The Dark Tower (23 page)

I spy with my little eye,
Susannah thought.

“Hold out thy hands, Nigel.”

When the robot did, they all saw the wiry hairs caught in the joints of his steel fingers. There was also a drop of blood on a . . . would you call it a knuckle? “What’s this?” she asked, holding several of the hairs up.

“I’m sorry, mum, I cawn’t—”

Couldn’t see. No, of course not. Nigel had infrared, but his actual eyesight was gone, courtesy of Susannah Dean, daughter of Dan, gunslinger in the Ka-Tet of Nineteen.

“They’re hairs. I also spy some blood.”

“Ah, yes,” Nigel said. “Rats in the kitchen, mum. I’m programmed to dispose of vermin when I detect them. There are a great many these days, I’m sorry to say; the world is moving on.” And then, snapping his head violently to the left:
“Un-deuxtrois! Minnie Mouse est la mouse pour moi!
”

“Um . . . did you kill Minnie and Mickey before or after you made the sandwiches, Nige old buddy?” Eddie asked.

“After, sai, I assure you.”

“Well, I might pass, anyway,” Eddie said. “I had a poorboy back in Maine, and it’s sticking to my ribs like a motherfucker.”

“You should say
un, deux, trois,
” Susannah told him. The words were out before she knew she was going to say them.

“Cry pardon?” Eddie was sitting with his arm around her. Since the four of them had gotten
back together, he touched Susannah at every opportunity, as if needing to confirm the fact that she was more than just wishful thinking.

“Nothing.” Later, when Nigel was either out of the room or completely broken down, she’d tell him her intuition. She thought that robots of Nigel and Andy’s type, like those in the Isaac Asimov stories she’d read as a teenager, weren’t supposed to lie. Perhaps Andy had either been modified or had modified himself so that wasn’t a problem. With Nigel, she thought it was a problem, indeed: can ya say problem big-big. She had an idea that, unlike Andy, Nigel was essentially goodhearted, but yes—he’d either lied or gilded the truth about the rats in the larder. Maybe about other things, as well.
Ein, zwei, drei
and
Un, deux, trois
was his method of letting off the pressure. For awhile, anyway.

It’s Mordred,
she thought, looking around. She took a sandwich because she had to eat—like Jake, she was ravenous—but her appetite was gone and she knew she’d take no enjoyment from what she plugged grimly down her throat.
He’s been at Nigel, and now he’s watching us somewhere. I know it
—
I feel it.

And, as she took her first bite of some long-preserved, vacuum-packed mystery-meat:

A mother always knows.

None of them wanted to sleep in the Extraction Room (although they would have had their pick of three hundred or more freshly made beds) nor in the deserted town outside, so Nigel took them to his quarters, pausing every now and then for a vicious head-clearing shake and to count off in either
German or French. To this he began adding numbers in some other language none of them knew.

Their way led them through a kitchen—all stainless steel and smoothly humming machines, quite different from the ancient cookhouse Susannah had visited todash beneath Castle Discordia—and although they saw the moderate clutter of the meal Nigel had prepared them, there was no sign of rats, living or dead. None of them commented on this.

Susannah’s sense of being observed came and went.

Beyond the pantry was a neat little three-room apartment where Nigel presumably hung his hat. There was no bedroom, but beyond the living room and a butler’s pantry full of monitoring equipment was a neat book-lined study with an oak desk and an easy chair beneath a halogen reading lamp. The computer on the desk had been manufactured by North Central Positronics, no surprise there. Nigel brought them blankets and pillows which he assured them were fresh and clean.

“Maybe you sleep on your feet, but I guess you like to sit down to read like anyone else,” Eddie said.

“Oh, yes indeedy, one-two-threedy,” Nigel said. “I enjoy a good book. It’s part of my programming.”

“We’ll sleep six hours, then push on,” Roland told them.

Jake, meanwhile, was examining the books more closely. Oy moved beside him, always at heel, as Jake checked the spines, occasionally pulling one out for a closer peek. “He’s got all of Dickens, it looks like,” he said. “Also Steinbeck . . . Thomas Wolfe . . . a lot of Zane Grey . . . somebody named Max Brand . . . a guy named Elmore Leonard . . . and the always popular Steve King.”

