Текст книги "The Dark Tower"

Автор книги: Stephen Edwin King

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“So brave,” Susannah said, and ruffled Jake’s hair. Then she bent to stroke Oy’s head. The bumbler stretched his long neck to maximize the caress, his eyes half-closed and a grin on his foxy little face. “So damned brave. Thankee-sai, Jake.”

“Thank Ake!” Oy agreed.

“If it hadn’t been for the turtle, they would have gotten us both.” Jake’s voice was steady, but he had gone pale. “As it was, the Pere… he…” Jake wiped away a tear with the heel of his hand and gazed at Roland. “You used his voice to send me on. I heard you.”

“Aye, I had to,” the gunslinger agreed. “ ‘Twas no more than what he wanted.”

Jake said, “The vampires didn’t get him. He used my Ruger before they could take his blood and change him into one of them. I don’t think they would’ve done that, anyway. They would have torn him apart and eaten him. They were mad.”

Roland was nodding.

“The last thing he sent—I think he said it out loud, although I’m not sure—it was…” Jake considered it. He was weeping freely now. “He said ‘May you find your Tower, Roland, and breach it, and may you climb to the top.’ Then…” Jake made a little puffing sound between his pursed lips. “Gone. Like a candle-flame. To whatever worlds there are.”

He fell silent. For several moments they all did, and the quiet had the feel of a deliberate thing. Then Eddie said, “All right, we’re back together again. What the hell do we do next?”

Four

Roland sat down with a grimace, then gave Eddie Dean a look which said—clearer than any words ever could have done—Why do you try my patience?

“All right,” Eddie said, “it’s just a habit. Quit giving me the look.”

“What’s a habit, Eddie?”

Eddie thought of his final bruising, addictive year with Henry less frequently these days, but he thought of it now. Only he didn’t like to say so, not because he was ashamed—Eddie really thought he might be past that—but because he sensed the gunslinger’s growing impatience with Eddie’s explaining things in terms of his big brother. And maybe that was fair. Henry had been the defining, shaping force in Eddie’s life, okay. Just as Cort had been the defining, shaping force in Roland’s… but the gunslinger didn’t talk about his old teacher all the time.

“Asking questions when I already know the answer,” Eddie said.

“And what’s the answer this time?”

“We’re going to backtrack to Thunderclap before we go on to the Tower. We’re either going to kill the Breakers or set them free. Whatever it takes to make the Beams safe. We’ll kill Walter, or Flagg, or whatever he’s calling himself. Because he’s the field marshal, isn’t he?”

“He was,” Roland agreed, “but now a new player has come on the scene.” He looked at the robot. “Nigel, I need you.”

Nigel unfolded his arms and raised his head. “How may I serve?”

“By getting me something to write with. Is there such?”

“Pens, pencils, and chalk in the Supervisor’s cubicle at the far end of the Extraction Room, sai. Or so there was, the last time I had occasion to be there.”

“The Extraction Room,” Roland mused, studying the serried ranks of beds. “Do you call it so?”

“Yes, sai.” And then, almost timidly: “Vocal elisions and fricatives suggest that you’re angry. Is that the case?”

“They brought children here by the hundreds and thousands—healthy ones, for the most part, from a world where too many are still born twisted—and sucked away their minds. Why would I be angry?”

“Sai, I’m sure I don’t know,” Nigel said. He was, perhaps, repenting his decision to come back here. “But I had no part in the extraction procedures, I assure you. I am in charge of domestic services, including maintenance.”

“Bring me a pencil and a piece of chalk.”

“Sai, you won’t destroy me, will you? It was Dr. Scowther who was in charge of the extractions over the last twelve or fourteen years, and Dr. Scowther is dead. This lady-sai shot him, and with his own gun.” There was a touch of reproach in Nigel’s voice, which was quite expressive within its narrow range.

Roland only repeated: “Bring me a pencil and a piece of chalk, and do it jin-jin.”

Nigel went off on his errand.

“When you say a new player, you mean the baby,” Susannah said.

“Certainly. He has two fathers, that bah-bo.”

Susannah nodded. She was thinking about the tale Mia had told her during their todash visit to the abandoned town of Fedic—abandoned, that was, except for the likes of Sayre and Scowther and the marauding Wolves. Two women, one white and one black, one pregnant and one not, sitting in chairs outside the Gin-Puppy Saloon. There Mia had told Eddie Dean’s wife a great deal—more than either of them had known, perhaps.

