"Michael Swanwick - Mother Grasshopper" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swanwick Michael)

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.