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?