Michael Swanwick - Mother Grasshopper

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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

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Michael Swanwick - Mother Grasshopper

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