"And the best thing," Pimli had continued, "is this: you'd be able to play near forever, by NBA standards. For instance, do ya hear, the most highly regarded player in my old country (although I never saw him play; he came after my time) was a fellow named Michael Jordan, and-"
"If he were taheen, what would he be?" Finli had interrupted.
This was a game they often played, especially when a few drinks over the line.
"A weasel, actually, and a damned handsome one," Pimli had said, and in a tone of surprise that had struck Finli as comical.
Once more he'd roared until tears came out of his eyes.
"But," Pimli had continued, "his career was over in hardly more than fifteen years, and that includes a retirement and a comeback or two. How many years could you play a game where you'd have to do no more than run back and forth the length of a campa court for an hour or so, Fin?"
Finli of Tego, who was then over three hundred years old, had shrugged and flicked his hand at the horizon. Delah. Years beyond counting.
And how long had Blue Heaven-Devar-Toi to the newer inmates, Algul Siento to the taheen and the Rods-how long had this prison been here? Also delah. But if Finli was correct (and Pimli's heart said that Finli almost certainly was), then delah was almost over. And what could he, once Paul Prentiss of Rahway, New Jersey, and now Pimli Prentiss of the Algul Siento, do about it?
His job, that was what.
His fackin job.
TWO
"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 a second 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?"
"Pardy," 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 die 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 katet.
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 myjob through The New York TimesV 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 the Times 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 i 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 hearty Well 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.