"Gardner Dozois & Michael Swanwick - Ancestral Voices" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

ANCESTRAL VOICES
By Gardner Dozois & Michael Swanwick
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Like all intelligent creatures, it adapted. Behind it was fire! fear! pain! horror! and it
fled from them through madness and roaring chaos, fled for a long nightmarish time
through an unfamiliar world, through a phantasmagorical confusion of alien shapes
and lights and stinks and noises, fled until its strength was gone and it could flee no
more.
After that was the black churning darkness of oblivion.
When it came to itself again, awareness returning bit by incremental bit, it was
in a dank and narrow alley between the back of a decaying flophouse hotel and the
side of a liquor store, lying still in the deep black shadow behind a mound of
overstuffed green garbage bags.
Warily, it surveyed its surroundings, taking in the tall brick walls that rose on
either side, the muddy, slime-coated pavement upon which it rested, the dull red
lightтАФfrom an ancient, buzzing neon sign on the cornerтАФthat ebbed and flooded
rhythmically through the darkness, the thin sliver of alien sky far overheadтАжand
again it was taken by disorientation and fear. It reached instinctively for knowledge,
for connection with the flood of data that would tell it location, status, mission, and
instead it touched fire! fear! pain! horror! and recoiled from the searing agony of the
memory.
Cautiously, it tried again to remember, like an electric linesman testing a live
wire by gingerly brushing it with his thumb, and again it was driven back by the
sizzling intensity of what lurked in the recesses of its own mind. Again and again it
tried to remember, until its mind was ablaze with pain, and shudders ran like waves
across the long flat carpet of its body. But nothing would come.
Its past was gone. It had no pastтАФit had been born in that endless moment of
pain and red screaming chaos, and before that it could not go. Instinctively it knew
that it didnтАЩt belong here, that the world around it was alien, frighteningly wrong, but
it couldnтАЩt remember how the world should be, what or where home was, what it
was doing here in this place whose wrongness beat in upon its senses from every
side.
Trembling, it lay flat in the cold mud of the alley. Each new sound from the
unknown world beyond, each metallic roar or shriek or clatter, sent a new pulse of
terror through it.
And then something blocked part of the light from the alley-mouth.
A monstrous figure loomed there, huge and dark and terrible.
 There was the sound of a can being kicked underfoot, sent clattering away
against the wall.
The figure moved slowly closer, down the alleyway, swaying, staggering from
side to side, pushing a wave of rich alien stink before it.
тАЬOblah-dee,тАЭ the figure muttered. тАЬOblahfucking-dee, oblahfucking-blahтАФтАЭ
It crashed against the wall, pushed away again. тАЬLife goes fucking onnnn, blahтАФтАЭ
The figure coughed, coughed again spasmodically, hawked and spat.
тАЬSonsabitches,тАЭ it mumbled. тАЬThink they can tell meтАжтАЭ
Weaving. Coming closer.
It saw the wino with the colorless, directionless perception characteristic of its
race, but, more importantly, it felt him, felt the rush and interplay of electrical
impulses along the intricate pathways of the winoтАЩs nervous system, felt the cold
living fire that pulsed about the cerebrum, felt the sensuous shifting and interweaving