The Waste Lands (69 page)

He didn’t need to look up to know that Jake had looked away from the dance of the cartridge and Susannah had not. He began to speed it up until the cartridge almost seemed to be floating above the back of his hand.

“Help me remember the voice of my father,” Susannah Dean said.

FOR A MOMENT THERE was silence except for a distant, crumping explosion in the city, the rain pounding on the roof of the Cradle, and the fat throb of the monorail’s slo-trans engines. Then a low-pitched hydraulic hum cut through the air. Eddie looked away from the cartridge dancing across the gunslinger’s fingers (it took an effort; he realized that in another few moments he would have been hypnotized himself) and peered through the iron bars. A slim silver rod was pushing itself up from the sloping pink surface between Blaine’s forward windows. It looked like an antenna of some kind.

“Susannah?” Roland asked in that same low voice.

“What?” Her eyes were open but her voice was distant and breathy—the voice of someone who is sleeptalking.

“Do you remember the voice of your father?”

“Yes . . . but I can’t hear it.”

“SIX MINUTES, MY FRIENDS.”

Eddie and Jake started and looked toward the control-box speaker, but Susannah seemed not to have heard at all; she only stared at the floating cartridge. Below it, Roland’s knuckles rippled up and down like the heddles of a loom.

“Try, Susannah,” Roland urged, and suddenly he felt Susannah change within the circle of his right arm. She seemed to gain weight . . . and, in some indefinable way, vitality as well. It was as if her essence had somehow changed.

And it had.

“Why you want to bother wit
dat
bitch?” the raspy voice of Detta Walker asked.

DETTA SOUNDED BOTH EXASPERATED and amused. “She never got no better’n a C in math her whole life. Wouldn’ta got dat widout me to he’p her.” She paused, then added grudgingly: “An’ Daddy. He he’ped some, too. I knowed about them forspecial numbahs, but was him showed us de net. My, I got de bigges’ kick outta dat!” She chuckled. “Reason Suze can’t remember is ’cause Odetta never understood’bout dem forspecial numbers in de firs’ place.”

“What forspecial numbers?” Eddie asked.

“
Prime
numbahs!” She pronounced the word
prime
in a way that almost rhymed with
calm
. She looked at Roland, appearing to be wholly awake again now ... except she was not Susannah, nor was she the same wretched, devilish creature who had previously gone under the name of Detta Walker, although she
sounded
the same. “She went to Daddy cryin an’ carryin on ’cause she was flunkin dat math course . . . and it wasn’t nuthin but funnybook algebra at dat! She could do de woik—if
I
could,
she
could—but she din’ want to. Poitry-readin bitch like her too good for a little
ars mathematica,
you see?” Detta threw her head back and laughed, but the poisoned, half-mad bitterness was gone from the sound. She seemed genuinely amused at the foolishness of her mental twin.

“And Daddy, he say, ‘I’m goan show you a trick, Odetta. I learned it in college. It he’ped me get through this prime numbah bi’ness, and it’s goan he’p you, too. He’p you find mos’ any prime numbah you want.’
Oh-detta,
dumb as ever, she say, ‘Teacher says ain’t no formula for prime numbahs, Daddy.’ And Daddy, he say right back, ‘They ain’t. But you can catch em, Odetta, if you have a net.’ He called it The Net of Eratosthenes. Take me over to dat box on the wall, Roland—I’m goan answer dat honkey computer’s riddle. I’m goan th’ow you a net and catch you a train-ride.”

Roland took her over, closely followed by Eddie, Jake, and Oy.

“Gimme dat piece o’ cha’coal you keep in yo’ poke.”

He rummaged and brought out a short stub of blackened stick. Detta took it and peered at the diamond-shaped grid of numbers. “Ain’t zackly de way Daddy showed me, but I reckon it comes to de same,” she said after a moment. “Prime numbah be like me—ornery and forspecial. It gotta be a numbah don’t nevvah divide even ’ceptin by one and its ownself. Two is prime, ’cause you can divide it by one an’ two, but it’s the
only
even numbah that’s prime. You c’n take out all the res’ dat’s even.”

“I’m lost,” Eddie said.

