Song of Susannah

ONE

Ka might have put that downtown bus where it was when Mia’s cab pulled up, or it might only have been coincidence. Certainly it’s the sort of question that provokes argument from the humblest street-preacher (can you give me hallelujah) all the way up to the mightiest of theological philosophers (can you give me a Socratic amen). Some might consider it almost frivolous; the mighty issues that loom their shadows behind the question, however, are anything but.

One downtown bus, half empty.

But if it hadn’t been there on the corner of Lex and Sixty-first, Mia likely would never have noticed the man playing the guitar. And, had she not stopped to listen to the man playing the guitar, who knows how much of what followed might have been different?

TWO

“Awwww, man, wouldja looka-dat!” the cab driver exclaimed, and lifted his hand to his windshield in an exasperated gesture. A bus was parked on the corner of Lexington and Sixty-first, its diesel engine rumbling and its taillights flashing what Mia took to be some kind of distress code. The bus driver was standing by one of the rear wheels, looking at the dark cloud of diesel smoke pouring from the bus’s rear vent.

“Lady,” said the cab driver, “you mind getting off on the corner of Sixtieth? Tha’be all right?”

Is it? Mia asked. What should I say?

Sure, Susannah replied absently. Sixtieth’s fine.

Mia’s question had called her back from her version of the Dogan, where she’d been trying to get in touch with Eddie. She’d had no luck doing that, and was appalled at the state of the place. The cracks in the floor now ran deep, and one of the ceiling panels had crashed down, bringing the fluorescent lights and several long snarls of electrical cable with it. Some of the instrument panels had gone dark. Others were seeping tendrils of smoke. The needle on the Susannah-Mio dial was all the way over into the red. Below her feet, the floor was vibrating and the machinery was screaming. And saying that none of this was real, it was all only a visualization technique, kind of missed the whole point, didn’t it? She’d shut down a very powerful process, and her body was paying a price. The Voice of the Dogan had warned her that what she was doing was dangerous; that it wasn’t (in the words of a TV ad) nice to fool Mother Nature. Susannah had no idea which of her glands and organs were taking the biggest beating, but she knew that they were hers. Not Mia’s. It was time to call a halt to this madness before everything went sky-high.

First, though, she’d tried to get in touch with Eddie, yelling his name into the mike with north central positronics stamped on it again and again. Nothing. Yelling Roland’s name also brought no result. If they were dead, she would have known it. She was sure of that. But not to be able to get in touch with them at all… what did that mean?

It mean you once mo’ been fucked mos’ righteous, honey chile, Detta told her, and cackled. This what you get fo’ messin wit’ honkies.

I can get out here? Mia was asking, shy as a girl arriving at her first dance. Really?

Susannah would have slapped her own brow, had she had one. God, when it was about anything but her baby, the bitch was so goddam timid!

Yes, go ahead. It’s only a single block, and on the avenues, the blocks are short.

The driver… how much should I give the driver?

Give him a ten and let him keep the change. Here, hold it out for me-

Susannah sensed Mia’s reluctance and reacted with weary anger. This was not entirely without amusement.

Listen to me, sweetheart, I wash my hands of you. Okay? Give him any fucking bill you want.

No, no, it’s all right. Humble now. Frightened. I trust you, Susannah. And she held up the remaining bills from Mats, fanned out in front of her eyes like a hand of cards.

Susannah almost refused, but what was the point? She came forward, took control of the brown hands holding the money, selected a ten, and gave it to the driver. “Keep the change,” she said.

“Thanks, lady!”

Susannah opened the curbside door. A robot voice began to speak when she did, startling her-startling both of them. It was someone named Whoopi Goldberg, reminding her to take her bags. For Susannah-Mia, the question of her gunna was moot. There was only one piece of baggage which concerned them now, and of this Mia would soon be delivered.

She heard guitar music. At the same time she felt her control over the hand stuffing money back into her pocket and the leg swinging out of the cab begin to ebb. Mia, taking over again now that Susannah had solved another of her little New York dilemmas. Susannah began to struggle against this usurpation

(my body, goddammit, mine, at least from the waist up, and that includes the head and the brain inside it!)

and then quit. What was the use? Mia was stronger. Susannah had no idea why that should be, but she knew that it was.

A kind of queer Bushido fatalism had come over Susannah Dean by this point. It was the sort of calmness that cloaks the drivers of cars skidding helplessly toward bridge overpasses, the pilots of planes that heel over into their final dives, their engines dead… and gunslingers driven to their final cave or draw. Later she might fight, if fighting seemed either worthwhile or honorable. She would fight to save herself or the baby, but not Mia-this was her decision. Mia had forfeited any chance of rescue she might once have deserved, in Susannah’s eyes.

For now there was nothing to do, except maybe to turn the labor force dial back to 10. She thought she would be allowed that much control.

Before that, though… the music. The guitar. It was a song she knew, and knew well. She had sung a version of it to the folken the night of their arrival in Calla Bryn Sturgis.

After all she had been through since meeting Roland, hearing “Man of Constant Sorrow” on this New York street-corner did not strike her as coincidental in the least. And it was a wonderful song, wasn’t it? Perhaps the avatar of all the folk songs she had so loved as a younger woman, the ones that had seduced her, step by step, into activism and had led her finally to Oxford, Mississippi. Those days were gone-she felt ever so much older than she had then-but this song’s sad simplicity still appealed to her. The Dixie Pig was less than a block from here. Once Mia had transported them through its doors, Susannah would be in the Land of the Crimson King. She had no doubts or illusions about that. She did not expect to return from there, did not expect to see either her friends or her beloved again, and had an idea she might have to die with Mia’s cheated howls for company… but none of that had to interfere with her enjoyment of this song now. Was it her death-song? If so, fine.

Susannah, daughter of Dan, reckoned there could have been far worse.

THREE

The busker had set up shop in front of a cafe called Blackstrap Molasses. His guitar case was open in front of him, its purple velvet interior (exactly the same shade as the rug in sai King’s Bridgton bedroom, can you say amen) scattered with change and bills, just so any unusually innocent passersby would know the right thing to do. He was sitting on a sturdy wooden cube which looked exactly like the one upon which the Rev. Harrigan stood to preach.

There were signs that he was almost through for the night. He had put on his jacket, which bore a New York Yankees patch on the sleeve, and a hat with JOHN LENNON LIVES printed above the bill. There had apparently been a sign in front of him but now it was back in his instrument case, words-side down. Not that Mia would have known what was writ upon it in any case, not she.

He looked at her, smiled, and quit his fingerpicking. She raised one of the remaining bills and said, “I’ll give you this if you’ll play that song again. All of it, this time.”

