The Dark Tower (99 page)

“I may go no further,” Bill said, shutting down the plow and cutting off Little Richard in mid-rave. “Tell ya sorry, as they say in the Arc o’ the Borderlands.”

Their trip had taken one full day and half of another, and during that time he had entertained them with a constant stream of what he called “golden oldies.” Some of these were not old at all to Susannah; songs like “Sugar Shack” and “Heat Wave” had been current hits on the radio when
she’d returned from her little vacation in Mississippi. Others she had never heard at all. The music was stored not on records or tapes but on beautiful silver discs Bill called “ceedees.” He pushed them into a slot in the plow’s instrument-cluttered dashboard and the music played from at least eight different speakers. Any music would have sounded fine to her, she supposed, but she was especially taken by two songs she had never heard before. One was a deliriously happy little rocker called “She Loves You.” The other, sad and reflective, was called “Hey Jude.” Roland actually seemed to know the latter one; he sang along with it, although the words he knew were different from the ones coming out of the plow’s multiple speakers. When she asked, Bill told her the group was called The Beetles.

“Funny name for a rock-and-roll band,” Susannah said.

Patrick, sitting with Oy in the plow’s tiny rear seat, tapped her on the shoulder. She turned and he held up the pad through which he was currently working his way. Beneath a picture of Roland in profile, he had printed:
BEATLES, not Beetles
.

“It’s a funny name for a rock-and-roll band no matter which way you spell it,” Susannah said, and that gave her an idea. “Patrick, do you have the touch?” When he frowned and raised his hands—
I don’t understand,
the gesture said—she rephrased the question. “Can you read my mind?”

He shrugged and smiled. This gesture said
I don’t know,
but she thought Patrick did know. She thought he knew very well.

They reached “the Federal” near noon, and there Bill served them a fine meal. Patrick wolfed his and then sat off to one side with Oy curled at his feet, sketching the others as they sat around the table in what had once been the common room. The walls of this room were covered with TV screens—Susannah guessed there were three hundred or more. They must have been built to last, too, because some were still operating. A few showed the rolling hills surrounding the Quonset, but most broadcast only snow, and one showed a series of rolling lines that made her feel queasy in her stomach if she looked at it too long. The snow-screens, Bill said, had once shown pictures from satellites in orbit around the Earth, but the cameras in those had gone dead long ago. The one with the rolling lines was more interesting. Bill told them that, until only a few months ago, that one had shown the Dark Tower. Then, suddenly, the picture had dissolved into nothing but those lines.

“I don’t think the Red King liked being on television,” Bill told them. “Especially if he knew company might be coming. Won’t you have another sandwich? There are plenty, I assure you. No? Soup, then? What about you, Patrick? You’re too thin, you know—far,
far
too thin.”

Patrick turned his pad around and showed them a picture of Bill bowing in front of Susannah, a tray of neatly cut sandwiches in one metal hand, a carafe of iced tea in the other. Like all of Patrick’s pictures, it went far beyond caricature, yet had been produced with a speed of hand that was eerie. Susannah applauded. Roland smiled and
nodded. Patrick grinned, holding his teeth together so that the others wouldn’t have to look at the empty hole behind them. Then he tossed the sheet back and began something new.

“There’s a fleet of vehicles out back,” Bill said, “and while many of them no longer run, some still do. I can give you a truck with four-wheel drive, and while I cannot assure you it will run smoothly, I believe you can count on it to take you as far as the Dark Tower, which is no more than one hundred and twenty wheels from here.”

Susannah felt a great and fluttery lift-drop in her stomach. One hundred and twenty wheels was a hundred miles, perhaps even a bit less. They
were
close. So close it was scary.

“You would not want to come upon the Tower after dark,” Bill said. “At least I shouldn’t think so, considering the new resident. But what’s one more night camped at the side of the road to such great travelers as yourselves? Not much, I should say! But even with one last night on the road (and barring breakdowns, which the gods know are always possible), you’d have your goal in sight by mid-morning of tomorrowday.”

Roland considered this long and carefully. Susannah had to tell herself to breathe while he did so, because part of her didn’t want to.

I’m not ready,
that part thought. And there was a deeper part—a part that remembered every nuance of what had become a recurring (and evolving) dream—that thought something else:
I’m not meant to go at all. Not all the way.

