“Okay, but why don’t you get Andy to do at least some of the plowing? I bet it’d go faster if you did. All you guys with the smallhold farms could share him, ever think of that? He could plow your fields, dig your wells, raise a barn roofbeam all by himself. And you’d save on taters and gravy.” He clapped Tian on the shoulder again. “That’s got to do ya fine.”

Tian’s mouth quirked. “It’s a lovely dream, all right.”

“Doesn’t work, huh? Or rather, he doesn’t work.”

“Some things he’ll do, but plowing fields and digging wells ain’t among em. You ask him, and he’ll ask you for your password. When you have no password to give him, he’ll ask you if you’d like to retry. And then—”

“Then he tells you you’re shit out of luck. Because of Directive Nineteen.”

“If you knew, why did you ask?”

“I knew he was that way about the Wolves, because I asked him. I didn’t know it extended to all this other stuff.”

Tian nodded. “He’s really not much help, and he can be tiresome—if’ee don’t ken that now, ye will if’ee stay long—but he does tell us when the Wolves are on their way, and for that we all say thankya.”

Eddie actually had to bite off the question that came to his lips. Why did they thank him when his news was good for nothing except making them miserable? Of course this time there might be more to it; this time Andy’s news might actually lead to a change. Was that what Mr. You-Will-Meet-An-Interesting-Stranger had been angling for all along? Getting the folken to stand up on their hind legs and fight? Eddie recalled Andy’s decidedly smarmy smile and found such altruism hard to swallow. It wasn’t fair to judge people (or even robots, maybe) by the way they smiled or talked, and yet everybody did it.

Now that I think about it, whatabout his voice? What about that smug little I-know-and-you-don’t thing he’s got going on? Or am I imagining that, too?

The hell of it was, he didn’t know.

Three

The sound of Susannah’s singing voice accompanied by the giggles of the children—all children great and small—drew Eddie and Tian back around to the other side of the house.

Zalman was holding one end of what looked like a stock-rope. Tia had the other. They were turning it in lazy loops with large, delighted grins on their faces while Susannah, sitting propped on the ground, recited a skip-rope rhyme Eddie vaguely remembered. Zalia and her four older children were jumping in unison, their hair rising and falling. Baby Aaron stood by, his diaper now sagging almost to his knees. On his face was a huge, delighted grin. He made rope-twirling motions with one chubby fist.