The Waste Lands dt-3

by Stephen King

  Below Roland’s band of pilgrims, the slo-trans engines throbbed in hard, steady beats. And on the route-map at the front of the carriage, the pulsing green dot had now begun to move perceptibly along the lighted line toward the last stop: Topeka, where Blaine the Mono clearly meant to end all of their lives.

  9

  AT LAST THE LAUGHTER stopped and the interior lights glowed steadily again.

  “WOULD YOU LIKE A LITTLE MUSIC?” Blaine asked. “I HAVE OVER SEVEN THOUSAND CONCERTI IN MY LIBRARY-A SAMPLING OF OVER THREE HUNDRED LEVELS. THE CONCERTI ARE MY FAVORITES, BUT I CAN ALSO OFFER SYMPHONIES, OPERAS, AND A NEARLY ENDLESS SELECTION OF POPULAR MUSIC. YOU MIGHT ENJOY SOME WAY-GOG MUSIC. THE WAY-GOG IS AN INSTRUMENT SOMETHING LIKE THE BAGPIPE. IT IS PLAYED ON ONE OF THE UPPER LEVELS OF THE TOWER.”

  “Way-Gog?” Jake asked.”

  Blaine was silent.

  “What do you mean, ’it’s played on one of the upper levels of the Tower’?” Roland asked.

  Blaine laughed… and was silent.

  “Have you got any Z.Z. Top?” Eddie asked sourly.

  “YES INDEED,” Blaine said. “HOW ABOUT A LITTLE TUBE-SNAKE BOOGIE; EDDIE OF NEW YORK?”

  Eddie rolled his eyes. “On second thought, I’ll pass.”

  “Why?” Roland asked abruptly. “Why do you wish to kill yourself?”

  “Because lie’s a pain,” Jake said darkly.

  “I’M BORED. ALSO, I AM PERFECTLY AWARE THAT I AM SUFFERING A DEGENERATIVE DISEASE WHICH HUMANS CALL GOING INSANE, LOSING TOUCH WITH REALITY, GOING LOONYTOONS, BLOWING A FUSE, NOT PLAYING WITH A FULL DECK, ET CETERA. REPEATED DIAGNOSTIC CHECKS HAVE FAILED TO REVEAL THE SOURCE OF THE PROBLEM. I CAN ONLY CONCLUDE THAT THIS IS A SPIRITUAL MALAISE BEYOND MY ABILITY TO REPAIR.”

  Blaine paused for a moment, then went on.

  “I HAVE FELT MY MIND GROWING STEADILY STRANGER OVER THE YEARS. SERVING THE PEOPLE OF MID-WORLD BECAME POINTLESS CENTURIES AGO. SERVING THOSE FEW PEOPLE OF LUD WHO WISHED TO VENTURE ABROAD BECAME EQUALLY SILLY NOT LONG AFTER, YET I CARRIED ON UNTIL THE ARRIVAL OF DAVID QUICK, A SHORT WHILE AGO. I DON’T REMEMBER EXACTLY WHEN THAT WAS. DO YOU BELIEVE, ROLAND OF GILEAD, THAT MACHINES MAY GROW SENILE?”

  “I don’t know.” Roland’s voice was distant, and Eddie only had to look at his face to know that, even now, hurtling a thousand feet over hell in the grip of a machine which had clearly gone insane, the gunslinger’s mind had once more turned to his damned Tower.

  “IN A WAY, I NEVER STOPPED SERVING THE PEOPLE OF LUD,” Blaine said. “I SERVED THEM EVEN AS I RELEASED THE GAS AND KILLED THEM.”

  Susannah said, “You are insane, if you believe that.”

  “YES, BUT I’M NOT CRAZY,” Blaine said, and went into another hysterical laughing fit. At last the robot voice resumed.

