2004 The Dark Tower VII The Dark Tower

“So,” Pimli said, sitting down in one of the two wing chairs by the window, “you found a maintenance drone. Where?”

“Close to where Track 97 leaves the switching-yard,” said Finli. “That track’s still hot—has what you call ‘a third rail’—and so that explains that. Then, after we’d left, you call and say there’s been asecond alarm.”

“Yes. And you found—?”

“Nothing,” Finli said. “That time, nothing. Probably a malfunction, maybe even caused by the first alarm.” He shrugged, a gesture that conveyed what they both knew: it was all

going to hell. And the closer to the end they moved, the faster it went.

“You and your fellows had a good look, though?”

“Of course. No intruders.”

But both of them were thinking in terms of intruders who were human, taheen, can-toi, or mechanical. No one in Finli’s search-party had thought to look up, and likely would not

have spotted Mordred even if they had: a spider now as big as a medium-sized dog, crouched in the deep shadow under the main station’s eave, held in place by a little

hammock of webbing.

“You’re going to check the telemetry again because of the second alarm?”

“Partly,” Finli said. “Mostly because things feel hinky to me.” This was a word he’d picked up from one of the many other-side crime novels he read—they fascinated him—and he used it at every opportunity.

“Hinky how?”

Finli only shook his head. He couldn’t say. “But telemetry doesn’t lie. Or so I was taught.”

“You question it?”

Aware he was on thin ice again—that they both were—Finli hesitated, and then decided what the hell. “These are the end-times, boss. I question damn near everything.”

“Does that include your duty, Finli o’ Tego?”

Finli shook his head with no hesitation. No, it didn’t include his duty. It was the same with

the rest of them, including the former Paul Prentiss of Rahway. Pimli remembered some old soldier—maybe “Dugout” Doug MacArthur—saying, “When my eyes close in death, gentlemen, my final thought will be of the corps. And the corps. And the corps.” Pimli’s

own final thought would probably be of Algul Siento. Because what else was there now? In the words of another great American—Martha Reeves of Martha and the Vandellas—they

had nowhere to run, baby, nowhere to hide. Things were out of control, running downhill with no brakes, and there was nothing left to do but enjoy the ride.

“Would you mind a little company as you go your rounds?” Pimli asked.

“Why not?” The Weasel replied. He smiled, revealing a mouthful of needle-sharp teeth. And sang, in his odd and wavering voice: “ ‘Dream with me…I’m on my way to the moon of my fa-aathers…’ ”

“Give me one minute,” Pimli said, and got up.

“Prayers?” Finli asked.

Pimli stopped in the doorway. “Yes,” he said. “Since you ask. Any comments, Finli o’ Tego?”

“Just one, perhaps.” The smiling thing with the human body and the sleek brown weasel’s head continued to smile. “If prayer’s so exalted, why do you kneel in the same room where you sit to shit?”

“Because the Bible suggests that when one is in company, one should do it in one’s closet. Further comments?”

“Nay, nay.” Finli waved a negligent hand. “Do thy best and thy worst, as the Manni say.”

Three

In the bathroom, Paul o’ Rahway closed the lid on the toilet, knelt on the tiles, and folded his hands.

If prayer’s so exalted, why do you kneel in the same room where you sit to shit?

Maybe I should have said because it keeps me humble,he thought.Because it keeps me right-sized. It’s dirt from which we arose and it’s dirt to which we return, and if there’s a room where it’s hard to forget that, it’s this one.

“God,” he said, “grant me strength when I am weak, answers when I am confused, courage when I am afraid. Help me to hurt no one who doesn’t deserve it, and even then not unless they leave me no other choice. Lord…”

And while he’s on his knees before the closed toilet seat, this man who will shortly be

asking his God to forgive him for working to end creation (and with absolutely no sense of irony), we might as well look at him a bit more closely. We won’t take long, for Pimli Prentiss isn’t central to our tale of Roland and his ka-tet. Still, he’s a fascinating man, full of folds and contradictions and dead ends. He’s an alcoholic who believes deeply in a

personal God, a man of compassion who is now on the very verge of toppling the Tower

and sending the trillions of worlds that spin on its axis flying into the darkness in a trillion

different directions. He would quickly put Dinky Earnshaw and Stanley Ruiz to death if he knew what they’d been up to…and he spends most of every Mother’s Day in tears, for he loved his own Ma dearly and misses her bitterly. When it comes to the Apocalypse, here’s

the perfect guy for the job, one who knows how to get kneebound and can speak to the Lord God of Hosts like an old friend.

