Wolves of the Calla (21 page)

“Sai Callahan says true,” Eddie said, and then, when Andy started forward again: “But stay a minute, Andy. Do ya, I beg.” It was absolutely weird how quickly that started to sound okay.

Andy stopped willingly enough and turned toward Eddie, his blue eyes glowing. Eddie had roughly a thousand questions about todash, but he
was currently even more curious about something else.

“You know about these Wolves.”

“Oh, yes. I told sai Tian. He was wroth.” Again Eddie detected something like smugness in Andy’s voice . . . but surely that was just the way it struck him, right? A robot—even one that had survived from the old days—couldn’t enjoy the discomforts of humans? Could it?

Didn’t take you long to forget the mono, did it, sugar?
Susannah’s voice asked in his head. Hers was followed by Jake’s.
Blaine’s a pain
. And then, just his own:
If you treat this guy like nothing more than a fortune-telling machine in a carnival arcade, Eddie old boy, you deserve whatever you get.

“Tell me about the Wolves,” Eddie said.

“What would you know, sai Eddie?”

“Where they come from, for a start. The place where they feel like they can put their feet up and fart right out loud. Who they work for. Why they take the kids. And why the ones they take come back ruined.” Then another question struck him. Perhaps the most obvious. “Also, how do you know when they’re coming?”

Clicks from inside Andy. A lot of them this time, maybe a full minute’s worth. When Andy spoke again, its voice was different. It made Eddie think about Officer Bosconi, back in the neighborhood. Brooklyn Avenue, that was Bosco Bob’s beat. If you just met him, walking along the street and twirling his nightstick, Bosco talked to you like you were a human being and so was he—howya doin, Eddie, how’s your mother these days, how’s your good-fornothin bro, are you gonna sign up for PAL Middlers,
okay, seeya at the gym, stay off the smokes, have a good day. But if he thought maybe you’d done something, Bosco Bob turned into a guy you didn’t want to know. That Officer Bosconi didn’t smile, and the eyes behind his glasses were like puddle ice in February (which just happened to be the Time o’ the Goat, over here on this side of the Great Whatever). Bosco Bob had never hit Eddie, but there were a couple of times—once just after some kids lit Woo Kim’s Market on fire—when he felt sure that bluesuit mothafuck
would
have hit him, if Eddie had been stupid enough to smart off. It wasn’t schizophrenia—at least not of the pure Detta/Odetta kind—but it was close. There were two versions of Officer Bosconi. One of them was a nice guy. The other one was a cop.

When Andy spoke again, it no longer sounded like your well-meaning but rather stupid uncle, the one who believed the alligator-boy and Elvis-is-alive-in-Buenos-Aires stories
Inside View
printed were absolutely true. This Andy sounded emotionless and somehow dead.

Like a
real
robot, in other words.

“What’s your password, sai Eddie?”

“Huh?”

“Password. You have ten seconds. Nine . . . eight . . . seven . . . ”

Eddie thought of spy movies he’d seen. “You mean I say something like ‘The roses are blooming in Cairo’ and
you
say ‘Only in Mrs. Wilson’s garden’ and then
I
say—”

“Incorrect password, sai Eddie . . . two . . . one . . . zero.” From within Andy came a low thudding sound which Eddie found singularly unpleasant. It
sounded like the blade of a sharp cleaver passing through meat and into the wood of the chopping block beneath. He found himself thinking for the first time about the Old People, who had surely built Andy (or maybe the people before the Old People, call them the Really Old People—who knew for sure?). Not people Eddie himself would want to meet, if the last remainders in Lud had been any example.

“You may retry once,” said the cold voice. It bore a resemblance to the one that had asked Eddie if Eddie would like his horoscope told, but that was the best you could call it—a resemblance. “Would you retry, Eddie of New York?”

Eddie thought fast. “No,” he said, “that’s all right. The info’s restricted, huh?”

Several clicks. Then: “
Restricted
: confined, kept within certain set limits, as information in a given document or q-disc; limited to those authorized to use that information; those authorized announce themselves by giving the password.” Another pause to think and then Andy said, “Yes, Eddie. That info’s restricted.”

“Why?” Eddie asked.

He expected no answer, but Andy gave him one. “Directive Nineteen.”

Eddie clapped him on his steel side. “My friend, that don’t surprise me at all. Directive Nineteen it is.”

