voice in their heads, a voice welcoming them to the wonderful world of North Central Positronics and the Sombra Group. Their crying would stop, their eyes fill with hope. Perhaps, they would think the nurses in their white uniforms were good in spite of their hairy, scary faces and yellow fangs. As good as the voice of the nice lady.
Then the hum would begin, quickly building in volume as it moved toward the middle of their heads, and this room would again fill with their frightened screams-
"Madam? Are you all right?"
"Yes. Why do you ask, Nigel?"
"I believe you shivered."
"Never mind. Just get me to the door to New York, the one that still works."
SIX
Once they left the infirmary, Nigel bore her rapidly down first one corridor and then another. They came to escalators that looked as if they had been frozen in place for centuries. Halfway down one of them, a steel ball on legs flashed its amber eyes at Nigel and cried, "Hmop! Hmvp!" Nigel responded "Howp, hmvp!"
in return and then said to Susannah (in the confidential tone certain gossipy people adopt when discussing Those Who Are Unfortunate), "He's a Mech Foreman and has been stuck there tor over eight hundred years-fried boards, I imagine. Poor soul! But he still tries to do his best."
Twice Nigel asked her if she believed his eyes could be replaced. The first time Susannah told him she didn't know.
The second time-feeling a little sorry for him (definitely him now, not it)-she asked what he thought.
"I think my days of service are nearly over," he said, and then added something that made her arms tingle with gooseflesh:
"O Discordia!"
The Diem Brothers are dead, she thought, remembering-had it been a dream? a vision? a glimpse of her Tower?-something from her time with Mia. Or had it been her time in Oxford, Mississippi? Or both? Papa Doc Duvalier is dead. Christa McAuliffe is dead. Stephen King is dead, popular writer killed while taking afternoon walk, O Discordia, O lost!
But who was Stephen King? Who was Christa McAuliffe, for that matter?
Once they passed a low man who had been present at the birth of Mia's monster. He lay curled on a dusty corridor floor like a human shrimp with his gun in one hand and a hole in his head. Susannah thought he'd committed suicide. In a way, she supposed that made sense. Because things had gone wrong, hadn't they? And unless Mia's baby found its way to where it belonged on its own, Big Red Daddy was going to be mad.
Might be mad even if Mordred somehow found his way home.
His other father. For this was a world of twins and mirror images, and Susannah now understood more about what she'd seen than she really wanted to. Mordred too was a twin, a Jekyll-and-Hyde creature with two selves, and he-or it-had the faces of two fathers to remember.
They came upon a number of other corpses; all looked like suicides to Susannah. She asked Nigel if he could tell-by their smells, or something-but he claimed he could not.
"How many are still here, do you think?" she asked. Her blood had had time to cool a litde, and now she felt nervous.
"Not many, madam. I believe that most have moved on.
Very likely to the Derva."
"What's the Derva?"
Nigel said he was dreadfully sorry, but that information was restricted and could be accessed only with the proper password.
Susannah tried chassit, but it was no good. Neither was nineteen or, her final try, ninety-nine. She supposed she'd have to be content with just knowing most of them were gone.
Nigel turned left, into a new corridor with doors on both sides. She got him to stop long enough to try one of them, but there was nothing of particular note inside. It was an office, and long-abandoned, judging by the thick fall of dust. She was interested to see a poster of madly jitterbugging teenagers on one wall. Beneath it, in large blue letters, was this:
SflY, VOU COOL CRTS fillD BOPPIIV KITTIES!
I ROCKED fiTTHE HOP WITH fllflll FREED!
ClEUElflllD, OHIO, OCTOBER 1954
Susannah was pretty sure that the performer on stage was Richard Penniman. Club-crawling folkies such as herself affected disdain for anyone who rocked harder than Phil Ochs, but Suze had always had a soft spot in her heart for Little Richard; good golly, Miss Molly, you sure like to ball. She guessed it was a Detta thing.
Did these people once upon a time use their doors to vacation in various tuheres and whens