Mother Grasshopper - Michael Swanwick, ebook
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MICHAEL SWANWICK
MOTHER GRASSHOPPER
In the year one, we came in an armada of a million spacecraft to settle upon,
colonize, and claim for our homeland this giant grasshopper on which we now
dwell.
We dared not land upon the wings for, though the cube-square rule held true and
their most rapid motions would be imperceptible on an historic scale, random
nerve firings resulted in pre-movement tremors measured at Richter 11. So we
opted to build in the eyes, in the faceted mirrorlands that reflected infinities
of flatness, a shimmering Iowa, the architecture of home.
It was an impossible project and one, perhaps, that was doomed from the start.
But such things are obvious only in retrospect. We were a young and vigorous
race then. Everything seemed possible.
Using shaped temporal fields, we force-grew trees which we cut down to build our
cabins. We planted sod and wheat and buffalo. In one vivid and unforgettable
night of technology we created a layer of limestone bedrock half a mile deep
upon which to build our towns. And when our work was done, we held hoe-downs in
a thousand county seats all across the eyelands.
We created new seasons, including Snow, after the patterns of those we had known
in antiquity, but the night sky we left unaltered, for this was to be our
home...now and forever. The unfamiliar constellations would grow their own
legends over the ages; there would be time. Generations passed, and cities grew
with whorls of suburbs like the arms of spiral galaxies around them, for we were
lonely, as were the thousands and millions we decanted who grew like the trees
of the cisocellar plains that were as thick as the ancient Black Forest.
I was a young man, newly bearded, hardly much more than a shirt-tail child, on
that Harvest day when the stranger walked into town.
This was so unusual an event (and for you to whom a town of ten thousand
necessarily means that there will be strangers, I despair of explaining} that
children came out to shout and run at his heels, while we older citizens,
conscious of our dignity, stood in the doorways of our shops, factories, and
co-ops to gaze ponderously in his general direction. Not quite at him, you
understand, but over his shoulder, into the flat, mesmeric plains and the
infinite white skies beyond.
He claimed to have come all the way from the equatorial abdomen, where gravity
is three times eye-normal, and this was easy enough to believe, for he was
ungodly strong. With my own eyes I once saw him take a dollar coin between thumb
and forefinger and bend it in half -- and a steel dollar at that! He also
claimed to have walked the entire distance, which nobody believed, not even me.
"If you'd walked even half that far," I said, "I reckon you'd be the most
remarkable man as ever lived."
He laughed at that and ruffled my hair. "Well, maybe I am," he said. "Maybe I
am."
I flushed and took a step backward, hand on the bandersnatch-skin hilt of my
fighting knife. I was as feisty as a bantam rooster in those days, and twice as
quick to take offense. "Mister, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to step
outside."
The stranger looked at me. Then he reached out and, without the slightest hint
of fear or anger or even regret, touched my arm just below the shoulder. He did
it with no particular speed and yet somehow I could not react fast enough to
stop him. And that touch, light though it was, paralyzed my arm, leaving it
withered and useless, even as it is today.
He put his drink down on the bar, and said, "Pick up my knapsack."
I did.
"Follow me."
So it was that without a word of farewell to my family or even a backward
glance, I left New Auschwitz forever.
That night, over a campfire of eel grass and dried buffalo chips, we ate a
dinner of refried beans and fatback bacon. It was a new and clumsy experience
for me, eating one-handed. For a long time, neither one of us spoke. Finally I
said, "Are you a magician?"
The stranger sighed. "Maybe so," he said. "Maybe I am."
You have a name?"
"No."
"What do we do now?"
"Business." He pushed his plate toward me. "I cooked. It's your turn to wash."
Our business entailed constant travel. We went to Brinkerton with cholera and to
Roxborough with typhus. We passed through Denver and Venice and Saint Petersburg
and left behind fleas, rats, and plague. In Upper Black Eddy, it was ebola. We
never stayed long enough to see the results of our work, but I read the
newspapers afterward, and it was about what you would expect.
Still, on the whole, humanity prospered. Where one city was decimated, another
was expanding. The over spilling hospitals of one county created a market for
the goods of a dozen others. The survivors had babies.
We walked to Tylersburg, Rutledge, and Uniontown and took wagons to
Shoemakersville, Confluence, and South Gibson. Booked onto steam trains for
Mount Lebanon, Mount Bethel, Mount Aetna, and Mount Nebo and diesel trains to
McKeesport, Reinholds Station, and Broomall. Boarded buses to Carbondale,
Feasterville, June Bug, and Lincoln Falls. Caught commuter flights to Paradise,
Nickel Mines, Niantic, and Zion.
The time passed quickly.
Then one shocking day my magician announced that he was going home.
"Home?" I said. "What about your work?"
"Our work, Daniel," he said gently. "I expect you'll do as good a job as ever I
did." He finished packing his few possessions into a carpetbag.
"You can't!" I cried.
With a wink and a sad smile, he slipped out the door.
For a time -- long or short, I don't know -- I sat motionless, unthinking,
unseeing. Then I leaped to my feet, threw open the door, and looked up and down
the empty street. Blocks away, toward the train station, was a scurrying black
speck.
