The Dark Tower

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 for sockets 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 read WE MUST ALL WORK TOGETHER TO CREATE A FIRE-FREE ENVIRONMENT and another reading ALL HAIL THE CAN-TOI, Finli said, very low: “They are so 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 measured darks: 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 had been 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.

“Are you?”

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 shoe-button 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 meant I tell you the truth. “This irrational feeling.”