Song of Susannah (10 page)

Mia, listen to me,
Susannah told her.
I can stop it again—I
think
I can—but you have to help. You have to sit down. If you don’t settle for awhile, God Himself won’t be able to stop your labor from running its course. Do you understand? Do you hear me?

Mia did. She stayed where she was for a moment, watching the woman from whom she’d stolen the shoes. Then, almost timidly, she asked a question:
Where should I go?

Susannah sensed that her kidnapper was for the first time becoming aware of the enormous city in which she now found herself, was finally seeing the surging schools of pedestrians, the floods of metal carriages (every third one, it seemed, painted a yellow
so bright it almost screamed), and towers so high that on a cloudy day their tops would have been lost to view.

Two women looked at an alien city through one set of eyes. Susannah knew it was
her
city, but in many ways, it no longer was. She’d left New York in 1964. How many years further along was this? Twenty? Thirty? Never mind, let it go. Now was not the time to worry about it.

Their combined gaze settled on the little pocket park across the street. The labor pains had ceased for the time being, and when the sign over there said
WALK
, Trudy Damascus’s black woman (who didn’t look particularly pregnant) crossed, walking slowly but steadily.

On the far side was a bench beside a fountain and a metal sculpture. Seeing the turtle comforted Susannah a little; it was as if Roland had left her this sign, what the gunslinger himself would have called a sigul.

He’ll come after me, too,
she told Mia.
And you should ’ware him, woman. You should ’ware him very well.

I’ll do what I need to do,
Mia replied.
You want to see the woman’s papers. Why?

I want to see when this is. The newspaper will say.

Brown hands pulled the rolled-up newspaper from the canvas Borders bag, unrolled it, and held it up to blue eyes that had started that day as brown as the hands. Susannah saw the date—June 1st, 1999—and marveled over it. Not twenty years or even thirty, but thirty-five. Until this moment she hadn’t realized how little she’d thought of the
world’s chances to survive so long. The contemporaries she’d known in her old life—fellow students, civil rights advocates, drinking buddies, and folk-music
aficionados
—would now be edging into late middle age. Some were undoubtedly dead.

Enough,
Mia said, and tossed the newspaper back into the trash barrel, where it curled into its former rolled shape. She brushed as much dirt as she could from the soles of her bare feet (because of the dirt, Susannah did not notice they had changed color) and then put on the stolen shoes. They were a little tight, and with no socks she supposed they’d give her blisters if she had to walk very far, but—

What do you care, right?
Susannah asked her.
Ain’t your feet.
And knew as soon as she’d said it (for this
was
a form of talking; what Roland called palaver) that she might be wrong about that. Certainly her own feet, those which had marched obediently through life below the body of Odetta Holmes (and sometimes Detta Walker), were long gone, rotting or—more likely—burned in some municipal incinerator.

But she did not notice the change in color. Except later she’d think:
You noticed, all right. Noticed it and blocked it right out. Because too much is too much.

Before she could pursue the question, as much philosophical as it was physical, of whose feet she now wore, another labor pain struck her. It cramped her stomach and turned it to stone even as it loosened her thighs. For the first time she felt the dismaying and terrifying need to
push.

You have to stop it!
Mia cried.
Woman, you have to! For the chap’s sake, and for ours, too!

Yes, all right, but how?

Close your eyes,
Susannah told her.

What? Didn’t you hear me? You’ve got to—

I heard you,
Susannah said.
Close your eyes.

The park disappeared. The world went dark. She was a black woman, still young and undoubtedly beautiful, sitting on a park bench beside a fountain and a metal turtle with a wet and gleaming metal shell. She might have been meditating on this warm late-spring afternoon in the year of 1999.

I’m going away for a little while now,
Susannah said.
I’ll be back. In the meantime, sit where you are. Sit quiet. Don’t move. The pain should draw back again, but even if it doesn’t at first, sit still. Moving around will only make it worse. Do you understand me?