The young man looked about twenty, and while there was nothing very handsome about him, with his pale, spotty complexion, the gold ring in one of his nostrils, and the cigarette jutting from the corner of his mouth, he had an engaging air. His eyes widened as he realized whose face was on the bit of currency she was holding. “Lady, for fifty bucks I’d play every Ralph Stanley song I know… and I know quite a few of em.”

“Just this one will do us fine,” Mia said, and tossed the bill. It fluttered into the busker’s guitar case. He watched its prankish descent with disbelief. “Hurry,” Mia said. Susannah was quiet, but Mia sensed her listening. “My time is short. Play.”

And so the guitar-player sitting on the box in front of the cafe began to play a song Susannah had first heard in The Hungry i, a song she had herself sung at God only knew how many hootenannies, a song she’d once sung behind a motel in Oxford, Mississippi. The night before they had all been thrown in jail, that had been. By then those three young voter-registration boys had been missing almost a month, gone into the black Mississippi earth somewhere in the general vicinity of Philadelphia (they were eventually found in the town of Longdale, can you give me hallelujah, can you please say amen). That fabled White Sledgehammer had begun once more to swing in the redneck toolies, but they had sung anyway. Odetta Holmes-Det, they called her in those days-had begun this particular song and then the rest of them joined in, the boys singing man and the girls singing maid. Now, rapt within the Dogan which had become her gulag, Susannah listened as this young man, unborn in those terrible old days, sang it again. The cofferdam of her memory broke wide open and it was Mia, unprepared for the violence of these recollections, who was lifted upon the wave.

FOUR

In the Land of Memory, the time is always Now.

In the Kingdom of Ago, the clocks tick… but their hands never move.

There is an Unfound Door

(O lost)

and memory is the key which opens it.

FIVE

Their names are Cheney, Goodman, Schwerner; these are those who fall beneath the swing of the White Sledgehammer on the 19th of June, 1964.

O Discordia!

SIX

They’re staying at a place called the Blue Moon Motor Hotel, on the Negro side of Oxford, Mississippi. The Blue Moon is owned by Lester Bambry, whose brother John is pastor of the First Afro-American Methodist Church of Oxford, can you give me hallelujah, can you say amen.

It is July 19th of 1964, a month to the day after the disappearance of Cheney, Goodman, and Schwerner. Three days after they disappeared somewhere around Philadelphia there was a meeting at John Bambry’s church and the local Negro activists told the three dozen or so remaining white northeners that in light of what was now happening, they were of course free to go home. And some of them have gone home, praise God, but Odetta Holmes and eighteen others stay. Yes. They stay at the Blue Moon Motor Hotel. And sometimes at night they go out back, and Delbert Anderson brings his guitar and they sing.

“I Shall Be Released, “they sing and

“John Henry,” they sing, gonna whop the steel on down (great Gawd, say Gawd-bomb), and they sing

“Blowin in the Wind “and they sing

“Hesitation Blues” by the Rev. Gary Davis, all of them laughing at the amiably risque verses: a dollar is a dollar and a dime is a dime I got a houseful of chillun ain’t none of em mine, and they sing:

"I Ain’t Marchin Anymore” and they sing in the Land of Memory and the Kingdom of Ago they sing in the blood-heat of their youth, in the strength of their bodies, in the confidence of their minds they sing, to deny Discordia to deny the can toi in affirmation of Gan the Maker, Gan the Evil-taker they don’t know these names they know all these names the heart sings what it must sing the blood knows what the blood knows on the Path of the Beam our hearts know all the secrets and they sing sing

Odetta begins and Delbert Anderson plays; she sings

“I am a maid of constant sorrow… I’ve seen trouble all my days… I bid farewell… to old Kentucky…”

SEVEN

So Mia was ushered through the Unfound Door and into the Land of Memory, transported to the weedy yard behind Lester Bambry’s Blue Moon Motor Hotel, and so she heard-

(hears)

EIGHT

Mia hears the woman who will become Susannah as she sings her song. She hears the others join in, one by one, until they are all singing together in a choir, and overhead is the Mississippi moon, raining its radiance down on their faces-some black, some white-and upon the cold steel rails of the tracks which run behind the hotel, tracks which run south from here, which run out to Longdale, the town where on August 5th of 1964 the badly decomposed bodies of their amigos will be found-James Cheney, twenty-one; Andrew Goodman, twenty-one; Michael Schwerner, twenty-four; O Discordia! And to you who favor darkness, give you joy of the red Eye that shines there.

She hears them sing.

All thro’ this Earth I’m bound to ramble… Thro’ storm and wind, thro’ sleet and rain… I’m bound to ride that Northern railroad…

Nothing opens the eye of memory like a song, and it is Odetta’s memories that lift Mia and carry her as they sing together, Det and her ka-mates under the silvery moon. Mia sees them walking hence from here with their arms linked, singing

(oh deep in my heart… I do believe…)

another song, the one they feel defines them most clearly. The faces lining the street and watching them are twisted with hate. The fists being shaken at them are cal-lused. The mouths of the women who purse their lips to shoot the spit that will clabber their cheeks dirty their hair stain their shirts are paintless and their legs are without stockings and their shoes are nothing but runover lumps. There are men in overalls (Oshkosh-by-gosh, someone say hallelujah). There are teenage boys in clean white sweaters and flattop haircuts and one of them shouts at Odetta, carefully articulating each word: We Will Kill! Every! Goddam! Nigger! Who Steps Foot On The Campus Of Oh Miss!

And the camaraderie in spite of the fear. Because of the fear. The feeling that they are doing something incredibly important: something for the ages. They will change America, and if the price is blood, why then they will pay it. Say true, say hallelujah, praise God, give up your loud amen.

Then comes the white boy named Darryl, and at first he couldn’t, he was limp and he couldn’t, and then later on he could and Odetta’s secret other-the screaming, laughing, ugly other-never came near. Darryl and Det lay together until morning, slept spoons until morning beneath the Mississippi moon. Listening to the crickets. Listening to the owls. Listening to the soft smooth hum of the Earth turning on its gimbals, turning and turning ever further into the twentieth century. They are young, their blood runs hot, and they never doubt their ability to change everything.

It’s fare you well, my own true lover…

This is her song in the weeds behind the Blue Moon Motor Hotel; this is her song beneath the moon.

I’ll never see your face again…

It’s Odetta Holmes at the apotheosis of her life, and Mia is there! She sees it, feels it, is lost in its glorious and some would say stupid hope (ah but I say hallelujah, we all say Gawd-bomb). She understands how being afraid all the time makes one’s friends more precious; how it makes every bite of every meal sweet; how it stretches time until every day seems to last forever, leading on to velvet night, and they know James Cheney is dead

(say true)

they know Andrew Goodman is dead

(say hallelujah)

they know Michael Schwerner-oldest of them and still just a baby at twenty-four-is dead.

