Текст книги "The Dark Tower"

Автор книги: Stephen Edwin King

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Roland nodded.

“I’ve thought for a long time that they must also be giving us some kind of… I don’t know… brain-booster… but with so many pills, it’s impossible to tell which one it might be. Which one it is that makes us cannibals, or vampires, or both.” He paused, looking down at the improbable sunray. He extended his hands on both sides. Dinky took one, Stanley the other.

“Watch this,” Dinky said. “This is good.”

Ted closed his eyes. So did the other two. For a moment there was nothing to see but three men looking out over the dark desert toward the Cecil B. DeMille sunbeam… and they were looking, Roland knew. Even with their eyes shut.

The sunbeam winked out. For a space of perhaps a dozen seconds the Devar-Toi was as dark as the desert, and Thunderclap Station, and the slopes of Steek-Tete. Then that absurd golden glow came back on. Dinky uttered a harsh (but not dissatisfied) sigh and stepped back, disengaging from Ted. A moment later, Ted let go of Stanley and turned to Roland.

“You did that?” the gunslinger asked.

“The three of us together,” Ted said. “Mostly it’s Stanley. He’s an extremely powerful sender. One of the few things that terrify Prentiss and the low men and the taheen is when they lose their artificial sunlight. It happens more and more often, you know, and not always because we’re meddling with the machinery. The machinery is just…” He shrugged. “It’s running down.”

“Everything is,” Eddie said.

Ted turned to him, unsmiling. “But not fast enough, Mr. Dean. This fiddling with the remaining two Beams must stop, and very soon, or it will make no difference. Dinky, Stanley, and I will help you if we can, even if it means killing the rest of them.”

“Sure,” Dinky said with a hollow smile. “If the Rev. Jim Jones could do it, why not us?”

Ted gave him a disapproving glance, then looked back at Roland’s ka-tet. “Perhaps it won’t come to that. But if it does…” He stood up suddenly and seized Roland’s arm. “Are we cannibals?” he asked in a harsh, almost strident voice. “Have we been eating the children the Greencloaks bring from the Borderlands?”

Roland was silent.

Ted turned to Eddie. “I want to know.”

Eddie made no reply.

“Madam-sai?” Ted asked, looking at the woman who sat astride Eddie’s hip. “We’re prepared to help you. Will you not help me by telling me what I ask?”

“Would knowing change anything?” Susannah asked.

Ted looked at her for a moment longer, then turned to Jake. “You really could be my young friend’s twin,” he said. “Do you know that, son?”

“No, but it doesn’t surprise me,” Jake said. “It’s the way things work over here, somehow. Everything… um… fits.”

“Will you tell me what I want to know? Bobby would.”

So you can eat yourself alive? Jake thought. Eat yourself instead of them?

He shook his head. “I’m not Bobby,” he said. “No matter how much I might look like him.”

Ted sighed and nodded. “You stick together, and why would that surprise me? You’re ka-tet, after all.”

“We gotta go,” Dink told Ted. “We’ve already been here too long. It isn’t just a question of getting back for room-check; me n Stanley’ve got to trig their fucking telemetery so when Prentiss and The Wease check it they’ll say ‘Teddy B was there all the time. So was Dinky Earnshaw and Stanley Ruiz, no problem with those boys.’”

“Yes,” Ted agreed. “I suppose you’re right. Five more minutes?”

Dinky nodded reluctantly. The sound of a siren, made faint by distance, came on the wind, and the young man’s teeth showed in a smile of genuine amusement. “They get so upset when the sun goes in,” he said. “When they have to face up to what’s really around them, which is some fucked-up version of nuclear winter.”

