The Dark Tower

But Finli didn’t back down. He rarely did, which was one of the things Pimli liked about him. “If you don’t want folk to look at you like a child, then you mustn’t act like one. There’ve been rumors of gunslingers coming out of Mid-World to save the day for a thousand years and more. And never a single authenticated sighting. Personally, I’d be more apt to expect a visit from your Man Jesus.”

“The Rods say—”

Finli winced as if this actually hurt his head. “Don’t start with what the Rods say. Surely you respect my intelligence — and your own — more than that. Their brains have rotted even faster than their skins. As for the Wolves, let me advance a radical concept: it doesn’t matter where they are or what’s happened to them. We’ve got enough booster to finish the job, and that’s all I care about.”

The Security Head stood for a moment at the steps that led up to the Damli House porch. He was looking after the two men on the identical bikes and frowning thoughtfully. “Brautigan’s been a lot of trouble.”

“Hasn’t he just!” Pimli laughed ruefully. “But his troublesome days are over. He’s been told that his special friends from Connecticut — a boy named Robert Garfield and a girl named Carol Gerber — will die if he makes any more trouble. Also he’s come to realize that while a number of his fellow Breakers regard him as a mentor, and some, such as the softheaded boy he’s with, revere him, no one is interested in his…philosophical ideas, shall we say. Not any longer, if they ever were. And I had a talk with him after he came back. A heart-to-heart.”

This was news to Finli. “About what?”

“Certain facts of life. Sai Brautigan has come to understand that his unique powers no longer matter as much as they once did. It’s gone too far for that. The remaining two Beams are going to break with him or without him. And he knows that at the end there’s apt to be…confusion. Fear and confusion.” Pimli nodded slowly. “Brautigan wants to be here at the end, if only to comfort such as Stanley Ruiz when the sky tears open.

“Come, let’s have another look at the tapes and the telemetry. Just to be safe.”

They went up the wide wooden steps of Damli House, side by side.

Five

Two of the can-toi were waiting to escort the Master and his Security Chief downstairs. Pimli reflected on how odd it was that everyone — Breakers and Algul Siento staff alike — had come to call them “the low men.” Because it was Brautigan who coined the phrase. “Speak of angels, hear the flutter of their wings,” Prentiss’s beloved Ma might have said, and Pimli supposed that if there were true manimals in these final days of the true world, then the can-toi would fill the bill much better than the taheen. If you saw them without their weird living masks, you would have thought they were taheen, with the heads of rats. But unlike the true taheen, who regarded humes (less a few remarkable exceptions such as Pimli himself) as an inferior race, the can-toi worshipped the human form as divine. Did they wear the masks in worship? They were closemouthed on the subject, but Pimli didn’t think so. He thought they believed they were becoming human — which was why, when they first put on their masks (these were living flesh, grown rather than made), they took a hume name to go with their hume aspect. Pimli knew they believed they would somehow replace human beings after the Fall…although how they could believe such a thing was entirely beyond him. There would be heaven after the Fall, that was obvious to anyone who’d ever read the Book of Revelation…but Earth?

Some new Earth, perhaps, but Pimli wasn’t even sure of that.

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.”