Song of Susannah - Stephen King [45]
“I had an idea you couldn’t read,” Susannah said. This was beside the point, but it was all she could think of to say. Her mind kept returning to the image of the baby; to those brilliant blue eyes. Gunslinger’s eyes.
“Aye, but I know my numbers, and when it comes to your mind, I read very well. Do you say you don’t recall the sign in the hotel lobby? Will you tell me that?”
Of course she remembered. According to the sign, the Plaza–Park would be part of an organization called Sombra/North Central in just another month. And when she’d said Not in our world, of course she had been thinking of 1964—the world of black-and-white television, absurdly bulky room-sized computers, and Alabama cops more than willing to sic the dogs on black marchers for voting rights. Things had changed greatly in the intervening thirty-five years. The Eurasian desk clerk’s combination TV and typewriter, for instance—how did Susannah know that wasn’t a dipolar computer run by some form of slo-trans engine? She did not.
“Go on,” she told Mia.
Mia shrugged. “You doom yourselves, Susannah. You seem positively bent on it, and the root is always the same: your faith fails you, and you replace it with rational thought. But there is no love in thought, nothing that lasts in deduction, only death in rationalism.”
“What does this have to do with your chap?”
“I don’t know. There’s much I don’t know.” She raised a hand, forestalling Susannah before Susannah could speak. “And no, I’m not playing for time, or trying to lead you away from what you’d know; I’m speaking as my heart tells me. Would you hear or not?”
Susannah nodded. She’d hear this…for a little longer, at least. But if it didn’t turn back to the baby soon, she’d turn it back in that direction herself.
“The magic went away. Maerlyn retired to his cave in one world, the sword of Eld gave way to the pistols of the gunslingers in another, and the magic went away. And across the arc of years, great alchemists, great scientists, and great—what?—technicians, I think? Great men of thought, anyway, that’s what I mean, great men of deduction —these came together and created the machines which ran the Beams. They were great machines but they were mortal machines. They replaced the magic with machines, do ya kennit, and now the machines are failing. In some worlds, great plagues have decimated whole populations.”
Susannah nodded. “We saw one of those,” she said quietly. “They called it the superflu.”
“The Crimson King’s Breakers are only hurrying along a process that’s already in train. The machines are going mad. You’ve seen this for yourself. The men believed there would always be more men like them to make more machines. None of them foresaw what’s happened. This…this universal exhaustion.”
“The world has moved on.”
“Aye, lady. It has. And left no one to replace the machines which hold up the last magic in creation, for the Prim has receded long since. The magic is gone and the machines are failing. Soon enough the Dark Tower will fall. Perhaps there’ll be time for one splendid moment of universal rational thought before the darkness rules forever. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
“Won’t the Crimson King be destroyed, too, when the Tower falls? Him and all his crew? The guys with the bleeding holes in their foreheads?”
“He has been promised his own kingdom, where he’ll rule forever, tasting his own special pleasures.” Distaste had crept into Mia’s voice. Fear, too, perhaps.
“Promised? Promised by whom? Who is more powerful than he?”
“Lady, I know not. Perhaps this is only what he has promised himself.” Mia shrugged. Her eyes wouldn’t quite meet Susannah’s.
“Can nothing prevent the fall of the Tower?”
“Not even your gunslinger friend hopes to prevent it,” Mia said, “only to slow it down by freeing the Breakers and—perhaps—slaying the Crimson King. Save it! Save it, O delight! Did he ever tell you that was his quest?”
Susannah considered this and shook her head. If Roland had ever said that, in so many words, she couldn