The Dark Tower (34 page)

Some
new
Earth, perhaps, but Pimli wasn’t even sure of that.

Two can-toi security guards, Beeman and Trelawney, stood at the end of the hall, guarding the head of the stairs going down to the basement. To Pimli, all can-toi men, even those with blond hair and skinny builds, looked weirdly like that actor from the forties and fifties, Clark Gable. They all seemed to have the same thick, sensual lips and batty ears. Then, when you got very close, you
could see the artificial wrinkles at the neck and behind the ears, where their hume masks twirled into pigtails and ran into the hairy, toothy flesh that was their reality (whether they accepted it or not). And there were the eyes. Hair surrounded them, and if you looked closely, you could see that what you originally took for
sockets
were, in fact, holes in those peculiar masks of living flesh. Sometimes you could hear the masks themselves breathing, which Pimli found both weird and a little revolting.

“Hile,” said Beeman.

“Hile,” said Trelawney.

Pimli and Finli returned the greeting, they all fisted their foreheads, and then Pimli led the way downstairs. In the lower corridor, walking past the sign which read
WE MUST ALL WORK TOGETHER TO CREATE A FIRE-FREE ENVIRONMENT
and another reading
ALL HAIL THE CAN-TOI
, Finli said, very low: “They are
so
odd.”

Pimli smiled and clapped him on the back. That was why he genuinely liked Finli o’ Tego: like Ike and Mike, they thought alike.

Most of the Damli House basement was a large room jammed with equipment. Not all of the stuff worked, and they had no use for some of the instruments that did (there was plenty they didn’t even understand), but they were very familiar with the surveillance equipment and the telemetry that measured
darks
: units of expended psychic energy. The Breakers were expressly forbidden from using their psychic abilities outside of The Study, and not all of them could, anyway. Many were like men and
women so severely toilet-trained that they were unable to urinate without the visual stimuli that assured them that yes, they were in the toilet, and yes, it was all right to let go. Others, like children who aren’t yet completely toilet-trained, were unable to prevent the occasional psychic outburst. This might amount to no more than giving someone they didn’t like a transient headache or knocking over a bench on the Mall, but Pimli’s men kept careful track, and outbursts that were deemed “on purpose” were punished, first offenses lightly, repeat offenses with rapidly mounting severity. And, as Pimli liked to lecture to the newcomers (back in the days when there had
been
newcomers), “Be sure your sin will find you out.” Finli’s scripture was even simpler:
Telemetry doesn’t lie
.

Today they found nothing but transient blips on the telemetry readouts. It was as meaningless as a four-hour audio recording of some group’s farts and burps would have been. The videotapes and the swing-guards’ daybooks likewise produced nothing of interest.

“Satisfied, sai?” Finli asked, and something in his voice caused Pimli to swing around and look at him sharply.

“Are
you?
”

Finli o’ Tego sighed. At times like this Pimli wished that either Finli were hume or that he himself were truly taheen. The problem was Finli’s inexpressive black eyes. They were almost the shoe-button eyes of a Raggedy Andy doll, and there was simply no way to read them. Unless, maybe, you were another taheen.

“I haven’t felt right for weeks now,” Finli said at last. “I drink too much graf to put myself asleep,
then drag myself through the day, biting people’s heads off. Part of it’s the loss of communications since the last Beam went—”

“You know that was inevitable—”

“Yes, of course I know. What I’m saying is that I’m trying to find rational reasons to explain irrational feelings, and that’s never a good sign.”

On the far wall was a picture of Niagara Falls. Some can-toi guard had turned it upside down. The low men considered turning pictures upside down the absolute height of humor. Pimli had no idea why. But in the end, who gave a shit?
I know how to do my facking job,
he thought, re-hanging Niagara Falls rightside up.
I know how to do that, and nothing else matters, tell God and the Man Jesus thank ya.

“We always knew things were going to get wacky at the end,” Finli said, “so I tell myself that’s all this is. This . . . you know . . .”

“This feeling you have,” the former Paul Prentiss supplied. Then he grinned and laid his right forefinger over a circle made by his left thumb and index finger. This was a taheen gesture which meant
I tell you the truth
. “This
irrational
feeling.”

“Yar. Certainly I know that the Bleeding Lion hasn’t reappeared in the north, nor do I believe that the sun’s cooling from the inside. I’ve heard tales of the Red King’s madness and that the Dan-Tete has come to take his place, and all I can say is ‘I’ll believe it when I see it.’ Same with this wonderful news about how a gunslinger-man’s come out of the west to save the Tower, as the old tales and songs predict. Bullshit, every bit of it.”

