THUMBPRINT READER INOPERATIVE
SHOW TICKET
NORTH CENTRAL POSITRONICS THANKS YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE
The sign didn't interest Susannah as much as the two things that lay on the filthy station platform beyond it: a child's doll, decayed to little more than a head and one floppy arm, and, beyond it, a grinning mask. Although the mask appeared to be made of steel, a good deal of it seemed to have rotted like flesh. The teeth poking out of the grin were canine fangs. The eyes were glass. Lenses, Susannah felt sure, no doubt also crafted by North Central Positronics. Surrounding the mask were a few shreds and tatters of green cloth, what had undoubtedly once been this thing's hood. Susannah had no trouble putting together the remains of the doll and the remains of the Wolf; her mamma, as Detta sometimes liked to tell folks (especially horny boys in road-house parking lots), didn't raise no fools.
"This is where they brought them," she said. "Where the Wolves brought the twins they stole from Calla Bryn Sturgis. Where they - what? - operated on them."
"Not just from Calla Bryn Sturgis," Mia said indifferently, "but aye. And once the babbies were here, they were taken there. A place you'll also recognize, I've no doubt."
She pointed across Fedic's single street and farther up. The last building before the castle wall abruptly ended the town was a long Quonset hut with sides of filthy corrugated metal and a rusty curved roof. The windows running along the side Susannah could see had been boarded up. Also along that side was a steel hitching rail. To it were tied what looked like seventy horses, all of them gray. Some had fallen over and lay with their legs sticking straight out. One or two had turned their heads toward the women's voices and then seemed to freeze in that position. It was very un-horselike behavior, but of course these weren't real horses. They were robots, or cyborgs, or whichever one of Roland's terms you might like to use. Many of them seemed to have run down or worn out.
In front of this building was a sign on a rusting steel plate. It read:
NORTH CENTRAL POSITRONICS, LTD.
Fedic Headquarters
Arc 16 Experimental Station
Maximum Security
VERBAL ENTRY CODE REQUIRED
EYEPRINT REQUIRED
"It's another Dogan, isn't it?" Susannah asked.
"Well, yes and no," Mia said. "It's the Dogan of all Dogans, actually."
"Where the Wolves brought the children."
"Aye, and will bring them again," Mia said. "For the King's work will go forward after this disturbance raised by your friend the gunslinger is past. I have no doubt of it."
Susannah looked at her with real curiosity. "How can you speak so cruel and yet be so serene?" she asked. "They bring children here and scoop out their heads like...like gourds. Children, who've harmed nobody! What they send back are great galumphing idiots who grow to their full size in agony and often die in much the same way. Would you be so sanguine, Mia, ifyour child was borne away across one of those saddles, shrieking for you and holding out his arms?"
Mia flushed, but was able to meet Susannah's gaze. "Each must follow the road upon which ka has set her feet, Susannah of New York. Mine is to bear my chap, and raise him, and thus end your dinn's quest. And his life."
"It's wonderful how everyone seems to think they know just what ka means for them," Susannah said. "Don't you think that's wonderful?"
"I think you're trying to make jest of me because you fear," Mia said levelly. "If such makes you feel better, than aye, have on." She spread her arms and made a little sarcastic bow over her great belly.
They had stopped on the boardwalk in front of a shop advertising MILLINERY & LADIES' WEAR and across from the Fedic Dogan. Susannah thought:Burn up the day, don't forget that's the other part of your job here. Kill time. Keep the oddity of a body we now seem to share in that women's restroom just as long as you possibly can.
"I'm not making fun," Susannah said. "I'm only asking you to put yourself in the place of all those other mothers."
Mia shook her head angrily, her inky hair flying around her ears and brushing at her shoulders. "I did not make their fate, lady, nor did they make mine. I'll save my tears, thank you. Would you hear my tale or not?"
"Yes, please."
"Then let us sit, for my legs are sorely tired."
Ten
In the Gin-Puppie Saloon, a few rickety storefronts back in the direction from which they'd come, they found chairs which would still bear their weight, but neither woman had any taste for the saloon itself, which smelled of dusty death. They dragged the chairs out to the boardwalk, where Mia sat with an audible sigh of relief.
"Soon," she said. "Soon you shall be delivered, Susannah of New York, and so shall I."