And here’s an irony: Paul Prentiss could be right out of the ads that proclaim “I got my job throughThe New York Times !” In 1970, laid off from the prison then known as Attica (he

and Nelson Rockefeller missed the mega-riot, at least), he spied an ad in theTimes with this headline:

WANTED: EXPERIENCED CORRECTIONS OFFICER

FOR HIGHLY RESPONSIBLE POSITION

IN PRIVATE INSTITUTION

High Pay! Top Benefits! Must Be Willing to Travel!

The high pay had turned out to be what his beloved Ma would have called “a pure-D, high-corn lie,” because there was no pay at all, not in the sense an America-side corrections officer would have understood, but the benefits…yes, the bennies were exceptional. To begin with he’d wallowed in sex as he now wallowed in food and booze, but that wasn’t the point. The point, in sai Prentiss’s view, was this: what did you want out of life? If it was to

do no more than watch the zeros increase in your bank account, than clearly Algul Siento was no place for you…which would be a terrible thing, because once you had signed on,

there was no turning back; it was all the corps. And the corps. And every now and then, when an example needed to be made, a corpse or two.

Which was a hundred per cent okey-fine with Master Prentiss, who had gone through the solemn taheen name-changing ceremony some twelve years before and had never regretted

it. Paul Prentiss had become Pimli Prentiss. It was at that point he had turned his heart as well as his mind away from what he now only called “America-side.” And not because he’d had the best baked Alaska and the best champagne of his life here. Not because he’d

had sim sex with hundreds of beautiful women, either. It was because this was his job, and he intended to finish it. Because he’d come to believe that their work at the Devar-Toi was God’s as well as the Crimson King’s. And behind the idea of God was something even

more powerful: the image of a billion universes tucked into an egg which he, the former Paul Prentiss of Rahway, once a forty-thousand-dollar-a-year man with a stomach ulcer and a bad medical benefits program okayed by a corrupt union, now held in the palm of his hand. He understood that he was also in that egg, and that he would cease to exist as flesh when he broke it, but surely if there was heaven and a God in it, then both superseded the power of the Tower. It was to that heaven he would go, and before that throne he would kneel to ask forgiveness for his sins. And he would be welcomed in with a heartyWell done, thou good and faithful servant . His Ma would be there, and she would hug him, and they would enter the fellowship of Jesus together. That day would come, Pimli was quite sure, and probably before Reap Moon rolled around again.

Not that he considered himself a religious nut. Not at all. These thoughts of God and heaven he kept strictly to himself. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, he was just a joe doing a job, one he intended to do well to the very end. Certainly he saw himself as no

villain, but no truly dangerous man ever has. Think of Ulysses S. Grant, that Civil War general who’d said he intended to fight it out on this line if it took all summer.

In the Algul Siento, summer was almost over.

Four

The Master’s home was a tidy Cape Cod at one end of the Mall. It was called Shapleigh

House (Pimli had no idea why), and so of course the Breakers called it Shit House. At the other end of the Mall was a much larger dwelling—a gracefully rambling Queen Anne called (for equally obscure reasons) Damli House. It would have looked at home on Fraternity Row at Clemson or Ole Miss. The Breakers called this one Heartbreak House, or sometimes Heartbreak Hotel. Fine. It was where the taheen and a sizable contingent of

can-toi lived and worked. As for the Breakers, let them have their little jokes, and by all means let them believe that the staff didn’t know.