“Would you care to hear an expanded horoscope, Eddie-sai?”

“Think I’ll pass.”

“What about a tune called ‘The Jimmy Juice I Drank Last Night’? It has many amusing verses.”
The reedy note of a pitch-pipe came from somewhere in Andy’s diaphragm.

Eddie, who found the idea of many amusing verses somehow alarming, increased his pace toward the others. “Why don’t we just put that on hold?” he said. “Right now I think I need another cup of coffee.”

“Give you joy of it, sai,” Andy said. To Eddie he sounded rather forlorn. Like Bosco Bob when you told him you thought you’d be too busy for PAL League that summer.

Roland sat on a stone outcrop, drinking his own cup of coffee. He listened to Eddie without speaking himself, and with only one small change of expression: a minute lift of the eyebrows at the words Directive Nineteen.

Across the clearing from them, Slightman the Younger had produced a kind of bubble-pipe that made extraordinarily tough bubbles. Oy chased them, popped several with his teeth, then began to get the hang of what Slightman seemed to want, which was for him to herd them into a fragile little pile of light. The bubble-pile made Eddie think of the Wizard’s Rainbow, those dangerous glass balls. And did Callahan really have one? The worst of the bunch?

Beyond the boys, at the edge of the clearing, Andy stood with his silver arms folded over the stainless-steel curve of his chest. Waiting to clean up the meal he had hauled to them and then cooked, Eddie supposed. The perfect servant. He cooks, he
cleans, he tells you about the dark lady you’ll meet. Just don’t expect him to violate Directive Nineteen. Not without the password, anyway.

“Come over to me, folks, would you?” Roland asked, raising his voice slightly. “Time we had a bit of palaver. Won’t be long, which is good, at least for us, for we’ve already had our own, before sai Callahan came to us, and after awhile talk sickens, so it does.”

They came over and sat near him like obedient children, those from the Calla and those who were from far away and would go beyond here perhaps even farther.

“First I’d hear what you know of these Wolves. Eddie tells me Andy may not say how he comes by what he knows.”

“You say true,” Slightman the Elder rumbled. “Either those who made him or those who came later have mostly gagged him on that subject, although he always warns us of their coming. On most other subjects, his mouth runs everlastingly.”

Roland looked toward the Calla’s big farmer. “Will you set us on, sai Overholser?”

Tian Jaffords looked disappointed not to be called on. His woman looked disappointed for him. Slightman the Elder nodded as if Roland’s choice of speaker was only to be expected. Overholser himself did not puff up as Eddie might have guessed. Instead he looked down at his own crossed legs and scuffed shor’boots for thirty seconds or so, rubbing at the side of his face, thinking. The clearing was so quiet Eddie could hear the minute rasp of the farmer’s palm on two or three days’ worth of bristles. At last he sighed, nodded, and looked up at Roland.

“Say thankee. Ye’re not what I expected, I must say. Nor your tet.” Overholser turned to Tian. “Ye were right to haul us out here, Tian Jaffords. This is a meeting we needed to have, and I say thankee.”

“It wasn’t me got you out here,” Jaffords said. “Was the Old Fella.”

Overholser nodded to Callahan. Callahan nodded back, then sketched the shape of a cross in the air with his scarred hand—as if to say, Eddie thought, that it wasn’t him, either, but God. Maybe so, but when it came to pulling coals out of a hot fire, he’d put two dollars on Roland of Gilead for every one he put on God and the Man Jesus, those heavenly gunslingers.

Roland waited, his face calm and perfectly polite.

Finally Overholser began to talk. He spoke for nearly fifteen minutes, slowly but always to the point. There was the business of the twins, to begin with. Residents of the Calla realized that children birthed in twos were the exception rather than the rule in other parts of the world and at other times in the past, but in their area of the Grand Crescent it was the singletons, like the Jaffordses’ Aaron, who were the rarities. The
great
rarities.

And, beginning perhaps a hundred and twenty years ago (or mayhap a hundred and fifty; with time the way it was, such things were impossible to pin down with any certainty), the Wolves had begun their raids. They did not come exactly once every generation; that would have been each twenty years or so, and it was longer than that. Still, it was
close
to that.