(Give up your loudest amen!)

They know that any of them is also eligible to wind up in the mud of Longdale or Philadelphia. At any time. The night after this particular hoot behind the Blue Moon, most of them, Odetta included, will be taken to jail and her time of humiliation will begin. But tonight she’s with her friends, with her lover, and they are one, and Discordia has been banished. Tonight they sing swaying with their arms around each other.

The girls sing maid, the boys sing man.

Mia is overwhelmed by their love for one another; she is exalted by the simplicity of what they believe.

At first, too stunned to laugh or to cry, she can only listen, amazed.

NINE

As the busker began the fourth verse, Susannah joined in, at first tentatively and then-at his encouraging smile-with a will, harmonizing above the young man’s voice:

For breakfast we had bulldog gravy

For supper we had beans and bread

The miners don’t have any dinner

And a tick of straw they call a bed…

TEN

The busker quit after that verse, looking at Susannah-Mia with happy surprise. “I thought I was the only one who knew that one,” he said. “It’s the way the Freedom Riders used to-”

“No,” Susannah said quietly. “Not them. It was the voter-registration people who sang the bulldog-gravy verse. The folks who came down to Oxford in the summer of ’64. When those three boys were killed.”

“Schwerner and Goodman,” he said. “I can’t remember the name of the-”

“James Cheney,” she said quietly. “He had the most beautiful hair.”

“You talk as though you knew him,” he said, “but you can’t be much over… thirty?”

Susannah had an idea she looked a good deal older than thirty, especially tonight, but of course this young man had fifty dollars more in his guitar case now than had been there a single song ago, and it had perhaps affected his eyesight.

“My mother spent the summer of ’64 in Neshoba County,” Susannah said, and with two spontaneously chosen words-my mother-did her captor more damage than she could have imagined. Those words flayed open Mia’s heart.

“Cool on Mom!” the young man exclaimed, and smiled. Then the smile faded. He fished the fifty out of the guitar case and held it up to her. “Take it back. It was a pleasure just to sing with you, ma’am.”

“I really couldn’t,” Susannah said, smiling. “Remember the struggle, that’d be enough for me. And remember Jimmy, Andy, and Michael, if it does ya. I know it would do me just fine.”

“Please,” the young man persisted. He was smiling again but the smile was troubled and he might have been any of those young men from the Land of Ago, singing in the moonlight between the slumped ass-ends of the Blue Moon’s shacky little units and the double-hammered heatless moonlight gleam of the railroad tracks; he could have been any in his beauty and the careless flower of his youth and how in that moment Mia loved him. Even her chap seemed secondary in that glow. She knew it was in many ways a false glow, imparted by the memories of her hostess, and yet she suspected that in other ways it might be real. She knew one thing for sure: only a creature such as herself, who’d had immortality and given it up, could appreciate the raw courage it took to stand against the forces of Discordia. To risk that fragile beauty by putting beliefs before personal safety.

Make him happy, take it back, she told Susannah, but would not come forward and make Susannah do so. Let it be her choice.

Before Susannah could reply, the alarm in the Dogan went off, flooding their shared mind with noise and red light.

Susannah turned in that direction, but Mia grabbed her shoulder in a grip like a claw before she could go.

What’s happening? What’s gone wrong?

Let me loose!.

Susannah twisted free. And before Mia could grab her again, she was gone.

ELEVEN

Susannah’s Dogan pulsed and flared with red panic-light. A Klaxon hammered an audio tattoo from the overhead speakers. All but two of the TV screens-one still showing the busker on the corner of Lex and Sixtieth, the other the sleeping baby-had shorted out. The cracked floor was humming under Susannah’s feet and throwing up dust. One of the control panels had gone dark, and another was in flames.

This looked bad.

As if to confirm her assessment, the Blaine-like Voice of the Dogan began to speak again. “WARNING!” it cried. “SYSTEM OVERLOAD! WITHOUT POWER REDUCTION IN SECTION ALPHA, TOTAL SYSTEM SHUTDOWN WILL OCCUR IN 40 SECONDS!”

Susannah couldn’t remember any Section Alpha from her previous visits to the Dogan, but wasn’t surprised to now see a sign labeled just that. One of the panels near it suddenly erupted in a gaudy shower of orange sparks, setting the seat of a chair on fire. More ceiling panels fell, trailing snarls of wiring.

“WITHOUT POWER REDUCTION IN SECTION ALPHA, TOTAL SYSTEM SHUTDOWN WILL OCCUR IN 30 SECONDS!”

What about the emotional temp dial?

“Leave it alone,” she muttered to herself.

Okay, chap? What about that one?

After a moment’s thought, Susannah flipped the toggle from asleep to awake and those disconcerting blue eyes opened at once, staring into Susannah’s with what looked like fierce curiosity.

Roland’s child, she thought with a strange and painful mixture of emotions. And mine. As for Mia? Girl, you nothing but a ka-mai. I’m sorry for you.

Ka-mai, yes. Not just a fool, but ka’s fool-a fool of destiny.

“WITHOUT POWER REDUCTION IN SECTION ALPHA, TOTAL SYSTEM SHUTDOWN WILL OCCUR IN 25 SECONDS!”

So waking the baby hadn’t done any good, at least not in terms of preventing a complete system crash. Time for Plan B.

She reached out for the absurd labor force control-knob, the one that looked so much like the oven-dial on her mother’s stove. Turning the dial back to 2 had been difficult, and had hurt like a bastard. Turning it the other way was easier, and there was no pain at all. What she felt was an easing somewhere deep in her head, as if some network of muscles which had been flexed for hours was now letting go with a little cry of relief.

The blaring pulse of the Klaxon ceased.

Susannah turned labor force to 8, paused there, then shrugged. What the hell, it was time to go for broke, get this over with. She turned the dial all the way to 10. The moment it was there, a great glossy pain hardened her stomach and then rolled lower, gripping her pelvis. She had to tighten her lips against a scream.

“POWER REDUCTION IN SECTION ALPHA HAS BEEN ACCOMPLISHED,” said the voice, and then it dropped into a John Wayne drawl that Susannah knew all too well. “THANKS A WHOLE HEAP, LI’L COWGIRL.”

She had to tighten her lips against another scream-not pain this time but outright terror. It was all very well to remind herself Blaine the Mono was dead and this voice was coming from some nasty practical joker in her own subconscious, but that didn’t stop the fear.

“LABOR… HAS COMMENCED,” said the amplified voice, dropping the John Wayne imitation. “LABOR… HAS COMMENCED.” Then, in a horrible (and nasal) Bob Dylan drawl that set her teeth on edge, the voice sang: “HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU… BABE!… HAPPY BIRTHDAY… TO YOU! HAPPY BIRTHDAY… DEAR MORDRED… HAPPY BIRTHDAY… TO YOU!”