Ted put his hands in his pockets for a moment, looking down at his feet, then up at Roland. “It’s time that this… this grotesque comedy came to an end. We three will be back tomorrow, if all goes well. Meanwhile, there’s a bigger cave about forty yards down the slope, and on the side away from Thunderclap Station and Algul Siento. There’s food and sleeping bags and a stove that runs on propane gas. There’s a map, very crude, of the Algul. I’ve also left you a tape recorder and a number of tapes. They probably don’t explain everything you’d like to know, but they’ll fill in many of the blank spots. For now, just realize that Blue Heaven isn’t as nice as it looks. The ivy towers are watchtowers. There are three runs of fence around the whole place. If you’re trying to get out from the inside, the first run you strike gives you a sting—”

“Like barbwire,” Dink said.

“The second one packs enough of a wallop to knock you out,” Ted went on. “And the third—”

“I think we get the picture,” Susannah said.

“What about the Children of Roderick?” Roland asked. “They have something to do with the Devar, for we met one on our way here who said so.”

Susannah looked at Eddie with her eyebrows raised. Eddie gave her a tell-you-later look in return. It was a simple and perfect bit of wordless communication, the sort people who love each other take for granted.

“Those wanks,” Dinky said, but not without sympathy. “They’re… what do they call em in the old movies? Trusties, I guess. They’ve got a little village about two miles beyond the station in that direction.” He pointed. “They do groundskeeping work at the Algul, and there might be three or four skilled enough to do roofwork… replacing shingles and such. Whatever contaminants there are in the air here, those poor shmucks are especially vulnerable to em. Only on them it comes out looking like radiation sickness instead of just pimples and eczema.”

“Tell me about it,” Eddie said, remembering poor old Chevin of Chayven: his sore-eaten face and urine-soaked robe.

“They’re wandering folken,” Ted put in. “Bedouins. I think they follow the railroad tracks, for the most part. There are catacombs under the station and Algul Siento. The Rods know their way around them. There’s tons of food down there, and twice a week they’ll bring it into the Devar on sledges. Mostly now that’s what we eat. It’s still good, but…” He shrugged.

“Things are falling down fast,” Dinky said in a tone of uncharacteristic gloom. “But like the man said, the wine’s great.”

“If I asked you to bring one of the Children of Roderick with you tomorrow,” Roland said, “could you do that?”

Ted and Dinky exchanged a startled glance. Then both of them looked at Stanley. Stanley nodded, shrugged, and spread his hands before him, palms down: Why, gunslinger?

Roland stood for a moment lost in thought. Then he turned to Ted. “Bring one with half a brain left in his head,” Roland instructed. “Tell him ‘Dan sur, dan tur, dan Roland, dan Gilead.’ Tell it back.”

Without hesitation, Ted repeated it.

Roland nodded. “If he still hesitates, tell him Chevin of Chayven says he must come. They speak a little plain, do they not?”

“Sure,” Dinky said. “But mister… you couldn’t let a Rod come up here and see you and then turn him free again. Their mouths are hung in the middle and run on both ends.”

“Bring one,” Roland said, “and we’ll see what we see. I have what my ka-mai Eddie calls a hunch. Do you ken hunch-think?”

Ted and Dinky nodded.

“If it works out, fine. If not… be assured that the fellow you bring will never tell what he saw here.”

“You’d kill him if your hunch doesn’t pan out?” Ted asked.

Roland nodded.

Ted gave a bitter laugh. “Of course you would. It reminds me of the part in Huckleberry Finn when Huck sees a steamboat blow up. He runs to Miss Watson and the Widow Douglas with the news, and when one of them asks if anyone was killed, Huck says with perfect aplomb, ‘No, ma’am, only a nigger.’ In this case we can say ‘Only a Rod. Gunslinger-man had a hunch, but it didn’t pan out.’”

Roland gave him a cold smile, one that was unnaturally full of teeth. Eddie had seen it before and was glad it wasn’t aimed at him. He said, “I thought you knew what the stakes were, sai Ted. Did I misunderstand?”

Ted met his gaze for a moment, then looked down at the ground. His mouth was working.

During this, Dinky appeared to be engaged in silent palaver with Stanley. Now he said: “If you want a Rod, we’ll get you one. It’s not much of a problem. The problem may be getting here at all. If we don’t…”

Roland waited patiently for the young man to finish. When he didn’t, the gunslinger asked: “If you don’t, what would you have us do?”

