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

know it when you smell it. You're bound for blood; for blood and passion
and high deeds and all the rest of the business, and maybe for a little
understanding if you're lucky and have eyes to see. Me, I'm bound for
nothing, literally. I've come to rest here in Kos, and while the Red Lady
spins her web of colors across the sky I sit and weave my own webs of
words and dreams and other spider stuffтАФ

What? Yes I do talk too much; old men like to babble, and philosophy's
a cushion for old bones. But it's my profession now, isn't it, and I've
promised you a story. What happened to my leg? That's a bloody story,
but I said you're bound for blood; I know the mark. I'll tell it to you then:
perhaps it'll help you to understand when you reach the narrow place,
perhaps it'll even help you to think, although that's a horrible weight to
wish on any man. It's customary to notarize my card before I start, keep
you from running off at the end without paying. Thank you, young sir.
Beware of some of these beggars, buck; they have a credit tally at Central
greater than either of us will ever run up. They turn a tidy profit out of
poverty. I'm an honest pauper, more's the pity, exist mostly on the
subsidy, if you call that existingтАФYes, I know. The leg.

We'll have to go back to the Realignment for that, more than half a
century ago, and half a sector away, at World. This was before World was
a member of the Commonwealth. In fact, that's what the Realignment was
about, the old Combine overthrown by the Quaestors, who then opted for
amalgamation and forced World into the Commonwealth. That's where
and when the story starts.

Start it with waiting.

A lot of things start like that, waiting. And when the thing you're
waiting for is probable death, and you're lying there loving life and
suddenly noticing how pretty everything is and listening to the flint hooves
of darkness click closer, feeling the iron-shod boots strike relentless sparks
from the surface of your mind, knowing that death is about to fall out of
the sky and that there's no way to twist out from underтАФthen, waiting can
take time. Minutes become hours, hours become unthinkable horrors. Add
enough horrors together, total the scaly snouts, and you've got a day and a
half I once spent laying up in a mountain valley in the Blackfriars on
World, almost the last day I ever spent anywhere.

This was just a few hours after D'kotta. Everything was a mess, nobody
really knew what was happening, everybody's communication lines cut. I
was just a buck myself then, working with the Quaestors in the field, a
hunted criminal. Nobody knew what the Combine would do next, we
didn't know what we'd do next, groups surging wildly from one place to
another at random, panic and riots all over the planet, even in the
Controlled Environments.

And D'kotta-on-the-Blackfriars was a seventy-mile swath of smoking
insanity, capped by boiling umbrellas of smoke that eddied ashes from the