They all took time to look at the two shelves of King books, better than thirty in all, at least four of them very large and two the size of doorstops. King had been an extremely busy writer-bee since his Bridgton days, it appeared. The newest volume was called
Hearts in Atlantis
and had been published in a year with which they were very familiar: 1999. The only ones missing, so far as they could tell, were the ones about
them
. Assuming King had gone ahead and written them. Jake checked the copyright pages, but there were few obvious holes. That might mean nothing, however, because he had written so much.

Susannah inquired of Nigel, who said he had never seen any books by Stephen King concerning Roland of Gilead or the Dark Tower. Then, having said so, he twisted his head viciously to the left and counted off in French, this time all the way to ten.

“Still,” Eddie said after Nigel had retired, clicking and clacking and clucking his way out of the room, “I bet there’s a lot of information here we could use. Roland, do you think we could pack the works of Stephen King and take them with us?”

“Maybe,” Roland said, “but we won’t. They might confuse us.”

“Why do you say so?”

Roland only shook his head. He didn’t know why he said so, but he knew it was true.

The Arc 16 Experimental Station’s nerve-center was four levels down from the Extraction Room, the kitchen, and Nigel’s study. One entered the Control Suite through a capsule-shaped vestibule. The vestibule could only be opened from the outside
by using three ID slides, one after the other. The piped-in Muzak on this lowest level of the Fedic Dogan sounded like Beatles tunes as rendered by The Comatose String Quartet.

Inside the Control Suite were over a dozen rooms, but the only one with which we need concern ourselves was the one filled with TV screens and security devices. One of these latter devices ran a small but vicious army of hunter-killer robots equipped with sneetches and laser pistols; another was supposed to release poison gas (the same kind Blaine had used to slaughter the people of Lud) in the event of a hostile takeover. Which, in the view of Mordred Deschain, had happened. He had tried to activate both the hunter-killers and the gas; neither had responded. Now Mordred had a bloody nose, a blue bruise on his forehead, and a swollen lower lip, for he’d fallen out of the chair in which he sat and rolled about on the floor, bellowing reedy, childish cries which in no way reflected the true depth of his fury.

To be able to see them on at least five different screens and not be able to kill or even hurt them! No wonder he was in a fury! He had felt the living darkness closing in on him, the darkness which signaled his change, and had forced himself to be calm so the change wouldn’t happen. He had already discovered that the transformation from his human self to his spider self (and back again) consumed shocking amounts of energy. Later on that might not matter, but for the time being he had to be careful, lest he starve like a bee in a burned-over tract of forest.

What I’d show you is much more bizarre than anything we have looked at so far, and I warn you
in advance that your first impulse will be to laugh. That’s all right. Laugh if you must. Just don’t take your eye off what you see, for even in your imagination, here is a creature which can do you damage. Remember that it came of two fathers, both of them killers.

Now, only a few hours after his birth, Mia’s chap already weighed twenty pounds and had the look of a healthy six-months’ baby. Mordred wore a single garment, a makeshift towel diaper which Nigel had put on when he had brought the baby his first meal of Dogan wildlife. The child
needed
a diaper, for he could not as yet hold his waste. He understood that control over these functions would be his soon—perhaps before the day was out, if he continued to grow at his current rate—but it couldn’t happen soon enough to suit him. He was for the nonce imprisoned in this idiotic infant’s body.

To be trapped in such a fashion was hideous. To fall out of the chair and be capable of nothing more than lying there, waving his bruised arms and legs, bleeding and squalling! DNK 45932 would have come to pick him up, could no more resist the commands of the King’s son than a lead weight dropped from a high window can resist the pull of gravity, but Mordred didn’t dare call him. Already the brown bitch suspected something wasn’t right with Nigel. The brown bitch was wickedly perceptive, and Mordred himself was terribly vulnerable. He was able to control every piece of machinery in the Arc 16 station, mating with machinery was one of his many talents, but as he lay on the floor of the
room with
CONTROL CENTER
on the door (it had been called “The Head” back in the long-ago, before the world moved on), Mordred was coming to realize how few machines there were to control. No wonder his father wanted to push down the Tower and begin again! This world was broken.