“That’s ’cause you just a stupid white boy,” Detta said, but not unkindly. She looked closely at the diamond shape a moment longer, then quickly began to touch the tip of the charcoal to all the even-numbered pads, leaving small black smudges on them.

“Three’s prime, but no product you git by
multiplyin
three can be prime,” she said, and now Roland heard an odd but wonderful thing: Detta was fading out of the woman’s voice; she was being replaced not by Odetta Holmes but by Susannah Dean. He would not have to bring her out of this trance; she was coming out of it on her own, quite naturally.

Susannah began using her charcoal to touch the multiples of three which were left now that the even numbers had been eliminated: nine, fifteen, twenty-one, and so on.

“Same with five and seven,” she murmured, and suddenly she was awake and all Susannah Dean again. “You just have to mark the odd ones like twenty-five that haven’t been crossed out already.” The diamond shape on the control box now looked like this:

“There,” she said tiredly. “What’s left in the net are all the prime numbers between one and one hundred. I’m pretty sure that’s the combination that opens the gate.”

“YOU HAVE ONE MINUTE, MY FRIENDS. YOU ARE PROVING TO BE A GOOD DEAL THICKER THAN I HAD HOPED YOU WOULD BE.”

Eddie ignored Blaine’s voice and threw his arms around Susannah. “Are you back, Suze? Are you awake?”

“Yes. I woke up in the middle of what she was saying, but I let her talk a little longer, anyway. It seemed impolite to interrupt.” She looked at Roland. “What do you say? Want to go for it?”

“FIFTY SECONDS.”

“Yes. You try the combination, Susannah. It’s your answer.”

She reached out toward the top of the diamond, but Jake put his hand over hers. “No,” he said. “ ‘This pump primes,
backward
.’ Remember?”

She looked startled, then smiled. “That’s right. Clever Blaine ... and clever Jake, too.”

They watched in silence as she pushed each number in turn, starting with ninety-seven. There was a minute click as each pad locked down. There was no tension-filled pause after she touched the last button; the gate in the center of the barrier immediately began to slide up on its tracks, rattling harshly and showering down flakes of rust from somewhere high above as it went.

“NOT BAD AT ALL,” Blaine said admiringly. “I’M LOOKING FORWARD TO THIS VERY MUCH. MAY I SUGGEST YOU CLIMB ON BOARD QUICKLY? IN FACT, YOU MAY WISH TO RUN. THERE ARE SEVERAL GAS OUTLETS IN THIS AREA.”

THREE HUMAN BEINGS (one carrying a fourth on his hip) and one small, furry animal ran through the opening in the barrier and sprinted toward Blaine the Mono. It stood humming in its narrow loading bay, half above the platform and half below it, looking like a giant cartridge—one which had been painted an incongruous shade of pink—lying in the open breech of a high-powered rifle. In the vastness of the Cradle, Roland and the others looked like mere moving specks. Above them, flocks of pigeons—now with only forty seconds to live—swooped and swirled beneath the Cradle’s ancient roof. As the travellers approached the mono, a curved section of its pink hull slid up, revealing a doorway. Beyond it was thick, pale blue carpeting.

“Welcome to Blaine,” a soothing voice said as they pelted aboard. They all recognized that voice; it was a slightly louder, slightly more confident version of Little Blaine. “Praise the Imperium! Please make sure your transit-card is available for collection and remember that false boarding is a serious crime punishable by law. We hope you enjoy your trip. Welcome to Blaine. Praise the Imperium! Please make sure your transit-card—”

The voice suddenly sped up, first becoming the chatter of a human chipmunk and then a high-pitched, gabbly whine. There was a brief electronic curse—
BOOP!—and
then it cut out entirely.

“I THINK WE CAN DISPENSE WITH
THAT
BORING OLD SHIT, DON’T YOU?” Blaine asked.

From outside came a tremendous, thudding explosion. Eddie, who was now carrying Susannah, was thrown forward and would have fallen if Roland hadn’t caught him by the arm. Until that moment, Eddie had held onto the desperate notion that Blaine’s threat about the poison gas was no more than a sick joke.
You should have known better, he thought. Anyone who thinks impressions of old movie actors is funny absolutely cannot be trusted. I think it’s like a law of nature.

