"Gardner Dozois - A Special Kind of Morning" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

isolation came a sick, smothering panic. It was the inverse of
claustrophobia. My flesh had turned to clear plastic, my bones to glass,
and I was naked, ultimately naked, and there was nothing I could wrap me
in. Surrounded by an army, I would still be alone; shrouded in iron thirty
feet underground, I would still be naked. One portion of my mind
wondered dispassionately if I was slipping into shock; the rest of it fought
to keep down the scream that gathered along tightening muscles. The
isolation increased. I was unaware of my surroundings, except for the heat
and the pressure of enclosure.

I was seeing the molten spider of D'kotta, lying on its back and showing
its obscene blotched belly, kicking legs of flame against the sky, each leg
raising a poison blister where it touched the clouds.

I was seeing the boy, face runneled by blood, beating heels against the
ground.

I was beginning to doubt big, simple ideas.

Nothing moved in the valley except wind through grass, spirits circling
in the form of birds.

Spider legs.

Crab dance.

The blocky shadow of the vacvan crept across the valley.

Suddenly, with the intensity of vision, I was picturing Ren sitting in the
van cab, shoulders resting against the door, legs stretched out along the
seat, feet propped up on the instrument board, one ankle crossed over the
other, gun resting across his lap, eyes watching the valley mouth through
the windfield. He would be smoking a cigarette, and he would take it from
his lips occasionally, flick the ashes onto the shiny dials with a fingernail,
smile his strange smile, and carefully burn holes in the plush fabric of the
upholstery. The fabric (real fabric; not plastic) would smolder, send out a
wisp of bad-smelling smoke, and there would be another charred black
hole in the seat. Ren would smile again, put the cigarette back in his
mouth, lean back, and puff slowly. Ren was waiting to answer the radio
signal from the orbot, to assure its pilot and crew that all was well, to talk
them down to death. If they suspected anything was wrong, he would be
the first to die. Even if everything went perfectly, he stood a high chance of
dying anyway; he was the most exposed. It was almost certainly a suicide
job. Ren said that he didn't give a shit; maybe he actually didn't. Or at
least had convinced himself that he didn't. He was an odd man. Older than
any of us, even Heynith, he had worked most of his life as a cadet
executive in Admin at Urheim, devoted his existence to his job,
subjugated all of his energies to it. He had been passed over three times
for promotion to executive status, years of redoubled effort and mounting
anxiety between each rejection. With the third failure he had been quietly