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."
We commenced marching, in silence at first. But then, not many miles down the
road and to my complete astonishment, Victoria began to sing!

We followed the faintest of paths -- less a trail than the memory of a dream of
the idea of one -- across the chitin. Alongside it grew an occasional patch of
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
leftovers were stored away for later.

After we'd eaten, Rivera caught my eye and gestured with his chin. We went
outside, and he led me to a shed out back. He unpadlocked the door and we
stepped within. A line of ten people lay unmoving on plainbuilt beds. They were
each catheterized to a drip-bag of processed ichor. Light from the door caught
their hair, ten white haloes in the gloom.

"We brought them with us," Rivera said. "Thought we'd be doing well enough to
make a go of it. Lately, though, I don't know, maybe it's the drought, but the
blood's been running thin, and it's not like we have the money to have a new
well drilled."

"I understand." Then, because it seemed a good time to ask, "There was a man
came by this way probably less'n a week ago. Tall, riding a --"

"He wouldn't help," Harry said. "Said it wasn't his responsibility. Then, before
he drove off, the sonofabitch tried to buy some of our food." He turned and
spat. "He told us you and the woman would be coming along. We been waiting."

"Wait. He told you I'd have a woman with me?"

"It's not just us we have to think of!" he said with sudden vehemence. "There's
the young fellers, too. They come along and all a man's stiffnecked talk about
obligations and morality goes right out the window. Sometimes I think how I
could come out here with a length of iron pipe and-- well." He shook his head
and then, almost pleadingly, said, "Can't you do something?"

"I think so." A faint creaking noise made me turn then. Victoria stood frozen in
the doorway. The light through her hair made of it a white flare. I closed my
eyes, wishing she hadn't stumbled across this thing. In a neutral voice I said,
"Get my bag."

Then Rivera and I set to haggling out a price.

We left the settlement with a goodly store of food and driving their third-best
pickup truck. It was a pathetic old thing and the shocks were scarce more than a
memory. We bumped and jolted toward the south.

For a long time Victoria did not speak. Then she turned to me and angrily
blurted, "You killed them!"

"It was what they wanted."

"How can you say that?" She twisted in the seat and punched me in the shoulder.
Hard. "How can you sit there and...say that?"

"Look," I said testily. "It's simple mathematics. You could make an equation out
of it. They can only drill so much ichor. That ichor makes only so much food.
Divide that by the number of mouths there are to feed and hold up the result
against what it takes to keep one alive. So much food, so many people. If the
one's smaller than the other, you starve. And the children wanted to live. The
folks in the shed didn't."

"They could go back! Nobody has to live out in the middle of nowhere trying to
scratch food out of nothing!"

"I counted one suicide for every two waking adults. Just how welcome do you
think they'd be, back to the oculus, with so many suicides living among them?
More than likely that's what drove them out here in the first place."

"Well...nobody would be starving if they didn't insist on having so many damn
children."

"How can you stop people from having children?" I asked.

There was no possible answer to that and we both knew it. Victoria leaned her
head against the cab window, eyes squeezed tight shut, as far from me as she
could get. "You could have woken them up! But no, you had your bag of goodies
and you wanted to play. I'm surprised you didn't kill me when you had the
chance."

"Vickie..."

"Don't speak to me!"

She started to weep.

I wanted to hug her and comfort her, she was so miserable. But I was driving,
and I only had the one good arm. So I didn't. Nor did I explain to her why it
was that nobody chose to simply wake the suicides up.

That evening, as usual, I got out the hatchet and splintered enough chitin for a
campfire. I was sitting by it, silent, when Victoria got out the jug of rough
liquor the settlement folks had brewed from ichor. "You be careful with that
stuff," I said. "It sneaks up on you. Don't forget, whatever experience you've
had drinking got left behind in your first life."

"Then you drink!" she said, thrusting a cup at me. "I'll follow your lead. When
you stop, I'll stop."

I swear I never suspected what she had in mind. And it had been a long while
since I'd tasted alcohol. So, like a fool, I took her intent at face value. I
had a drink. And then another.
Time passed.

We talked some, we laughed some. Maybe we sang a song or two.

Then, somehow, Victoria had shucked off her blouse and was dancing. She whirled
around the campfire, her long skirts lifting up above her knees and occasionally
flirting through the flames so that the hem browned and smoked but never quite
caught fire.

This wildness seemed to come out of nowhere. I watched her, alarmed and aroused,
too drunk to think clearly, too entranced even to move.

