Shardik

[BillyxRansom]

the bear, shardik. one of the guardians of the beam, yes?

the beam that is necessary for the tower's existence?


i hope someone knows where i am going with this....

[Brainslinger]

the bear, shardik. one of the guardians of the beam, yes?

Yes. Since the great old ones recreated the beam portals and (probably) the guardians, he might be a replacement of the original guardian that came before. (I don't know what happed to the original, though. He might still exist as a spiritual entity or even be part of the same cybernetic Shardik in some way. I'm sure he existed before the cyborg was created though.)


the beam that is necessary for the tower's existence?
Yes. One of them.


i hope someone knows where i am going with this....
Not really. (Not meant to be cheeky. I understood your questions if that's what you mean.)

[Letti]

For my part I haven't got the faintest idea.
Could we get some clues..?

[BillyxRansom]

Well if it is a guardian of the beam, why would they destroy it?? Aren't they supposed to regard the guardians as "friendlies"?

Sorry if
a) this question is dumb
b) this came off worse than i hoped

[Letti]

I don't think it functioned as a guardian anymore... it was very sick and got useless. Time killed it. I am sure if it had had any use they would have tried to save it but this way they made it a favour.
I remember some of them felt sorry for it.

[flaggwalkstheline]

I see what ur getting at: if roland n his kat-tet killed the guardian did it hurt the beam?
and the answer is no
remember it wasnt the real guardian, it may have functioned just like it for a long time but it was made by humans and eventually broke down because science is unable to create a perfect facsimile of magic, north central postitronics came pretty close but not close enough

[Brainslinger]

Besides it was as much self defence as anything, and they are gunslingers! Remember Eddie was stuck up a tree with it clamouring for his blood.

[BillyxRansom]

Besides it was as much self defence as anything, and they are gunslingers! Remember Eddie was stuck up a tree with it clamouring for his blood.

That's true, that was one thing I considered, but I guess I just didn't understand how they couldn't have managed to form the association that they were there to protect the Beam, but if that wasn't the real Guardian, then I guess that settles it. Huh. *shrugs*

[LadyHitchhiker]

I thought this was a great question, and had always wondered this myself to some extent.

Why would they make him as a guardian to begin with, if they didn't really need him to guard him? Excellent question.

[Myrtok]

Weren't the beams themselves, as well as the Guardians, just mechanical contructs made by the Great Old Ones in an effort to hold the world together once it had started slipping? I mean, as a guardian, Shardik wasn't much. A single pistol shot took him down. I got the idea that the GOOs knew they were going to pass on, and the Shardik robot was just there to keep the future generations of "primitives" away.

I think he was actually just named after the "magical" guardian from fairy tales.

[Brainslinger]

Weren't the beams themselves, as well as the Guardians, just mechanical contructs made by the Great Old Ones in an effort to hold the world together once it had started slipping?

If you read on, the origin of the Beams is answered in later books. Song of Susannah mainly.

As for the guardians, I think they might have started off as spiritual beings. I think the Great Old Ones created cybernetic constructs based around them.

Whether the original guardians still exist or have moved on, I don't know. The book IT certainly suggests the Turtle is a goner. His influence is felt in these books though so I'm not sure about that.

[pathoftheturtle]

There certainly is a suggestion from It, but what's suggested isn't certain.


If you read on, the origin of the Beams is answered in later books. Song of Susannah mainly.Yar.
The point of this thread, to me, supports the idea that Roland does believe that the Tower is gone beyond saving. In the earlier books, his world seemed more emphatically degraded, and any reason was very unclear. The evil eyes in Eddie's first vision of the Dark Tower, for example, hadn't yet been ascribed to the Crimson King. I think it's quite possible that S.K. himself hadn't yet decided the source of the corruption, or how deep it ran. Roland thought that if he couldn't get to the heart of things, details would't matter.

[fatbrett2]

Here's the deal - Shardik/Mir was created to guard the portal by the same Great Old shortsighted dolts who got the worlds into this mess in the first place by replacing magic with technology. While it is hard to see what he might have been meant to protect the portal FROM, Shardik certainly thought that humans were the evil to be guarded against.