  “AT SOME POINT THEY FORGOT THAT THE VOICE OF THE MONO WAS ALSO THE VOICE OF THE COMPUTER. NOT LONG AFTER THAT THEY FORGOT I WAS A SERVANT AND BEGAN BELIEVING I WAS A GOD. SINCE I WAS BUILT TO SERVE, I FULFILLED THEIR REQUIREMENTS AND BECAME WHAT THEY WANTED-A GOD DISPENSING BOTH FAVOR AND PUNISHMENT ACCORDING TO WHIM… OR RANDOM-ACCESS MEMORY, IF YOU PREFER. THIS AMUSED ME FOR A SHORT WHILE. THEN, LAST MONTH, MY ONLY REMAINING COLLEAGUE-PATRICIA-COMMITTED SUICIDE.”

  Either he really is going senile, Susannah thought, or his inability to grasp the passage of time is another manifestation of his insanity, or it’s just another sign of how sick Roland’s world has gotten.

  “I WAS PLANNING TO FOLLOW HER EXAMPLE, WHEN YOU CAME ALONG. INTERESTING PEOPLE WITH A KNOWLEDGE OF RIDDLES!”

  “Hold it!” Eddie said, lifting his hand. “I still don’t have this straight. I suppose I can understand you wanting to end it all; the people who built you are gone, there haven’t been many passengers over the last two or three hundred years, and it must have gotten boring, doing the Lud to Topeka run empty all the time, but-”

  “NOW WAIT JUST A DARN MINUTE, PARD,” Blaine said in his John Wayne voice. “YOU DON’T WANT TO GET THE IDEA THAT I’M NOTHING BUT A TRAIN. IN A WAY, THE BLAINE YOU ARE SPEAKING TO IS ALREADY THREE HUNDRED MILES BEHIND US, COMMUNICATING BY ENCRYPTED MICROBURST RADIO TRANSMISSIONS.”

  Jake suddenly remembered the slim silver rod he’d seen pushing itself out of Blaine’s brow. The antenna of his father’s Mercedes-Benz rose out of its socket like that when you turned on the radio.

  That’s how it’s communicating with the computer banks under the city, he thought. If we could break that antenna off, somehow…

  “But you do intend to kill yourself, no matter where the real you is, don’t you?” Eddie persisted.

  No answer-but there was something cagey in that silence. In it Eddie sensed Blaine watching… and waiting.

  “Were you awake when we found you?” Susannah asked. “You weren’t, were you?”

  “I WAS RUNNING WHAT THE PUBES CALLED THE GOD-DRUMS ON BEHALF OF THE GRAYS, BUT THAT WAS ALL. YOU WOULD SAY I WAS DOZING.”

  “Then why don’t you just take us to the end of the line and go back to sleep?”

  “Because he’s a pain,” Jake repeated in a low voice.

  “BECAUSE THERE ARE DREAMS,” Blaine said at exactly the same time, and in a voice that was eerily like Little Blaine’s.

  “Why didn’t you end it all when Patricia destroyed herself?” Eddie asked. “For that matter, if your brain and her brain are both part of the same computer, how come you both didn’t step out together?”

  “PATRICIA WENT MAD,” Blaine said patiently, speaking as if he himself had not just admitted the same thing was happening to him. “IN HER CASE, THE PROBLEM INVOLVED EQUIPMENT MALFUNCTION AS WELL AS SPIRITUAL MALAISE. SUCH MALFUNCTIONS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE IMPOSSIBLE WITH SLO-TRANS TECHNOLOGY, BUT OF COURSE THE WORLD HAS MOVED ON… HAS IT NOT, ROLAND OF GILEAD?”

  “Yes,” Roland said. “There is some deep sickness at the Dark Tower, which is the heart of everything. It’s spreading. The lands below us are only one more sign of that sickness.”

  “I CANNOT VOUCH FOR THE TRUTH OR FALSITY OF THAT STATEMENT; MY MONITORING EQUIPMENT IN END-WORLD, WHERE THE DARK TOWER STANDS, HAS BEEN DOWN FOR OVER EIGHT HUNDRED YEARS. AS A RESULT, I CANNOT READILY DIFFERENTIATE FACT FROM SUPERSTITION. IN FACT, THERE SEEMS TO BE VERY LITTLE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE TWO AT THE PRESENT TIME. IT IS VERY SILLY THAT IT SHOULD BE SO-NOT TO MENTION RUDE-AND I AM SURE IT HAS CONTRIBUTED TO MY OWN SPIRITUAL MALAISE.”

