"First comes smiles, then lies. Last is gunfire." —Roland Deschain, of Gilead
The blood that flows through you flows through me, when I look in any mirror, it's your face that I see.
Take my hand, lean on me,
We're almost free,
Wandering boy.
—Rodney Crowell
Resistance
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Prologue: Roont
ONE
Tian was blessed (though few farmers would have used such a word) with three patches: River Field, where
his family had grown rice since time out of mind; Roadside Field, where ka-Jaffords had grown sharproot,
pumpkin, and corn for those same long years and generations; and Son of a Bitch, a thankless tract which
mostly grew rocks, blisters, and busted hopes. Tian wasn't the first Jaffords determined to make something of
the twenty acres behind the home place; his Gran-pere, perfectly sane in most other respects, had been
convinced there was gold there. Tian's Ma had been equally positive it would grow porin, a spice of great
worth. Tian's particular insanity was madrigal. Of course madrigal would grow in Son of a Bitch. Must grow
there. He'd gotten hold of a thousand seeds (and a dear penny they had cost him) that were now hidden
beneath the floorboards of his bedroom. All that remained before planting next year was to break ground in
Son of a Bitch. This chore was easier spoken of than accomplished.
Clan Jaffords was blessed with livestock, including three mules, but a man would be mad to try using a mule
out in Son of a Bitch; the beast unlucky enough to draw such duty would likely be lying legbroke or stung to
death by noon of the first day. One of Tian's uncles had almost met this latter fate some years before. He had
come running back to the home place, screaming at the top of his lungs and pursued by huge mutie wasps
with stingers the size of nails.
They had found the nest (well, Andy had found it; Andy wasn't bothered by wasps no matter how big they
were) and burned it with kerosene, but there might be others. And there were holes. Yer-bugger, plenty o'
them, and you couldn't burn holes, could you? No. Son of a Bitch sat on what the old folks called "loose
ground." It was consequently possessed of almost as many holes as rocks, not to mention at least one cave
that puffed out draughts of nasty, decay-smelling air. Who knew what boggarts and speakies might lurk down
its dark throat?
And the worst holes weren't out where a man (or a mule) could see them. Not at all, sir, never think so. The
leg-breakers were always concealed in innocent-seeming nestles of weeds and high grass. Your mule would
step in, there would come a bitter crack like a snapping branch, and then the damned thing would be lying
there on the ground, teeth bared, eyes rolling, braying its agony at the sky. Until you put it out of its misery,
that was, and stock was valuable in Calla Bryn Sturgis, even stock that wasn't precisely threaded.
Tian therefore plowed with his sister in the traces. No reason not to. Tia was roont, hence good for little else.
She was a big girl—the roont ones often grew to prodigious size—and she was willing, Man Jesus love her.
The Old Fella had made her a Jesus-tree, what he called a crusie-fix, and she wore it everywhere. It swung
back and forth now, thumping against her sweating skin as she pulled.
The plow was attached to her shoulders by a rawhide harness. Behind her, alternately guiding the plow by its
old iron-wood handles and his sister by the hame-traces, Tian grunted and yanked and pushed when the blade
of the plow dropped down and verged on becoming stuck. It was the end of Full Earth but as hot as
midsummer here in Son of a Bitch; Tia's overalls were dark and damp and stuck to her long and meaty
thighs. Each time Tian tossed his head to get his hair out of his eyes, sweat flew out of the mop in a spray.
"Gee, ye bitch!" he cried. 'Yon rock's a plow-breaker, are ye blind?"
Not blind; not deaf, either; just roont. She heaved to the left, and hard. Behind her, Tian stumbled forward
with a neck-snapping jerk and barked his shin on another rock, one he hadn't seen and the plow had, for a
wonder, missed. As he felt the first warm trickles of blood running down to his ankle, he wondered (and not
for the first time) what madness it was that always got the Jaffordses out here. In his deepest heart he had an
idea that madrigal would sow no more than the porin had before it, although you could grow devil-grass; yar,
he could've bloomed all twenty acres with that shit, had he wanted. The trick was to keep it out, and it was
always New Earth's first chore. It—
The plow rocked to the right and then jerked forward, almost pulling his arms out of their sockets. "Arr!" he
cried. "Go easy, girl! I can't grow em back if you pull em out, can I?"