He’d needed to change back into the spider in order to regain the chair, where he’d once again resumed his human shape . . . but by the time he made it, his stomach was rumbling and his mouth was sour with hunger. It wasn’t just changing that sucked up the energy, he’d come to suspect; the spider was closer to his true form, and when he was in that shape his metabolism ran hot and fast. His thoughts changed, as well, and there was an attraction to that, because his human thoughts were colored by emotions (over which he seemed to have no control, although he supposed he might, in time) that were mostly unpleasant. As a spider, his thoughts weren’t real thoughts at all, at least not in the human sense; they were dark bellowing things that seemed to rise out of some wet interior ground. They were about

(
EAT
)

and

(
ROAM
)

and

(
RAPE
)

and

(
KILL
)

The many delightful ways to do these things rumbled through the dan-tete’s rudimentary consciousness like huge headlighted machines that went speeding unheeding through the world’s darkest weather. To think in such a way—to let go
of his human half—was immensely attractive, but he thought that to do so now, while he had almost no defenses, would get him killed.

And almost already had. He raised his right arm—pink and smooth and perfectly naked—so he could look down at his right hip. This was where the brown bitch had shot him, and although Mordred had grown considerably since then, had doubled both in length and weight, the wound remained open, seeping blood and some custardy stuff, dark yellow and stinking. He thought that this wound in his human body would never heal. No more than his other body would ever be able to grow back the leg the bitch had shot off. And had she not stumbled—ka: aye, he had no doubt of it—the shot would have taken his head off instead of his leg, and then the game would have been over, because—

There was a harsh, croaking buzz. He looked into the monitor that showed the other side of the main entry and saw the domestic robot standing there with a sack in one hand. The sack was twitching, and the black-haired, clumsily diapered baby sitting at the banks of monitors immediately began to salivate. He reached out one endearingly pudgy hand and punched a series of buttons. The security room’s curved outer door slid open and Nigel stepped into the vestibule, which was built like an airlock. Mordred went immediately on to the buttons that would open the inner door in response to the sequence 2-5-4-1-3-1-2-1, but his motor control was still almost nonexistent and he was rewarded by another harsh buzz and an infuriating female voice (infuriating because it reminded him of the brown bitch’s voice) which said, “YOU HAVE ENTERED
THE WRONG SECURITY CODE FOR THIS DOOR. YOU MAY RETRY ONCE WITHIN THE NEXT TEN SECONDS. TEN . . . NINE . . .”

Mordred would have said
Fuck you
if he’d been capable of speech, but he wasn’t. The best he could do was a babble of baby-talk that undoubtedly would have caused Mia to crow with a mother’s pride. Now he didn’t bother with the buttons; he wanted what the robot had in the bag too badly. The rats (he assumed they were rats) were alive this time.
Alive,
by God, the blood still running in their veins.

Mordred closed his eyes and concentrated. The red light Susannah had seen before his first change once more ran beneath his fair skin from the crown of his head to the stained right heel. When that light passed the open wound in the baby’s hip, the sluggish flow of blood and pussy matter grew briefly stronger, and Mordred uttered a low cry of misery. His hand went to the wound and spread blood over the small bowl of his belly in a thoughtless comforting gesture. For a moment there was a sense of blackness rising to replace the red flush, accompanied by a wavering of the infant’s shape. This time there was no transformation, however. The baby slumped back in the chair, breathing hard, a tiny trickle of clear urine dribbling from his penis to wet the front of the towel he wore. There was a muffled pop from beneath the control panel in front of the chair where the baby slumped askew, panting like a dog.

Across the room, a door marked
MAIN ACCESS
slid open. Nigel tramped stolidly in, twitching his capsule of a head almost constantly now, counting off not in two or three languages but in perhaps as many as a dozen.

“Sir, I really cannot continue to—”

Mordred made a baby’s cheerful goo-goo-ga-ga sounds and held out his hands toward the bag. The thought which he sent was both clear and cold:
Shut up. Give me what I need
.