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

grass. A lot of wind-blown loess had swept across the chitin-lands over the
centuries. It caught in cracks in the carapace and gave purchase to fortuitous
seeds. Once I even saw a rabbit. But before I could point it out to Victoria, I
saw something else. Up ahead, in a place where the shell had powdered and a rare
rainstorm had turned the powder briefly to mud, were two overlapping tire
prints. A motorbike had been by here, and recently.

I stared at the tracks for a long time, clenching and unclenching my good hand.

The very next day we came upon a settlement.

It was a hardscrabble place. Just a windmill to run the pump that brought up a
trickle of ichor from a miles-deep well, a refinery to process the stuff edible,
and a handful of unpainted clapboard buildings and Quonset huts. Several
battered old pickup trucks sat rusting under the limitless sky.

A gaunt man stood by the gate, waiting for us. His jaw was hard, his backbone
straight and his hands empty. But I noted here and there a shiver of movement in
a window or from the open door of a shed, and I made no mistake but that there
were weapons trained upon us.

"Name's Rivera," the man said when we came up to him.

I swept off my bowler hat. "Daniel. This's Miss Victoria, my ward."

"Passing through?"

"Yessir, I am, and I see no reason I should ever pass this way again. If you
have food for sale, I'll pay you market rates. But if not, why, with your
permission, we'll just keep on moving on."

"Fair spoken." From somewhere Rivera produced a cup of water, and handed it to
us. I drank half, handed the rest to Victoria. She shivered as it went down.

"Right good," I said. "And cold too."

"We have a heat pump," Rivera said with grudging pride. "C'mon inside. Let's see
what the women have made us to eat."

Then the children came running out, whooping and hollering, too many to count,
and the adult people behind them, whom I made out to be twenty in number. They
made us welcome.

They were good people, if outlaws, and as hungry for news and gossip as anybody
can be. I told them about a stump speech I had heard made by Tyler B. Morris,
who was running for governor of the Northern Department, and they spent all of
dinnertime discussing it. The food was good, too -- ham and biscuits with
red-eye gravy, sweet yams with butter, and apple cobbler to boot. If I hadn't
seen their chemical complex, I'd've never guessed it for synthetic. There were
lace curtains in the window, brittleold but clean, and I noted how carefully the