The waste lands - Stephen King [236]
Roland stirred in his chair. “What rumors did you hear, Blaine? And who did you hear them from?”
But Blaine chose not to answer this question.
“I EVENTUALLY BECAME SO DISTURBED BY HER BLATTING THAT I ERASED THE CIRCUITS CONTROLLING HER NON-VOLUNTARIES. I EMANCIPATED HER, YOU MIGHT SAY. SHE RESPONDED BY THROWING HERSELF IN THE RIVER. SEE YOU LATER, PATRICIA-GATOR.”
Got lonely, couldn’t stop crying, drowned herself, and all this crazy mechanical asshole can do is joke about it, Susannah thought. She felt almost sick with rage. If Blaine had been a real person instead of just a bunch of circuits buried somewhere under a city which was now far behind them, she would have tried to put some new marks on his face to remember Patricia by. You want interesting, motherfucker? I’d like to show you interesting, so I would.
“ASK ME A RIDDLE,” Blaine invited.
“Not quite yet,” Eddie said. “You still haven’t answered my original question.” He gave Blaine a chance to respond, and when the computer voice didn’t do so, he went on. “When it comes to suicide, I’m, like, pro-choice. But why do you want to take us with you? I mean, what’s the point?”
“Because he wants to,” Little Blaine said in his horrified whisper.
“BECAUSE I WANT TO,” Blaine said. “THAT’S THE ONLY REASON I HAVE AND THE ONLY ONE I NEED TO HAVE. NOW LET’S GET DOWN TO BUSINESS. I WANT SOME RIDDLES AND I WANT THEM IMMEDIATELY. IF YOU REFUSE, I WON’T WAIT UNTIL WE GET TO TOPEKA—I’LL DO US ALL RIGHT HERE AND NOW.”
Eddie, Susannah, and Jake looked around at Roland, who still sat in his chair with his hands folded in his lap, looking at the route-map at the front of the coach.
“Fuck you,” Roland said. He did not raise his voice. He might have told Blaine that a little Way-Gog would indeed be very nice.
There was a shocked, horrified gasp from the overhead speakers— Little Blaine.
“WHAT DO YOU SAY?” In its clear disbelief, the voice of Big Blaine had once again become very close to the voice of his unsuspected twin.
“I said fuck you,” Roland said calmly, “but if that puzzles you, Blaine, I can make it clearer. No. The answer is no.”
10
THERE WAS NO RESPONSE from either Blaine for a long, long time, and when Big Blaine did reply, it was not with words. Instead, the walls, floor, and ceiling began to lose their color and solidity again. In a space of ten seconds the Barony Coach had once more ceased to exist. The mono was now flying through the mountain-range they had seen on the horizon: iron-gray peaks rushed toward them at suicidal speed, then fell away to disclose sterile valleys where gigantic beetles crawled about like landlocked turtles. Roland saw something that looked like a huge snake suddenly uncoil from the mouth of a cave. It seized one of the beetles and yanked it back into its lair. Roland had never in his life seen such animals or countryside, and it made his skin want to crawl right off his flesh. It was inimical, but that was not the problem. It was alien—that was the problem. Blaine might have transported them to some other world.
“PERHAPS I SHOULD DERAIL US HERE,” Blaine said. His voice was meditative, but beneath it the gunslinger heard a deep, pulsing rage.
“Perhaps you should,” the gunslinger said indifferently.
He did not feel indifferent, and he knew it was possible the computer might read his real feelings in his voice—Blaine had told them he had such equipment, although he was sure the computer could lie, Roland had no reason to doubt it in this case. If Blaine did read certain stress-patterns in the gunslinger’s voice, the game was probably up. He was an incredibly sophisticated machine . . . but still a machine, for all that. He might not be able to understand that human beings are often able to go through with a course of action even when all their emotions rise up and proclaim against it. If he analyzed patterns