Mia might be frightened, and she was certainly determined to have her way, but she wasn’t dumb. She asked only a single question.

Where are you going?

Back to the Dogan,
Susannah said. My
Dogan. The one inside.

The building Jake had found on the far side of the River Whye was some sort of ancient communications-and-surveillance post. The boy had described it to them in some detail, but he still might not have recognized Susannah’s imagined version of it,
which was based on a technology which had been far out of date only thirteen years later, when Jake had left New York for Mid-World. In Susannah’s when, Lyndon Johnson had been President and color TV was still a curiosity. Computers were huge things that filled whole buildings. Yet Susannah had visited the city of Lud and seen some of the wonders there, and so Jake
might
have recognized the place where he had hidden from Ben Slightman and Andy the Messenger Robot, after all.

Certainly he would have recognized the dusty linoleum floor, with its checkerboard pattern of black and red squares, and the rolling chairs along consoles filled with blinking lights and glowing dials. And he would have recognized the skeleton in the corner, grinning above the frayed collar of its ancient uniform shirt.

She crossed the room and sat in one of the chairs. Above her, black-and-white TV screens showed dozens of pictures. Some were of Calla Bryn Sturgis (the town common, Callahan’s church, the general store, the road leading east out of town). Some were still pictures like studio photographs: one of Roland, one of a smiling Jake holding Oy in his arms, and one—she could hardly bear to look at it—of Eddie with his hat tipped back cowpoke-style and his whittling knife in one hand.

Another monitor showed the slim black woman sitting on the bench beside the turtle, knees together, hands folded in her lap, eyes closed, a pair of stolen shoes on her feet. She now had three bags: the one she’d stolen from the woman on Second
Avenue, the rush sack with the sharpened Orizas in it . . . and a bowling bag. This one was a faded red, and there was something with square corners inside it. A box. Looking at it in the TV screen made Susannah feel angry—betrayed—but she didn’t know why.

The bag was pink on the other side,
she thought.
It changed color when we crossed, but only a little.

The woman’s face on the black-and-white screen above the control board grimaced. Susannah felt an echo of the pain Mia was experiencing, only faint and distant.

Got to stop that. And quick.

The question still remained: how?

The way you did on the other side. While she was horsing her freight up to that cave just as fast as she damn could.

But that seemed a long time ago now, in another life. And why not? It
had
been another life, another world, and if she ever hoped to get back there, she had to help right now. So what had she done?

You used this stuff, that’s what you did. It’s only in your head, anyway—what Professor Overmeyer called “a visualization technique” back in Psych One. Close your eyes.

Susannah did so. Now both sets of eyes were closed, the physical ones that Mia controlled in New York and the ones in her mind.

Visualize.

She did. Or tried.

Open.

She opened her eyes. Now on the panel in front of her there were two large dials and a single toggle-switch
where before there had been rheostats and flashing lights. The dials looked to be made of Bakelite, like the oven-dials on her mother’s stove back in the house where Susannah had grown up. She supposed there was no surprise there; all you imagined, no matter how wild it might seem, was no more than a disguised version of what you already knew.

The dial on her left was labeled
EMOTIONAL TEMP
. The markings on it ran from 32 to 212 (32 in blue; 212 in bright red). It was currently set at 160. The dial in the middle was marked
LABOR FORCE
. The numbers around its face went from 0 to 10, and it was currently turned to 9. The label under the toggle-switch simply read
CHAP
, and there were only two settings:
AWAKE
and
ASLEEP
. It was currently set to
AWAKE.

Susannah looked up and saw one of the screens was now showing a baby
in utero.
It was a boy. A
beautiful
boy. His tiny penis floated like a strand of kelp below the lazy curl of his umbilical cord. His eyes were open, and although the rest of the image was black and white, those eyes were a piercing blue. The chap’s gaze seemed to go right through her.

They’re Roland’s eyes,
she thought, feeling stupid with wonder.
How can that be?

