"Delany, Samuel R - The Einstein Intersection 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Delaney Samuel R)

I dived forward. The slope increased, and suddenly I slid down a long way, very fast, getting even more scraped up. I came up sharply against pipes.
Eyes closed, I lay there, the tip of the crossbow uncomfortable under my shoulder, the blade handle biting between the bars and my hip. Then the places that were uncomfortable got numb.
If you really relax with your eyes closed, the lids pull slowly open. When I finally relaxed, light filled my eyes from the bottoms up like milk poured in bowls.
Light? I blinked.
Gray light beyond the grating, the gray that sunlight gets when it comes from around many corners. Only I was at least another two levels down. I lay behind the entrance to another drain like the one I had leaped through.
Then somewhere, the roar of a bull, still echoing through these deep stones.
I pulled myself up on the bars, elbows smarting, shoulders bruised, and something pulled sore in the bulk of my thigh. I gazed into the room below.
At one time there was a floor level with the bottom of this grating, but most of it had fallen in a long and longer time ago. Now the room was double height and the grate was at least fifteen feet above the present floor.
Seventy, eighty meters across, the room was round. The walls were dressed stone, or bare rock, and rose in gray towards the far light. There were many vaulted entrances into dark tunnels.
In the center was a machine.
While I watched it began to hum wistfully to itself and several banks of lights glittered into a pattern, froze, glittered into another. It was a computer from the old time (when you owned this Earth, you wraiths and memories), a few of which chuckled and chattered throughout the source-cave. I'd had them described to me, but this was the first I'd seen.
What had wakened me-
(and had I been asleep? And had I dreamed, remembering now with the throbbing image clinging to the back of my eyes, Friza?)
-was the wail of the beast.
Head down, hide bristling over the hunks of his shoulders, gemmed with water from the ceiling, he hunched into the room, dragging the knuckles of one hand, the other- the one I had wounded twice-hugged to his belly.

And on three legs, a four legged animal (even one with hands) limps.
He blinked about the room, and wailed again, his voice leaving pathos quickly and striking against rage. He stopped the sound with a sniff, then looked around and knew that I was there.
And I wanted very much not to be.
I squatted now behind the grating and looked back and up and down and couldn't see any way out. Hunt, Lo Hawk had said.
The hunter can be a pretty pathetic creature.
He swung his head again, tasting the air for me, his injured hand twitching high on his belly.
(The hunted's not so hot either.)
The computer whistled a few notes of one of the ancient tunes, some chorus from Carmen. The bull-beast glanced at it uncomprehending.
How was I to hunt him?
I brought the crossbow down and aimed through the grate. It wouldn't mean anything unless I got him in the eye. And he wasn't looking in the right direction.
I lowered the bow and took up my blade. I brought it to my mouth and blew. Blood bubbled from the holes. Then the note blasted and went reeling through the room.
He raised his head and stared at me.
Up went the bow; I aimed through the bars, pulled the trigger-Raging forward with horns shaking, he got bigger and bigger and bigger through the frame of stone. I fell back while the roar covered me, closing my eyes against the sight: his eye gushed about my shaft. He grasped the bars behind which I crouched.

Metal grated on stone, stone pulled from stone. And then the frame was a lot bigger than it had been. He hurled the crumpled grate across the room to smash into the wall and send pieces of stone rolling.
Then he reached in and grabbed me, legs and waist, in his fist, and I was being waved high in the air over his bellowing face (left side blind and bloody) and the room arching under me and my head flung from shoulder to shoulder and trying to point the crossbow down-one shaft broke on the stone by his hoof a long way below. Another struck awfully close to the shaft that Lo Hawk had shot into his side. Waiting for a wall of stone to come up and jelly my head, I fumbled another arrow into the slot.
His cheek was sheeted with blood. And suddenly there was more blood. The shaft struck and totally disappeared in the blind well of bone and lymph. I saw the other eye cloud as though someone had overblown the lens with powdered lime.
He dropped me.
Didn't throw me; just dropped. I grabbed the hair on his wrist. It slipped through my hands, and I slid down his forearms to the crook of his elbow.
Then his arm began to fall. Slowly I turned upside down. The back of his hand hit the floor, and his hind feet were clacking around on the stone.
He snorted, and I began to slide back down his fore-arm towards his hand, slowing myself by clutching at the bristles with feet and hands. I rolled clear of his palm and staggered away from him.
The thing in my thigh that was sprained throbbed.
I stepped backward and couldn't step any more.
He swayed over me, shook his head, splattering me with

his ruined eye. And he was grand. And he was still strong, dying above me. And he was huge. Furious, I swayed with him in my fury, my fists clutched against my hips, tongue stifled in my mouth.
He was great and he was handsome and he still stood there defying me while dying, scoffing at my bruises. Damn you, beast who would be greater than-
One arm buckled, a hindleg now, and he collapsed away from me, crashing.
Something in the fistsful of darkness that were his nostrils thundered and roared-but softer, and softer. His ribs rose to furrow his side, fell to rise again; I took up the bow and limped to the bloody tears of his lips, fitted one final shaft. It followed the other two into his brain.
His hands jerked three feet, then fell (Boom! Boom!) relaxing now.
When he was still, I went and sat on the base of the computer and leaned against the metal casing. Somewhere inside it was clicking.
I hurt. Lots.
Breathing was no fun any more. And I had, somewhere during all this, bitten the inside of my cheek. And when I do that, it gets me so mad I could cry.
I closed my eyes.