Susannah visualized a fire extinguisher mounted on the wall behind her, and when she turned it was, of course, right there (she had not imagined the little sign reading ONLY YOU AND SOMBRA CAN HELP PREVENT CONSOLE FIRES, how-ever-that, along with a drawing of Shardik o’ the Beam in a Smokey the Bear hat, was some other joker’s treat). As she hurried across the cracked and uneven floor to get the extinguisher, skirting the fallen ceiling panels, another pain ripped into her, lighting her belly and thighs on fire, making her want to double over and bear down on the outrageous stone in her womb.

Not going to take long, she thought in a voice that was part Susannah and part Detta. No ma’am. This chap comin in on the express train!

But then the pain let up slightly. She snatched the extinguisher off the wall when it did, trained the slim black horn on the flaming control panel, and pressed the trigger. Foam billowed out, coating the flames. There was a baleful hissing sound and a smell like burning hair.

“THE FIRE… IS OUT,” the Voice of the Dogan proclaimed. “THE FIRE… IS OUT.” And then changing, quick as a flash, to a plummy British Lord Haw-Haw accent: “I SAY, JOLLY GOOD SHOW, SEW-ZANNAH, AB-SO-LUTELY BRILLLL-IANT!”

She lurched across the minefield of the Dogan’s floor again, seized the microphone, and pressed the transmit toggle. Above her, on one of the TV screens still operating, she could see that Mia was on the move again, crossing Sixtieth.

Then Susannah saw the green awning with the cartoon pig, and her heart sank. Not Sixtieth, but Sixty-first. The hijacking mommybitch had reached her destination.

“Eddie!” she shouted into the microphone. “Eddie or Roland!” And what the hell, she might as well make it a clean sweep. “Jake! Pere Callahan! We’ve reached the Dixie Pig and we’re going to have this damn baby! Come for us if you can, but be careful!”

She looked up at the screen again. Mia was now on the Dixie Pig side of the street, peering at the green awning. Hesitating. Could she read the words dixie pig? Probably not, but she could surely understand the cartoon. The smiling, smoking pig. And she wouldn’t hesitate long in any case, now that her labor had started.

“Eddie, I have to go. I love you, sugar! Whatever else happens, you remember that! Never forget it! Ilove you! This is…” Her eye fell on the semicircular readout on the panel behind the mike. The needle had fallen out of the red. She thought it would stay in the yellow until the labor was over, then subside into the green.

Unless something went wrong, that was.

She realized she was still gripping the mike. “This is Susannah-Mio, signing off. God be with you, boys. God and ka.”

She put the microphone down and closed her eyes.

TWELVE

Susannah sensed the difference in Mia immediately. Although she’d reached the Dixie Pig and her labor had most emphatically commenced, Mia’s mind was for once elsewhere. It had turned to Odetta Holmes, in fact, and to what Michael Schwerner had called the Mississippi Summer Project. (What the Oxford rednecks had called him was The Jewboy.) The emotional atmosphere to which Susannah returned was fraught, like still air before a violent September storm.

Susannah! Susannah, daughter of Dan!

Yes, Mia.

I agreed to mortality.

So you said.

And certainly Mia had looked mortal in Fedic. Mortal and terribly pregnant.

Yet I’ve missed most of what makes the short-time life worthwhile. Haven’t I? The grief in that voice was awful; the surprise was even worse. And there’s no time for you to tell me. Not now.

Go somewhere else, Susannah said, with no hope at all. Hail a cab, go to a hospital. We’ll have it together, Mia. Maybe we can even raise it toge-

If I have it anywhere but here, it will die and we’ll die with it. She spoke with utter certainty. And I will have it. I’ve been cheated of all but my chap, and I willhave it. But… Susannah… before we go in… you spoke of your mother.

I lied. It was me in Oxford. Lying was easier than trying to explain time travel and parallel worlds.

Show me the truth. Show me your mother. Show me, I beg!

There was no time to debate this request pro and con; it was either do it or refuse on the spur of the moment. Susannah decided to do it.

Look, she said.

THIRTEEN

In the Land of Memory, the time is always Now.

There is an Unfound Door

(O lost)

and when Susannah found it and opened it, Mia saw a woman with her dark hair pulled back from her face and startling gray eyes. There is a cameo brooch at the woman’s throat. She’s sitting at the kitchen table, this woman, in an eternal shaft of sun. In this memory it is always ten minutes past two on an afternoon in October of 1946, the Big War is over, Irene Daye is on the radio, and the smell is always gingerbread.

“Odetta, come and sit with me,” says the woman at the table, she who is mother. “Have something sweet. You look good, girl.”

And she smiles.

O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again!

FOURTEEN

Prosaic enough, you would say, so you would. A young girl comes home from school with her book-bag in one hand and her gym-bag in the other, wearing her white blouse and her pleated St. Ann’s tartan skirt and the knee-socks with the bows on the side (orange and black, the school colors). Her mother, sitting at the kitchen table, looks up and offers her daughter a piece of the gingerbread that just came out of the oven. It is only one moment in an unmarked million, a single atom of event in a lifetime of them. But it stole Mia’s breath

(you look good, girl)

and showed her in a concrete way she had previously not understood how rich motherhood could be… if, that was, it was allowed to run its course uninterrupted.

The rewards?

Immeasurable.

In the end you could be the woman sitting in the shaft of sun. You could be the one looking at the child sailing bravely out of childhood’s harbor. You could be the wind in that child’s unfurled sails.

You.

Odetta, come and sit with me.

Mia’s breath began to hitch in her chest.

Have something sweet.

Her eyes fogged over, the smiling cartoon pig on the awning first doubling, then quadrupling.

You look good, girl.

Some time was better than no time at all. Even five years-or three-was better than no time at all. She couldn’t read, hadn’t been to Morehouse, hadn’t been to no house, but she could do that much math with no trouble: three = better than none. Even one = better than none.

Oh…

Oh, but…

Mia thought of a blue-eyed boy stepping through a door, one that was found instead of lost. She thought of saying to him You look good, son!

She began to weep.

What have I done was a terrible question. What else could I have done was perhaps even worse.

O Discordia!

FIFTEEN

This was Susannah’s one chance to do something: now, while Mia stood at the foot of the steps leading up to her fate. Susannah reached into the pocket of her jeans and touched the turtle, the skolpadda. Her brown fingers, separated from Mia’s white leg by only a thin layer of lining, closed around it.

She pulled it out and flipped it behind her, casting it into the gutter. From her hand into the lap of ka.

Then she was carried up the three steps to the double doors of the Dixie Pig.

