"Gardner Dozois - Horse Of Air (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

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GARDNER R. DOZOIS

Horse of Air

GARDNER R. Dozois was born July 23, 1947, in Salem, Massachusetts, his ancestry conveniently half
Irish and the remainder an amalgamation of French, Scottish, Dutch and American Indian. He spent
three years of army service as a military journalist in Nuremberg, Germany, and since then he has
worked as journalist, radio and TV broadcaster, busboy, IBM card filer, and editorial reader for
Dell and Award Books and UPD Magazines. Along the way he took part in amateur theatrics and
dabbled in photography, anthropology, sociology, natural history and history, exercising his body
in bicycling and swimming and his mind in worrying, and he began to write.

His first story was sold in 1966, and the total now exceeds a baker's dozen. In addition to the
science fiction magazines, he has contributed stories to several volumes of the Orbit series,
Quark 7, New Dimensions 1 and ll, and Universe l. His short story "A Dream at Noonday," was a
finalist in the 1970 Nebula Award balloting. Dozois is the editor of a collection of stories, A
Day in the Life (1972). He is a member of Science Fiction Writers of America and the SFWA
Speakers' Bureau, and he has been a guest instructor at the Clarion Writers' Workshop.

In the 1971 Nebula Award balloting his name appeared on the final

ballot twice: with his novelette "A Special Kind of Morning" and with his short story "Horse of
Air."

Sometimes when the weather is good I sit and look out over the ` city, fingers hooked through the
mesh.

-The mesh is weather-stained, beginning to rust. As his fingers scrabble at it, chips of rust
flake off, staining his hands the color of crusted blood. The heavy wire is hot and smooth under
his fingers, turning rougher and drier at a rust spot. If he presses his tongue against the wire,
it tastes slightly of lemons. He doesn't do that very often

The city is quieter now. You seldom see motion, mostly birds if you do. AS I watch, two pigeons
strut along the roof ledge of the low building several stories below my balcony, stopping every
now and then to pick at each other's feathers. They look fatter than ever. I wonder what they eat
these days. Probably it is better not to know. They have learned to keep away from me anyway,
although the mesh that encloses my small balcony floor to ceiling makes it difficult to get at
them if they do land nearby. I'm not _┬░ really hungry, of course, but they are noisy and leave
droppings. , I don't really bear any malice toward them. It's not a personal thing; I do it for
the upkeep of the place.

(I hate birds. 1 will kill any- of them I can reach. I do it with my
belt buckle, snapping it between the hoops of wire.) -