Mia blinked at the deliberate crudity, then nodded. "If you like."
"Tell me how it can be Roland's. And if you want me to believe anything you tell me, you better start by making me believe this."
Mia dug her fingernails into the skin of a pokeberry, stripped it away in one quick gesture, and ate the fruit down greedily. She considered opening another, then simply rolled it between her palms (those disconcertingly white palms), warming it. After enough of this, Susannah knew, the fruit would split its skin on its own. Then she began.
Three
"How many Beams do there be, Susannah of New York?"
"Six," Susannah said. "At least, there were. I guess now there are only two that - "
Mia waved a hand impatiently, as if to sayDon't waste my time. "Six, aye. And when the Beams were created out of that greater Discordia, the soup of creation some (including the Manni) call the Over and some call thePrim, what made them?"
"I don't know," Susannah said. "Was it God, do you think?"
"Perhaps there is a God, but the Beams rose from thePrim on the airs of magic, Susannah, the true magic which passed long ago. Was it God that made magic, or was it magic that made God? I know not. It's a question for philosophers, and mothering's my job. But once upon a time all was Discordia and from it, strong and all crossing at a single unifying point, came the six Beams. There was magic to hold them steady for eternity, but when the magic left from all there is but the Dark Tower, which some have called Can Calyx, the Hall of Resumption, men despaired. When the Age of Magic passed, the Age of Machines came."
"North Central Positronics," Susannah murmured. "Dipolar computers. Slo-trans engines." She paused. "Blaine the Mono. But not in our world."
"No? Do you say your world is exempt? What about the sign in the hotel lobby?" The pokeberry popped. Mia stripped it and gobbled it, drizzling juice through a knowing grin.
"I had an idea you couldn't read," Susannah said. This was beside the point, but it was all she could think of to say. Her mind kept returning to the image of the baby; to those brilliant blue eyes. Gunslinger's eyes.
"Aye, but I know my numbers, and when it comes to your mind, I read very well. Do you say you don't recall the sign in the hotel lobby? Will you tell me that?"
Of course she remembered. According to the sign, the Plaza - Park would be part of an organization called Sombra/North Central in just another month. And when she'd saidNot in our world, of course she had been thinking of 1964 - the world of black-and-white television, absurdly bulky room-sized computers, and Alabama cops more than willing to sic the dogs on black marchers for voting rights. Things had changed greatly in the intervening thirty-five years. The Eurasian desk clerk's combination TV and typewriter, for instance - how did Susannah know that wasn't a dipolar computer run by some form of slo-trans engine? She did not.
"Go on," she told Mia.
Mia shrugged. "You doom yourselves, Susannah. You seem positively bent on it, and the root is always the same: your faith fails you, and you replace it with rational thought. But there is no love in thought, nothing that lasts in deduction, only death in rationalism."
"What does this have to do with your chap?"
"I don't know. There's much I don't know." She raised a hand, forestalling Susannah before Susannah could speak. "And no, I'mnot playing for time, or trying to lead you away from what you'd know; I'm speaking as my heart tells me. Would you hear or not?"
Susannah nodded. She'd hear this...for a little longer, at least. But if it didn't turn back to the baby soon, she'd turn it back in that direction herself.
"The magic went away. Maerlyn retired to his cave in one world, the sword of Eld gave way to the pistols of the gunslingers in another, and the magic went away. And across the arc of years, great alchemists, great scientists, and great - what? - technicians, I think? Great men of thought, anyway, that's what I mean, great men ofdeduction - these came together and created the machines which ran the Beams. They were great machines but they weremortal machines. They replaced themagic withmachines, do ya kennit, and now the machines are failing. In some worlds, great plagues have decimated whole populations."
Susannah nodded. "We saw one of those," she said quietly. "They called it the superflu."
"The Crimson King's Breakers are only hurrying along a process that's already in train. The machines are going mad. You've seen this for yourself. The men believed there would always be more men like them to make more machines. None of them foresaw what's happened. This...this universal exhaustion."
"The world has moved on."