The Dark Tower

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.

Nigel put the bag in his lap. From within it came a cheeping sound almost like human speech, and for the first time Mordred realized that the twitches were all coming from a single creature. Not a rat, then! Something bigger! Bigger and bloodier!

He opened the bag and peered in. A pair of gold-ringed eyes looked pleadingly back at him. For a moment he thought it was the bird that flew at night, the hoo-hoo bird, he didn’t know its name, and then he saw the thing had fur, not feathers. It was a throcken, known in many parts of Mid-World as a billy-bumbler, this one barely old enough to be off its mother’s teat.

There now, there, he thought at it, his mouth filling with drool. We’re in the same boat, my little cully — we’re motherless children in a hard, cruel world. Be still and I’ll give you comfort.

Dealing with a creature as young and simple-headed as this wasn’t much different from dealing with the machines. Mordred looked into its thoughts and located the node that controlled its simple bit of will. He reached for it with a hand made of thought — made of his will — and seized it. For a moment he could hear the creature’s timid, hopeful thought

(don’t hurt me please don’t hurt me; please let me live; I want to live have fun play a little; don’t hurt me please don’t hurt me please let me live)