Pimli clapped him on the shoulder. “Does my heart good to hear you say so!”

It did, too. Finli o’ Tego had done a hell of a job during his tenure as Head. His security cadre had had to kill half a dozen Breakers over the years—all of them homesick fools trying to escape—and two others had been lobotomized, but Ted Brautigan was the only one who’d actually made it “under the fence” (this phrase Pimli had picked up from a film called
Stalag 17
), and they had reeled him back in, by God. The can-toi took the credit, and the Security Chief let them, but Pimli knew the truth: it was Finli who’d choreographed each move, from beginning to end.

“But it might be more than just nerves, this feeling of mine,” Finli continued. “I
do
believe that sometimes folk can have bona fide intuitions.” He laughed. “How could one not believe that, in a place as lousy with precogs and postcogs as this one?”

“But no teleports,” Pimli said. “Right?”

Teleportation was the one so-called wild talent of which all the Devar staff was afraid, and with good reason. There was no end to the sort of havoc a teleport could wreak. Bringing in about four acres of outer space, for instance, and creating a vacuum-induced hurricane. Fortunately there was a simple test to isolate that particular talent (easy to administer, although the equipment necessary was another leftover of the old people and none of them knew how long it would continue to work) and a simple procedure (also left behind by the old ones) for shorting out such dangerous organic circuits. Dr. Gangli was able to take care of potential teleports in under two minutes. “So simple it makes a vasectomy look like brain-surgery,” he’d said once.

“Absa-fackin-lutely no teleports,” was what Finli
said now, and led Prentiss to an instrument console that looked eerily like Susannah Dean’s visualization of her Dogan. He pointed at two dials marked in the henscratch of the old people (marks similar to those on the Unfound Door). The needle of each dial lay flat against the
O
mark on the left. When Finli tapped them with his furry thumbs, they jumped a little and then fell back.

“We don’t know exactly what these dials were actually meant to measure,” he said, “but one thing they
do
measure is teleportation potential. We’ve had Breakers who’ve tried to shield the talent and it doesn’t work. If there was a teleport in the woodpile, Pimli o’ New Jersey, these needles would be jittering all the way up to fifty or even eighty.”

“So.” Half-smiling, half-serious, Pimli began to count off on his fingers. “No teleports, no Bleeding Lion stalking from the north, no gunslingerman. Oh, and the Greencloaks succumbed to a computer virus. If all that’s the case, what’s gotten under your skin? What feels hinky-di-di to ya?”

“The approaching end, I suppose.” Finli sighed heavily. “I’m going to double the guard in the watchtowers tonight, any ro’, and humes along the fence, as well.”

“Because it feels hinky-di-di.” Pimli, smiling a little.

“Hinky-di-di, yar.” Finli did not smile; his cunning little teeth remained hidden inside his shiny brown muzzle.

Pimli clapped him on the shoulder. “Come on, let’s go up to The Study. Perhaps seeing all those Breakers at work will soothe you.”

“P’rhaps it will,” Finli said, but he still didn’t smile.

Pimli said gently, “It’s all right, Fin.”

“I suppose,” said the taheen, looking doubtfully around at the equipment, and then at Beeman and Trelawney, the two low men, who were respectfully waiting at the door for the two big bugs to finish their palaver. “I suppose ’tis.” Only his heart didn’t believe it. The only thing he was sure his heart believed was that there were no teleports left in Algul Siento.

Telemetry didn’t lie.

Beeman and Trelawney saw them all the way down the oak-paneled basement corridor to the staff elevator, which was also oak-paneled. There was a fire-extinguisher on the wall of the car and another sign reminding Devar-
folken
that they had to work together to create a fire-free environment.

This too had been turned upside down.

Pimli’s eyes met Finli’s. The Master believed he saw amusement in his Security Chief’s look, but of course what he saw might have been no more than his own sense of humor, reflected back at him like a face in a mirror. Finli untacked the sign without a word and turned it rightside up. Neither of them commented on the elevator machinery, which was loud and ill-sounding. Nor on the way the car shuddered in the shaft. If it froze, escape through the upper hatch would be no problem, not even for a slightly overweight (well . . .
quite
overweight) fellow like Prentiss. Damli House was hardly a skyscraper, and there was plenty of help near at hand.

