Wolves of the Calla (81 page)

Movement on one of the screens caught his eye. He looked at it and saw Benny’s Da’ and Andy the Messenger Robot coming over the hilltop guarded by the cactus sentries. As he watched, the spiny barrel arms swung inward to block the road—and, perhaps, impale the prey. Andy, however, had no reason to fear cactus spines. He swung an arm and broke one of the barrels off halfway down its length. It fell into the dust, spurting white goo. Maybe it wasn’t sap at all, Jake thought. Maybe it
was blood. In any case, the cactus on the other side swiveled away in a hurry. Andy and Ben Slightman stopped for a moment, perhaps to discuss this. The screen’s resolution wasn’t clear enough to show if the human’s mouth was moving or not.

Jake was seized by an awful, throat-closing panic. His body suddenly seemed too heavy, as if it were being tugged by the gravity of a giant planet like Jupiter or Saturn. He couldn’t breathe; his chest lay perfectly flat.
This is what Goldilocks would have felt like,
he thought in a faint and distant way,
if she had awakened in the little bed that was just right to hear the Three Bears coming back in downstairs
. He hadn’t eaten the porridge, he hadn’t broken Baby Bear’s chair, but he now knew too many secrets. They boiled down to
one
secret. One monstrous secret.

Now they were coming down the road. Coming to the Dogan.

Oy was looking up at him anxiously, his long neck stretched to the max, but Jake could barely see him. Black flowers were blooming in front of his eyes. Soon he would faint. They would find him stretched out here on the floor. Oy might try to protect him, but if Andy didn’t take care of the bumbler, Ben Slightman would. There were four dead rock-cats out there and Benny’s Da’ had dispatched at least one of them with his trusty bah. One small barking billy-bumbler would be no problem for him.

Would you be so cowardly, then?
Roland asked inside his head.
But why would they kill such a coward as you? Why would they not just send you west with the broken ones who have forgotten the faces of their fathers?

That brought him back. Most of the way, at least.
He took a huge breath, yanking in air until the bottoms of his lungs hurt. He let it out in an explosive whoosh. Then he slapped himself across the face, good and hard.

“Ake!”
Oy cried in a reproving—almost shocked—voice.

“S’okay,” Jake said. He looked at the monitors showing the galley and the bunkroom and decided on the latter. There was nothing to hide behind or under in the galley. There might be a closet, but what if there wasn’t? He’d be screwed.

“Oy, to me,” he said, and crossed the humming room beneath the bright white lights.

The bunkroom held the ghostly aroma of ancient spices: cinnamon and clove. Jake wondered—in a distracted, back-of-the-mind way—if the tombs beneath the Pyramids had smelled this way when the first explorers had broken into them. From the upper bunk in the corner, the reclining skeleton grinned at him, as if in welcome.
Feel like a nap, little trailhand? I’m taking a long one!
Its ribcage shimmered with silky overlays of spiderweb, and Jake wondered in that same distracted way how many generations of spider-babies had been born in that empty cavity. On another pillow lay a jawbone, prodding a ghostly, ghastly memory from the back of the boy’s mind. Once, in a world where he had died, the gunslinger had found a bone like that. And used it.

The forefront of his mind pounded with two cold questions and one even colder resolve. The
questions were how long it would take them to get here and whether or not they would discover his pony. If Slightman had been riding a horse of his own, Jake was sure the amiable little pony would have whinnied a greeting already. Luckily, Slightman was on foot, as he had been last time. Jake would have come on foot himself, had he known his goal was less than a mile east of the river. Of course, when he’d snuck away from the Rocking B, he hadn’t even been sure that he
had
a goal.

The resolve was to kill both the tin-man and the flesh-and-blood man if he was discovered. If he could, that was. Andy might be tough, but those bulging blue-glass eyes looked like a weak point. If he could blind him—

There’ll be water if God wills it,
said the gunslinger who now always lived in his head, for good and ill.
Your job now is to hide if you can. Where?

Not in the bunks. All of them were visible in the monitor covering this room and there was no way he could impersonate a skeleton. Under one of the two bunk-stacks at the rear? Risky, but it would serve . . . unless . . .

Jake spied another door. He sprang forward, depressed the lever-handle, and pulled the door open. It was a closet, and closets made fine hiding places, but this one was filled with jumbles of dusty electronic equipment, top to bottom. Some of it fell out.

