“The universe,” the man in black said carelessly. He burped and threw the bones into the fire where they first glistened and then blackened. The wind above the cup of the golgotha keened and moaned.
“Universe?” the gunslinger said blankly. It was a word with which he was unfamiliar. His first thought was that the other was speaking poetry.
“You want the Tower,” the man in black said. It seemed to be a question.
“Yes.”
“Well, you shan’t have it,” the man in black said, and smiled with bright cruelty. “No one cares in the counsels of the great if you pawn your soul or sell it outright, Roland. I have an idea of how close to the edge that last pushed you. The Tower will kill you half a world away.”
“You know nothing of me,” the gunslinger said quietly, and the smile faded from the other’s lips.
“I made your father and I broke him,” the man in black said grimly. “I came to your mother as Marten—there’s a truth you always suspected, is it not?—and took her. She bent beneath me like a willow... although (this may comfort you) she never broke. In any case it was written, and it was. I am the furthest minion of he who now rules the Dark Tower, and Earth has been given into that king’s red hand.”
“Red? Why do you say red?”
“Never mind. We’ll not speak of him, although you’ll learn more than you cared to if you press on. What hurt you once will hurt you twice. This is not the beginning but the beginning’s end. You’d do well to remember that... but you never do.”
“I don’t understand.”
“No. You don’t. You never did. You never will. You have no imagination. You’re blind that way.”
“What did I see?” the gunslinger asked. “What did I see at the end? What was it?”
“What did it seem to be?”
The gunslinger was silent, thoughtful. He felt for his tobacco, but there was none. The man in black did not offer to refill his poke by either black magic or white. Later he might find more in his grow-bag, but later seemed very far away now.
“There was light,” the gunslinger said finally. “Great white light. And then—” He broke off and stared at the man in black. He was leaning forward, and an alien emotion was stamped on his face, writ too large for lies or denial. It was awe or wonder. Perhaps they were the same.
“You don’t know,” he said, and began to smile. “O great sorcerer who brings the dead to life. You don’t know. You’re a fake!”
“I know,” the man in black said. “But I don’t know... what.”
“White light,” the gunslinger repeated. “And then—a blade of grass. One single blade of grass that filled everything. And I was tiny. Infinitesimal.”
“Grass.” The man in black closed his eyes. His face looked drawn and haggard. “A blade of grass. Are you sure?”
“Yes.” The gunslinger frowned. “But it was purple.”
“Hear me now, Roland, son of Steven. Would you hear me?”
“Yes.”
And so the man in black began to speak.
V
The universe (he said) is the Great All, and offers a paradox too great for the finite mind to grasp. As the living brain cannot conceive of a nonliving brain—although it may think it can—the finite mind cannot grasp the infinite.
The prosaic fact of the universe’s existence alone defeats both the pragmatist and the romantic. There was a time, yet a hundred generations before the world moved on, when mankind had achieved enough technical and scientific prowess to chip a few splinters from the great stone pillar of reality. Even so, the false light of science (knowledge, if you like) shone in only a few developed countries. One company (or cabal) led the way in this regard; North Central Positronics, it called itself. Yet, despite a tremendous increase in available facts, there were remarkably few insights.
“Gunslinger, our many-times-great grandfathers conquered the-disease-which-rots, which they called cancer, almost conquered aging, walked on the moon—”
“I don’t believe that,” the gunslinger said flatly.
To this the man in black merely smiled and answered, “You needn’t. Yet it was so. They made or discovered a hundred other marvelous baubles. But this wealth of information produced little or no insight. There were no great odes written to the wonders of artificial insemination—having babies from frozen mansperm—or to the cars that ran on power from the sun. Few if any seemed to have grasped the truest principle of reality: new knowledge leads always to yet more awesome mysteries. Greater physiological knowledge of the brain makes the existence of the soul less possible yet more probable by the nature of the search. Do you see? Of course you don’t. You’ve reached the limits of your ability to comprehend. But never mind—that’s beside the point.”
“Whatisthe point, then?”
