He knew now that the living dolls were real and that they were the living ancestors of the Proavitoi.
Many of the little creatures began to fall asleep again. Their waking moments were short, but their sleeps seemed to be likewise. Several of the living mummies woke a second time while Ceran was still in the room, woke refreshed from very short sleeps and were anxious to talk again.
“You are incredible!” Ceran cried out, and all the small and smaller and still smaller creatures smiled and laughed their assent. Of course they were. All good creatures everywhere are incredible, and were there ever so many assembled in one place? But Ceran was greedy. A roomful of miracles wasn’t enough.
“I have to take this back as far as it will go!” he cried avidly. “Where are the even older ones?”
“There are older ones and yet older and again older,” said the first grandmother, “and thrice-over older ones, but perhaps it would be wise not to seek to be too wise. You have seen enough. The old people are sleepy. Let us go up again.”
Go up again, out of this? Ceran would not. He saw passages and descending ramps, down into the heart of the great hill itself. There were whole worlds of rooms about him and under his feet. Ceran went on and down, and who was to stop him? Not dolls and creatures much smaller than dolls.
Manbreaker had once called himself an old pirate who revelled in the stream of his riches. But Ceran was the Young Alchemist who was about to find the Stone itself.
He walked down the ramps through centuries and millennia. The atmosphere he had noticed on the upper levels was a clear odor now—sleepy, half-remembered, smiling, sad, and quite strong. That is the way Time smells.
“Are there those here even older than you?” Ceran asked a small grandmother whom he held in the palm of his hand.
“So old and so small that I could hold in my hand,” said the grandmother in what Ceran knew from Nokoma to be the older uncompounded form of the Proavitus language.
Smaller and older the creatures had been getting as Ceran went through the rooms. He was boiled lobster now for sure. He had to believe it alclass="underline" he saw and felt it. The wren-sized grandmother talked and laughed and nodded that there were those far older than herself, and in doing so she nodded herself back to sleep. Ceran returned her to her niche in the hive-like wall where there were thousands of others, miniaturized generations.
Of course he was not in the house of Nokoma now. He was in the heart of the hill that underlay all the houses of Proavitus, and these were the ancestors of everybody on the asteroid.
“Are there those here even older than you?” Ceran asked a small grandmother whom he held on the tip of his finger.
“Older and smaller,” she said, “but you come near the end.”
She was asleep, and he put her back in her place. The older they were, the more they slept.
He was down to solid rock under the roots of the hill. He was into the passages that were cut out of that solid rock, but they could not be many or deep. He had a sudden fear that the creatures would become so small that he could not see them or talk to them, and so he would miss the secret of the beginning.
But had not Nokoma said that all the old people knew the secret? Of course. But he wanted to hear it from the oldest of them. He would have it now, one way or the other.
“Who is the oldest? Is this the end of it? Is this the beginning? Wake up! Wake up!” he called when he was sure he was in the lowest and oldest room.
“Is it Ritual?” asked some who woke up. Smaller than mice they were, no bigger than bees, maybe older than both.
“It is a special Ritual,” Ceran told them. “Relate to me how it was in the beginning.”
What was that sound—too slight, too scattered to be a noise? It was like a billion microbes laughing. It was the hilarity of little things waking up to a high time.
“Who is the oldest of all?” Ceran demanded, for their laughter bothered him. “Who is the oldest and first?”
“I am the oldest, the ultimate grandmother,” one said gaily. “All the others are my children. Are you also of my children?”
“Of course,” said Ceran, and the small laughter of unbelief flittered out from the whole multitude of them.
“Then you must be the ultimate child, for you are like no other. If you be, then it is as funny at the end as it was in the beginning.”
“How was it in the beginning?” Ceran bleated. “You are the first. Do you know how you came to be?”
“Oh, yes, yes,” laughed the ultimate grandmother, and the hilarity of the small things became a real noise now.
“How did it begin?” demanded Ceran, and he was hopping and skipping about in his excitement.
“Oh, it was so funny a joke the way things began that you would not believe it,” chittered the grandmother. “A joke, a joke!”
“Tell me the joke, then. If a joke generated your species, then tell me that cosmic joke.”
“Tell yourself,” tinkled the grandmother. “You are a part of the joke if you are of my children. Oh, it is too funny to believe. How good to wake up and laugh and go to sleep again.”
Blazing green frustration! To be so close and to be balked by a giggling bee!
“Don’t go to sleep again! Tell me at once how it began!” Ceran shrilled, and he had the ultimate grandmother between thumb and finger.
“This is not Ritual,” the grandmother protested. “Ritual is that you guess what it was for three days, and we laugh and say, ‘No, no, no, it was something nine times as wild as that. Guess some more.’”
“I will not guess for three days! Tell me at once or I will crush you,” Ceran threatened in a quivering voice.
“I look at you, you look at me, I wonder if you will do it,” the ultimate grandmother said calmly.
Any of the tough men of the Expedition would have done it—would have crushed her, and then another and another and another of the creatures till the secret was told. If Ceran had taken on a tough personality and a tough name he’d have done it. If he’d been Gutboy Barrelhouse he’d have done it without a qualm. But Ceran Swicegood couldn’t do it.
“Tell me,” he pleaded in agony. “All my life I’ve tried to find out how it began, how anything began. And you know!”
“We know. Oh, it was so funny how it began. So joke! So fool, so clown, so grotesque thing! Nobody could guess, nobody could believe.”
“Tell me! Tell me!” Ceran was ashen and hysterical.
“No, no, you are no child of mine,” chortled the ultimate grandmother. “Is too joke a joke to tell a stranger. We could not insult a stranger to tell so funny, so unbelieve. Strangers can die. Shall I have it on conscience that a stranger died laughing?”
“Tell me! Insult me! Let me die laughing!” But Ceran nearly died crying from the frustration that ate him up as a million bee-sized things laughed and hooted and giggled:
“Oh, it was so funny the way it began!”
And they laughed. And laughed. And went on laughing … until Ceran Swicegood wept and laughed together, and crept away, and returned to the ship still laughing. On his next voyage he changed his name to Blaze Bolt and ruled for ninety-seven days as king of a sweet sea island in M-81, but that is another and much more unpleasant story.
Afterword by Andy Duncan
I first encountered “Nine Hundred Grandmothers” in The Norton Book of Science Fiction, edited by Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery with Karen Joy Fowler, an anthology that turned out to be important to my fiction-writing career. It was published in fall 1993, during my first year in the graduate creative-writing program at North Carolina State University. I don’t think I bought a copy immediately, but in January 1994 I had my first workshop with Nebula Award winner John Kessel, who peered at my manuscript and peered at me and peered at my manuscript again and said, “There’s a long, rich history of this sort of thing, and you’re part of it whether you know it or not.”