Obviously Shardik had gone batshit insane and was being eaten alive by parasites, and in any case, he did nothing at all about the very serious threat to the beam (and thus the portal) posed by the breakers. It's safe to say he was no longer capable of performing his duties, if he ever had been in the first place. He was, from the day he was assembled, a bad idea conceived by a group of people who had nothing BUT bad ideas. Their enormous egos led them to interfere in the harmonious workings of the universe(s) and Shardik was but one of their tools.

Hax says the Guardians were the last of the inventions of the Great Old Ones, an attempt to atone for the destruction they'd brought to the world. The immediate actions of Shardik once he was made (namely, killing everyone he saw) indicate that the intention was for him to erase the human presence near the portal.

Particularly in light of the much-reduced human population of Roland's world and the fact that Shardik (unlike the portal) was a human creation, he has outlived what little usefulness he may have had.

BEAM SAYS THANKYA!

As for Roland et al killing a friend of the beam, don't forget Roland's original quest - his only quest - is to reach, enter, and climb the Tower. The mission only expands to protecting the Tower in the latter half of the series. Even then, Roland doesn't care about the beams in-and-of-themselves. When he takes on the task of saving all of existence by protecting the beams and tower, there is only one reason he does so: If the universe(s) come(s) to an end, he won't exist, and guys that don't exist can't get to the Tower (and the Tower won't be there anyway, because it won't exist either).

Saving the world(s) is an irrelevant bonus prize for Roland, and he couldn't care less about it. He never has the best interests of the beams, the ka-tet, or the Tower, in-and-of-themselves, in mind.

Everything he does, he does it in the interest of reaching, entering, and climbing the Tower. Sometimes, two or more of these interests coincide, but this truly is just coincidence. He says as much in the last book, but it was never a secret.

[Brainslinger]

Spoilers for later books:

I've often wondered why The Crimson King didn't send his agents to destroy the portal machine rather than setting the Breakers on the Beam, particularly as it seemed to be breaking down. I suppose one explanation could be that since the Beam and probably the portal existed before the machine took over he couldn't be sure that would work, i.e. the beams could just revert back to their magic/prim counterparts... so he took the more direct approach.


I got the impression King's ideas concerning the Beams changed a bit as the series progressed though. Not that any of it is particularly contradictory.

[fatbrett2]

The portal came before the beam - the portals may or may not be man-made, but in TWL Roland said "The Great Old Ones created the Beams. They are lines of some sort..." (p 73).

[Brainslinger]

I forgot that bit.

In Song of Susannah (don't highlight if you haven't read,) Mia states that the Beams arose out of the Prim suggesting they predate the Great Old Ones since we're talking about the forming of the world(s). Not really a contradiction though. It just means Roland was wrong, or he was referring to the Great Old One's technological take-over of the Beams.

[fatbrett2]

I'd take that to mean that before the prim receded, there was something magical and non-man-made that filled the role now occupied by the current beams, which were a half-assed human imitation of the original, superior configuration.

I also agree that King was probably never as interested in this (or many more such trivialities) as we are, he didn't think it all through in advance, he didn't really give a shit, and with years and years passing between the first appearance of the beams in TWL and the end of the series, he didn't remember everything he'd said about this stuff previously.

[Woofer]

Besides it was as much self defence as anything, and they are gunslingers! Remember Eddie was stuck up a tree with it clamouring for his blood.

That's true, that was one thing I considered, but I guess I just didn't understand how they couldn't have managed to form the association that they were there to protect the Beam, but if that wasn't the real Guardian, then I guess that settles it. Huh. *shrugs*

Shardik the mechanical guardian is every bit as rabid as a real bear would be with that infection. For all we know it was hurting the beam.

[High_Desert_Gunslinger]

For all we know it was hurting the beam.

Never thought of it that way

[pathoftheturtle]

Or vice versa.

[Jean]

Or vice versa.
right

[Dan-Tete]

Well if it is a guardian of the beam, why would they destroy it?? Aren't they supposed to regard the guardians as "friendlies"?

Sorry if
a) this question is dumb
b) this came off worse than i hoped


Ah, I see where you're going with this, and I understand why you're confused. I've not read the last book yet, so i don't kno hwo the quest ends - don't spoil it lol - but I imagine that because the overall quest is to keep the beams going, destroying one of the beams' Guardians can't be a good thing...