Stephen King – The Dark Tower

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 calledHearts 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 aboutthem . 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 childneeded 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

withCONTROL 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