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..."