“Beans!” he whispered in a low, urgent voice. He picked up what had fallen, tossed it high and low, then shut the closet door again. Okay, it would have to be under one of the beds—

“WELCOME TO ARC QUADRANT OUTPOST 16,” boomed the recorded voice. Jake flinched, and saw another door, this one to his left and standing partway open. Try the door or squeeze under one of the two tiers of bunks at the rear of the room? He had time to try one bolthole or the other, but not both. “THIS IS A MEDIUM SECURITY OUTPOST.”

Jake went for the door, and it was just as well he went when he did, because Slightman didn’t let the recording finish its spiel. “Ninety-nine,” came his voice from the loudspeakers, and the recording thanked him.

It was another closet, this one empty except for two or three moldering shirts in one corner and a dust-caked poncho slumped on a hook. The air was almost as dusty as the poncho, and Oy uttered three fast, delicate sneezes as he padded in.

Jake dropped to one knee and put an arm around Oy’s slender neck. “No more of that unless you want to get us both killed,” he said. “You be quiet, Oy.”

“Kiyit Oy,” the bumbler whispered back, and winked. Jake reached up and pulled the door back to within two inches of shut, as it had been before. He hoped.

He could hear them quite clearly—
too
clearly. Jake realized there were mikes and speakers all over this place. The idea did nothing for his peace of mind. Because if he and Oy could hear
them
. . .

It was the cactuses they were talking about, or
rather that Slightman was talking about. He called them boom-flurry, and wanted to know what had gotten them all fashed.

“Almost certainly more rock-cats, sai,” Andy said in his complacent, slightly prissy voice. Eddie said Andy reminded him of a robot named C3PO in
Star Wars,
a movie to which Jake had been looking forward. He had missed it by less than a month. “It’s their mating season, you know.”

“Piss on that,” Slightman said. “Are you telling me boom-flurry don’t know rock-cats from something they can actually catch and eat? Someone’s been out here, I tell you. And not long since.”

A cold thought slipped into Jake’s mind: had the floor of the Dogan been dusty? He’d been too busy gawking at the control panels and TV monitors to notice. If he and Oy had left tracks, those two might have noticed already. They might only be pretending to have a conversation about the cactuses while they actually crept toward the bunkroom door.

Jake took the Ruger out of the docker’s clutch and held it in his right hand with his thumb on the safety.

“A guilty conscience doth make cowards of us all,” Andy said in his complacent, just-thought-you’d-like-to-know voice. “That’s my free adaptation of a—”

“Shut up, you bag of bolts and wires,” Slightman snarled. “I—” Then he screamed. Jake felt Oy stiffen against him, felt his fur begin to rise. The bumbler started to growl. Jake slipped a hand around his snout.

“Let go!” Slightman cried out. “Let go of me!”

“Of course, sai Slightman,” Andy said, now sounding solicitous. “I only pressed a small nerve in your elbow, you know. There would be no lasting damage unless I applied at least twenty foot-pounds of pressure.”

“Why in the hell would you do that?” Slightman sounded injured, almost whiny. “En’t I doing all you could want, and more? En’t I risking my life for my boy?”

“Not to mention a few little extras,” Andy said silkily. “Your spectacles . . . the music machine you keep deep down in your saddlebag . . . and, of course—”

“You know why I’m doing it and what’d happen to me if I was found out,” Slightman said. The whine had gone out of his voice. Now he sounded dignified and a little weary. Jake listened to that tone with growing dismay. If he got out of this and had to squeal on Benny’s Da’, he wanted to squeal on a villain. “Yar, I’ve taken a few little extras, you say true, I say thankya. Glasses, so I can see better to betray the people I’ve known all my life. A music machine so I won’t have to hear the conscience you prate about so easy and can get to sleep at night. Then you pinch something in my arm that makes me feel like my by-Riza eyes are going to fall right out of my by-Riza
head
.”

