Susannah couldn't help being curious. "How many?"
A brief pause. "I should say five hundred and ninety-five are currently operational." She immediately noticed that fiveninety-five added up to nineteen. Added up to chassit.
"Do you mind giving me a carry to the one I came through before the shooting started?" Susannah pointed toward the far end of the room.
"No, madam, I don't mind at all, but I'm sorry to tell you that it will do you no good," Nigel said in his plummy voice.
"That door, NEW YORK #7/FEDIC, is one-way." A pause. Relays clicking in the steel dome of its head. "Also, it burned out after its last use. It has, as you might say, gone to the clearing at the end of the path."
"Oh, that's just wonderfull" Susannah cried, but realized she wasn't exactly surprised by Nigel's news. She remembered the ragged humming sound she'd heard it makingjust before Sayre had pushed her rudely through it, remembered thinking, even in her distress, that it was a dying thing. And yes, it had died. "Just wonderful!"
"I sense you are distressed, madam."
"You're goddamned right I'm distressed! Bad enough the damned thing only opened one-way! Now it's shut down completely!"
"Except for the default," Nigel agreed.
"Default? What do you mean, default?"
"That would be NEW YORK #9/FEDIC," Nigel told her. "At one time there were over thirty one-way New York-to-Fedic ports, but I believe #9 is the only one that remains. All commands pertaining to NEW YORK #7/FEDIC will now have defaulted to #9."
Chassit, she thought... almost prayed. He's talking about chassit, I think. Oh God, I hope he is.
"Do you mean passwords and such, Nigel?"
"Why, yes, madam."
"Take me to Door #9."
"As you wish."
Nigel began to move rapidly up the aisle between the hundreds of empty beds, their taut white sheets gleaming under the brilliant overhead lamps. Susannah's imagination momentarily populated this room with screaming, frightened children, freshly arrived from Calla Bryn Sturgis, maybe from the neighboring Callas, as well. She saw not just a single rathead nurse but battalions of them, eager to clamp the helmets over the heads of the kidnapped children and start the process that... that did what? Ruined them in some way. Sucked the intelligence out of their heads and knocked their growth-hormones out of whack and ruined them forever. Susannah supposed that at first they would be cheered up to hear such a pleasant voice in their heads, a voice welcoming them to the wonderful world of North Central Positronics and the Sombra Group. Their crying would stop, their eyes fill with hope. Perhaps, they would think the nurses in their white uniforms were good in spite of their hairy, scary faces and yellow fangs. As good as the voice of the nice lady.
Then the hum would begin, quickly building in volume as it moved toward the middle of their heads, and this room would again fill with their frightened screams-
"Madam? Are you all right?"
"Yes. Why do you ask, Nigel?"
"I believe you shivered."
"Never mind. Just get me to the door to New York, the one that still works."
SIX
Once they left the infirmary, Nigel bore her rapidly down first one corridor and then another. They came to escalators that looked as if they had been frozen in place for centuries. Halfway down one of them, a steel ball on legs flashed its amber eyes at Nigel and cried, "Hmop! Hmvp!" Nigel responded "Howp, hmvp!"
in return and then said to Susannah (in the confidential tone certain gossipy people adopt when discussing Those Who Are Unfortunate), "He's a Mech Foreman and has been stuck there tor over eight hundred years-fried boards, I imagine. Poor soul! But he still tries to do his best."
Twice Nigel asked her if she believed his eyes could be replaced. The first time Susannah told him she didn't know.
The second time-feeling a little sorry for him (definitely him now, not it)-she asked what he thought.
"I think my days of service are nearly over," he said, and then added something that made her arms tingle with gooseflesh:
"O Discordia!"
The Diem Brothers are dead, she thought, remembering-had it been a dream? a vision? a glimpse of her Tower?-something from her time with Mia. Or had it been her time in Oxford, Mississippi? Or both? Papa Doc Duvalier is dead. Christa McAuliffe is dead. Stephen King is dead, popular writer killed while taking afternoon walk, O Discordia, O lost!
But who was Stephen King? Who was Christa McAuliffe, for that matter?
Once they passed a low man who had been present at the birth of Mia's monster. He lay curled on a dusty corridor floor like a human shrimp with his gun in one hand and a hole in his head. Susannah thought he'd committed suicide. In a way, she supposed that made sense. Because things had gone wrong, hadn't they? And unless Mia's baby found its way to where it belonged on its own, Big Red Daddy was going to be mad.