Tia turned her broad, sweaty, empty face up to a sky full of low-hanging clouds and honked laughter. Man
Jesus, but she even sounded like a donkey. Yet it was laughter, human laughter. Tian wondered, as he
sometimes couldn't help doing, if that laughter meant anything. Did she understand some of what he was
saying, or did she only respond to his tone of voice? Did any of the roont ones—
"Good day, sai," said a loud and almost completely toneless voice from behind him. The owner of the voice
ignored Tian's scream of surprise. "Pleasant days, and may they be long upon the earth. I am here from a
goodish wander and at your service."
Tian whirled around, saw Andy standing there—all seven feet of him—and was then almost jerked flat as his
sister took another of her large lurching steps forward. The plow's hame-traces were pulled from his hands
and flew around his throat with an audible snap. Tia, unaware of this potential disaster, took another sturdy
step forward. When she did, Tian's wind was cut off. He gave a whooping, gagging gasp and clawed at the
straps. All of this Andy watched with his usual large and meaningless smile.
Tia jerked forward again and Tian was pulled off his feet. He landed on a rock that dug savagely into the cleft
of his buttocks, but at least he could breathe again. For the moment, anyway. Damned unlucky field! Always
had been! Always would be!
Tian snatched hold of the leather strap before it could pull tight around his throat again and yelled, "Hold, ye
bitch! Whoa up if you don't want me to twist yer great and useless tits right off the front of yer!"
Tia halted agreeably enough and looked back to see what was what. Her smile broadened. She lifted one
heavily muscled arm—it glowed with sweat—and pointed. "Andy!" she said. "Andy's come!"
"I ain't blind," Tian said and got to his feet, rubbing his bottom. Was that part of him also bleeding? Good
Man Jesus, he had an idea it was.
"Good day, sai," Andy said to her, and tapped his metal throat three times with his three metal fingers. "Long
days and pleasant nights."
Although Tia had surely heard the standard response to this—And may you have twice the number—a
thousand times or more, all she could do was once more raise her broad idiot's face to the sky and honk her
donkey laugh. Tian felt a surprising moment of pain, not in his arms or throat or outraged ass but in his heart.
He vaguely remembered her as a little girl: as pretty and quick as a dragonfly, as smart as ever you could
wish. Then—
But before he could finish the thought, a premonition came. He felt a sinking in his heart. The news would
come while I'm out here, he thought. Out in this godforsaken patch where nothing is well and all luck is bad.
It was time, wasn't it? Overtime.
"Andy," he said.
"Yes!" Andy said, smiling. "Andy, your friend! Back from a goodish wander and at your service. Would you
like your horoscope, sai Tian? It is Full Earth. The moon is red, what is called the Huntress Moon in Mid-
World that was. A friend will call! Business affairs prosper! You will have two ideas, one good and one bad
—"
"The bad one was coming out here to turn this field," Tian said. "Never mind my goddam horoscope, Andy.
Why are you here?"
Andy's smile probably could not become troubled—he was a robot, after all, the last one in Calla Bryn
Sturgis or for miles and wheels around—but to Tian it seemed to grow troubled, just the same. The robot
looked like a young child's stick-figure of an adult, impossibly tall and impossibly thin. His legs and arms
were silvery. His head was a stainless-steel barrel with electric eyes. His body, no more than a cylinder, was
gold. Stamped in the middle—what would have been a man's chest—was this legend:
NORTH CENTRAL POSITRONICS, LTD.
IN ASSOCIATION WITH
LaMERK INDUSTRIES
PRESENTS
ANDY
Design: MESSENGER (Many Other Functions)
Serial # DNF-44821-V-63
Why or how this silly thing had survived when all the rest of the robots were gone—gone for generations—
Tian neither knew nor cared. You were apt to see him anywhere in the Calla (he would not venture beyond its
borders) striding on his impossibly thin silver legs, looking everywhere, occasionally clicking to himself as
he stored (or perhaps purged—who knew?) information. He sang songs, passed on gossip and rumor from
one end of town to the other—a tireless walker was Andy the Messenger Robot—and seemed to enjoy the
giving of horoscopes above all things, although there was general agreement in the village that they meant
little.
