Roland put an arm around the boy’s shoulders for a moment. “That we have a lot of things to talk about.”
“WE ARE KA-TET,” ROLAND began, “which means a group of people bound together by fate. The philosophers of my land said a ka-tet could only be broken by death or treachery. My great teacher, Cort, said that since death and treachery are also spokes on the wheel of ka, such a binding can never be broken. As the years pass and I see more, I come more and more to Cort’s way of looking at it. “Each member of a ka-tet is like a piece in a puzzle. Taken by itself, each piece is a mystery, but when they are put together, they make a picture … or part of a picture. It may take a great many ka-tets to finish one picture. You mustn’t be surprised if you discover your lives have been touching in ways you haven’t seen until now. For one thing, each of you three is capable of knowing each other’s thoughts—“
“What?” Eddie cried.
“It’s true. You share your thoughts so naturally that you haven’t even been aware it’s happening, but it has been. It’s easier for me to see, no doubt, because I am not a full member of this ka-tet—possibly because I am not from your world—and so cannot take part completely in the thought-sharing ability. But I can send. Susannah … do you remember when we were in the circle?” “Yes. You told me to let the demon go when you told me. But you didn’t say that out loud.”
“Eddie … do you remember when we were in the bear’s clearing, and the mechanical bat came at you?”
“Yes. You told me to get down.”
“He never opened his mouth, Eddie,” Susannah said. “Yes, you did! You yelled! I heard you, man!” “I yelled, all right, but I did it with my mind.” The gunslinger turned to Jake. “Do you remember? In the house?”
“When the board I was pulling on wouldn’t come up, you told me to pull on the other one. But if you can’t read my mind, Roland, how did you know what land of trouble I was in?”
“I saw. I heard nothing, but I saw—just a little, as if through a dirty window.” His eyes surveyed them. “This closeness and sharing of minds is called khef, a word that means many other things in the original tongue of the Old World—water, birth, and life-force are only three of them. Be aware of it. For now, that’s all I want.”
“Can you be aware of something you don’t believe in?” Eddie asked. Roland smiled. “Just keep an open mind.” “That I can do.”
“Roland?” It was Jake. “Do you think Oy might be part of our ka-tet?” Susannah smiled. Roland didn’t. “I’m not prepared to even guess right now, but I’ll tell you this, Jake—I’ve been thinking about your furry friend a good deal. Ka does not rule all, and coincidences still happen . . . but the sudden appearance of a billy-bumbler that still remembers people doesn’t seem completely coincidental to me.”
He glanced around at them.
“I’ll begin. Eddie will speak next, taking up from the place where I leave off. Then Susannah. Jake, you’ll speak last. All right?” They nodded.
“Fine,” Roland said. “We are ka-tet—one from many. Let the pala-ver begin.”
THE TALK WENT ON until sundown, stopping only long enough for them to eat a cold meal, and by the time it was over, Eddie felt as if he had gone twelve hard rounds with Sugar Ray Leonard. He no longer doubted that they had been “sharing khef,” as Roland put it; he and Jake actually seemed to have been living each other’s life in their dreams, as if they were two halves of the same whole. Roland began with what had happened under the mountains, where Jake’s first life in this world had ended. He told of his own palaver with the man in black, and Walter’s veiled words about a Beast and someone he called the Ageless Stranger. He told of the strange, daunting dream which had come to him, a dream in which the whole universe had been swallowed in a beam of fantastic white light. And how, at the end of that dream, there had been a single blade of purple grass. Eddie glanced sideways at Jake and was stunned by the knowledge— the recognition—in the boy’s eyes.
ROLAND HAD BABBLED PARTS of this story to Eddie in his time of delir-ium, but it was entirely new to Susannah, and she listened with wide eyes. As Roland repeated the things Walter had told him, she caught glints of her own world, like reflections in a smashed mirror: automobiles, cancer, rockets to the moon, artificial insemination. She had no idea who the Beast might be, but she recognized the name of the Ageless Stranger as a variation upon the name of Merlin, the magician who had supposedly orchestrated the career of King Arthur. Curiouser and curiouser.
Roland told of how he had awakened to find Walter long years dead—time had somehow slipped forward, perhaps a hundred years, per-haps five hundred. Jake listened in fascinated silence as the gunslinger told of reaching the edge of the Western Sea, of how he had lost two of the fingers on his right hand, and how he had drawn Eddie and Susannah before encountering Jack Mort, the dark third.
The gunslinger motioned to Eddie, who took up the tale with the coming of the great bear.
“Shardik?” Jake interjected. “But that’s the name of a book! A book in our world! It was written by the man who wrote that famous book about the rabbits—” “Richard Adams!” Eddie shouted. “And the book about the bunnies was Watership Down! I knew I knew that name! But how can that be, Roland? How is it that the people in your world know about things in ours?” “There are doors, aren’t there?” Roland responded. “Haven’t we seen four of them already? Do you think they never existed before, or never will again?” “But—“