Pimli Prentiss and Finli o’ Tego strolled up the Mall in companionable silence…except, that was, when they passed off-duty Breakers, either alone or in company. Pimli greeted each of them with unfailing courtesy. The greetings they returned varied from the completely cheerful to sullen grunts. Yet each made some sort of response, and Pimli

counted this a victory. He cared about them. Whether they liked it or not—many didn’t—he cared about them. They were certainly easier to deal with than the murderers,

rapists, and armed robbers of Attica.

Some were reading old newspapers or magazines. A foursome was throwing horseshoes. Another foursome was on the putting green. Tanya Leeds and Joey Rastosovich were playing chess under a graceful old elm, the sunlight making dapples on their faces. They greeted him with real pleasure, and why not? Tanya Leeds was now actually Tanya Rastosovich, for Pimli had married them a month ago, just like the captain of a ship. And he supposed that in a way, that was what this was: the good shipAlgul Siento, a cruise

vessel that sailed the dark seas of Thunderclap in her own sunny spotlight. The sun went out from time to time, say true, but today’s outage had been minimal, only forty-three

seconds.

“How’s it going, Tanya? Joseph?” Always Joseph and never Joey, at least not to his face; he didn’t like it.

They said it was going fine and gave him those dazed, fuck-struck smiles of which only newlyweds are capable. Finli said nothing to the Rastosoviches, but near the Damli House end of the Mall, he stopped before a young man sitting on a faux marble bench beneath a tree, reading a book.

“Sai Earnshaw?” the taheen asked.

Dinky looked up, eyebrows raised in polite enquiry. His face, studded with a bad case of acne, bore the same polite no-expression.

“I see you’re readingThe Magus, ” Finli said, almost shyly. “I myself am readingThe Collector . Quite a coincidence!”

“If you say so,” Dinky replied. His expression didn’t change.

“I wonder what you think of Fowles? I’m quite busy right now, but perhaps later we could discuss him.”

Still wearing that politely expressionless expression, Dinky Earnshaw said, “Perhaps later

you could take your copy ofThe Collector —hardcover, I hope—and stick it up your furry ass. Sideways.”

Finli’s hopeful smile disappeared. He gave a small but perfectly correct bow. “I’m sorry you feel that way, sai.”

“The fuck outta here,” Dinky said, and opened his book again. He raised it pointedly before his face.

Pimli and Finli o’ Tego walked on. There was a period of silence during which the Master of Algul Siento tried out different approaches to Finli, wanting to know how badly he’d been hurt by the young man’s comment. The taheen was proud of his ability to read and

appreciate hume literature, that much Pimli knew. Then Finli saved him the trouble by putting both of his long-fingered hands—his ass wasn’t actually furry, but his fingers

were—between his legs.

“Just checking to make sure my nuts are still there,” he said, and Pimli thought the good humor he heard in the Chief of Security’s voice was real, not forced.

“I’m sorry about that,” Pimli said. “If there’s anyone in Blue Heaven who has an authentic case of post-adolescent angst, it’s sai Earnshaw.”

“ ‘You’re tearing me apart!’ ” Finli moaned, and when the Master gave him a startled look, Finli grinned, showing those rows of tiny sharp teeth. “It’s a famous line from a film calledRebel Without a Cause, ” he said. “Dinky Earnshaw makes me think of James Dean.” He paused to consider. “Without the haunting good looks, of course.”

“An interesting case,” Prentiss said. “He was recruited for an assassination program run by a Positronics subsidiary. He killed his control and ran. We caught him, of course. He’s never been any real trouble—not for us—but he’s got that pain-in-the-ass attitude.”

“But you feel he’s not a problem.”

Pimli gave him a sideways glance. “Is there somethingyou feel I should know about him?”

“No, no. I’ve never seen you so jumpy as you’ve been over the last few weeks. Hell, call a spade a spade—soparanoid .”

“My grandfather had a proverb,” Pimli said. “ ‘You don’t worry about dropping the eggs until you’re almost home.’ We’re almost home now.”