Leaving the door open behind me, I ran after it.
I just missed the afternoon express to Lackawanna. I asked the stationmaster
when was the next train after it. He said tomorrow. Had he seen a tall man
carrying a carpetbag, looking thus and so? Yes, he had. Where was he? On the
train to Lackawanna. Nothing more heading that way today. Did he know where I
could rent a car? Yes, he did. Place just down the road.
Maybe I'd've caught the magician if I hadn't gone back to the room to pick up my
bags. Most likely not. At Lackawanna station I found he'd taken the bus to
Johnstown. In Johnstown, he'd moved on to Erie and there the trail ran cold. It
took me three days hard questioning to pick it up again.
For a week I pursued him thus, like a man possessed.
Then I awoke one morning and my panic was gone. I knew I wasn't going to catch
my magician anytime soon. I took stock of my resources, counted up what little
cash-money I had, and laid out a strategy. Then I went shopping. Finally, I hit
the road. I'd have to be patient, dogged, wily, but I knew that, given enough
time, I'd find him.
Find him, and kill him too.
The trail led me to Harper's Ferry, at the very edge of the oculus. Behind was
civilization. Ahead was nothing but thousands of miles of empty chitin-lands.
People said he'd gone south, off the lens entirely.
Back at my boarding house, I was approached by one of the lodgers. He was a
skinny man with a big mustache and sleeveless white T-shirt that hung from his
skinny shoulders like wet laundry on a muggy Sunday.
"What you got in that bag?"
"Black death," I said, "infectious meningitis, tuberculosis. You name it."
He thought for a bit. "I got this gal," he said at last. "I don't suppose you
could..."
"I'll take a look at her," I said, and hoisted the bag.
We went upstairs to his room.
She lay in the bed, eyes closed. There was an IV needle in her arm, hooked up to
a drip feed. She looked young, but of course that meant nothing. Her hair,
neatly brushed and combed, laid across the coverlet almost to her waist, was
white -- white as snow, as death, as finest bone china.
"How long has she been like this?" I asked.
"Ohhhh..." He blew out his cheeks. "Forty-seven, maybe fifty years?"
"You her father?"
"Husband. Was, anyhow. Not sure how long the vows were meant to hold up under
these conditions: can't say I've kept 'em any too well. You got something in
that bag for her?" He said it as casual as he could, but his eyes were big and
spooked-looking.
I made my decision. "Tell you what," I said. "I'll give you forty dollars for
her."
"The sheriff wouldn't think much of what you just said," the man said low and
quiet.
"No. But then, I suppose I'll be off of the eye-lands entirely before he knows a
word of it."
I picked up my syringe.
"Well? Is it a deal or not?"
Her name was Victoria. We were a good three days march into the chitin before
she came out of the trance state characteristic of the interim zombie stage of
Recovery. I'd fitted her with a pack, walking shoes, and a good stout stick, and
she strode along head up, eyes blank, speaking in the tongues of angels afloat
between the stars.
"-- cisgalactic phase intercept," she said. "Do you read? Das Uberraumboot
zuruckgegenerinnernte. Verstehen? Anadaemonic mesotechnological conflict
strategizing. Drei tausenden Allen mit Laseren! Hello? Is anybody --"
Then she stumbled over a rock, cried out in pain, and said, "Where am I ?"
I stopped, spread a map on the ground, and got out my pocket gravitometer. It
was a simple thing: a glass cylinder filled with aerogel and a bright orange
ceramic bead. The casing was tin, with a compressor screw at the top, a
calibrated scale along the side, and the words "Flynn & Co." at the bottom. I
flipped it over, watched the bead slowly fall. I tightened the screw a notch,
then two, then three, increasing the aerogel's density. At five, the bead
stopped. I read the gauge, squinted up at the sun, and then jabbed a finger on
an isobar to one edge of the map.
"Right here," I said. "Just off the lens. See?"
"I don't --" She was trembling with panic. Her dilated eyes shifted wildly from
one part of the empty horizon to another. Then suddenly, sourcelessly, she burst
into tears.
Embarrassed, I looked away. When she was done crying I patted the ground. "Sit."
Sniffling, she obeyed. "How old are you, Victoria?"
"How old am...? Sixteen?" she said tentatively. "Seventeen?" Then, "Is that
really my name?"
"It was. The woman you were grew tired of life, and injected herself with a drug
that destroys the ego and with it all trace of personal history." I sighed. "So
in one sense you're still Victoria, and in another sense you're not. What she
did was illegal, though; you can never go back to the oculus. You'd be locked
into jail for the rest of your life."
She looked at me through eyes newly young, almost childlike in their experience,
and still wet with tears. I was prepared for hysteria, grief, rage. But all she
said was, "Are you a magician?"
That rocked me back on my heels. "Well -- yes," I said. "I suppose I am."
She considered that silently for a moment. "So what happens to me now?"
"Your job is to carry that pack. We also go turn-on-turn with the dishes." I
straightened, folding the map. "Come on. We've got a far way yet to go."
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