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

your presence by the killing, especially if you were incautious enough to kill near
your own nest or refuge. It was just now beginning to realize how much of its
surroundings were artificial, crafted; the other night it had seen the buildings and
rooftops and alleyways as natural formations, alien mountains and canyons and
outcroppings of rock, and only now, replaying the thread of that memory, could it
begin to guess how much of all it had seen so far had been made.
Created! This spoke of a world of almost unbelievable complexity, a world
whose ways would have to be unraveled with patience and caution, and it dare not
endanger the best refuge it had found so far just for a quick and easy kill.
It reversed direction, flowing backward as easily as it had flowed forward,
disappearing under a chiffonier.
The workman continued tapping at the wardrobe, as unaware of his reprieve
as he had been of his endangerment. As he put the hammer away and fished a
screwdriver out of his belt, he began to whistle тАЬAmazing Grace.тАЭ Already deep
inside the warehouse, the hammering and whistling fading behind, it sped through the
dim and cobwebbed spaces beneath dustcovered harpsichords and mildewing
Victorian sofas and wormholed grandfather clocks, seeking out the sealed-off and
deserted sections of the building where men never went, seeking safer prey.


It adapted.
There were pigeons by the dozen in the deserted attic of the warehouse, and in
the long-unused belvedere, boarded-up sloppily enough to be open to the sky on
three sides, there were pigeons by the hundreds. There were cats on the surrounding
maze of rooftops, and rats in the alleyways and sewers it learned to hunt by night.
There was a little park a few blocks from the warehouse, and there among the trees
and bushes it learned to take squirrels and field mice and nesting birds of all sorts.
People would bring big dogs to the park and unleash them and let them run, and it
took several of those, finding them very satisfactory. It needed a good deal of
nourishment, fairly frequently, and finding that nourishment kept it busy.
It stayed hidden by daylight as much as it could, although it soon realized that
the native sophonts were unlikely to spot it even thenтАФit blended well with the
stained and soot-covered and moss-overgrown walls of the city, and it traveled the
roofways where people seldom looked. Electrical appliances and motor vehicles
made it uneasy, and it stayed away from them; it had learned early that they were not
alive, but their electrical fields touched off strange longings and sudden goosed
scurryings of almost-memories that disturbed the placid mental status quo it had
established for itself, the easy looping of its mind in ways that did not force it to
confront the fire! fear! pain! horror! that always lurked somewhere just below its
surface thoughts. It also had a strange effect occasionally on the electric appliances,
though it didnтАЩt pay any attention to that.
 It adapted, the weeks went by, and fall began to solidify into winter.
Prey became harder to find as the days grew colder. It often went hungry. It
had made serious inroads on the local dog and cat populationтАФalthough there were
always a few strays drifting in to partially compensateтАФand many of the pigeons
were nesting elsewhere now, having shifted their range for blocks and even miles to
avoid the relentless horror that poured like smoke across the gables and ledges and
roof-eaves. Even the rats had noticeably thinned out.
One dull gray afternoon, it took three children who were playing in the park,
and that evening the park and the streets around the park were thick with men with