The Dark Tower-Part 1#-2#(42)
"Do you say so, gunslinger? Truey-true?"
Roland nodded. "We'll palaver all you would about this, if there's time, and about those old days, but not now. No time now. You have to go with your friends, and I must stay with mine."
Sheemie looked at him a moment longer, and yes, Susannah W now see the boy who had busded about a long-ago tavern called the Travellers' Rest, picking up empty beer schooners and dropping them into die wash-barrel which stood beneath die two-headed elk's head that was known as The Romp, avoiding the occasional shove from Coral Thorin or the even more ill-natured kicks that were apt to come from an aging whore called Pettie the Trotter. She could see the boy who had almost been killed for spilling liquor on the boots of a hardcase named Roy Depape. It had been Cuthbert who had saved Sheemie from death that night … but it had been Roland, known to the townsfolk as Will Dearborn, who had saved them all.
Sheemie put his arms around Roland's neck and hugged him tight. Roland smiled and stroked his curly hair with his disfigured right hand. A loud, honking sob escaped Sheemie's throat. Susannah could see the tears in the corners of the gunslinger's eyes.
"Aye," Roland said, speaking in a voice almost too low to hear. "I always knew you were special; Bert and Alain did, too. And here we find each other, well-met further down the path. We're well-met, Sheemie son of Stanley. So we are. So we are."
<h3>Chapter VI:THE MASTER OF BLUE HEAVEN</h3>
ONE
Pimli Prentiss, the Algul Siento Master, was in the bathroom when Finli (known in some quarters as The Weasel) knocked at the door. Prentiss was examining his complexion by the unforgiving light of the fluorescent bar over the washbasin. In the magnifying mirror, his skin looked like a grayish, crater-pocked plain, not much different from the surface of the wastelands stretching in every direction around the Algul. The sore on which he was currently concentrating looked like an erupting volcano.
"Who be for me?" Prentiss bawled, although he had a pretty good idea.
"Finli O'Tego!"
"Walk in, Finli!" Never taking his eyes from the mirror. His fingers, closing in on the sides of the infected pimple, looked huge. They applied pressure.
Finli crossed Prentiss's office and stood in the bathroom door. He had to bend slightly in order to look in. He stood over seven feet, very tall even for a taheen.
"Back from the station like I was never gone," said Finli. Like most of the taheen, his speaking voice reeled wildly back and forth between a yelp and a growl. To Pimli, they all sounded like the hybrids from H. G. Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau, and he kept expecting them to break into a chorus of "Are we not men?" Finli had picked this out of his mind once and asked about it. Prentiss had replied with complete honesty, knowing that in a society where low-grade telepathy was the rule, honesty was ever the best policy. The only policy, when dealing with the taheen. Besides, he liked Finli O'Tego.
"Back from the station, good," Pimli said. "And what did you find?"
"A maintenance drone. Looks like it went rogue on the Arc 16 side and-"
"Wait," Prentiss said. "If you will, if you will, thanks."
Finli waited. Prentiss leaned even closer toward the mirror, face frowning in concentration. The Master of Blue Heaven was tall himself, about six-two, and possessed of an enormous sloping belly supported by long legs with slab diighs. He was balding and had the turnip nose of a veteran drinker. He looked perhaps fifty. He felt like about fifty (younger, when he hadn't spent the previous night tossing them back with Finli and several of the can-toi). He had been fifty when he came here, a good many years ago; at least twenty-five, and that might be a big underestimation. Time was goofy on this side, just like direction, and you were apt to lose both quickly. Some folken lost their minds, as well. And if they ever lost the sun machine for good-
The top of the pimple bulged … trembled … burst. Ah!
A glut of bloody pus leaped from the site of the infection, splattered onto die mirror, and began to drool down its slighdy concave surface. Pimli Prentiss wiped it off with the tip of a finger, turned to flick it into the jakes, then offered it to Finli instead.
The taheen shook his head, then made the sort of exasperated noise any veteran dieter would have recognized, and guided the Master's finger into his mouth. He sucked the pus off and then released the finger with an audible pop.
"Shouldn't do it, can't resist," Finli said. "Didn't you tell me that folken on the other side decided eating rare beef was bad for them?"