And it was true. Seventeen days ago, not long before the last batch of Wolves had come galloping through the door from the Arc 16 Staging Area, their equipment in the basement of Damli House had picked up the first appreciable bend in the Bear-Turtle Beam. Since then the Beam of Eagle and Lion had snapped. Soon the Breakers would no longer be needed; soon the disintegration of the second-to-last Beam would happen with or without their help. It was like a precariously balanced object that had now picked up a sway. Soon it would go too far beyond its point of perfect balance, and then it would fall. Or, in the case of the Beam, it would break. Wink out of existence. It was the Tower that would fall. The last Beam, that of Wolf and Elephant, might hold for another week or another month, but not much longer.

Thinking of that should have pleased Pimli, but it didn’t. Mostly because his thoughts had returned to the Greencloaks. Sixty or so had gone through Calla-bound last time, the usual deployment, and they should have been back in the usual seventy-two hours with the usual catch of Calla children.

Instead…nothing.

He asked Finli whathe thought about that.

Finli stopped. He looked grave. “I think it may have been a virus,” he said.

“Cry pardon?”

“A computer virus. We’ve seen it happen with a good deal of our computer equipment in

Damli, and you want to remember that, no matter how fearsome the Greencloaks may look to a bunch of rice-farmers, computers on legs is all they really are.” He paused. “Or the Calla-folkenmay have found a way to kill them. Would it surprise me to find that they’d

gotten up on their hind legs to fight? A little, but not a lot. Especially if someone with guts stepped forward to lead them.”

“Someone like a gunslinger, mayhap?”

Finli gave him a look that stopped just short of patronizing.

Ted Brautigan and Stanley Ruiz rode up the sidewalk on ten-speed 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 spit-shiny 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 matterwhere 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-to-heart.”

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 theywere 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 the subject, but Pimli didn’t think so. He thought they believed they werebecoming 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…althoughhow 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?

Somenew Earth, perhaps, but Pimli wasn’t even sure of that.

Two can-toi security guards, Beeman and Trelawney, stood at the end of the hall, guarding the head of the stairs going down to the basement. To Pimli, all can-toi men, even those with blond hair and skinny builds, looked weirdly like that actor from the forties and fifties, Clark Gable. They all seemed to have the same thick, sensual lips and batty ears. Then, when you got very close, you could see the artificial wrinkles at the neck and behind the ears, where their hume masks twirled into pigtails and ran into the hairy, toothy flesh that was their reality (whether they accepted it or not). And there were the eyes. Hair surrounded them, and if you looked closely, you could see that what you originally took forsockets were, in fact, holes in those peculiar masks of living flesh. Sometimes you could hear the masks themselves breathing, which Pimli found both weird and a little revolting.

“Hile,” said Beeman.

“Hile,” said Trelawney.

Pimli and Finli returned the greeting, they all fisted their foreheads, and then Pimli led the way downstairs. In the lower corridor, walking past the sign which readWE MUST ALL

WORK TOGETHER TO CREATE A FIRE-FREE ENVIRONMENT and another readingALL HAIL THE CAN-TOI , Finli said, very low: “They areso odd.”

Pimli smiled and clapped him on the back. That was why he genuinely liked Finli o’ Tego: like Ike and Mike, they thought alike.

Six

Most of the Damli House basement was a large room jammed with equipment. Not all of

the stuff worked, and they had no use for some of the instruments that did (there was plenty they didn’t even understand), but they were very familiar with the surveillance equipment

and the telemetry that measureddarks : units of expended psychic energy. The Breakers were expressly forbidden from using their psychic abilities outside of The Study, and not all of them could, anyway. Many were like men and women so severely toilet-trained that

they were unable to urinate without the visual stimuli that assured them that yes, they were in the toilet, and yes, it was all right to let go. Others, like children who aren’t yet

completely toilet-trained, were unable to prevent the occasional psychic outburst. This might amount to no more than giving someone they didn’t like a transient headache or knocking over a bench on the Mall, but Pimli’s men kept careful track, and outbursts that were deemed “on purpose” were punished, first offenses lightly, repeat offenses with

rapidly mounting severity. And, as Pimli liked to lecture to the newcomers (back in the days when there hadbeen newcomers), “Be sure your sin will find you out.” Finli’s scripture was even simpler:Telemetry doesn’t lie .

