"Well, there'll be water if God wills it," said the robot formerly known as Stuttering Bill, "or so the old people did say.
And mayhap I'll see you again, in the clearing at the end of the path, if nowhere else. If robots are allowed to go there. I hope it's so, for there's many I've known that I'd see again."
He sounded so forlorn that Susannah went to him and raised her arms to be picked up, not thinking about the absurdity of wanting to hug a robot. But he did and she did-quite fervendy, too. Bill made up for the malicious Andy, back in Calla Bryn Sturgis, and was worth hugging for diat, if nothing else. As his arms closed around her, it occurred to Susannah that Bill could break her in two with those titanium-steel arms if he wanted to. But he didn't. He was gentle.
"Long days and pleasant nights, Bill," she said. "May you do well, and we all say so."
"Thank you, madam," he said and put her down. "I say thudda-thank, diumma-thank, thukka-" Wheep! And he struck his head, producing a bright clang. "I say thank ya kindly." He paused. "I did fix the stutter, say true, but as I may have told you,
I am not entirely without emotions."
FIVE
Patrick surprised them both by walking for almost four hours beside Susannah's electric scooter before tiring and climbing into Ho Fat II. They listened for the horn warning them that Bill had seen Mordred (or that the instruments in the Federal had detected him), but did not hear i t... and the wind was blowing their way. By sunset, they had left the last of the snow. The land continued to flatten out, casting their shadows long before them.
When they finally stopped for the night, Roland gathered enough brush for a fire and Patrick, who had dozed off, woke up long enough to eat an enormous meal of Vienna sausage and baked beans. (Susannah, watching the beans disappear into Patrick's tongueless mouth, reminded herself to spread her hides upwind of him when she finally laid down her weary head.) She and Oy also ate heartily, but Roland hardly touched his own food.
When dinner was done, Patrick took up his pad to draw, frowned at his pencil, and then held out a hand to Susannah.
She knew what he wanted, and took the glass canning jar from the litde bag of personals she kept slung over her shoulder. She held onto this because there was only the one pencil sharpener, and she was afraid that Patrick might lose it. Of course Roland could sharpen the Eberhard-Fabers with his knife, but it would change the quality of the points somewhat. She tipped the jar, spilling erasers and paperclips and the required object into her cupped palm. Then she handed it to Patrick, who sharpened his pencil with a few quick twists, handed it back, and immediately fell to his work. For a moment Susannah looked at the pink erasers and wondered again why Dandelo had bothered to cut them off. As a way of teasing the boy? If so, it hadn't worked.
Later in life, perhaps, when die sublime connections between his brain and his fingers rusted a little (when the small but undeniably brilliant world of his talent had moved on), he might require erasers. For now even his mistakes continued to be inspirations.
He didn't draw long. When Susannah saw him nodding over his pad in the orange glare of the fading sunset, she took it from his unprotesting fingers, bedded him down in the back of the cart (propped level with the front end on a convenient boulder jutting from the ground), covered him with hides, and kissed his cheek.
Sleepily, Patrick reached up and touched the sore below her own cheek. She winced, then held steady at his gende touch.
The sore had clotted over again, but it throbbed painfully.
Even smiling hurt her these days. The hand fell away and Patrick slept.
The stars had come out. Roland was looking raptly up at them.
"What do you see?" she asked him.
"What do you see?" he asked in turn.
She looked at the brightening celestial landscape. "Well,"
she said, "there's Old Star and Old Mother, but they seem to have moved west. And that there-oh my goodness!" She placed her hands on his stubbly cheeks (he never seemed to grow an actual beard, only a bristly scruff) and turned it. "That wasn't there back when we left from the Western Sea, I know it wasn't. That one's in our world, Roland-we call it the Big Dipper!"
He nodded. "And once, according to the oldest books in my father's library, it was in the sky of our world, as well. Lydia's Dipper, it was called. And now here it is again." He turned to her, smiling. "Another sign of life and renewal. How the Crimson King must hate to look up from his entrapment and see it riding the sky again!"
SIX
Not long after, Susannah slept. And dreamed.
SEVEN
She's in Central Park again, under a bright gray sky from which the first few snowflakes are once more drifting; carolers nearby are singing not "Silent Night" or "What Child Is This "but the Rice Song: "Rice be a green-o, See what we seen-o, Seen-o the green-o, Come-comecommala!"
She takes off her cap, afraid it will have changed somehow, but it still says MERRY CHRISTMAS! and
(no twins here)