That’s where they changed me, Mia had told her, “they” presumably meaning Scowther and a team of other doctors. Plus magicians? Folk like the Manni, only gone over to the other side? Maybe. Who could say? In the Extraction Room she’d been made mortal. Then, with Roland’s sperm already in her, something else had happened. Mia didn’t remember much about that part, only a red darkness. Susannah wondered now if the Crimson King had come to her in person, mounting her with its huge and ancient spider’s body, or if its unspeakable sperm had been transported somehow to mix with Roland’s. In either case, the baby grew into the loathsome hybrid Susannah had seen: not a werewolf but a were-spider. And now it was out there, somewhere. Or perhaps it was here, watching them even as they palavered and Nigel returned with various writing implements.

Yes, she thought. It’s watching us. And hating us… but not equally. Mostly it’s Roland the dan-tete hates. Its first father.

She shivered.

“Mordred means to kill you, Roland,” she said. “That’s its job. What it was made for. To end you, and your quest, and the Tower.”

“Yes,” Roland said, “and to rule in his father’s place. For the Crimson King is old, and I have come more and more to believe that he is imprisoned, somehow. If that’s so, then he’s no longer our real enemy.”

“Will we go to his castle on the other side of the Discordia?” Jake asked. It was the first time he’d spoken in half an hour. “We will, won’t we?”

“I think so, yes,” Roland said. “Le Casse Roi Russe, the old legends call it. We’ll go there ka-tet and slay what lives there.”

“Let it be so,” Eddie said. “By God, let that be so.”

“Aye,” Roland agreed. “But our first job is the Breakers. The Beamquake we felt in Calla Bryn Sturgis, just before we came here, suggests that their work is nearly done. Yet even if it isn’t—”

“Ending what they’re doing is our job,” Eddie said.

Roland nodded. He looked more tired than ever. “Aye,” he said. “Killing them or setting them free. Either way, we must finish their meddling with the two Beams that remain. And we must finish off the dan-tete. The one that belongs to the Crimson King… and to me.”

Five

Nigel ended up being quite helpful (although not just to Roland and his ka-tet, as things fell). To begin with he brought two pencils, two pens (one of them a great old thing that would have looked at home in the hand of a Dickens scrivener), and three pieces of chalk, one of them in a silver holder that looked like a lady’s lipstick. Roland chose this and gave Jake another piece. “I can’t write words you’d understand easily,” he said, “but our numbers are the same, or close enough. Print what I say to one side, Jake, and fair.”

Jake did as he was bid. The result was crude but understandable enough, a map with a legend.

“Fedic,” Roland said, pointing to 1, and then drew a short chalk line to 2. “And here’s Castle Discordia, with the doors beneath. An almighty tangle of em, from what we hear. There’ll be a passage that’ll take us from here to there, under the castle. Now, Susannah, tell again how the Wolves go, and what they do.” He handed her the chalk in its holder.

She took it, noticing with some admiration that it sharpened itself as it was used. A small trick but a neat one.

“They ride through a one-way door that brings them out here,” she said, drawing a line from 2 to 3, which Jake had dubbed Thunderclap Station. “We ought to know this door when we see it, because it’ll be big, unless they go through single-file.”

“Maybe they do,” Eddie said. “Unless I’m wrong, they’re pretty well stuck with what the old people left them.”

“You’re not wrong,” Roland said. “Go on, Susannah.” He wasn’t hunkering but sitting with his right leg stretched stiffly out. Eddie wondered how badly his hip was hurting him, and if he had any of Rosalita’s cat-oil in his newly recovered purse. He doubted it.

She said, “The Wolves ride from Thunderclap along the course of the railroad tracks, at least until they’re out of the shadow… or the darkness… or whatever it is. Do you know, Roland?”

“No, but we’ll see soon enough.” He made his impatient twirling gesture with his left hand.

“They cross the river to the Callas and take the children. When they get back to the Thunderclap Station, I think they must board their horses and their prisoners on a train and go back to Fedic that way, for the door’s no good to them.”

“Aye, I think that’s the way of it,” Roland agreed. “They bypass the devar-toi—the prison we’ve marked with an 8—for the time being.”

Susannah said: “Scowther and his Nazi doctors used the hood-things on these beds to extract something from the kids. It’s the stuff they give to the Breakers. Feed it to em or inject em with it, I guess. The kids and the brain-stuff go back to Thunderclap Station by the door. The kiddies are sent back to Calla Bryn Sturgis, maybe the other Callas as well, and at what you call the devar-toi—”

“Mawster, dinnah is served,” Eddie said bleakly.

Nigel chipped in at this point, sounding absolutely cheerful. “Would you care for a bite, sais?”

Jake consulted his stomach and found it was rumbling. It was horrible to be this hungry so soon after the Pere’s death—and after the things he had seen in the Dixie Pig—but he was, nevertheless. “Is there food, Nigel? Is there really?”