Ted shrugged. The gesture was such a perfect imitation of Dinky’s that it was funny. “The best you can,” he said. “There are also weapons in the lower cave. A dozen of the electric fireballs they call sneetches. A number of machine-guns, what I’ve heard some of the low men call speed-shooters. They’re U.S. Army AR-15s. Other things we’re not sure of.”

“One of them’s some kind of sci-fi raygun like in a movie,” Dinky said. “I think it’s supposed to disintegrate things, but either I’m too dumb to turn it on or the battery’s dead.” He turned anxiously to the white-haired man. “Five minutes are up, and more. We have to put an egg in our shoe and beat it, Tedster. Let’s chug.”

“Yes. Well, we’ll be back tomorrow. Perhaps by then you’ll have a plan.”

“You don’t?” Eddie asked, surprised.

“My plan was to run, young man. It seemed like a terribly bright idea at the time. I ran all the way to the spring of 1960. They caught me and brought me back, with a little help from my young friend Bobby’s mother. And now, we really must—”

“One more minute, do it please ya,” Roland said, and stepped toward Stanley. Stanley looked down at his feet, but his beard-scruffy cheeks once more flooded with color. And—

He’s shivering, Susannah thought. Like an animal in the woods, faced with its first human being.

Stanley looked perhaps thirty-five, but he could have been older; his face had the carefree smoothness Susannah associated with certain mental defects. Ted and Dinky both had pimples, but Stanley had none. Roland put his hands on the fellow’s forearms and looked earnestly at him. At first the gunslinger’s eyes met nothing but the masses of dark, curly hair on Stanley’s bowed head.

Dinky started to speak. Ted silenced him with a gesture.

“Will’ee not look me in the face?” Roland asked. He spoke with a gentleness Susannah had rarely heard in his voice. “Will’ee not, before you go, Stanley, son of Stanley? Sheemie that was?”

Susannah felt her mouth drop open. Beside her, Eddie grunted like a man who has been punched. She thought, But Roland’s old… so old! Which means that if this is the tavern-boy he knew in Mejis… the one with the donkey and the pink sombrera hat… then he must also be…

The man raised his face slowly. Tears were streaming from his eyes.

“Good old Will Dearborn,” he said. His voice was hoarse, and jigged up and down through the registers as a voice will do when it has lain long unused. “I’m so sorry, sai. Were you to pull your gun and shoot me, I’d understand. So I would.”

“Why do’ee say so, Sheemie?” Roland asked in that same gentle voice.

Stanley’s tears flowed faster. “You saved my life. Arthur and Richard, too, but mostly you, good old Will Dearborn who was really Roland of Gilead. And I let her die! Her that you loved! And I loved her, too!”

The man’s face twisted in agony and he tried to pull away from Roland. Yet Roland held him.

“None of that was your fault, Sheemie.”

“I should have died for her!” he cried. “I should have died in her place! I’m stupid! Foolish as they said!” He slapped himself across the face, first one way and then the other, leaving red weals. Before he could do it again, Roland seized the hand and forced it down to his side again.

“ ‘Twas Rhea did the harm,” Roland said.

Stanley—who had been Sheemie an eon ago—looked into Roland’s face, searching his eyes.

“Aye,” Roland said, nodding. “ ‘Twas the Cöos… and me, as well. I should have stayed with her. If anyone was blameless in the business, Sheemie—Stanley—it was you.”

“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 could now see the boy who had bustled about a long-ago tavern called the Travellers’ Rest, picking up empty beer schooners and dropping them into the wash-barrel which stood beneath the 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.”

Chapter VI:

The Master of Blue Heaven

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 thighs. 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 the mirror, and began to drool down its slightly 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 bottle 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—the scrape of a rock or a thorn—could lead to infection and death 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 earth 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 worse 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 with 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 the Hell of Darkness when his life was over, unless…

Unless there was nothing. This was an idea Pimli denied with 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 that all things 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.

“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?”

“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 through The 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 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 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.