SEVEN
Mordred wasn’t strong enough to lift the bumbler from the bag, and Nigel either would not or could not help him. The robot only stood inside the door of the Control Center, twisting his head to one side or the other, counting and clanking more loudly than ever. A hot, cooked smell had begun to rise from his innards.
Mordred succeeded in turning the bag over and the bumbler, probably half a yearling, fell into his lap. Its eyes were halfopen, but the yellow- and-black orbs were dull and unmoving.
Mordred threw his head back, grimacing in concentration.
That red flash ran down his body, and his hair tried to stand on end. Before it could do more than begin to rise, however, it and the infant’s body to which it had been attached were gone. The spider came. It hooked four of its seven legs about the bumbler’s body and drew it effortlessly up to the craving mouth. In twenty seconds it had sucked the bumbler dry. It plunged its mouth into the creature’s soft underbelly, tore it open, lifted the body higher, and ate the guts which came tumbling out: delicious, strength-giving packages of dripping meat. It ate deeper, making muffled mewling sounds of satisfaction, snapping the billybum bier’s spine and sucking the brief dribble of marrow. Most of the energy was in the blood-aye, always in the blood, as the Grandfathers well knew-but there was strength in meat, as well. As a human baby (Roland had used the old Gilead endearment, bah-bo), he could have taken no nourishment from either the juice or the meat. Would likely have choked to death on it.
But as a spider-
He finished and cast the corpse aside onto the floor, just as he had the used-up, desiccated corpses of the rats. Nigel, that dedicated busding butler, had disposed of those. He would not dispose of this one. Nigel stood silent no matter how many times Mordred bawled Nigel, I need you! Around the robot, the smell of charred plastic had grown strong enough to activate the overhead fans. DNK 45932 stood with his eyeless face turned to the left. It gave him an oddly inquisitive look, as if he’d died while on the verge of asking an important question: What is the meaning of life, perhaps, or Who put the overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s chowder'? In any case, his brief career as a rat- and bumblercatcher was over.
For the time being, Mordred was full of energy-the meal had been fresh and wonderful-but that wouldn’t last long. If he stayed in his spider- shape, he’d use up this new reservoir of strength even faster. If he went back to being a baby, however, he wouldn’t even be able to get down from the chair in which he was sitting, or once more put on the diaper-which had, of course, slid off his body when he changed. But he had to change back, for in his spider-shape he couldn’t tfiink clearly at all. As for deductive reasoning? The idea was a bitter joke.
The white node on the spider’s back closed its human eyes, and the black body beneath flushed a congested red. The legs retracted toward the body and disappeared. The node which was the baby’s head grew and gained detail as the body beneath paled and took on human shape; the child’s blue eyes-bombardier eyes, gunslinger eyes- flashed. He was still full of strength from the bumbler’s blood and meat, he could feel it as the transformation rushed toward its conclusion, but a distressing amount of it (something like the foam on top of a glass of beer) had already dissipated. And not just from switching back and forth, either. The fact was that he was growing at a headlong pace. That sort of growth required relentless nourishment, and there was damned little nourishment to be had in the Arc 16 Experimental Station. Or in Fedic beyond, for that matter. There were canned goods and meals in foil packets and powdered power drinks, yar, plenty of those, but none of what was here would feed him as he needed to be fed. He needed fresh meat and even more than meat he needed blood. And the blood of animals would sustain the avalanche of his growth for only so long. Very soon he was going to need human blood, or the pace of his growth would first slow, then stop. The pain of starvation would come, but that pain, twisting relentlessly in his vitals like an auger, would be nothing to the mental and spiritual pain of watching them on the various video screens: still alive, reunited in their fellowship, with the comfort of a cause.
The pain of seeing him. Roland of Gilead.
How, he wondered, did he know the things he knew? From his mother? Some of them, yes, for he’d felt a million of Mia’s thoughts and memories (a good many of them swiped from Susannah) rush into him as he fed on her. But to know it was that way with the Grandfathers, as well, how did he know that?
That, for instance, a German vampire who swilled the life’s blood of a Frenchman might speak French for a week or ten days, speak it like a native, and then the ability, like his victim’s memories, would begin to fade…
How could he know a thing like that?
Did it matter?
