"WITHOUT POWER REDUCTION IN SECTION ALPHA, TOTAL SYSTEM SHUTDOWN WILL OCCUR IN 25 SECONDS!"
So waking the baby hadn't done any good, at least not in terms of preventing a complete system crash. Time for Plan B.
She reached out for the absurd LABOR FORCE control-knob, the one that looked so much like the oven-dial on her mother's stove. Turning the dial back to 2 had been difficult, and had hurt like a bastard. Turning it the other way was easier, and there was no pain at all. What she felt was aneasing somewhere deep in her head, as if some network of muscles which had been flexed for hours was now letting go with a little cry of relief.
The blaring pulse of the Klaxon ceased.
Susannah turned LABOR FORCE to 8, paused there, then shrugged. What the hell, it was time to go for broke, get this over with. She turned the dial all the way to 10. The moment it was there, a great glossy pain hardened her stomach and then rolled lower, gripping her pelvis. She had to tighten her lips against a scream.
"POWER REDUCTION IN SECTION ALPHA HAS BEEN ACCOMPLISHED," said the voice, and then it dropped into a John Wayne drawl that Susannah knew all too well. "THANKS A WHOLE HEAP, LI'L COWGIRL. "
She had to tighten her lips against another scream - not pain this time but outright terror. It was all very well to remind herself Blaine the Mono was dead and this voice was coming from some nasty practical joker in her own subconscious, but that didn't stop the fear.
"LABOR. . . HAS COMMENCED," said the amplified voice, dropping the John Wayne imitation. "LABOR. . . HAS COMMENCED. " Then, in a horrible (and nasal) Bob Dylan drawl that set her teeth on edge, the voice sang: "HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU. . . BABE!. . . HAPPY BIRTHDAY. . . TO YOU! HAPPY BIRTHDAY. . . DEAR MORDRED. . . HAPPY BIRTHDAY. . . TO YOU!"
Susannah visualized a fire extinguisher mounted on the wall behind her, and when she turned it was, of course, right there (she had not imagined the little sign reading ONLY YOU AND SOMBRA CAN HELP PREVENT CONSOLE FIRES, however - that, along with a drawing of Shardik o' the Beam in a Smokey the Bear hat, was some other joker's treat). As she hurried across the cracked and uneven floor to get the extinguisher, skirting the fallen ceiling panels, another pain ripped into her, lighting her belly and thighs on fire, making her want to double over and bear down on the outrageous stone in her womb.
Not going to take long,she thought in a voice that was part Susannah and part Detta. No ma'am. This chap comin in on the express train!
But then the pain let up slightly. She snatched the extinguisher off the wall when it did, trained the slim black horn on the flaming control panel, and pressed the trigger. Foam billowed out, coating the flames. There was a baleful hissing sound and a smell like burning hair.
"THE FIRE. . . IS OUT," the Voice of the Dogan proclaimed. "THE FIRE. . . IS OUT. " And then changing, quick as a flash, to a plummy British Lord Haw-Haw accent:
"I SAY,JOLLY GOOD SHOW, SEW-ZANNAH, AB-SO-LUTELYBRILLLL-IANT! "
She lurched
across the minefield of the Dogan's floor again, seized the microphone, and pressed the transmit toggle. Above her, on one of the TV screens still operating, she could see that Mia was on the move again, crossing Sixtieth.
Then Susannah saw the green awning with the cartoon pig, and her heart sank. Not Sixtieth, but Sixty-first. The hijacking mommybitch had reached her destination.
"Eddie!" she shouted into the microphone. "Eddie or Roland!" And what the hell, she might as well make it a clean sweep. "Jake! Pere Callahan! We've reached the Dixie Pig and we're going to have this damn baby! Come for us if you can, but be careful!"
She looked up at the screen again. Mia was now on the Dixie Pig side of the street, peering at the green awning. Hesitating. Could she read the words DIXIE PIG? Probably not, but she could surely understand the cartoon. The smiling, smoking pig. And she wouldn't hesitate long in any case, now that her labor had started.
"Eddie, I have to go. I love you, sugar! Whatever else happens, you remember that! Never forget it!I love you! This is. . . " Her eye fell on the semicircular readout on the panel behind the mike. The needle had fallen out of the red. She thought it would stay in the yellow until the labor was over, then subside into the green.
Unless something went wrong, that was.
She realized she was still gripping the mike.
"This is Susannah-Mio, signing off. God be with you, boys. God and ka. "
She put the microphone down and closed her eyes.
Twelve
Susannah sensed the difference in Mia immediately. Although she'd reached the Dixie Pig and her labor had most emphatically commenced, Mia's mind was for once elsewhere. It had turned to Odetta Holmes, in fact, and to what Michael Schwerner had called the Mississippi Summer Project. (What the Oxford rednecks had calledhim was The Jewboy. ) The emotional atmosphere to which Susannah returned wasfraught, like still air before a violent September storm.
Susannah! Susannah, daughter of Dan!