Behind them, the curved section of hull slid back into place with a soft thud. Air began to hiss gently from hidden vents, and Jake felt his ears pop gently. “I think he just pressurized the cabin.”

Eddie nodded, looking around with wide eyes. “I felt it, too. Look at this place! Wow!”

He had once read of an aviation company—Regent Air, it might have been—that had catered to people who wanted to fly between New York and Los Angeles in a grander style than airlines such as Delta and United allowed for. They had operated a customized 727 complete with drawing room, bar, video lounge, and sleeper compartments. He imagined the interior of that plane must have looked a little like what he was seeing now.

They were standing in a long, tubular room furnished with plush-upholstered swivel chairs and modular sofas. At the far end of the compartment, which had to be at least eighty feet long, was an area that looked not like a bar but a cosy bistro. An instrument that could have been a harpsichord stood on a pedestal of polished wood, highlighted by a hidden baby spotlight. Eddie almost expected Hoagy Carmichael to appear and start tinkling out “Stardust.”

Indirect lighting glowed from panels placed high along the walls, and dependent from the ceiling halfway down the compartment was a chandelier. To Jake it looked like a smaller replica of the one which had lain in ruins on the ballroom floor of The Mansion. Nor did this surprise him—he had begun to take such connections and doublings as a matter of course. The only thing about this splendid room which seemed wrong was its lack of even a single window.

The
pièce de résistance
stood on a pedestal below the chandelier. It was an ice-sculpture of a gunslinger with a revolver in his left hand. The right hand was holding the bridle of the ice-horse that walked, head-down and tired, behind him. Eddie could see there were only three digits on this hand: the last two fingers and the thumb.

Jake, Eddie, and Susannah stared in fascination at the haggard face beneath the frozen hat as the floor began to thrum gently beneath their feet. The resemblance to Roland was remarkable.

“I HAD TO WORK RATHER FAST, I’M AFRAID,” Blaine said modestly. “DOES IT DO ANYTHING FOR YOU?”

“It’s absolutely amazing,” Susannah said.

“THANK YOU, SUSANNAH OF NEW YORK.”

Eddie was testing one of the sofas with his hand. It was incredibly soft; touching it made him want to sleep for at least sixteen hours. “The Great Old Ones really travelled in style, didn’t they?”

Blaine laughed again, and the shrill, not-quite-sane undertone of that laugh made them look at each other uneasily. “DON’T GET THE WRONG IDEA,” Blaine said. “THIS WAS THE BARONY CABIN—WHAT I BELIEVE YOU WOULD CALL FIRST CLASS.”

“Where are the other cars?”

Blaine ignored the question. Beneath their feet, the throb of the engines continued to speed up. Susannah was reminded of how the pilots revved their engines before charging down the runway at LaGuardia or Idlewild. “PLEASE TAKE YOUR SEATS, MY INTERESTING NEW FRIENDS.”

Jake dropped into one of the swivel chairs. Oy jumped promptly into his lap. Roland took the chair nearest him, sparing one glance at the ice-sculpture. The barrel of the revolver was beginning to drip slowly into the shallow china basin in which the sculpture stood.

Eddie sat down on one of the sofas with Susannah. It was every bit as comfortable as his hand had told him it would be. “Exactly where are we going, Blaine?”

Blaine replied in the patient voice of someone who realizes he is speaking to a mental inferior and must make allowances. “ALONG THE PATH OF THE BEAM. AT LEAST, AS FAR ALONG IT AS MY TRACK GOES.”

“To the Dark Tower?” Roland asked. Susannah realized it was the first time the gunslinger had actually spoken to the loquacious ghost in the machine below Lud.

“Only as far as Topeka,” Jake said in a low voice.

“YES,” Blaine said. “TOPEKA IS THE NAME OF MY TERMINATING POINT, ALTHOUGH I AM SURPRISED YOU KNOW IT.”

With all you know about our world,
Jake thought,
how come you don’t know that some lady wrote a book about you, Blaine? Was it the name-change? Was something that simple enough to fool a complicated machine like you into overlooking your own biography? And what about Beryl Evans, the woman who supposedly wrote Charlie the Choo-Choo? Did you know her, Blaine? And where is she now?