  This statement reminded Eddie of something Roland had said not so long ago. What might that have been? He groped for it, but could find nothing… only a vague memory of the gunslinger speaking in an irritated way which was very unlike his usual manner.

  “PATRICIA BEGAN SOBBING CONSTANTLY, A STATE I FOUND BOTH RUDE AND UNPLEASANT. I BELIEVE SHE WAS LONELY AS WELL AS MAD. ALTHOUGH THE ELECTRICAL FIRE WHICH CAUSED THE ORIGINAL PROBLEM WAS QUICKLY EXTINGUISHED, LOGIC-FAULTS CONTINUED TO SPREAD AS CIRCUITS OVERLOADED AND SUB-BANKS FAILED. I CONSIDERED ALLOWING THE MALFUNCTIONS TO BECOME SYSTEM-WIDE AND DECIDED TO ISOLATE THE PROBLEM AREA INSTEAD. I HAD HEARD RUMORS, YOU SEE, THAT A GUNSLINGER WAS ONCE MORE ABROAD IN THE EARTH. I COULD SCARCELY CREDIT SUCH STORIES, AND YET I NOW SEE I WAS WISE TO WAIT.”

  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 BLAT-TING 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 in the gunslinger’s voice which indicated fear, he would probably assume that Roland was bluffing. Such a mistake could get them all killed.

  “YOU ARE RUDE AND ARROGANT,” Blaine said. “THESE MAY SEEM LIKE INTERESTING TRAITS TO YOU, BUT THEY ARE NOT TO ME.”

  Eddie’s face was frantic. He mouthed the words What are you DOING? Roland ignored him; he had his hands full with Blaine, and he knew perfectly well what he was doing.

  “Oh, I can be much ruder than I have been.”

  Roland of Gilead unfolded his hands and got slowly to his feet. He stood on what appeared to be nothing, legs apart, his right hand on his hip and his left on the sandalwood grip of his revolver. He stood as he had stood so many times before, in the dusty streets of a hundred forgotten towns, in a score of rock-lined canyon killing-zones, in unnumbered dark saloons with their smells of bitter beer and old fried meals. It was just another showdown in another empty street. That was all, and that was enough. It was khef, ka, and ka-tet. That the showdown always came was the central fact of his life and the axle upon which his own ka revolved. That the battle would be fought with words instead of bullets this time made no difference; it would be a battle to the death, just the same. The stench of killing in the air was as clear and definite as the stench of exploded carrion in a swamp. Then the battle-rage descended, as it always did… and he was no longer really there to himself at all.

  “I can call you a nonsensical, empty-headed, foolish, arrogant machine. I can call you a stupid, unwise creature whose sense is no more than the sound of a winter wind in a hollow tree.”

  “STOP IT.”

  Roland went on in the same serene tone, ignoring Blaine completely. “Unfortunately, I am somewhat restricted in my ability to be rude, since you are only a machine… what Eddie calls a ’gadget.”

  “I AM A GREAT DEAL MORE THAN JUST-”

  “I cannot call you a sucker of cocks, for instance, because you have no mouth and no cock. I cannot say you are viler than the vilest beggar who ever crawled the gutters of the lowest street in creation, because even such a creature is better than you; you have no knees on which to crawl, and would not fall upon them even if you did, for you have no conception of such a human flaw as mercy. I cannot even say you fucked your mother, because you had none.”

  Roland paused for breath. His three companions were holding theirs. All around them, suffocating, was Blaine the Mono’s thunderstruck silence.

  “I can call you a faithless creature who let your only companion kill herself, a coward who has delighted in the torture of the foolish and the slaughter of the innocent, a lost and bleating mechanical goblin who-”

  “I COMMAND YOU TO STOP IT OR I’ll KILL YOU ALL RIGHT HERE!”

  Roland’s eyes blazed with such wild blue fire that Eddie shrank away from him. Dimly, he heard Jake and Susannah gasp.

