Song of Susannah

Never since crossing the worlds had Susa

“Tell me how your chap can be Roland’s son, for I would hear.”

“Aye, ’tis a good trick, but one the old people of River Crossing could have explained to you, I’ve no doubt.”

Susa

“Because you are possessed,” Mia said, “and I am your possessor, sure. I can look through any of your memories that I like. I can read what your eyes see. Now be quiet and listen if you would learn, for I sense our time has grown short.”

This is what Susa

“There are six Beams, as you did say, but there are twelve Guardians, one for each end of each Beam. This—for we’re still on it—is the Beam of Shardik. Were you to go beyond the Tower, it would become the Beam of Maturin, the great turtle upon whose shell the world rests.

“Similarly, there are but six demon elementals, one for each Beam. Below them is the whole invisible world, those creatures left behind on the beach of existence when thePrim receded. There are speaking demons, demons of house which some call ghosts, ill-sick demons which some—makers of machines and worshippers of the great false god rationality, if it does ya—call disease. Many small demons but only six demon elementals. Yet as there are twelve Guardians for the six Beams, there are twelve demonaspects, for each demon elemental is both male and female.”

Susa

As the hyenas—or whatever they were—cackled, she said: “You’re telling me that the demon elementals are hermaphrodites. That’s why they’re sterile, because they’re both.”

“Aye. In the place of the Oracle, your dinh had intercourse with one of these demon elementals in order to gain information, what’s calledprophecy in the High Speech. He had no reason to think the Oracle was anything but a succubus, such as those that sometimes exist in the lonely places—”

“Right,” Susa

“If you like,” Mia said, and this time when she offered Susa

“The demon took the gunslinger’s seed as female, and gave it back to you as male.”

“When we were in the speaking ring,” Susa

And how had she gotten through it? By summoning Detta, of course. By calling on the bitch, victor in a hundred nasty little sex-skirmishes fought in the parking lots of two dozen roadhouses and county-line honky-tonks. Detta, who had trapped it—

“It tried to get away,” she told Mia. “Once it figured out it had its cock caught in a damn Chinese finger-puller, it tried to get away.”

“If it had wanted to get away,” Mia said quietly, “itwould have.”

“Why would it bother fooling me?” Susa

Roland’sbaby.

Roland’s doom.

“You know everything you need to know about the chap,” Mia said. “Don’t you?”

Susa

“I’ve kept my promise,” Mia said. “Let’s go back. The cold’s not good for the chap.”

“Just a minute longer,” Susa

“Eat and ask and be quick about both.”

“Who areyou ? Who are you really? Are you this demon? Does she have a name, by the way? She and he, do they have a name?”

“No,” Mia said. “Elementals have no need of names; they are what they are. Am I a demon? Is that what you’d know? Yar, I suppose I am. Or I was. All that is vague now, like a dream.”

“And you’re not me…or are you?”

Mia didn’t answer. And Susa

“Mia?” Low. Musing.

Mia was hunkering against the merlon with her serape tucked between her knees. Susa

“You ain’t nothing but the baby-sitter, girl.”

The reaction was all she’d hoped for, and more. Mia’s face registered shock, then anger. Hell,fury. “Youlie! I’m this chap’smother! And when he comes, Susa

“Oh, yes,” Susa

“Nay! I shall have the raising of him, for so they have promised!” Mia crossed her arms protectively over her belly. “He’s mine, I’m his mother and I shall have the raising of him!”

“Girl, why don’t you getreal? Do you think they’llkeep their word?Them? How can you see so much and not see that?”

Susa

“Why would they not let me raise him?” Mia asked shrilly. “Who better? Who better than Mia, who was made for only two things, to bear a son and raise him?”

“But you’re not just you,” Susa

“I have their promise,” she said. Her face was downcast, set in its stubbor

“Turn it around,” Susa

“I’d tell you to stop your blabbering tongue!”

“Who are you, really? Where in the hell did they get you? Was it like a newspaper ad you answered, ‘Surrogate Mother Wanted, Good Benefits, Short Term of Employment’? Who are you, really?”

“Shut up!”

Susa

“Come on!” she said, her voice taking on the rasping tones of Detta Walker. “Come on and take off yo’ blindfold, honeybunch, jus’ like you made me take off mine! Tell the truth and spit in the devil’s eye!Who the fuck are you? ”