“I allow it from the rest of them,” Andy said, and now his voice had changed. Jake once more thought of Blaine, and once more his dismay grew. What if Tian Jaffords heard
this
voice? What if Vaughn Eisenhart heard it? Overholser? The rest of the
folken
? “They heap contumely on my head like hot coals and never do I raise a word o’
protest, let alone a hand. ‘Go here, Andy. Go there, Andy. Stop yer foolish singing, Andy. Stuff yer prattle. Don’t tell us of the future, because we don’t want to hear it.’ So I don’t, except of the Wolves, because they’d hear what makes em sad and I’d tell em, yes I would; to me each tear’s a drop of gold. ‘You’re nobbut a stupid pile of lights n wires,’ they say. ‘Tell us the weather, sing the babby to sleep, then get t’hell out o’ here.’ And I allow it. Foolish Andy am I, every child’s toy and always fair game for a tongue-whipping. But I won’t take a tongue-whipping from
you,
sai. You hope to have a future in the Calla after the Wolves are done with it for another few years, don’t you?”

“You know I do,” Slightman said, so low Jake could barely hear him. “And I deserve it.”

“You and your son, both say thankya, passing your days in the Calla, both say commala! And that can happen, but it depends on more than the death of the outworlders.
It depends on my silence
. If you want it, I demand respect.”

“That’s absurd,” Slightman said after a brief pause. From his place in the closet, Jake agreed wholeheartedly. A robot demanding respect
was
absurd. But so was a giant bear patrolling an empty forest, a Morlock thug trying to unravel the secrets of dipolar computers, or a train that lived only to hear and solve new riddles. “And besides, hear me I beg, how can I respect you when I don’t even respect myself?”

There was a mechanical click in response to this, very loud. Jake had heard Blaine make a similar sound when he—or it—had felt the absurd closing in, threatening to fry his logic circuits.
Then Andy said: “No answer, nineteen. Connect and report, sai Slightman. Let’s have done with this.”

“All right.”

There were thirty or forty seconds’ worth of keyboard-clatter, then a high, warbling whistle that made Jake wince and Oy whine far back in his throat. Jake had never heard a sound quite like it; he was from the New York of 1977, and the word
modem
would have meant nothing to him.

The shriek cut off abruptly. There was a moment’s silence. Then: “THIS IS ALGUL SIENTO. FINLI O’ TEGO HERE. PLEASE GIVE YOUR PASSWORD. YOU HAVE TEN SEC—”

“Saturday,” Slightman replied, and Jake frowned. Had he ever heard that happy weekend word on this side? He didn’t think so.

“THANK YOU. ALGUL SIENTO ACKNOWLEDGES. WE ARE ONLINE.” There was another brief, shrieking whistle. Then: “REPORT, SATURDAY.”

Slightman told of watching Roland and “the younger one” going up to the Cave of the Voices, where there was now some sort of door, very likely conjured by the Manni. He said he’d used the far-seer and thus gotten a very good look—

“Telescope,” Andy said. He had reverted to his slightly prissy, complacent voice. “Such are called telescopes.”

“Would
you
care to make my report, Andy?” Slightman inquired with cold sarcasm.

“Cry pardon,” Andy said in a long-suffering voice. “Cry pardon, cry pardon, go on, go on, as ye will.”

There was a pause. Jake could imagine Slightman glaring at the robot, the glare robbed of its ferocity by the way the foreman would have to crane his neck in order to deliver it. Finally he went on.

“They left their horses below and walked up. They carried a pink sack which they passed from hand to hand, as if ’twere heavy. Whatever was in it had square edges; I could make that out through the telescope far-seer. May I offer two guesses?”

“YES.”

“First, they might have been putting two or three of the Pere’s most valuable books in safekeeping. If that’s the case, a Wolf should be sent to destroy them after the main mission’s accomplished.”

“WHY?” The voice was perfectly cold. Not a human being’s voice, Jake was sure of that. The sound of it made him feel weak and afraid.

“Why, as an example, do it please ya,” Slightman said, as if this should have been obvious. “As an example to the priest!”

“CALLAHAN WILL VERY SOON BE BEYOND EXAMPLES,” the voice said. “WHAT IS YOUR OTHER GUESS?”

When Slightman spoke again, he sounded shaken. Jake hoped the traitor son of a bitch
was
shaken. He was protecting his son, sure, his only son, but why he thought that gave him the right—

“It may have been maps,” Slightman said. “I’ve thought long and long that a man who has books is apt to have maps. He may have given em maps of the Eastern Regions leading into Thunderclap—they haven’t been shy about saying that’s where
they plan to head next. If it is maps they took up there, much good may they do em, even if they live. Next year north’ll be east, and likely the year after it’ll swap places with south.”