“Yes, indeed, young man,” Nigel said. “Only tinned goods, I’m afraid, but I can offer better than two dozen choices, including baked beans, tuna-fish, several kinds of soup—”

“Tooter-fish for me,” Roland said, “but bring an array, if you will.”

“Certainly, sai.”

“I don’t suppose you could rustle me up an Elvis Special,” Jake said longingly. “That’s peanut butter, banana, and bacon.”

“Jesus, kid,” Eddie said. “I don’t know if you can tell in this light, but I’m turning green.”

“I have no bacon or bananas, unfortunately,” Nigel said (pronouncing the latter ba-NAW-nas), “but I do have peanut butter and three kinds of jelly. Also apple butter.”

“Apple butter’d be good,” Jake said.

“Go on, Susannah,” Roland said as Nigel moved off on his errand. “Although I suppose I needn’t speed you along so; after we eat, we’ll need to take some rest.” He sounded far from pleased with the idea.

“I don’t think there’s any more to tell,” she said. “It sounds confusing—looks confusing, too, mostly because our little map doesn’t have any scale—but it’s essentially just a loop they make every twenty-four years or so: from Fedic to Calla Bryn Sturgis, then back to Fedic with the kids, so they can do the extraction. Then they take the kids back to the Callas and the brainfood to this prison where the Breakers are.”

“The devar-toi,” Jake said.

Susannah nodded. “The question is what we do to interrupt the cycle.”

“We go through the door to Thunderclap station,” Roland said, “and from the station to where the Breakers are kept. And there…” He looked at each of his ka-tet in turn, then raised his finger and made a dryly expressive shooting gesture.

“There’ll be guards,” Eddie said. “Maybe a lot of them. What if we’re outnumbered?”

“It won’t be the first time,” Roland said.

Chapter II:

The Watcher

One

When Nigel returned, he was bearing a tray the size of a wagon-wheel. On it were stacks of sandwiches, two Thermoses filled with soup (beef and chicken), plus canned drinks. There was Coke, Sprite, Nozz-A-La, and something called Wit Green Wit. Eddie tried this last and pronounced it foul beyond description.

All of them could see that Nigel was no longer the same pippip, jolly-good fellow he’d been for God alone knew how many decades and centuries. His lozenge-shaped head kept jerking to one side or the other. When it went to the left he would mutter “Un, deux, trois!” To the right it was “Ein, zwei, drei!” A constant low clacking had begun in his diaphragm.

“Sugar, what’s wrong with you?” Susannah asked as the domestic robot lowered the tray to the floor amidst them.

“Self-diagnostic exam series suggests total systemic breakdown during the next two to six hours,” Nigel said, sounding glum but otherwise calm. “Pre-existing logic faults, quarantined until now, have leaked into the GMS.” He then twisted his head viciously to the right. “Ein, zwei, drei! Live free or die, here’s Greg in your eye!”

“What’s GMS?” Jake asked.

“And who’s Greg?” Eddie added.

“GMS stands for general mentation systems,” said Nigel. “There are two such systems, rational and irrational. Conscious and subconscious, as you might say. As for Greg, that would be Greg Stillson, a character in a novel I’m reading. Quite enjoyable. It’s called The Dead Zone, by Stephen King. As to why I bring him up in this context, I have no idea.”

Two

Nigel explained that logic faults were common in what he called Asimov Robots. The smarter the robot, the more the logic faults… and the sooner they started showing up. The old people (Nigel called them the Makers) compensated for this by setting up a stringent quarantine system, treating mental glitches as though they were smallpox or cholera. (Jake thought this sounded like a really fine way of dealing with insanity, although he supposed that psychiatrists wouldn’t care for the idea much; it would put them out of business.) Nigel believed that the trauma of having his eyes shot out had weakened his mental survival-systems somehow, and now all sorts of bad stuff was loose in his circuits, eroding his deductive and inductive reasoning capabilities, gobbling logic-systems left and right. He told Susannah he didn’t hold this against her in the slightest. Susannah raised a fist to her forehead and thanked him big-big. In truth, she did not completely believe good old DNK 45932, although she was damned if she knew why. Maybe it was just a holdover from their time in Calla Bryn Sturgis, where a robot not much different from Nigel had turned out to be a nasty, grudge-holding cully indeed. And there was something else.

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.

Three

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.

Four

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.

Five

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.

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)

and he responded:

All is well, don’t fear, cully, all is well.

The bumbler in the bag (Nigel had found it in the motor-pool, 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 quarter-brilliance. When Oy began to whine, Jake woke at once. The others slept on, at least for the time being.