The Dark Tower

Finli’s hopeful smile disappeared. He gave a small but perfectly correct bow. "I’m sorry you feel that way, sai."

"The f**k outta here," Dinky said, and opened his book again. He raised it pointedly before his face.

Pimli and Finli O’Tego walked on. There was a period of silence during which the Master of Algul Siento tried out different approaches to Finli, wanting to know how badly he’d been hurt by the young man’s comment. The taheen was proud of his ability to read and appreciate hume literature, that much Pimli knew. Then Finli saved him the trouble by putting both of his long-fingered hands-his ass wasn’t actually furry, but his fingers were-between his legs.

"Just checking to make sure my nuts are still there," he said, and Pimli thought the good humor he heard in the Chief of Security’s voice was real, not forced.

"I’m sorry about that," Pimli said. "If there’s anyone in Blue Heaven who has an authentic case of post-adolescent angst, it’s sai Earnshaw."

"’You’re tearing me apart!’" Finli moaned, and when the Master gave him a startled look, Finli grinned, showing those rows of tiny sharp teeth. "It’s a famous line from a film called Rebel Without a Cause," he said. "Dinky Earnshaw makes me think of James Dean." He paused to consider. "Without the haunting good looks, of course."

"An interesting case," Prentiss said. "He was recruited for an assassination program run by a Positronics subsidiary. He killed his control and ran. We caught him, of course. He’s never been any real trouble-not for us-but he’s got that pain-inthe-ass attitude."

"But you feel he’s not a problem."

Pimli gave him a sideways glance. "Is there something you feel I should know about him?"

"No, no. I’ve never seen you so jumpy as you’ve been over the last few weeks. Hell, call a spade a spade-so paranoid."

"My grandfather had a proverb," Pimli said. "’You don’t worry about dropping the eggs until you’re almost home.’ We’re almost home now."

And it was true. Seventeen days ago, not long before the last batch of Wolves had come galloping through the door from the Arc 16 Staging Area, their equipment in the basement of Damli House had picked up the first appreciable bend in the Bear-Turtle Beam. Since then the Beam of Eagle and Lion had snapped. Soon the Breakers would no longer be needed; soon the disintegration of the second-to-last Beam would happen with or without their help. It was like a precariously balanced object that had now picked up a sway. Soon it would go too far beyond its point of perfect balance, and then it would fall. Or, in the case of the Beam, it would break. Wink out of existence. It was the Tower that would fall. The last Beam, that of Wolf and Elephant, might hold for another week or another month, but not much longer.

Thinking of that should have pleased Pimli, but it didn’t.

Mostly because his thoughts had returned to the Greencloaks.

Sixty or so had gone through Calla-bound last time, the visual deployment, and they should have been back in the usual seventy-two hours with the usual catch of Calla children.

Instead… nothing.

He asked Finli what he thought about that.

Finli stopped. He looked grave. "I think it may have been a virus," he said.

"Cry pardon?"

"A computer virus. We’ve seen it happen with a good deal of our computer equipment in Damli, and you want to remember that, no matter how fearsome the Greencloaks may look to a bunch of rice-farmers, computers on legs is all they really are." He paused. "Or the Calla-/o/fen may have found a way to kill them. Would it surprise me to find that they’d gotten up on their hind legs to fight? A little, but not a lot. Especially if someone with guts stepped forward to lead them."

"Someone like a gunslinger, mayhap?"

Finli gave him a look that stopped just short of patronizing.

Ted Brautigan and Stanley Ruiz rode up the sidewalk on tenspeed bikes, and when the Master and the Security Head raised hands to them, both raised their hands in return. Brautigan didn’t smile but Ruiz did, the loose happy smile of a true mental defective. He was all eye-boogers, stubbly cheeks, and spitshiny lips, but a powerful bugger just the same, before God he was, and such a man could do worse than chum around with Brautigan, who had changed completely since being hauled back from his little "vacation" in Connecticut. Pimli was amused by the identical tweed caps the two men were wearing-their bikes were also identical-but not by Finli’s look.

"Quit it," Pimli said.

"Quit what, sai?" Finli asked.

"Looking at me as if I were a little kid who just lost the top off his ice cream cone and doesn’t have the wit to realize it."

But Finli didn’t back down. He rarely did, which was one of the things Pimli liked about him. "If you don’t want folk to look at you like a child, then you mustn’t act like one. There’ve been rumors of gunslingers coming out of Mid-World to save the day for a thousand years and more. And never a single authenticated sighting. Personally, I’d be more apt to expect a visit from your Man Jesus."

"The Rods say-"

Finli winced as if this actually hurt his head. "Don’t start with what the Rods say. Surely you respect my intelligence-and your own-more than that. Their brains have rotted even faster than their skins. As for the Wolves, let me advance a radical concept: it doesn’t matter where they are or what’s happened to them. We’ve got enough booster to finish the job, and that’s all I care about."

The Security Head stood for a moment at the steps that led up to the Damli House porch. He was looking after the two men on the identical bikes and frowning thoughtfully. "Brautigan’s been a lot of trouble."

"Hasn’t he just!" Pimli laughed ruefully. "But his troublesome days are over. He’s been told that his special friends from Connecticut-a boy named Robert Garfield and a girl named Carol Gerber-will die if he makes any more trouble. Also he’s come to realize that while a number of his fellow Breakers regard him as a mentor, and some, such as the softheaded boy he’s with, revere him, no one is interested in his… philosophical ideas, shall we say. Not any longer, if they ever were.

And I had a talk with him after he came back. A heart-toheart."

This was news to Finli. "About what?"

"Certain facts of life. Sai Brautigan has come to understand that his unique powers no longer matter as much as they once did. It’s gone too far for that. The remaining two Beams are going to break with him or without him. And he knows that at the end there’s apt to be… confusion. Fear and confusion." Pimli nodded slowly. "Brautigan wants to be here at the end, if only to comfort such as Stanley Ruiz when the sky tears open.

"Come, let’s have another look at the tapes and the telemetry. Just to be safe."

They went up the wide wooden steps of Damli House, side by side.

FIVE

Two of the can-toi were waiting to escort the Master and his Security Chief downstairs. Pimli reflected on how odd it was that everyone-Breakers and Algul Siento staff alike-had come to call them "the low men." Because it was Brautigan who coined the phrase. "Speak of angels, hear the flutter of their wings,"

Prentiss’s beloved Ma might have said, and Pimli supposed that if there were true manimals in these final days of the true world, then the can-toi would fill the bill much better than the taheen. If you saw them without their weird living masks, you would have thought they were taheen, with the heads of rats. But unlike the true taheen, who regarded humes (less a few remarkable exceptions such as Pimli himself) as an inferior race, the can-toi worshipped the human form as divine. Did they wear the masks in worship? They were closemouthed on die subject, but Pimli didn’t think so. He thought they believed they were becoming human-which was why, when they first put on their masks (these were living flesh, grown rather than made), they took a hume name to go with their hume aspect. Pimli knew they believed they would somehow replace human beings after the Fall… although hmv they could believe such a thing was entirely beyond him. There would be heaven after the Fall, that was obvious to anyone who’d ever read the Book of Revelation… but Earth?

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 litde 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 anodier reading ALL HAIL THE CAN-TOI, Finli said, very low: "They are so odd."