Now he watched them sleep. The boy Jake had awakened, but only briefly. Earlier Mordred had watched them eat, four fools and a bumbler-full of blood, full of energy-dining in a circle together. Always they would sit in a circle, they would make that circle even when they stopped to rest five minutes on the trail, doing it without even being aware of it, their circle that kept die rest of the world out. Mordred had no circle. Although he was new, he already understood that outsidewas his ka, just as it was the ka of winter’s wind to swing through only half die compass: from north to east and then back again to bleak north once more. He accepted this, yet he still looked at them with the outsider’s resentment, knowing he would hurt them and that the satisfaction would be bitter. He was of two worlds, the foretold joining of Prim and Am, of gadosh and godosh, of Gan and Gilead. He was in a way like Jesus Christ, but in a way he was purer than the sheepgod-man, for the sheepgod-man had but one true father, who was in the highly hypothetical heaven, and a stepfather who was on Earth. Poor old Joseph, who wore horns put on him by God Himself.
Mordred Deschain, on the other hand, had two fathers.
One of whom now slept on the screen before him.
You’re old, Father, he thought. It gave him vicious pleasure to think so; it also made him feel small and mean, no more than… well, no more than a spider, looking down from its web. Mordred was twins, and would remain twins until Roland of the Eld was dead and the last ka-tet broken. And the longing voice that told him to go to Roland, and call him father? To call Eddie and Jake his brothers, Susannah his sister? That was the gullible voice of his mother. They’d kill him before he could get a single word out of his mouth (assuming he had reached a stage where he could do more than gurgle baby-talk). They’d cut off his balls and feed them to the brat’s bumbler. They’d bury his castrated corpse, and shit on the ground where he lay, and then move on.
You ’re finally old, Father, and now you walk with a limp, and at end of day I see you rub your hip with a hand that’s picked up the tiniest bit of a shake.
Look, if you would. Here sits a baby with blood streaking his fair skin. Here sits a baby weeping his silent, eerie tears. Here sits a baby that knows both too much and too little, and although we must keep our fingers away from his mouth (he snaps, this one; snaps like a baby crocodile), we are allowed to pity him a litde.
If ka is a train-and it is, a vast, hurding mono, maybe sane, maybe not-then this nasty litde lycanthrope is its most vulnerable hostage, not tied to the tracks like little Nell but strapped to the thing’s very headlight.
He may tell himself he has two fathers, and diere may be some truth to it, but there is no father here and no mother, either. He ate his mother alive, say true, ate her big-big, she was his first meal, and what choice did he have about that? He is the last miracle ever to be spawned by the still-standing Dark Tower, the scarred wedding of the rational and the irrational, the natural and die supernatural, and yet he is alone, and he is a-hungry. Destiny might have intended him to rule a chain of universes (or destroy them all), but so far he has succeeded in establishing dominion over nothing but one old domestic robot who has now gone to the clearing at the end of the path.
He looks at the sleeping gunslinger with love and hate, loathing and longing. But suppose he went to them and was not killed? What if they were to welcome him in? Ridiculous idea, yes, but allow it for the sake of argument. Even then he would be expected to set Roland above him, accept Roland as dinh, and that he will never do, never do, no, never do.
Chapter III:
THE SHINING WIRE
ONE
“You were watching them,” said a soft, laughing voice. Then it lilted a bit of cradle nonsense Roland would have remembered well from his own early childhood: “’Penny, posy, Jack’s a-nosy!
Do ya say so? Yes I do-so! He’s my sneaky, peeky, darling bah-bo!”
Did you like what you saw before you fell asleep? Did you watch them move on with the rest of the failing world?”
Perhaps ten hours had passed since Nigel the domestic robot had performed his last duty. Mordred, who in fact had fallen deeply asleep, turned his head toward the voice of the stranger with no residual fuzzy-headedness or surprise. He saw a man in bluejeans and a hooded parka standing on the gray tiles of the Control Center. His gunna- nothing more than a beat-up duffelbag-lay at his feet. His cheeks were flushed, his face handsome, his eyes burning hot. In his hand was an automatic pistol, and as he looked into the dark eye of its muzzle,
Mordred Deschain for the second time realized that even gods could die once their divinity had been diluted with human blood. But he wasn’t afraid. Not of this one. He did look back into the monitors that showed Nigel’s apartment, and confirmed that the newcomer was right: it was empty.
The smiling stranger, who seemed to have sprung from the very floor, raised the hand not holding the gun to the hood of his parka and turned a bit of it outward. Mordred saw a flash of metal. Some kind of woven wire coated the inside of the hood.
“I call it my ’thinking-cap,’” said the stranger. “I can’t hear your thoughts, which is a drawback, but you can’t get into my head, which is a-”
(which is a definite advantage, wouldn’t you say)
“-which is a definite advantage, wouldn’t you say?”
There were two patches on the jacket. One read U.S. ARMY and showed a bird-the eagle-bird, not the hoo-hoo bird. The other patch was a name: RANDALL FLAGG. Mordred discovered
(also with no surprise) that he could read easily.
