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

"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.