Finally she collapsed gracefully at my feet. The firelight was red on her naked
back, shifting with each gasping breath she took. She looked up at me through
her long, sweat-tangled hair, and her eyes were like amber, dark as cypress
swamp water, brown and bottomless. Eyes a man could drown in.

I pulled her toward me. Laughing, she surged forward, collapsing upon me,
tumbling me over backward, fumbling with my belt and then the fly of my jeans.
Then she had my cock out and stiff and I'd pushed her skirt up above her waist
so that it seemed she was wearing nothing but a thick red sash. And I rolled her
over on her back and she was reaching down between her legs to guide me in and
she was smiling and lovely.

I plunged deep, deep, deep into her, and oh god but it felt fine. Like that
eye-opening shock you get when you plunge into a cold lake for the first time on
a hot summer's day and the water wraps itself around you and feels so impossibly
good. Only this was warm and slippery-slick and a thousand times better. Then I
was telling her things, telling her I needed her, I wanted her, I loved her,
over and over again.

I awoke the next morning with a raging hangover. Victoria was sitting in the cab
of the pickup, brushing her long white hair in the rear-view mirror and humming
to herself.

"Well," she said, amused. "Look what the cat dragged in. There's water in the
jerrycans. Have yourself a drink. I expect we could also spare a cup for you to
wash your face with."

"Look," I said. "I'm sorry about last night."

"No you're not."

"I maybe said some foolish things, but --"

Her eyes flashed storm-cloud dark. "You weren't speaking near so foolish then as
you are now. You meant every damn word, and I'm holding you to them." Then she
laughed. "You'd best get at that water. You look hideous."

So I dragged myself off.
Overnight, Victoria had changed. Her whole manner, the way she held herself,
even the way she phrased her words, told me that she wasn't a child anymore. She
was a woman.

The thing I'd been dreading had begun.

"Resistance is useless," Victoria read. "For mine is the might and power of the
Cosmos Itself!" She'd found a comic book stuck back under the seat and gone
through it three times, chuckling to herself, while the truck rattled down that
near-nonexistent road. Now she put it down. "Tell me something," she said. "How
do you know your magician came by this way?"

"I just know is all," I said curtly. I'd given myself a shot of B-complex
vitamins, but my head and gut still felt pretty ragged. Nor was it particularly
soothing having to drive this idiot truck one-armed. And, anyway, I couldn't say
just how I knew. It was a feeling I had, a certainty.

"I had a dream last night. After we, ummmm, danced."

I didn't look at her.

"I was on a flat platform, like a railroad station, only enormous. It stretched
halfway to infinity. There were stars all around me, thicker and more colorful
than I'd ever imagined them. Bright enough to make your eyes ache. Enormous
machines were everywhere, golden, spaceships I suppose. They were taking off and
landing with delicate little puffs of air, like it was the easiest thing
imaginable to do. My body was so light I felt like I was going to float up among
them. You ever hear of a place like that?"

"No."

"There was a man waiting for me there. He had the saddest smile, but cold, cruel
eyes. Hello, Victoria, he said, and How did you know my name, I asked. Oh, I
keep a close eye on Daniel, he said, I'm grooming him for an important job. Then
he showed me a syringe. Do you know what's in here? he asked me. The liquid in
it was so blue it shone." She fell silent.

"What did you say?"

"I just shook my head. Mortality, he said. It's an improved version of the drug
you shot yourself up with fifty years ago. Tell Daniel it'll be waiting for him
at Sky Terminus, where the great ships come and go. That was all. You think it
means anything?"

I shook my head.

She picked up the comic book, flipped it open again. "Well, anyway, it was a
strange dream."
That night, after doing the dishes, I went and sat down on the pickup's
sideboard and stared into the fire, thinking. Victoria came and sat down beside
me. She put a hand on my leg. It was the lightest of touches, but it sent all my
blood rushing to my cock.

She smiled at that and looked up into my eyes. "Resistance is useless," she
said.

Afterward we lay together between blankets on the ground, looking up at the
night sky. It came to me then that being taken away from normal life young as I
had been, all my experience with love had come before the event and all my
experience with sex after, and that I'd therefore never before known them both
together. So that in this situation I was as naive and unprepared for what was
happening to us as Victoria was.

Which was how I admitted to myself I loved Victoria. At the time it seemed the
worst possible thing that could've happened to me.

We saw it for the first time that next afternoon. It began as a giddy feeling,
like a mild case of vertigo, and a vague thickening at the center of the sky as
if it were going dark from the inside out. This was accompanied by a bulging up
of the horizon, as if God Himself had placed hands flat on either edge and
leaned forward, bowing it upward.