Today they found nothing but transient blips on the telemetry readouts. It was as meaningless as a four-hour audio recording of some group’s farts and burps would have been. The videotapes and the swing-guards’ daybooks likewise produced nothing of

interest.

“Satisfied, sai?” Finli asked, and something in his voice caused Pimli to swing around and look at him sharply.

“Areyou? ”

Finli o’ Tego sighed. At times like this Pimli wished that either Finli were hume or that he himself were truly taheen. The problem was Finli’s inexpressive black eyes. They were

almost the shoebutton eyes of a Raggedy Andy doll, and there was simply no way to read them. Unless, maybe, you were another taheen.

“I haven’t felt right for weeks now,” Finli said at last. “I drink too much graf to put myself asleep, then drag myself through the day, biting people’s heads off. Part of it’s the loss of

communications since the last Beam went—”

“You know that was inevitable—”

“Yes, of course I know. What I’m saying is that I’m trying to find rational reasons to explain irrational feelings, and that’s never a good sign.”

On the far wall was a picture of Niagara Falls. Some can-toi guard had turned it upside

down. The low men considered turning pictures upside down the absolute height of humor. Pimli had no idea why. But in the end, who gave a shit?I know how to do my facking job, he thought, re-hanging Niagara Falls rightside up.I know how to do that, and nothing else matters, tell God and the Man Jesus thank ya.

“We always knew things were going to get wacky at the end,” Finli said, “so I tell myself that’s all this is. This…you know…”

“This feeling you have,” the former Paul Prentiss supplied. Then he grinned and laid his

right forefinger over a circle made by his left thumb and index finger. This was a taheen gesture which meantI tell you the truth . “Thisirrational feeling.”

“Yar. Certainly I know that the Bleeding Lion hasn’t reappeared in the north, nor do I believe that the sun’s cooling from the inside. I’ve heard tales of the Red King’s madness and that the Dan-Tete has come to take his place, and all I can say is ‘I’ll believe it when I see it.’ Same with this wonderful news about how a gunslinger-man’s come out of the west to save the Tower, as the old tales and songs predict. Bullshit, every bit of it.”

Pimli clapped him on the shoulder. “Does my heart good to hear you say so!”

It did, too. Finli o’ Tego had done a hell of a job during his tenure as Head. His security cadre had had to kill half a dozen Breakers over the years—all of them homesick fools

trying to escape—and two others had been lobotomized, but Ted Brautigan was the only one who’d actually made it “under the fence” (this phrase Pimli had picked up from a film

calledStalag 17 ), and they had reeled him back in, by God. The can-toi took the credit, and the Security Chief let them, but Pimli knew the truth: it was Finli who’d choreographed

each move, from beginning to end.

“But it might be more than just nerves, this feeling of mine,” Finli continued. “Ido believe that sometimes folk can have bona fide intuitions.” He laughed. “How could one not believe that, in a place as lousy with precogs and postcogs as this one?”

“But no teleports,” Pimli said. “Right?”

Teleportation was the one so-called wild talent of which all the Devar staff was afraid, and with good reason. There was no end to the sort of havoc a teleport could wreak. Bringing in about four acres of outer space, for instance, and creating a vacuum-induced hurricane.

Fortunately there was a simple test to isolate that particular talent (easy to administer, although the equipment necessary was another leftover of the old people and none of them knew how long it would continue to work) and a simple procedure (also left behind by the

old ones) for shorting out such dangerous organic circuits. Dr. Gangli was able to take care of potential teleports in under two minutes. “So simple it makes a vasectomy look like brain-surgery,” he’d said once.

“Absa-fackin-lutely no teleports,” was what Finli said now, and led Prentiss to an instrument console that looked eerily like Susannah Dean’s visualization of her Dogan. He