It couldn’t, of course. All this was nothing but the work of her own imagination, a visualization technique. But if so, why would she imagine Roland’s blue eyes? Why not Eddie’s hazel ones? Why not her husband’s hazel eyes?

No time for that now. Do what you have to do.

She reached out to
EMOTIONAL TEMP
with her
lower lip caught between her teeth (on the monitor showing the park bench, Mia also began biting her lower lip). She hesitated, then dialed it back to 72, exactly as if it was a thermostat. And wasn’t it?

Calm immediately filled her. She relaxed in her chair and let her lip escape the grip of her teeth. On the park monitor, the black woman did the same. All right, so far, so good.

She hesitated for a moment with her hand not quite touching the
LABOR FORCE
dial, then moved on to
CHAP
instead. She flipped the toggle from
AWAKE
to
ASLEEP
. The baby’s eyes closed immediately. Susannah found this something of a relief. Those blue eyes were disconcerting.

All right, back to
LABOR FORCE
. Susannah thought this was the important one, what Eddie would call the Big Casino. She took hold of the old-fashioned dial, applied a little experimental force, and was not exactly surprised to find the clunky thing dully resistant in its socket. It didn’t want to turn.

But you will,
Susannah thought.
Because we need you to. We
need
you to.

She grasped it tightly and began turning it slowly counter-clockwise. A pain went through her head and she grimaced. Another momentarily constricted her throat, as if she’d gotten a fishbone stuck in there, but then both pains cleared. To her right an entire bank of lights flashed on, most of them amber, a few bright red.

“WARNING,” said a voice that sounded eerily like that of Blaine the Mono. “THIS OPERATION MAY EXCEED SAFETY PARAMETERS.”

No shit, Sherlock,
Susannah thought. The
LABOR FORCE
dial was now down to 6. When she turned it past 5, another bank of amber and red lights flashed on, and three of the monitors showing Calla scenes shorted out with sizzling pops. Another pain gripped her head like invisible pressing fingers. From somewhere beneath her came the start-up whine of motors or turbines. Big ones, from the sound. She could feel them thrumming against her feet, which were bare, of course—Mia had gotten the shoes.
Oh well,
she thought,
I didn’t have any feet at all before this, so maybe I’m ahead of the game.

“WARNING,” said the mechanical voice. “WHAT YOU’RE DOING IS DANGEROUS, SUSANNAH OF NEW YORK. HEAR ME I BEG. IT’S NOT NICE TO FOOL MOTHER NATURE.”

One of Roland’s proverbs occurred to her: You do what
you
need to, and I’ll do what
I
need to, and we’ll see who gets the goose. She wasn’t sure what it meant, but it seemed to fit this situation, so she repeated it aloud as she slowly but steadily turned the
LABOR FORCE
dial past 4, to 3 . . .

She meant to turn the dial all the way back to 1, but the pain which ripped through her head when the absurd thing passed 2 was so huge—so
sickening
—that she dropped her hand.

For a moment the pain continued—intensified, even—and she thought it would kill her. Mia would topple off the bench where she was sitting, and both of them would be dead before their shared body hit the concrete in front of the turtle sculpture. Tomorrow
or the next day, her remains would take a quick trip to Potter’s Field. And what would go on the death certificate? Stroke? Heart attack? Or maybe that old standby of the medical man in a hurry, natural causes?

But the pain subsided and she was still alive when it did. She sat in front of the console with the two ridiculous dials and the toggle-switch, taking deep breaths and wiping the sweat from her cheeks with both hands. Boy-howdy, when it came to visualization technique, she had to be the champ of the world.

This is more than visualization—you know that, right?

She supposed she did. Something had changed her—had changed all of them. Jake had gotten the touch, which was a kind of telepathy. Eddie had grown (was still growing) into some sort of ability to create powerful, talismanic objects—one of them had already served to open a door between two worlds. And she?