"Yar," Pimli said, wiping the pimple (which was still oozing) with a Kleenex. He had been here a long time, and there would never be any going back, for all sorts of reasons, but until recently he had been up on current events; until the previous-could you call it a year?-he'd gotten The New York Times on a fairly regular basis. He bore a great affection for the Times, loved doing the daily crossword puzzle. It was a little touch of home.
"But they go on eating it, just the same."
"Yar, I suppose many do." He opened the medicine cabinet and brought out a botde of hydrogen peroxide from Rexall.
"It's your fault for putting it in front of me," Finli said.
"Not that such stuff is bad for us, ordinarily; it's a natural sweet, like honey or berries. The problem's Thunderclap." And, as if his boss hadn't gotten the point, Finli added: "Too much of what comes out of it don't run the true thread, no matter how sweet it might taste. Poison, do ya."
Prentiss dampened a cotton ball with the hydrogen peroxide and swabbed out the wound in his cheek. He knew exactly what Finli was talking about, how could he not? Before coming here and assuming the Master's mantle, he hadn't seen a blemish on his skin in well over thirty years. Now he had pimples on his cheeks and brow, acne in the hollows of his temples, nasty nests of blackheads around his nose, and a cyst on his neck that would soon have to be removed by Gangli, the compound doctor.
(Prentiss thought Gangli was a terrible name for a physician; it reminded him both of ganglion and gangrene.) The taheen and the can-toi were less susceptible to dermatological problems, but their flesh often broke open spontaneously, they suffered from nosebleeds, and even minor wounds-die scrape of a rock or a thorn-could lead to infection and deadi if not promptly seen to. Antibiotics had worked a treat on such infections to begin with; not so well anymore. Same with such pharmaceutical marvels as Accutane. It was the environment, of course; death baking out of the very rocks and eartfi that surrounded them. If you wanted to see things at their worst you only had to look at the Rods, who were no better than slow mutants these days. Of course, they wandered far to the … was it still the southeast?
They wandered far in the direction where a faint red glow could be seen at night, in any case, and everyone said things were much woi"se in that direction. Pimli didn't know for sure if that was true, but he suspected it was. They didn't call the lands beyond Fedic the Discordia because they were vacation spots.
"Want more?" he asked Finli. "I've got a couple on my forehead that're ripe."
"Nay, I want to make my report, double-check the videotapes and telemetry, go on over to The Study for a quick peek, and then sign out. After that I want a hot bath and about three hours with a good book. I'm reading The Collector."
"And you like it," Prentiss said, fascinated.
"Very much, say thankya. It reminds me of our situation here. Except I like to think our goals are a little nobler and our motivations a little higher than sexual attraction."
"Noble? So you call it?"
Finli shrugged and made no reply. Close discussion of what was going on here in Blue Heaven was generally avoided by unspoken consent.
Prentiss led Finli into his own library-study, which overlooked the part of Blue Heaven they called the Mall. Finli ducked beneath the light fixture widi the unconscious grace of long practice. Prentiss had once told him (after a few shots of graf) that he would have made a hell of a center in the NBA.
"The first all-taheen team," he'd said. "They'd call you The Freaks, but so what?"
"These basketball players, they get the best of everything?"
Finli had inquired. He had a sleek weasel's head and large black eyes. No more expressive than dolls' eyes, in Pimli's view.
He wore a lot of gold chains-they had become fashionable among Blue Heaven personnel, and a brisk trading market in such things had grown up over the last few years. Also, he'd had his tail docked. Probably a mistake, he'd told Prentiss one night when they'd both been drunk. Painful beyond belief and bound to send him to die Hell of Darkness when his life was over, unless …
Unless there was nothing. This was an idea Pimli denied widi all his mind and heart, but he'd be a liar if he didn't admit (if only to himself) that the idea sometimes haunted him in the watches of the night. For such thoughts there were sleeping pills. And God, of course. His faith diat all tilings served the will of God, even the Tower itself.
In any case, Pimli had confirmed that yes, basketball players-American basketball players, at least-got the best of everything, including more pussy than a fackin toilet seat. This remark had caused Finli to laugh until reddish tears had seeped from the corners of his strangely inexpressive eyes.