Yes, Mia.
I agreed to mortality.
So you said.
And certainly Mia had looked mortal in Fedic. Mortal andterribly pregnant.
Yet I've missed most of what makes the short-time life worthwhile. Haven't I?The grief in that voice was awful; the surprise was even worse. And there's no time for you to tell me. Not now.
Go somewhere else,Susannah said, with no hope at all. Hail a cab, go to a hospital. We'll have it together, Mia. Maybe we can even raise it toge -
If I have it anywhere but here, it will die and we'll die with it. She spoke with utter certainty. And I willhave it. I've been cheated of all but my chap, and I willhave it. But. . . Susannah. . . before we go in. . . you spoke of your mother.
I lied. It was me in Oxford. Lying was easier than trying to explain time travel and parallel worlds.
Show me the truth. Show me your mother. Show me, I beg!
There was no time to debate this request pro and con; it was either do it or refuse on the spur of the moment. Susannah decided to do it.
Look,she said.
Thirteen
In the Land of Memory, the time is alwaysNow.
There is an Unfound Door
(O lost)
and when Susannah found it and opened it, Mia saw a woman with her dark hair pulled back from her face and startling gray eyes. There is a cameo brooch at the woman's throat. She's sitting at the kitchen table, this woman, in an eternal shaft of sun. In this memory it is always ten minutes past two on an afternoon in October of 1946, the Big War is over, Irene Daye is on the radio, and the smell is always gingerbread.
"Odetta, come and sit with me," says the woman at the table, she who is mother. "Have something sweet. You lookgood, girl. "
And she smiles.
O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again!
Fourteen
Prosaic enough, you would say, so you would. A young girl comes home from school with her book-bag in one hand and her gym-bag in the other, wearing her white blouse and her pleated St. Ann's tartan skirt and the knee-socks with the bows on the side (orange and black, the school colors). Her mother, sitting at the kitchen table, looks up and offers her daughter a piece of the gingerbread that just came out of the oven. It is only one moment in an unmarked million, a single atom of event in a lifetime of them. But it stole Mia's breath
(you lookgood,girl )
and showed her in a concrete way she had previously not understood how rich motherhood could be. . . if,that was, it was allowed to run its course uninterrupted.
The rewards?
Immeasurable.
In the endyou could be the woman sitting in the shaft of sun. You could be the one looking at the child sailing bravely out of childhood's harbor. You could be the wind in that child's unfurled sails.
You.
Odetta, come and sit with me.
Mia's breath began to hitch in her chest.
Have something sweet.
Her eyes fogged over, the smiling cartoon pig on the awning first doubling, then quadrupling.
You lookgood,girl.
Some time was better than no time at all. Even five years - or three - was better than no time at all. She couldn't read, hadn't been to Morehouse, hadn't been tono house, but she could do that much math with no trouble: three = better than none. Even one = better than none.
Oh. . .
Oh, but. . .
Mia thought of a blue-eyed boy stepping through a door, one that was found instead of lost. She thought of saying to himYou look good,son!
She began to weep.
What have I donewas a terrible question. What else couldI have done was perhaps even worse.
O Discordia!
Fifteen
This was Susannah's one chance to do something: now, while Mia stood at the foot of the steps leading up to her fate. Susannah reached into the pocket of her jeans and touched the turtle, thesk?ldpadda. Her brown fingers, separated from Mia's white leg by only a thin layer of lining, closed around it.
She pulled it out and flipped it behind her, casting it into the gutter. From her hand into the lap of ka.
Then she was carried up the three steps to the double doors of the Dixie Pig.
Sixteen
It was very dim inside and at first Mia could see nothing but murky, reddish-orange lights. Electricflambeaux of the sort that still lit some of the rooms in Castle Discordia. Her sense of smell needed no adjusting, however, and even as a fresh labor pain clamped her tight, her stomach reacted to the smell of roasting pork and cried out to be fed. Herchap cried out to be fed.
That's not pork, Mia,Susannah said, and was ignored.
As the doors were closed behind her - there was a man (or a manlike being) standing at each of them - she began to see better. She was at the head of a long, narrow dining room. White napery shone. On each table was a candle in an orange-tinted holder. They glowed like fox-eyes. The floor here in the foyer was black marble, but beyond thema?tre d 's stand there was a rug of darkest crimson.
Beside the stand was a sai of about sixty with white hair combed back from a lean and rather predatory face. It was the face of an intelligent man, but his clothes - the blaring yellow sportcoat, the red shirt, the black tie - were those of a used-car salesman or a gambler who specializes in rooking small-town rubes. In the center of his forehead was a red hole about an inch across, as if he had been shot at close range. It swam with blood that never overflowed onto his pallid skin.
At the tables in the dining room stood perhaps fifty men and half again as many women. Most of them were dressed in clothes as loud or louder than those of the white-haired gent. Big rings glared on fleshy fingers, diamond eardrops sparked back orange light from theflambeaux.