Eddie thought of asking Overholser and Slightman how the Old People could have shut Andy’s
mouth concerning the Wolves if the Wolves had been raiding out of Thunderclap for less than two centuries, then didn’t bother. Asking what couldn’t be answered was a waste of time, Roland would have said. Still, it was interesting, wasn’t it? Interesting to wonder when someone (or some
thing
) had last programmed Andy the Messenger (Many Other Functions).

And why.

The children, Overholser said, one of each set between the ages of perhaps three and fourteen, were taken east, into the land of Thunderclap. (Slightman the Elder put his arm around his boy’s shoulders during this part of the tale, Eddie noticed.) There they remained for a relatively short period of time—mayhap four weeks, mayhap eight. Then most of them would be returned. The assumption made about those few who did not return was that they had died in the Land of Darkness, that whatever evil rite was performed on them killed a few instead of just ruining them.

The ones who came back were at best biddable idiots. A five-year-old would return with all his hard-won talk gone, reduced to nothing but babble and reaching for the things he wanted. Diapers which had been left forgotten two or three years before would go back on and might stay on until such a roont child was ten or even twelve.

“Yer-bugger, Tia
still
pisses herself one day out of every six, and can be counted on to shit herself once a moon, as well,” Jaffords said.

“Hear him,” Overholser agreed gloomily. “My own brother, Welland, was much the same until he died. And of course they have to be watched more
or less constant, for if they get something they like, they’ll eat it until they bust. Who’s watching yours, Tian?”

“My cuz,” Zalia said before Tian could speak. “Heddon n Hedda can help a little now, as well; they’ve come to a likely enough age—” She stopped and seemed to realize what she was saying. Her mouth twisted and she fell silent. Eddie guessed he understood. Heddon and Hedda could help now, yes. Next year, one of them would still be able to help. The other one, though . . .

A child taken at the age of ten might come back with a few rudiments of language left, but would never get much beyond that. The ones who were taken oldest were somehow the worst, for they seemed to come back with some vague understanding of what had been done to them. What had been stolen from them. These had a tendency to cry a great deal, or to simply creep off by themselves and peer into the east, like lost things. As if they might see their poor brains out there, circling like birds in the dark sky. Half a dozen such had even committed suicide over the years. (At this, Callahan once more crossed himself.)

The roont ones remained childlike in stature as well as in speech and behavior until about the age of sixteen. Then, quite suddenly, most of them sprouted to the size of young giants.

“Ye can have no idea what it’s like if ye haven’t seen it and been through it,” Tian said. He was looking into the ashes of the fire. “Ye can have no idea of the pain it causes them. When a babby cuts his teeth, ye ken how they cry?”

“Yes,” Susannah said.

Tian nodded. “It’s as if their whole bodies are teething, kennit.”

“Hear him,” Overholser said. “For sixteen or eighteen months, all my brother did was sleep and eat and cry and grow. I can remember him crying even
in
his sleep. I’d get out of my bed and go across to him and there’d be a whispering sound from inside his chest and legs and head. ’Twere the sound of his bones growing in the night, hear me.”

Eddie contemplated the horror of it. You heard stories about giants—fee-fi-fo-fum, and all that—but until now he’d never considered what it might be like to
become
a giant.
As if their whole bodies are teething,
Eddie thought, and shivered.

“A year and a half, no longer than that and it were done, but I wonder how long it must seem to them, who’re brought back with no more sense of time than birds or bugs.”

“Endless,” Susannah said. Her face was very pale and she sounded ill. “It must seem endless.”

“The whispering in the nights as their bones grow,” Overholser said. “The headaches as their
skulls
grow.”

“Zalman screamed one time for nine days without stopping,” Zalia said. Her voice was expressionless, but Eddie could see the horror in her eyes; he could see it very well. “His cheekbones pushed up. You could see it happening. His forehead curved out and out, and if you held an ear close to it you could hear the skull creaking as it spread. It sounded like a tree-branch under a weight of ice.

“Nine days he screamed. Nine. Morning, noon, and in the dead of night. Screaming and screaming.
Eyes gushing water. We prayed to all the gods there were that he’d go hoarse—that he’d be stricken dumb, even—but none such happened, say thankee. If we’d had a gun, I believe we would have slew him as he lay on his pallet just to end his pain. As it was, my good old da’ was ready to slit ’een’s thr’ut when it stopped. His bones went on yet awhile—his skellington, do ya—but his head was the worst of it and it finally stopped, tell gods thankya, and Man Jesus too.”