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

of me, but somehow I'd never allowed myself to admit it. Now I'd had my
face jammed in it, and, coming on top of all the other anguish I'd gone
through the last two days, it was too much.
 I pushed into the clearing.

My footsteps triggered some response in the null. It surged drunkenly
to its feet, arms swinging limply, and turned to face me.

The null was slightly taller than me, built very slender, and couldn't
have weighed too much more than a hundred pounds. It was bald,
completely hairless. The fingers were shriveled, limp flesh dangling from
the club of the hand; they had never been used. The toes had been
developed to enable technicians to walk nulls from one section of the
Cerebrum to another, but the feet had never had a chance to toughen or
grow callused: they were a mass of blood and lacerations. The nose was a
rough blob of pink meat around the nostrils, the ears similarly atrophied.
The eyes were enormous, huge milky corneas and small pupils, like those
of a nocturnal bird; adapted to the gloom of the Cerebrum, and allowed to
function to forestall sensory deprivation; they aren't cut into the
psychocybernetic current like the synapses or the ganglions. There were
small messy wounds on the temples, wrists, and spine-base where
electrodes had been torn loose. It had been shrouded in a pajamalike suit
of nonconductive material, but that had been torn almost completely
away, only a few hanging tatters remaining. There were no sex organs. The
flesh under the rib cage was curiously collapsed; no stomach or digestive
tract. The body was covered with bruises, cuts, gashes, extensive swatches
sun-baked to second-degree burns, other sections seriously frostbitten or
marred by bad coldburns from the night shrubs. My awe grew, deepened
into archetypical dread. It was from D'kotta, there could be no doubt
about it. Somehow it had survived the destruction of its Cerebrum,
somehow it had walked through the boiling hell to the foothills, somehow
it had staggered up to and over the mountain shoulder. I doubted if
there'd been any predilection in its actions; probably it had just walked
blindly away from the ruined Cerebrum in a straight line and kept
walking. Its actions with the talus bluff demonstrated that; maybe earlier
some dim instinct had helped it fumble its way around obstacles in its
path, but now it was exhausted, baffled, stymied. It was miraculous that it
had made it this far. And the agony it must have suffered on its way was
inconceivable. I shivered, spooked. The short hairs bristled on the back of
my neck. The null lurched toward me. I whimpered and sprang
backwards, nearly falling, swinging up the gun.

The null stopped, its head lolling, describing a slow semicircle. Its eyes
were tracking curiously, and I doubted if it could focus on me at all. To it,
I must have been a blur of darker gray.

I tried to steady my ragged breathing. It couldn't hurt me; it was
harmless, nearly dead anyway. Slowly, I lowered the gun, pried my fingers
from the stock, slung the gun over my shoulder.