SIXTEEN

It was very dim inside and at first Mia could see nothing but murky, reddish-orange lights. Electric flambeaux of the sort that still lit some of the rooms in Castle Discordia. Her sense of smell needed no adjusting, however, and even as a fresh labor pain clamped her tight, her stomach reacted to the smell of roasting pork and cried out to be fed. Her chap cried out to be fed.”

That’s not pork, Mia, Susannah said, and was ignored.

As the doors were closed behind her-there was a man (or a manlike being) standing at each of them-she began to see better. She was at the head of a long, narrow dining room. White napery shone. On each table was a candle in an orange-tinted holder. They glowed like fox-eyes. The floor here in the foyer was black marble, but beyond the maitre d’s stand there was a rug of darkest crimson.

Beside the stand was a sai of about sixty with white hair combed back from a lean and rather predatory face. It was the face of an intelligent man, but his clothes-the blaring yellow sportcoat, the red shirt, the black tie-were those of a used-car salesman or a gambler who specializes in rooking small-town rubes. In the center of his forehead was a red hole about an inch across, as if he had been shot at close range. It swam with blood that never overflowed onto his pallid skin.

At the tables in the dining room stood perhaps fifty men and half again as many women. Most of them were dressed in clothes as loud or louder than those of the white-haired gent. Big rings glared on fleshy fingers, diamond eardrops sparked back orange light from the flambeaux.

There were also some dressed in more sober attire-jeans and plain white shirts seemed to be the costume of choice for this minority. These folken were pallid and watchful, their eyes seemingly all pupil. Around their bodies, swirling so faintly that they sometimes disappeared, were blue auras. To Mia these pallid, aura-enclosed creatures looked quite a bit more human than the low men and women. They were vampires-she didn’t have to observe the sharpened fangs which their smiles disclosed to know it-but still they looked more human than Sayre’s bunch. Perhaps because they once had been human. The others, though…

Their faces are only masks, she observed with growing dismay. Beneath the ones the Wolves wear lie the electric men-the robots-but what is beneath these?

The dining room was breathlessly silent, but from somewhere nearby came the uninterrupted sounds of conversation, laughter, clinking glasses, and cutlery against china. There was a patter of liquid-wine or water, she supposed-and a louder outburst of laughter.

A low man and a low woman-he in a tuxedo equipped with plaid lapels and a red velvet bow tie, she in a strapless silver lame evening dress, both of startling obesity-turned to look (with obvious displeasure) toward the source of these sounds, which seemed to be coming from behind some sort of swaggy tapestry depicting knights and their ladies at sup. When the fat couple turned to look, Mia saw their cheeks wrinkle upward like clingy cloth, and for a moment, beneath the soft angle of their jaws, she saw something dark red and tufted with hair.

Susannah, was that skin? Mia asked. Dear God, was it their skin?

Susannah made no reply, not even Itold you so or Didn’t I warn you? Things had gone past that now. It was too late for exasperation (or any of the milder emotions), and Susannah felt genuinely sorry for the woman who had brought her here. Yes, Mia had lied and betrayed; yes, she had tried her best to get Eddie and Roland killed. But what choice had she ever had? Susannah realized, with dawning bitterness, that she could now give the perfect definition of a ka-mai: one who has been given hope but no choices.

Like giving a motorcycle to a blindman, she thought.

Richard Sayre-slim, middle-aged, handsome in a full-lipped, broad-browed way-began to applaud. The rings on his fingers flashed. His yellow blazer blared in the dim light. “Hile, Mia!” he cried.

“Hile, Mia!” the others responded.

“Hile, Mother!”

“Hile, Mother!” the vampires and low men and low women cried, and they, too began to applaud. The sound was certainly enthusiastic enough, but the acoustics of the room dulled it and turned it into the rustle of batwings. A hungry sound, one that made Susannah feel sick to her stomach. At the same time a fresh contraction gripped her and turned her legs to water. She reeled forward, yet almost welcomed the pain, which partially muffled her trepidation. Sayre stepped forward and seized her by the upper arms, steadying her before she could fall. She had thought his touch would be cold, but his fingers were as hot as those of a cholera victim.

Farther back, she saw a tall figure come out of the shadows, something that was neither low man nor vampire. It wore jeans and a plain white shirt, but emerging from the shirt’s collar was the head of a bird. It was covered with sleek feathers of dark yellow. Its eyes were black. It patted its hands together in polite applause, and she saw-with ever-growing dismay-that those hands were equipped with talons rather than fingers.

Half a dozen bugs scampered from beneath one of the tables and looked at her with eyes that hung on stalks. Horribly intelligent eyes. Their mandibles clicked in a sound that was like laughter.

Hile, Mia! she heard in her head. An insectile buzzing. Hile, Mother! And then they were gone, back into the shadows.

Mia turned to the door and saw the pair of low men who blocked it. And yes, those were masks; this close to the door-guards it was impossible not to see how their sleek black hair had been painted on. Mia turned back to Sayre with a sinking heart.

Too late now.

Too late to do anything but go through with it.

SEVENTEEN

Sayre’s grip had slipped when she turned. Now he re-established it by taking her left hand. At the same moment her right hand was seized. She turned that way and saw the fat woman in the silver lame dress. Her huge bust overflowed the top of her gown, which struggled gamely to hold it back. The flesh of her upper arms quivered loosely, giving off a suffocating scent of talcum powder. On her forehead was a red wound that swam but never overflowed.

It’s how they breathe, Mia thought. That’s how they breathe when they’re wearing their-

In her growing dismay, she had largely forgotten about Susannah Dean and completely about Detta. So when Detta Walker came forward-hell, when she leaped forward-there was no way Mia could stop her. She watched her arms shoot out seemingly of their own accord and saw her fingers sink into the plump cheek of the woman in the silver lame gown. The woman shrieked, but oddly, the others, Sayre included, laughed uproariously, as if this were the funniest thing they’d ever seen in their lives.

The mask of humanity pulled away from the low woman’s startled eye, then tore. Susannah thought of her final moments on the castle allure, when everything had frozen and the sky had torn open like paper.

Detta ripped the mask almost entirely away. Tatters of what looked like latex hung from the tips of her fingers. Beneath where the mask had been was the head of a huge red rat, a mutie with yellow teeth growing up the outside of its cheeks in a crust and what looked like white worms dangling from its nose.

“Naughty girl,” said the rat, shaking a roguish finger at Susannah-Mio. Its other hand was still holding hers. The thing’s mate-the low man in the garish tuxedo-was laughing so hard he had doubled over, and when he did, Mia saw something poking out through the seat of his pants. It was too bony to be a tail, but she supposed it was, all the same.

