In any case, Mia had agreed to the dark man's terms. And really, how much sport could there have been in getting her to do that? She'd been made for motherhood, had arisen from thePrim with that imperative, had known it herself ever since seeing her first perfect human baby, the boy Michael. How could she have said no? Even if the offer had only been for three years, or for one, how? Might as well expect a long-time junkie to refuse a loaded spike when it was offered.
Mia had been taken into the Arc 16 Experimental Station. She'd been given a tour by the smiling, sarcastic (and undoubtedly frightening) Walter, who sometimes called himself Walter of End-World and sometimes Walter of All-World. She'd seen the great room filled with beds, awaiting the children who would come to fill them; at the head of each was a stainless-steel hood attached to a segmented steel hose. She did not like to think what the purpose of such equipment might be. She'd also been shown some of the passages under the Castle on the Abyss, and had been in places where the smell of death was strong and suffocating. She - there had been a red darkness and she -
"Were you mortal by then?" Susannah asked. "It sounds as though maybe you were."
"I was on my way," she said. "It was a process Walter calledbecoming. "
"All right. Go on."
But here Mia's recollections were lost in a dark fugue - not todash, but far from pleasant. A kind of amnesia, and it wasred. A color Susannah had come to distrust. Had the pregnant woman's transition from the world of the spirit to the world of the flesh - her trip to Mia - been accomplished through some other kind of doorway? She herself didn't seem to know. Only that there had been a time of darkness - unconsciousness, she supposed - and then she had awakened "...as you see me. Only not yet pregnant, of course."
According to Walter, Mia could not actually make a baby, even as a mortal woman. Carry, yes. Conceive, no. So it came to pass that one of the demon elementals had done a great service for the Crimson King, taking Roland's seed as female and passing it on to Susannah as male. And there had been another reason, as well. Walter hadn't mentioned it, but Mia had known.
"It's the prophecy," she said, looking into Fedic's deserted and shadowless street. Across the way, a robot that looked like Andy of the Calla stood silent and rusting in front of the Fedic Café, which promisedGOOD MEELS CHEEP .
"What prophecy?" Susannah asked.
" 'He who ends the line of Eld shall conceive a child of incest with his sister or his daughter, and the child will be marked, by his red heel shall you know him. It is he who shall stop the breath of the last warrior.' "
"Woman,I'm not Roland's sister, or his daughter, either! You maybe didn't notice a small but basic difference in the color of our hides, namely his beingwhite and mine beingblack. " But she thought she had a pretty good idea of what the prophecy meant, just the same. Families were made in many ways. Blood was only one of them.
"Did he not tell you what dinh means?" Mia asked.
"Of course. It means leader. If he was in charge of a whole country instead of just three scruffy-ass gunpuppies, it'd mean king."
"Leader and king, you say true. Now, Susannah, will you tell me that such words aren't just poor substitutes for another?"
Susannah made no reply.
Mia nodded as though she had, then winced when a fresh contraction struck. It passed, and she went on. "The sperm was Roland's. I believe it may have been preserved somehow by the old people's science while the demon elemental turned itself inside out and made man from woman, but that isn't the important part. The important part is that it lived and found the rest of itself, as ordained by ka."
"My egg."
"Your egg."
"When I was raped in the ring of stones."
"Say true."
Susannah sat, musing. Finally she looked up. "Seem to me that it's what I said before. You didn't like it then, not apt to like it now, but - girl, you just the baby-sitter."
There was no rage this time. Mia only smiled. "Who went on having her periods, even when she was being sick in the mornings? You did. And who's got the full belly today?I do. If there was a baby-sitter, Susannah of New York, it was you."
"How can that be? Do you know?"
Mia did.
Fourteen
The baby, Walter had told her, would betransmitted to Mia; sent to her cell by cell just as a fax is sent line by line.
Susannah opened her mouth to say she didn't know what a fax was, then closed it again. She understood thegist of what Mia was saying, and that was enough to fill her with a terrible combination of awe and rage. Shehad been pregnant. She was, in a real sense, pregnant right this minute. But the baby was being
(faxed)
sent to Mia. Was this a process that had started fast and slowed down, or started slow and speeded up? The latter, she thought, because as time passed she'd felt less pregnant instead of more. The little swelling in her belly had mostly flattened out again. And now she understood how both she and Mia could feel an equal attachment to the chap: it did, in fact, belong to both of them. Had been passed on like a...a blood transfusion.
Only when they want to take your blood and put it into someone else, they ask your permission. If they're doctors, that is, and not one of Pere Callahan's vampires. You're a lot closer to one of those, Mia, aren't you?
"Science or magic?" Susannah asked. "Which one was it that allowed you to steal my baby?"
Mia flushed a little at that, but when she turned to Susannah, she was able to meet Susannah's eyes squarely. "I don't know," she said. "Likely a mixture of both. And don't be so self-righteous! It's inme, not you. It's feeding off my bones and my blood, not yours."