by Stephen King
“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.
1-Fedic
2- Castle
3 -M-’R.a-WadTroi.Ks
5- Do^o-n
(o - R,’wer
7- CcxItaS
8 - DcvO-r-To!
“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 die 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 bvitter, 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, mosdy because our litde 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 wagonwheel.
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 tfiis 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, zioei, 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 die robot did, diey 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!n
“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 1 (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 diere. 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 writerbee 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 dept
h 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.