“Come, Mia,” Sayre said, drawing her forward. And then he leaned toward her, peering earnestly into her eyes like a lover. “Or is it you, Odetta? It is, isn’t it? It’s you, you pestering, overeducated, troublesome Negress.”

“No, it be me, you ratface honky mahfah!” Detta crowed, and then spat into Sayre’s face.

Sayre’s mouth opened in a gape of astonishment. Then it snapped shut and twisted into a bitter scowl. The room had gone silent again. He wiped the spit from his face-from the mask he wore over his face-and looked at it unbelievingly.

“Mia?” he asked. “Mia, you let her do this to me? Me, who would stand as your baby’s godfather?”

“You ain’t jack shit!” Detta cried. “You suck yo’ ka-daddy’s cock while you diddle yo’ fuckfinger up his poop-chute and thass all you good fo’! You-”

“Get RID of her!” Sayre thundered.

And before the watching audience of vampires and low men in the Dixie Pig’s front dining room, Mia did just that. The result was extraordinary. Detta’s voice began to dwindle, as if she were being escorted out of the restaurant (by the bouncer, and by the scruff of the neck). She quit trying to speak and only laughed raucously, but soon enough that, too, was gone.

Sayre stood with his hands clasped before him, looking solemnly at Mia. The others were also staring. Somewhere behind the tapestry of the knights and their ladies at feast, the low laughter and conversation of some other group continued.

“She’s gone,” Mia said at last. “The bad one is gone.” Even in the room’s quiet she was hard to hear, for she spoke in little more than a whisper. Her eyes were timidly cast down, and her cheeks had gone deathly white. “Please, Mr. Sayre… sai Sayre… now that I’ve done as you ask, please say you’ve told me the truth, and I may have the raising of my chap. Please say so! If you do, you’ll never hear from the other one again, I swear it on my father’s face and my mother’s name, so I do.”

“You had neither,” Sayre said. He spoke in a tone of distant contempt. The compassion and mercy for which she begged owned no space in his eyes. And above them, the red hole in the center of his forehead filled and filled but never spilled.

Another pain, this one the greatest so far, sank its teeth into her. Mia staggered, and this time Sayre didn’t bother steadying her. She went to her knees before him, put her hands on the rough, gleaming surface of his ostrich-skin boots, and looked up into his pale face. It looked back at her from above the violent yellow scream of his sports jacket.

“Please,” she said. “Please, I beg you: keep your promise to me.”

“I may,” he said, “or I may not. Do you know, I have never had my boots licked. Can you imagine? To have lived as long as I have and never to have had a single good old-

fashioned boot-licking.”

Somewhere a woman tittered.

Mia bent forward.

No, Mia, thee mustn’t, Susannah moaned, but Mia made no reply. Nor did the paralyzing pain deep in her vitals stop her. She stuck her tongue out between her lips and began licking the rough surface of Richard Sayre’s boots. Susannah could taste them, at a great distance. It was a husky, dusty, leathery taste, full of rue and humiliation.

Sayre let her go on so for a bit, then said: “Stop it. Enough.”

He pulled her roughly to her feet and stood with his unsmiling face not three inches from her own. Now that she’d seen them, it was impossible to unsee the masks he and the rest of them wore. The taut cheeks were almost transparent, and whorls of dark scarlet hair were faintly visible beneath.

Or perhaps you called it fur when it covered the whole face.

“Your beggary does you no credit,” he said, “although I must admit the sensation was extraordinary.”

“You promised!” she cried, attempting to pull back and out of his grip. Then another contraction struck and she doubled over, trying only not to shriek. When it eased a little, she pressed on. ’You said five years… or maybe seven… yes, seven… the best of everything for my chap, you said-”

“Yes,” Sayre said. “I do seem to recall that, Mia.” He frowned as one does when presented with an especially pernicious problem, then brightened. The area of mask around one corner of his mouth wrinkled up for a moment when he smiled, revealing a yellow snag of tooth growing out of the fold where his lower lip met his upper. He let go of her with one hand in order to raise a finger in the gesture pedagogical. “The best of everything, yes. Question is, do you fill that particular bill?”

Appreciative murmurs of laughter greeted this sally. Mia recalled them calling her Mother and saluting her hile, but that seemed distant now, like a meaningless fragment of dream.

You was good enough to tote him, though, wasn’t you? Detta asked from someplace deep inside-from the brig, in fact. Yassuh! You ’us good enough to do dot, sho!

“I was good enough to carry him, wasn’t I?” Mia almost spat at him. “Good enough to send the other one into the swamp to eat frogs, her all the time thinking they were caviar… I was good enough for that, wasn’t I?”

Sayre blinked, clearly startled by so brisk a response.

Mia softened again. “Sai, think of all I gave up!”

“Pish, you had nothing!” Sayre replied. “What were you but a meaningless spirit whose existence revolved around no more than fucking the occasional saddletramp? Slut of the winds, isn’t that what Roland calls your kind?”

“Then think of the other one,” Mia said. “She who calls herself Susannah. I have stolen all her life and purpose for my chap, and at your bidding.”

Sayre made a dismissive gesture. “Your mouth does you no credit, Mia. Therefore close it.”

He nodded to his left. A low man with a wide, bulldoggy face and a luxuriant head of curly gray hair came forward. The red hole in his brow had an oddly slanted Chinese look. Walking behind him was another of the bird-things, this one with a fierce, dark brown hawk’s head protruding from the round neck of a tee-shirt with duke blue devils printed on it. They took hold of her. The bird-thing’s grip was repulsive-scaly and alien.

“You have been an excellent custodian,” Sayre said, “on that much we can surely agree. But we must also remember that it was Roland of Gilead’s jilly who actually bred the child, mustn’t we?”

“That’s a lie!” she screamed. “Oh, that is a filthy… LIE!”

He went on as if he’d not heard her. “And different jobs require different skills. Different strokes for different folks, as they say.”

“PLEASE!” Mia shrieked.

The hawkman put its taloned hands to the sides of its head and then rocked from side to side, as if deafened. This witty pantomime drew laughter and even a few cheers.

Susannah dimly felt warmth gush down her legs-Mia’s legs-and saw her jeans darken at the crotch and thighs. Her water had finally broken.

“Let’s go-ooo-ooo… and have a BABY!” Sayre proclaimed in game-show-host tones of excitement. There were too many teeth in that smile, a double row both top and bottom. “After that, we’ll see. I promise you that your request will be taken under consideration. In the meantime… Hile, Mia! Hile, Mother!”

“Hile, Mia! Hile, Mother!” the rest cried, and Mia suddenly found herself borne toward the back of the room, the bulldog-faced low man gripping her left arm and the hawkman gripping her right. Hawkman made a faint and unpleasant buzzing sound in his throat each time he exhaled. Her feet barely touched the rug as she was carried toward the bird-thing with the yellow feathers; Canaryman, she thought him.