At last Roland said: “I thank you, Bill—we all say thank you, I’m sure—but I think we’ll pass on your kind offer. Were you to ask me why, I couldn’t
say. Only that part of me thinks that tomorrowday’s too soon. That part of me thinks we should go the rest of the way on foot, just as we’ve already traveled so far.” He took a deep breath, let it out. “I’m not ready to be there yet. Not quite ready.”

You too,
Susannah marveled.
You too
.

“I need a little more time to prepare my mind and my heart. Mayhap even my soul.” He reached into his back pocket and brought out the photocopy of the Robert Browning poem that had been left for them in Dandelo’s medicine chest. “There’s something writ in here about remembering the old times before coming to the last battle . . . or the last stand. It’s well-said. And perhaps, really, all I need is what this poet speaks of—a draught of earlier, happier sights. I don’t know. But unless Susannah objects, I believe we’ll go on foot.”

“Susannah doesn’t object,” she said quietly. “Susannah thinks it’s just what the doctor ordered. Susannah only objects to being dragged along behind like a busted tailpipe.”

Roland gave her a grateful (if distracted) smile—he seemed to have gone away from her somehow during these last few days—and then turned back to Bill. “I wonder if you have a cart I could pull? For we’ll have to take at least some gunna . . . and there’s Patrick. He’ll have to ride part of the time.”

Patrick looked indignant. He cocked an arm in front of him, made a fist, and flexed his muscle. The result—a tiny goose-egg rising on the biceps of his drawing-arm—seemed to shame him, for he dropped it quickly.

Susannah smiled and reached out to pat his
knee. “Don’t look like that, sugar. It’s not your fault that you spent God knows how long caged up like Hansel and Gretel in the witch’s house.”

“I’m sure I have such a thing,” Bill said, “and a battery-powered version for Susannah. What I don’t have, I can make. It would take an hour or two at most.”

Roland was calculating. “If we leave here with five hours of daylight ahead of us, we might be able to make twelve wheels by sunset. What Susannah would call nine or ten miles. Another five days at that rather leisurely speed would bring us to the Tower I’ve spent my life searching for. I’d come to it around sunset if possible, for that’s when I’ve always seen it in my dreams. Susannah?”

And the voice inside—that deep voice—whispered:
Four nights. Four nights to dream. That should be enough. Maybe more than enough
. Of course, ka would have to intervene. If they had indeed outrun its influence, that wouldn’t—
couldn’t
—happen. But Susannah now thought ka reached everywhere, even to the Dark Tower. Was, perhaps, embodied
by
the Dark Tower.

“That’s fine,” she told him in a faint voice.

“Patrick?” Roland asked. “What do you say?”

Patrick shrugged and flipped a hand in their direction, hardly looking up from his pad. Whatever they wanted, that gesture said. Susannah guessed that Patrick understood little about the Dark Tower, and cared less. And why would he care? He was free of the monster, and his belly was full. Those things were enough for him. He had lost his tongue, but he could sketch to his heart’s content. She was sure that to Patrick, that seemed like more than an even trade. And yet . . . and yet . . .

He’s not meant to go, either. Not him, not Oy, not me. But what is to become of us, then?

She didn’t know, but she was queerly unworried about it. Ka would tell. Ka, and her dreams.

An hour later the three humes, the bumbler, and Bill the robot stood clustered around a cut-down wagon that looked like a slightly larger version of Ho Fat’s Luxury Taxi. The wheels were tall but thin, and spun like a dream. Even when it was full, Susannah thought, it would be like pulling a feather. At least while Roland was fresh. Pulling it uphill would undoubtedly rob him of his energy after awhile, but as they ate the food they were carrying, Ho Fat II would grow lighter still . . . and she thought there wouldn’t be many hills, anyway. They had come to the open lands, the prairie-lands; all the snow- and tree-covered ridges were behind them. Bill had provided her with an electric run-about that was more scooter than golf-cart. Her days of being dragged along behind (“like a busted tailpipe”) were done.

“If you’ll give me another half an hour, I can smooth this off,” Bill said, running a three-fingered steel hand along the edge where he had cut off the front half of the small wagon that was now Ho Fat II.