They reached the third floor, where the sign on the closed elevator door was rightside up. It said
STAFF ONLY
and
PLEASE USE KEY
and
GO DOWN IMMEDIATELY IF YOU HAVE REACHED THIS LEVEL IN ERROR. YOU WILL NOT BE PENALIZED IF YOU REPORT IMMEDIATELY.

As Finli produced his key-card, he said with a casualness that might have been feigned (God
damn
his unreadable black eyes): “Have you heard from sai Sayre?”

“No,” Pimli said (rather crossly), “nor do I really expect to. We’re isolated here for a reason, deliberately forgotten in the desert just like the scientists of the Manhattan Project back in the 1940s. The last time I saw him, he told me it might be . . . well, the last time I saw him.”

“Relax,” Finli said. “I was just asking.” He swiped the key-card down its slot and the elevator door slid open with a rather hellish
screee
sound.

The Study was a long, high room in the center of Damli, also oak-paneled and rising three full stories to a glass roof that allowed the Algul’s hard-won sunlight to pour in. On the balcony opposite the door through which Prentiss and the Tego entered was an odd trio consisting of a ravenhead taheen named Jakli, a can-toi technician named Conroy, and two hume guards whose names Pimli could not immediately recall. Taheen, can-toi, and humes got on together during work hours by virtue of careful—and sometimes brittle—courtesy, but one did not expect to see them socializing off-duty. And indeed the balcony was strictly off-limits when it came to “socializing.” The Breakers
below were neither animals in a zoo nor exotic fish in an aquarium; Pimli (Finli o’ Tego, as well) had made this point to the staff over and over. The Master of Algul Siento had only had to lobo one staff member in all his years here, a perfectly idiotic hume guard named David Burke, who had actually been throwing something—had it been peanut-shells?—down on the Breakers below. When Burke had realized the Master was serious about lobotomizing him, he begged for a second chance, promising he’d never do anything so foolish and demeaning again. Pimli had turned a deaf ear. He’d seen a chance to make an example which would stand for years, perhaps for decades, and had taken it. You could see the now
truly
idiotic Mr. Burke around to this day, walking on the Mall or out by Left’rds Bound’ry, mouth slack and eyes vaguely puzzled—
I
almost
know who I am, I
almost
remember what I did to end up like this,
those eyes said. He was a living example of what simply wasn’t done when one was in the presence of working Breakers. But there was no rule expressly prohibiting staff from coming up here and they all did from time to time.

Because it was refreshing.

For one thing, being near working Breakers made talk unnecessary. What they called “good mind” kicked in as you walked down the third-floor hall on either side, from either elevator, and when you opened the doors giving on the balcony good mind bloomed in your head, opening all sorts of perceptual doorways. Aldous Huxley, Pimli had thought on more than one occasion, would have gone absolutely bonkers up here. Sometimes one found one’s heels leaving the floor in a kind
of half-assed float. The stuff in your pockets tended to rise and hang in the air. Formerly baffling situations seemed to resolve themselves the moment you turned your thoughts to them. If you’d forgotten something, your five o’clock appointment or your brother-in-law’s middle name, for instance, this was the place where you could remember. And even if you realized that what you’d forgotten was important, you were never distressed.
Folken
left the balcony with smiles on their faces even if they’d come up in the foulest of moods (a foul mood was an excellent reason to visit the balcony in the first place). It was as if some sort of happy-gas, invisible to the eye and unmeasurable by even the most sophisticated telemetry, always rose from the Breakers below.

The two of them hiled the trio across the way, then approached the wide fumed-oak railing and looked down. The room below might have been the capacious library of some richly endowed gentlemen’s club in London. Softly glowing lamps, many with genuine Tiffany shades, stood on little tables or shone on the walls (oak-paneled, of course). The rugs were the most exquisite Turkish. There was a Matisse on one wall, a Rembrandt on another . . . and on a third was the
Mona Lisa
. The real one, as opposed to the fake hanging in the Louvre on Keystone Earth. A man stood before it with his arms clasped behind him. From up here he looked as though he were studying the painting—trying to decipher the famously enigmatic smile, maybe—but Pimli knew better. The men and women holding magazines looked as though they were reading, too, but if you were right down there you’d see that they were gazing blankly over
the tops of their
McCall
’
s
and their
Harper’s
or a little off to one side. An eleven- or twelve-year-old girl in a gorgeous striped summer dress that might have cost sixteen hundred dollars in a Rodeo Drive kiddie boutique was sitting before a dollhouse on the hearth, but Pimli knew she wasn’t paying any attention to the exquisitely made replica of Damli at all.