Then my inner ear knew that the land which had been flat as flat for all these
many miles was now slanting downhill all the way to the horizon. That was the
gravitational influence of all that mass before us. Late into the day it just
appeared. It was like a conjuring trick. One moment it wasn't there at all and
then, with the slightest of perceptual shifts, it dominated the vision. It was
so distant that it took on the milky backscatter color of the sky and it went up
so high you literally couldn't see the top. It was -- I knew this now -- our
destination:

The antenna.

Even driving the pickup truck, it took three days after first sighting to reach
its base.

On the morning of one of those days, Victoria suddenly pushed aside her
breakfast and ran for the far side of the truck. That being the only privacy to
be had for hundreds of miles around.

I listened to her retching. Knowing there was only one thing it could be.

She came back, pale and shaken. I got a plastic collection cup out of my bag.
"Pee into this," I told her. When she had, I ran a quick diagnostic. It came up
positive.

"Victoria," I said. "I've got an admission to make. I haven't been exactly
straight with you about the medical consequences of your...condition."
It was the only time I ever saw her afraid. "My God," she said, "What is it?
Tell me! What's happening to me?"

"Well, to begin with, you're pregnant."

There were no roads to the terminus, for all that it was visible from miles off.
It lay nestled at the base of the antenna, and to look at the empty and
trackless plains about it, you'd think there was neither reason for its
existence nor possibility of any significant traffic there.

Yet the closer we got, the more people we saw approaching it. They appeared out
of the everywhere and nothingness like hydrogen atoms being pulled into
existence in the stressed spaces between galaxies, or like shards of ice
crystallizing at random in supercooled superpure water. You'd see one far to
your left, maybe strolling along with a walking stick slung casually over one
shoulder and a gait that just told you she was whistling. Then beyond her in the
distance a puff of dust from what could only be a half-track. And to the right,
a man in a wide-brimmed hat sitting ramrod-straight in the saddle of a native
parasite larger than any elephant. With every hour a different configuration,
and all converging.

Roads materialized underfoot. By the time we arrived at the terminus, they were
thronged with people.

The terminal building itself was as large as a city, all gleaming white marble
arches and colonnades and parapets and towers. Pennants snapped in the wind.
Welcoming musicians played at the feet of the columns. An enormous holographic
banner dopplering slowly through the rainbow from infrared to ultraviolet and
back again, read:

BYZANTIUM PORT AUTHORITY MAGNETIC-LEVITATION MASS TRANSIT DIVISION
GROUND
TERMINUS

Somebody later told me it provided employment for a hundred thousand people, and
I believed him.

Victoria and I parked the truck by the front steps. I opened the door for her
and helped her gingerly out. Her belly was enormous by then, and her sense of
balance was off. We started up the steps. Behind us, a uniformed lackey got in
the pickup and drove it away.

The space within was grander than could have been supported had the terminus not
been located at the cusp of antenna and forehead, where the proximate masses
each canceled out much of the other's attraction. There were countless ticket
windows, all of carved mahogany. I settled Victoria down on a bench -- her feet
were tender -- and went to stand in line. When I got to the front, the
ticket-taker glanced at a computer screen and said, "May I help you, sir?"
"Two tickets, first-class. Up."

He tapped at the keyboard and a little device spat out two crisp pasteboard
tickets. He slid them across the polished brass counter, and I reached for my
wallet. "How much?" I said.

He glanced at his computer and shook his head. "No charge for you, Mister
Daniel. Professional courtesy."

"How did you know my name?"

"You're expected." Then, before I could ask any more questions, "That's all I
can tell you, sir. I can neither speak nor understand your language. It is
impossible for me to converse with you."

"Then what the hell," I said testily, "are we doing now?"

He flipped the screen around for me to see. On it was a verbatim transcript of
our conversation. The last line was: I SIMPLY READ WHAT'S ON THE SCREEN, SIR.

Then he turned it back toward himself and said, "I simply read what's --"

"Yeah, yeah, I know," I said. And went back to Victoria.

Even at mag-lev speeds, it took two days to travel the full length of the
antenna. To amuse myself, I periodically took out my gravitometer and made
readings. You'd think the figures would diminish exponentially as we climbed out
of the gravity well. But because the antennae swept backward, over the bulk of
the grasshopper, rather than forward and away, the gravitational gradient of our
journey was quite complex. It lessened rapidly at first, grew temporarily
stronger, and then lessened again, in the complex and lovely flattening
sine-wave known as a Sheffield curve. You could see it reflected in the size of
the magnetic rings we flashed through, three per minute, how they grew skinnier
then fatter and finally skinnier still as we flew upward.