  “Kill if you will, but command me nothing!” the gunslinger roared. “You have forgotten the faces of those who made you! Now either kill us or be silent and listen to me, Roland of Gilead, son of Steven, gunslinger, and lord of the ancient lands! I have not come across all the miles and all the years to listen to your childish prating! Do you understand? Now you will listen to ME!”

  There was a moment of shocked silence. No one breathed. Roland stared sternly forward, his head high, his hand on the butt of his gun.

  Susannah Dean raised her hand to her mouth and felt the small smile there as a woman might feel some strange new article of clothing- a hat, perhaps-to make sure it is still on straight. She was afraid that this was the end of her life, but the feeling which dominated her heart at that moment was not fear but pride. She glanced to her left and saw Eddie regarding Roland with an amazed grin. Jake’s expression was even simpler: it was adoration, pure and simple.

  “Tell him!” Jake breathed. “Walk it to him! Right!”

  “You better pay attention,” Eddie agreed. “He really doesn’t give much of a rat’s ass, Blaine. They didn’t call him The Mad Dog of Gilead for nothing.”

  After a long, long moment, Blaine asked: “DID THEY CALL YOU SO, ROLAND SON OF STEVEN?”

  “It may have been so,” Roland agreed, standing calmly on thin air above the sterile foothills.

  “WHAT GOOD ARE YOU TO ME IF YOU WON’T TELL ME RIDDLES?” Blaine asked. Now he sounded like a grumbling, sulky child who has been allowed to stay up too long past his usual bedtime.

  “I didn’t say we wouldn’t,” Roland said,

  “NO?” Blaine sounded bewildered. “I DO NOT UNDERSTAND, YET VOICE-PRINT ANALYSIS INDICATES RATIONAL DISCOURSE. PLEASE EXPLAIN.”

  “You said you wanted them right now,” the gunslinger replied. “That was what I was refusing. Your eagerness has made you unseemly.”

  “I DON’T UNDERSTAND.”

  “It has made you rude. Do you understand that?”

  There was a long, thoughtful silence. Then: “IF WHAT I SAID STRUCK YOU AS RUDE, I APOLOGIZE.”

  “It is accepted, Blaine. But there is a larger problem.”

  “EXPLAIN.”

  Blaine now sounded a bit unsure of himself, a
nd Roland was not entirely surprised. It had been a long time since the computer had experienced any human responses other than ignorance, neglect, and superstitious subservience. If it had ever been exposed to simple human courage, it had been a long time ago.

  “Close the carriage again and I will.” Roland sat down as if further argument-and the prospect of immediate death-was now unthinkable.

  Blaine did as he was asked. The walls filled with color and the nightmare landscape below was once more blotted out. The blip on the route-map was now blinking close to the dot which marked Candleton.

  “All right,” Roland said. “Rudeness is forgivable, Blaine; so I was taught in my youth, and the clay has dried in the shapes left by the artist’s hand. But I was also taught that stupidity is not.”

  “HOW HAVE I BEEN STUPID, ROLAND OF GILEAD?” Blaine’s voice was soft and ominous. Susannah suddenly thought of a cat crouched outside a mouse-hole, tail swishing back and forth, green eyes shining.

  “We have something that you want,” Roland said, “but the only reward you offer if we give it to you is death. That’s very stupid.”

  There was a long, long pause as Blaine thought this over. Then: “WHAT YOU SAY IS TRUE, ROLAND OF GILEAD, BUT THE QUALITY OF YOUR RIDDLES IS NOT PROVEN. I WILL NOT REWARD YOU WITH YOUR LIVES FOR BAD RIDDLES.”

  Roland nodded. “I understand, Blaine. Listen, now, and take understanding from me. I have told some of this to my friends already. When I was a boy in the Barony of Gilead, there were seven Fair-Days each year-Winter, Wide Earth, Sowing, Mid-Summer, Full Earth, Reaping, and Year’s End. Riddling was an important part of every Fair-Day, but it was the most important event of the Fair of Wide Earth and that of Full Earth, for the riddles told were supposed to augur well or ill for the success of the crops.”

  “THAT IS SUPERSTITION WITH NO BASIS AT ALL IN FACT,” Blaine said. “I FIND IT ANNOYING AND UPSETTING.”