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By Root 468 0

she’d never had a child herself, Susannah knew there would be magic even in the dirty diapers and the colic if the child were the result of a loving union. But to have the child and then have him taken away from you just when it was getting good, just as the child approached what most people agreed was the age of reason, responsibility, and accountability? To then be swept over the Crimson King’s red horizon? That was an awful idea. And was Mia so besotted by her impending motherhood that she didn’t realize the little she had been promised was now being whittled away? Walter/Flagg had come to her in Fedic, Scenic Aftermath of the Red Death, and promised her seven years with her son. On the telephone in the Plaza-Park, however, Richard Sayre had spoken of a mere five.

In any case, Mia had agreed to the dark man’s terms. And really, how much sport could there have been in getting her to do that? She’d been made for motherhood, had arisen from the Prim with that imperative, had known it herself ever since seeing her first perfect human baby, the boy Michael. How could she have said no? Even if the offer had only been for three years, or for one, how? Might as well expect a long-time junkie to refuse a loaded spike when it was offered.

Mia had been taken into the Arc 16 Experimental Station. She’d been given a tour by the smiling, sarcastic (and undoubtedly frightening) Walter, who sometimes called himself Walter of End-World and sometimes Walter of All-World. She’d seen the great room filled with beds, awaiting the children who would come to fill them; at the head of each was a stainless-steel hood attached to a segmented steel hose. She did not like to think what the purpose of such equipment might be. She’d also been shown some of the passages under the Castle on the Abyss, and had been in places where the smell of death was strong and suffocating. She—there had been a red darkness and she—

“Were you mortal by then?” Susannah asked. “It sounds as though maybe you were.”

“I was on my way,” she said. “It was a process Walter called becoming. ”

“All right. Go on.”

But here Mia’s recollections were lost in a dark fugue—not todash, but far from pleasant. A kind of amnesia, and it was red. A color Susannah had come to distrust. Had the pregnant woman’s transition from the world of the spirit to the world of the flesh—her trip to Mia—been accomplished through some other kind of doorway? She herself didn’t seem to know. Only that there had been a time of darkness—unconsciousness, she supposed—and then she had awakened “…as you see me. Only not yet pregnant, of course.”

According to Walter, Mia could not actually make a baby, even as a mortal woman. Carry, yes. Conceive, no. So it came to pass that one of the demon elementals had done a great service for the Crimson King, taking Roland’s seed as female and passing it on to Susannah as male. And there had been another reason, as well. Walter hadn’t mentioned it, but Mia had known.

“It’s the prophecy,” she said, looking into Fedic’s deserted and shadowless street. Across the way, a robot that looked like Andy of the Calla stood silent and rusting in front of the Fedic Café, which promised GOOD MEELS CHEEP.

“What prophecy?” Susannah asked.

“ ‘He who ends the line of Eld shall conceive a child of incest with his sister or his daughter, and the child will be marked, by his red heel shall you know him. It is he who shall stop the breath of the last warrior.’ ”

“Woman, I’m not Roland’s sister, or his daughter, either! You maybe didn’t notice a small but basic difference in the color of our hides, namely his being white and mine being black.” But she thought she had a pretty good idea of what the prophecy meant, just the same. Families were made in many ways. Blood was only one of them.

“Did he not tell you what dinh means?” Mia asked.

“Of course. It means leader. If he was in charge of a whole country instead of just three scruffy-ass gunpuppies, it’d mean king.”

“Leader and king, you say true. Now, Susannah, will you tell me that such words aren’t just poor substitutes for