“We say thankya, but it won’t be necessary,” Roland said. “We’ll lay a couple of hides over it, just so.”

He’s impatient to be off,
Susannah thought,
and after all this time, why wouldn’t he be? I’m anxious to be off, myself.

“Well, if you say so, let it be so,” Bill said, sounding unhappy about it. “I suppose I just hate to see you go. When will I see humes again?”

None of them answered that. They didn’t know.

“There’s a mighty loud horn on the roof,” Bill said, pointing at the Federal. “I don’t know what sort of trouble it was meant to signal—radiation leaks, mayhap, or some sort of attack—but I do know the sound of it will carry across a hundred wheels at least. More, if the wind’s blowing in the right direction. If I should see the fellow you think is following you, or if such motion-sensors as still work pick him up, I’ll set it off. Perhaps you’ll hear.”

“Thank you,” Roland said.

“Were you to drive, you could outrun him easily,” Bill pointed out. “You’d reach the Tower and never have to see him.”

“That’s true enough,” Roland said, but he showed absolutely no sign of changing his mind, and Susannah was glad.

“What will you do about the one you call his Red Father, if he really does command Can’-Ka No Rey?”

Roland shook his head, although he had discussed this probability with Susannah. He thought they might be able to circle the Tower from a distance and come then to its base from a direction that was blind to the balcony on which the Crimson King was trapped. Then they could work their way around to the door beneath him. They wouldn’t know if that was possible until they could actually see the Tower and the lay of the land, of course.

“Well, there’ll be water if God wills it,” said the
robot formerly known as Stuttering Bill, “or so the old people did say. And mayhap I’ll see you again, in the clearing at the end of the path, if nowhere else. If robots are allowed to go there. I hope it’s so, for there’s many I’ve known that I’d see again.”

He sounded so forlorn that Susannah went to him and raised her arms to be picked up, not thinking about the absurdity of wanting to hug a robot. But he did and she did—quite fervently, too. Bill made up for the malicious Andy, back in Calla Bryn Sturgis, and was worth hugging for that, if nothing else. As his arms closed around her, it occurred to Susannah that Bill could break her in two with those titanium-steel arms if he wanted to. But he didn’t. He was gentle.

“Long days and pleasant nights, Bill,” she said. “May you do well, and we all say so.”

“Thank you, madam,” he said and put her down. “I say thudda-thank, thumma-thank, thukka—”
Wheep!
And he struck his head, producing a bright clang. “I say thank ya kindly.” He paused. “I
did
fix the stutter, say true, but as I may have told you, I am not entirely without emotions.”

Patrick surprised them both by walking for almost four hours beside Susannah’s electric scooter before tiring and climbing into Ho Fat II. They listened for the horn warning them that Bill had seen Mordred (or that the instruments in the Federal had detected him), but did not hear it . . . and the wind was blowing their way. By sunset, they had left the last of the snow. The land continued to flatten out, casting their shadows long before them.

When they finally stopped for the night, Roland gathered enough brush for a fire and Patrick, who had dozed off, woke up long enough to eat an enormous meal of Vienna sausage and baked beans. (Susannah, watching the beans disappear into Patrick’s tongueless mouth, reminded herself to spread her hides upwind of him when she finally laid down her weary head.) She and Oy also ate heartily, but Roland hardly touched his own food.

When dinner was done, Patrick took up his pad to draw, frowned at his pencil, and then held out a hand to Susannah. She knew what he wanted, and took the glass canning jar from the little bag of personals she kept slung over her shoulder. She held onto this because there was only the one pencil sharpener, and she was afraid that Patrick might lose it. Of course Roland could sharpen the Eberhard-Fabers with his knife, but it would change the quality of the points somewhat. She tipped the jar, spilling erasers and paperclips and the required object into her cupped palm. Then she handed it to Patrick, who sharpened his pencil with a few quick twists, handed it back, and immediately fell to his work. For a moment Susannah looked at the pink erasers and wondered again why Dandelo had bothered to cut them off. As a way of teasing the boy? If so, it hadn’t worked. Later in life, perhaps, when the sublime connections between his brain and his fingers rusted a little (when the small but undeniably brilliant world of his talent had moved on), he might require erasers. For now even his mistakes continued to be inspirations.