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

as if the big jets in the landing pattern were brushing their wheels on the roof as they
went over.
Again it fled in unknowing panic, pouring itself like a tide of mist across
rooftops, up walls, down rusting and dilapidated fire escapes. Instinctively seeking
shelter from this nightmare place, it squeezed between the slats of a broken and
boarded-up window, and found itself in darkness.
In darkness, it calmed again, its panic fading.
There were heavy, bulky objects around it in the gloom, its spatial sense told
it, and gratefully it poured itself under them, working its way as far in as it could.
Feeling safer for the sheltering mass above it, it let its mind drift into the neutral
looping that served its kind for sleepтАж.
 Early the next morning, a neutral alarm jolted it back into active mode, and it
watched from under a cluster of heavy Victorian furnitureтАФdressers, hunt cabinets,
wardrobes, highboys, roll-top mahogany desks: the sheltering masses of the night
beforeтАФas a man came into the room, a bald-pated man with a frizzy halo of white
hair around his ears and a hammer tucked by the claw-end into the breast pocket of
his coveralls. It had found refuge in an antique warehouse, a rundown and
half-abandoned brick building that had, sometime in the nineteenth century, been a
harness-makerтАЩs factory. Now the downstairs floor was used as a workshop, while
the upper two floors were devoted to the storage of antiques awaiting either
renovation or delivery, room after room of dusty furniture, some of which had not
been moved or touched in years.
Whistling, the man kicked at a wardrobe, tapped the joints a few times with
the hammer, then tipped the wardrobe over so he could work the nails loose from
the wood.
It had shrunk away at the close approach of the manтАЩs feet. Now it stirred and
oozed forward again, sliding under a sideboard, a pharmacistтАЩs cabinet, a
claw-footed bath basin, pausing finally under an overstuffed damask armchair to
observe the workman.
Still whistling, the workman pulled a square of sandpaper from his hip pocket
and began to rasp away at the wardrobe.
The fire-of-life was there, the crackling electric interplay of the nervous
systemтАж.
Hunger stirred in it again, and it felt its mantle stiffen and rise.
Slowly it slid forwardтАж.
The workman tucked the sandpaper away in his pocket, picked up the
hammer again, and tapped ruminatively at the wardrobe. The wan gray morning light
gleamed from his bald head and glinted from his thick eyeglasses as he moved. He
was a superstitious man, given to hunches and omens and premonitions, but now, in
a supreme bit of irony, with death gliding silently up behind him, he was oblivious to
its presence.
Death was a lightless black ribbon that reared up behind him, a hooded flat
cobra-shaped shadow that loomed over him, paused, and with the slightest
involuntary tremble prepared to strike, to reach out to claim himтАж.
Inches from the workman, so close his internal interplay of forces was a
tantalizing tickle, it stopped. It stopped, made hesitant by a flicker of the same sort
of shadowy, half understood instinct or almost-memory that the night before had
taught it how to kill. The pattern of the fire-of-life was complex and intensely
brightтАФthis was certainly a sophont, and somehow it knew that killing sophonts
could be dangerous if other sophonts learned of the killing, if you alerted them to