He had one other function, however, and that meant much.
"Why are ye here, ye bag of bolts and beams? Answer me! Is it the Wolves? Are they coming from
Thunderclap?"
Tian stood there looking up into Andy's stupid smiling metal face, the sweat growing cold on his skin,
praying with all his might that the foolish thing would say no, then offer to tell his horoscope again, or
perhaps to sing "The Green Corn A-Dayo," all twenty or thirty verses.
But all Andy said, still smiling, was: "Yes, sai."
"Christ and the Man Jesus," Tian said (he'd gotten an idea from the Old Fella that those were two names for
the same thing, but had never bothered pursuing the question). "How long?"
"One moon of days before they arrive," Andy replied, still smiling.
"From full to full?"
"Close enough, sai."
Thirty days, then, give or take one. Thirty days to the Wolves. And there was no sense hoping Andy was
wrong. No one kenned how the robot could know they were coming out of Thunderclap so far in advance of
their arrival, but he did know. And he was never wrong.
"Fuck you for your bad news!" Tian cried, and was furious at the waver he heard in his own voice. "What use
are you?"
"I'm sorry that the news is bad," Andy said. His guts clicked audibly, his eyes flashed a brighter blue, and he
took a step backward. "Would you not like me to tell your horoscope? This is the end of Full Earth, a time
particularly propitious for finishing old business and meeting new people—"
"And fuck your false prophecy, too!" Tian bent, picked up a clod of earth, and threw it at the robot A pebble
buried in the clod clanged off Andy's metal hide. Tia gasped, then began to cry. Andy backed off another step,
his shadow trailing out long in Son of a Bitch field. But his hateful, stupid smile remained.
"What about a song? I have learned an amusing one from the Manni far north of town; it is called 'In Time of
Loss, Make God Your Boss.' " From somewhere deep in Andy's guts came the wavering honk of a pitch-pipe,
followed by a ripple of piano keys. "It goes—"
Sweat rolling down his cheeks and sticking his itchy balls to his thighs. The stink-smell of his own foolish
obsession. Tia blating her stupid face at the sky. And this idiotic, bad-news-bearing robot getting ready to
sing him some sort of Manni hymn.
"Be quiet, Andy." He spoke reasonably enough, but through clamped teeth.
"Sai," the robot agreed, then fell mercifully silent.
Tian went to his bawling sister, put his arm around her, smelled the large (but not entirely unpleasant) smell
of her. No obsession there, just the smell of work and obedience. He sighed, then began to stroke her
trembling arm.
"Quit it, ye great bawling cunt," he said. The words might have been ugly but the tone was kind in the
extreme, and it was tone she responded to. She began to quiet. Her brother stood with the flare of her hip
pushing into him just below his ribcage (she was a full foot taller), and any passing stranger would likely
have stopped to look at them, amazed by the similarity of face and the great dissimilarity of size. The
resemblance, at least, was honestly come by: they were twins.
He soothed his sister with a mixture of endearments and profanities—in the years since she had come back
roont from the east, the two modes of expression were much the same to Tian Jaffords—and at last she
ceased her weeping. And when a rustic flew across the sky, doing loops and giving out the usual series of
ugly blats, she pointed and laughed.
A feeling was rising in Tian, one so foreign to his nature that he didn't even recognize it. "Isn't right," he said.
"Nossir. By the Man Jesus and all the gods that be, it isn't." He looked to the east, where the hills rolled away
into a rising membranous darkness that might have been clouds but wasn't. It was the edge of Thunderclap.
"Isn't right what they do to us."
"Sure you wouldn't like to hear your horoscope, sai? I see bright coins and a beautiful dark lady."
"The dark ladies will have to do without me," Tian said, and began pulling the harness off his sister's broad
shoulders. "I'm married, as I'm sure ye very well know."
"Many a married man has had his jilly," Andy observed. To Tian he sounded almost smug.
"Not those who love their wives." Tian shouldered the harness (he'd made it himself, there being a marked