On the second day, Victoria gave birth. It was a beautiful child, a boy. I
wanted to name him Hector, after my father, but Victoria was set on Jonathan,
and as usual I gave in to her.

Afterward, though, I studied her features. There were crow's-feet at the corners
of her eyes, or maybe "laugh lines" was more appropriate, given Victoria's
personality. The lines to either side of her mouth had deepened. Her whole face
had a haggard cast to it. Looking at her, I felt a sadness so large and
pervasive it seemed to fill the universe.

She was aging along her own exponential curve. The process was accelerating now,
and I was not at all certain she would make it to Sky Terminus. It would be a
close thing in either case.

I could see that Victoria knew it too. But she was happy as she hugged our
child. "It's been a good life," she said. "I wish you could have grown with me
-- don't pout, you're so solemn, Daniel! -- but other than that I have no
complaints."

I looked out the window for a minute. I had known her for only -what? --a week,
maybe. But in that brief time she had picked me up, shaken me off, and turned my
life around. She had changed everything. When I looked back, I was crying.

"Death is the price we pay for children, isn't it?" she said. "Down below,
they've made death illegal. But they're only fooling themselves. They think it's
possible to live forever. They think there are no limits to growth. But
everything dies -- people, stars, the universe. And once it's over, all lives
are the same length."

"I guess I'm just not so philosophical as you. It's a damned hard thing to lose
your wife."

"Well, at least you figured that one out."

"What one?

"That I'm your wife." She was silent a moment. Then she said, "I had another
dream. About your magician. And he explained about the drug. The one he called
mortality."

"Huh," I said. Not really caring.

"The drug I took, you wake up and you burn through your life in a matter of
days. With the new version, you wake up with a normal human lifespan, the length
people had before the immortality treatments. One hundred fifty, two hundred
years -- that's not so immediate. The suicides are kept alive because their
deaths come on so soon; it's too shocking to the survivors' sensibilities. The
new version shows its effects too slowly to be stopped."

I stroked her long white hair. So fine. So very, very brittle. "Let's not talk
about any of this."

Her eyes blazed "Let's do! Don't pretend to be a fool, Daniel. People multiply.
There's only so much food, water, space. If nobody dies, there'll come a time
when everybody dies." Then she smiled again, fondly, the way you might at a
petulent but still promising child. "You know what's required of you, Daniel.
And I'm proud of you for being worthy of it."

Sky Terminus was enormous, dazzling, beyond description. It was exactly like in
Vickie's dream. I helped her out onto the platform. She could barely stand by
then, but her eyes were bright and curious. Jonathan was asleep against my chest
in a baby-sling.

Whatever held the atmosphere to the platform, it offered no resistance to the
glittering, brilliantly articulated ships that rose and descended from all
parts. Strange cargoes were unloaded by even stranger longshoremen.

"I'm not as excited by all this as I would've been when I was younger," Victoria
murmured. "But somehow I find it more satisfying. Does that make sense to you?"

I began to say something. But then, abruptly, the light went out of her eyes.
Stiffening, she stared straight ahead of herself into nothing that I could see.
There was no emotion in her face whatsoever.

"Vickie?" I said.

Slowly, she tumbled to the ground.

It was then, while I stood stunned and unbelieving, that the magician came
walking up to me.

In my imagination I'd run through this scene a thousand times: Leaving my bag
behind, I stumbled off the train, toward him. He made no move to escape. I
flipped open my jacket with a shrug of the shoulder, drew out the revolver with
my good hand, and fired.

Now, though...

He looked sadly down at Victoria's body and put an arm around my shoulders.

"God," he said, "don't they just break your heart?"

I stayed on a month at the Sky Terminus to watch my son grow up. Jonathan died
without offspring and was given an orbital burial. His coffin circled the
grasshopper seven times before the orbit decayed and it scratched a bright
meteoric line down into the night. The flare lasted about as long as would a
struck sulfur match.

He'd been a good man, with a wicked sense of humor that never came from my side
of the family.

So now I wander the world. Civilizations rise and fall about me. Only I remain
unchanged. Where things haven't gotten too bad, I scatter mortality. Where they
have I unleash disease.

I go where I go and I do my job. The generations rise up like wheat before me,
and like a harvester I mow them down. Sometimes -- not often -- I go off by
myself, to think and remember. Then I stare up into the night, into the
colonized universe, until the tears rise up in my sight and drown the swarming
stars.

I am Death and this is my story.