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..."
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 die 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.