE!)
She sent it with all her might. . .
No answer. Not even that faint
(wimeweh)
nonsense word. She waited a moment longer, then turned around and sat with her back propped against the door. She dropped the extra ammo clips between her spread knees and then held the Walther PPK up in her right hand. A good weapon to have with your back to a locked door, she reckoned; she liked the weight of it. Once upon a time, she and others had been trained in a protest technique called passive resistance. Lie down on the lunchroom floor, cover your soft middle and softer privates. Do not respond to those who strike you and revile you and curse your parents. Sing in your chains like the sea.
What would her old friends make of what she had become?
Susannah said: "You know what? I don't give shit one. Passive resistance is also dead. "
"Madam?"
"Nothing, Nigel. "
"Madam, may I ask-"
"What I'm doing?"
"Exactly, madam. "
"Waiting on a friend, Chumley. Just waiting on a friend. "
She thought that DNK 45932 would remind her that his name was Nigel, but he didn't. Instead, he asked how long she would wait for her friend. Susannah told him until hell froze over. This elicited a long silence. Finally Nigel asked: "May I go, then, madam?"
"How will you see?"
"I have switched to infrared. It is less satisfying than three-X macrovision, but it will suffice to get me to the repair bays. "
Is there anyone in the repair bays who can fix you?" Susannah asked with mild curiosity. She pushed the button that dropped the clip out of the Walther's butt, then rammed it back In taking a certain elemental pleasure in the oily, metallic sound it made.
I m sure I can't say, madam," Nigel replied, "although the probability of such a thing is very low, certainly less than one Pe r cent. If no one comes, then I, like you, will wait. "
She nodded, suddenly tired and very sure that this was where the grand quest ended-here, leaning against this door.
But you didn't give up, did you? Giving up was for cowards, not gunslingers.
"May ya do fine, Nigel-thanks for the piggyback. Long days and pleasant nights. Hope you get your eyes back. Sorry I shot em out, but I was in a bit of a tight and didn't know whose side you were on. "
"And good wishes to you, madam. "
Susannah nodded. Nigel clumped off and then she was alone, leaning against the door to New York. Waiting for Jake.
Listening for Jake.
/> All she heard was the rusty, dying wheeze of the machinery in the walls.
