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 droughts 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 perfecdy 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 diought 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 die 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 the hoo-hoo bird, he didn’t know its name, and then he saw die 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)
and he responded:
All is well, don’t fear, cully, all is well.
The bumbler in the bag (Nigel had found it in the motorpool, separated from its mother, brothers, and sisters by the closing of an automatic door) relaxed-not believing, exactly, but hoping to believe.
SIX
In Nigel’s study, the lights had been turned down to quarterbrilliance.
When Oy began to whine, Jake woke at once. The others slept on, at least for the time being.
What’s wrong, Oy?
The bumbler didn’t reply, only went on whining deep in his throat. His gold-ringed eyes peered into the gloomy far corner of the study, as if seeing something terrible there. Jake could remember peering into the corner of his bedroom the same way after waking from some nightmare in the small hours of die morning, a dream of Frankenstein or Dracula or
(Tyrannasorbet Wrecks)
some other boogeyman, God knew what. Now, thinking that perhaps bumblers also had nightmares, he tried even harder to touch Oy’s mind. There was nothing at first, then a deep, blurred image
(eyes eyes looking out of the darkness)
of something that might have been a billy-bumbler in a sack.
“Shhhh,” he whispered into Oy’s ear, putting his arms around him. “Don’t wake ’em, they need their sleep.”
“Leep,” Oy said, very low.
“You just had a bad dream,” Jake whispered. “Sometimes I have them, too. They’re not real. Nobody’s got you in a bag. Go back to sleep.”
“Leep.” Oy put his snout on his right forepaw. “Oy-be ki-yit.”
That’s right, Jake thought at him, Oy be quiet.
The gold-ringed eyes, still looking troubled, remained open a bit longer. Then Oy winked at Jake with one and closed both.
A moment later, the bumbler was asleep again. Somewhere close by, one of his kind had died… but dying was the way of the world; it was a hard world and always had been.
Oy dreamed of being with Jake beneath the great orange orb of the Peddler’s Moon. Jake, also sleeping, picked it up by touch and they dreamed of Old Cheap Rover Man’s Moon together.
Oy, who died? asked Jake beneath the Peddler’s one-eyed, knowing wink.
Oy, said his friend. Delah. Many.
Beneath the Old Cheap Man’s empty orange stare Oy said no more; had, in fact, found a dream within his dream, and here also Jake went with him. This dream was better. In it, the two of them were playing together in bright sunshine. To them came another bumbler: a sad fellow, by his look. He tried to talk to them, but neither Jake nor Oy could tell what he said, because he was speaking in English.