Sayre brought her to a stop with a single hand-gesture and spoke to Canaryman, pointing toward the Dixie Pig’s street door as he did. Mia heard Roland’s name, and also Jake’s. The Canaryman nodded. Sayre pointed emphatically at the door again and shook his head. Nothing gets in, that headshake said. Nothing!

The Canaryman nodded again and then spoke in buzzing chirps that made Mia feel like screaming. She looked away, and her gaze happened on the mural of the knights and their ladies. They were at a table she recognized-it was the one in the banqueting hall of Castle Discordia. Arthur Eld sat at the head with his crown on his brow and his lady-wife at his right hand. And his eyes were a blue she knew from her dreams.

Ka might have chosen that particular moment to puff some errant draft across the dining room of the Dixie Pig and twitch aside the tapestry. It was only for a second or two, but long enough for Mia to see there was another dining room-a private dining room-behind it.

Sitting at a long wooden table beneath a blazing crystal chandelier were perhaps a dozen men and women, their appledoll faces twisted and shrunken with age and evil. Their lips had burst back from great croggled bouquets of teeth; the days when any of these monstrosities could close their mouths were long gone. Their eyes were black and oozing some sort of noisome tarry stuff from the corners. Their skin was yellow, scaled with teeth, and covered with patches of diseased-looking fur.

What are they? Mia screamed. What in the name of the gods are they?

Mutants, Susannah said. Or perhaps the word is hybrids. And it doesn’t matter, Mia. You saw what matters, didn’t you?

She had, and Susannah knew it. Although the velvet swag had been twitched aside but briefly, it had been long enough for both of them to see the rotisserie which had been set in the middle of that table, and the headless corpse twirling upon it, skin browning and puckering and sizzling fragrant juices. No, the smell in the air hadn’t been pork. The thing turning on the spit, brown as a squab, was a human baby. The creatures around it dipped delicate china cups into the drippings beneath, toasted each other… and drank.

The draft died. The tapestry settled back into place. And before the laboring woman was once more taken by the arms and hustled away from the dining room and deeper into this building that straddled many worlds along the Beam, she saw the joke of that picture. It wasn’t a drumstick Arthur Eld was lifting to his lips, as a first, casual, glance might have suggested; it was a baby’s leg. The glass Queen Rowena had raised in toast was not filled with wine but with blood.

“Hile, Mia!” Sayre cried again. Oh, he was in the best of spirits, now that the homing pigeon had come back to the cote.

Hile, Mia! the others screamed back. It was like some sort of crazy football cheer. Those from behind the mural joined in, although their voices were reduced to little more than growls. And their mouths, of course, were stuffed with food.

“Hile, Mother!” This time Sayre offered her a mocking bow to go with the mockery of his respect.

Hile, Mother! the vampires and the low men responded, and on the satiric wave of their applause she was carried away, first into the kitchen, then into the pantry, and then down the stairs beyond.

Ultimately, of course, there was a door.

EIGHTEEN

Susannah knew the kitchen of the Dixie Pig by the smell of obscene cookery: not pork after all, but certainly what the pirates of the eighteenth century had called long pork.

For how many years had this outpost served the vampires and low men of New York City? Since Callahan’s time, in the seventies and eighties? Since her own, in the sixties? Almost certainly longer. Susannah supposed there might have been a version of the Dixie Pig here since the time of the Dutch, they who had bought off the Indians with sacks of beads and planted their murderous Christian beliefs ever so much more deeply than their flag. A practical folk, the Dutch, with a taste for spareribs and little patience for magic, either white or black.

She saw enough to recognize the kitchen for the twin of the one she had visited in the bowels of Castle Discordia. That was where Mia had killed a rat that had been trying to claim the last remaining food in the place, a pork-roast in the oven.

Except there was no oven and no roast, she thought. Hell, no kitchen. There was a piglet out behind the barn, one of Tian and Zalia Jaffords’s. And I was the one who killed it and drank its hot blood, not she. By then she mostly had me, although I still didn’t know it. I wonder if Eddie-

As Mia took her away for the last time, tearing her free from her thoughts and sending her a-tumble into the dark, Susannah realized how completely the needy, terrible bitch had possessed her life. She knew why Mia had done it-because of the chap. The question was why she, Susannah Dean, had allowed it to happen. Because she’d been possessed before? Because she was as addicted to the stranger inside as Eddie had been to heroin?

She feared it might be true.

Swirling dark. And when she opened her eyes again, it was upon that savage moon hanging above the Discordia, and the flexing red glow

(forge of the King)

on the horizon.

“Over here!” cried a woman’s voice, just as it had cried before. “Over here, out of the wind!”

Susannah looked down and saw she was legless, and sitting in the same rude dog-cart as on her previous visit to the allure. The same woman, tall and comely, with black hair streaming in the wind, was beckoning to her. Mia, of course, and all this no more real than Susannah’s vague dream-memories of the banquet room.

She thought: Fedic, though, was real. Mia’s body is there just as mine is at this very moment being hustled through the kitchen behind the Dixie Pig, where unspeakable meals are prepared for inhuman customers. The castle allure is Mia’s dream-place, her refuge, her Dogan.

“To me, Susannah of Mid-World, and away from the Red King’s glow! Come out of the wind and into the lee of this merlon!”

Susannah shook her head. “Say what you have to say and be done, Mia. We’ve got to have a baby-aye, somehow, between us-and once it’s out, we’re quits. You’ve poisoned my life, so you have.”

Mia looked at her with desperate intensity, her belly blooming beneath the serape, her hair harried backward at the wind’s urging. “’Twas you who took the poison, Susannah! ’Twas you who swallowed it! Aye, when the child was still a seed unbloomed in your belly!”

Was it true? And if it was, which of them had invited Mia in, like the vampire she truly was? Had it been Susan nah, or Detta?

Susannah thought neither.

She thought it might actually have been Odetta Holmes. Odetta who would never have broken the nasty old blue lady’s forspecial plate. Odetta who loved her dolls, even though most of them were as white as her plain cotton panties.

“What do you want with me, Mia, daughter of none? Say and have finished with it!”

“Soon we’ll be together-aye, really and truly, lying together in the same childbed. And all I ask is that if a chance comes for me to get away with my chap, you’ll help me take it.”

Susannah thought it over. In the wilderness of rocks and gaping crevasses, the hyenas cackled. The wind was numbing, but the pain that suddenly clamped her midsection in its jaws was worse. She saw that same pain on Mia’s face and thought again how her entire existence seemed to have become a wilderness of mirrors. In any case, what harm could such a promise do? The chance probably wouldn’t come, but if it did, was she going to let the thing Mia wanted to call Mordred fall into the hands of the King’s men?

“Yes,” she said. “All right. If I can help you get away with him, I will help you.”

“Anywhere!” Mia cried in a harsh whisper. “Even…” She stopped. Swallowed. Forced herself to go on. “Even into the todash darkness. For if I had to wander forever with my son by my side, that would be no condemnation.”

Maybe not for you, sister, Susannah thought, but said nothing. In truth, she was fed up with Mia’s megrims.

“And if there’s no way for us to be free,” Mia said, “kill us.”

Although there was no sound up here but the wind and the cackling hyenas, Susannah could sense her physical body still on the move, now being carried down a flight of stairs. All that real-world stuff behind the thinnest of membranes. For Mia to have transported her to this world, especially while in the throes of childbirth, suggested a being of great power. Too bad that power couldn’t be harnessed, somehow.

Mia apparently mistook Susannah’s continued silence for reluctance, for she rushed around the allure’s circular walkway in her sturdy huaraches and almost ran to where Susannah sat in her gawky, balky cart. She seized Susannah’s shoulders and shook her.

“Yar!” she cried vehemently. “Kill us! Better we be together in death than to…” She trailed off, then spoke in a dull and bitter voice: “I’ve been cozened all along. Haven’t I?”

And now that the moment had come, Susannah felt neither vindication nor sympathy nor sorrow. She only nodded.

“Do they mean to eat him? To feed those terrible elders with his corpse?”

“I’m almost sure not,” Susannah said. And yet cannibalism was in it somewhere; her heart whispered it was so.

“They don’t care about me at all,” Mia said. “Just the baby-sitter, isn’t that what you called me? And they won’t even let me have that, will they?”

“I don’t think so,” Susannah said. ’You might get six months to nurse him, but even that…” She shook her head, then bit her lip as a fresh contraction gusted into her, turning all the muscles in her belly and thighs to glass. When it eased a little she finished, “I doubt it.”

“Then kill us, if it comes to that. Say you will, Susannah, do ya, I beg!”

“And if I do for you, Mia, what will you do for me? Assuming I could believe any word out of your liar’s mouth?”

“I’d free you, if chance allows.”

Susannah thought it over, and decided that a poor bargain was better than no bargain at all. She reached up and took the hands which were gripping her shoulders. “All right. I agree.”

Then, as at the end of their previous palaver in this place, the sky tore open, and the merlon behind them, and the very air between them. Through the rip, Susannah saw a moving hallway. The image was dim, blurry. She understood she was looking through her own eyes, which were mostly shut. Bulldog and Hawkman still had her. They were bearing her toward the door at the end of the hallway-always, since Roland had come into her life, there was another door-and she guessed they must think she’d passed out, or fainted. She supposed that in a way, she had.

Then she fell back into the hybrid body with the white legs… only who knew how much of her previously brown skin was now white? She thought that situation, at least, was about to end, and she 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:

NewYork/Fedic

Maximum Security

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 gadgets they used on the stolen twins, but now they were being put to some other purpose. What?

Sayre leaned down to her, close enough so she could smell his cologne. Susannah thought it was English Leather.

“To accomplish the final labor and actually push the baby out, we need this physical link,” he said. “Bringing you here to Fedic was absolutely vital.” He patted her shoulder. “Good luck. It won’t be long now.” He smiled at her winsomely. The mask he wore wrinkled upward, revealing some of the red horror which lay beneath. “Then we can kill you.”

The smile broadened.

“And eat you, of course. Nothing goes to waste at the Dixie Pig, not even such an arrogant bitch as yourself.”

Before Susannah could reply, the female voice in her head spoke again. “Please speak your name, slowly and distinctly.”

“Fuck you!” Susannah snarled back.

“Fuk Yu does not register as a valid name for a non-Asian,” said the pleasant female voice. “We detect hostility, and apologize in advance for the following procedure.”

For a moment there was nothing, and then Susannah’s mind lit up with pain beyond anything she had ever been called upon to endure. More than she had suspected could exist. Yet her lips remained closed as it raved through her. She thought of the song, and heard it true even through the thunder of the pain: I am a maid… of constant sorrow… I’ve seen trials all my days…

At last the thunder ceased.

“Please speak your name, slowly and distinctly,” said the pleasant female voice in the middle of her head, “or this procedure will be intensified by a factor of ten.”

No need of that, Susannah sent the female voice. I’m convinced.

“Suuuu-zaaaa-nahhh,” she said. “Suuu-zannn-ahhh…”

They stood watching her, all of them except for Ms. Rat-head, who was peering ecstatically up to where the baby’s down-covered head had once again appeared between the withdrawing lips of Mia’s vagina.

“Miiii-aaaahhhh…”

“Suuuu-zaaa…”

“Miiii…”

“annn-ahhh…”

By the time the next contraction began, Dr. Scowther had seized a pair of forceps. The voices of the women became one, uttering a word, a name, that was neither Susannah nor Mia but some combination of both.

“The link,” said the pleasant female voice, “has been established.” A faint click. “Repeat the link has been established. Thank you for your cooperation.”

“This is it, people,” Scowther said. His pain and terror appeared forgotten; he sounded excited. He turned to his nurse. “It may cry, Alia. If it does, let it alone, for your father’s sake! If it doesn’t, swab out its mouth at once!”

“Yes, doctor.” The thing’s lips quivered back, revealing a double set of fangs. Was that a grimace or a smile?

Scowther looked around at them with a touch of his previous arrogance. “All of you stay exactly where you are until I say you can move,” he said. “None of us knows exactly what we’ve got here. We only know that the child belongs to the Crimson King himself-”

Mia screamed at that. In pain and in protest.

“Oh, you idiot,” Sayre said. He drew back a hand and slapped Scowther with enough force to make his hair fly and send blood spraying against the white wall in a pattern of fine droplets.

“No!” Mia cried. She tried to struggle up onto her elbows, failed, fell back. “No, you said I should have the raising of him! Oh, please… if only for a little while, I beg…”

Then the worst pain yet rolled over Susannah-over both of them, burying them. They screamed in tandem, and Susannah didn’t need to hear Scowther, who was commanding her to push, to push NOW!

“It’s coming, doctor!” the nurse cried in nervous ecstasy.

Susannah closed her eyes and bore down, and as she felt the pain begin to flow out of her like water whirlpooling its way down a dark drain, she also felt the deepest sorrow she had ever known. For it was Mia the baby was flowing into; the last few lines of the living message Susannah’s body had somehow been made to transmit. It was ending. Whatever happened next, this part was ending, and Susannah Dean let out a cry of mingled relief and regret; a cry that was itself like a song.

And on the wings of that song, Mordred Deschain, son of Roland (and one other, O can you say Discordia), came into the world.