"Gardner Dozois - When the Great Days Came" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

When the Great Days Came
GARDNER R. DOZOIS
From Hartwell, David - Year's Best SF 11 (2006)

Gardner R. Dozois lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He recently retired from the editorship of
Asimov's, after winning 13 Hugo Awards as best editor, and establishing Asimov's as the leading
magazine of the day in SF. Before that, he was one of the leading anthologists in SF, and he
continues to be very active as an anthologist. He has published nearly sixty anthologies,
sometimes co-edited with others, often Jack M. Dann. His most prominent anthology since 1984 is
the annual Year's Best Science Fiction, a recasting and expansion of Best SF Stories of the Year,
which he edited from 1977 to 1987 (5 volumes). He began writing SF in the 1960s, and has
published fiction throughout his career, though less often since 1984. Some of his stories are
collected in The Visible Man (1977), Slow Dancing Through Time (7990), Geodesic Dreams (1992),
and Morning Child and Other Stories (2004).

"When the Great Days Came" was published in Fantasy & Science Fiction. It is an amusing tale
that proves that even the end of the world as we know it might look quite different to a rat. It's all
a matter of point of view.

The rat slunk down the dark alley, keeping close to the comforting bulk of the brick wall of an
abandoned warehouse, following scent trails that it and thousands of its kind had laid down countless
times before. It stopped to snateh up a cockroach, crunching it in its strong jaws, and to sniff at a frozen
patch of garbage, and then scurried on. Above it, the stars shone bright and cold where a patch of night
sky looked down into the deep stone canyon of the alleyway.

It was in an alley near 10th and Broadway, in New York City, although the human terms meant nothing
to it, but as far as the world it lived in and the kind of life it led in that world was concerned, it would
have made very little difference if it had been in any big city in the world.

It's tempting to give the rat an anthropomorphic humanized name like Sleektail or Sharptooth or
Longwhiskers, but in fact the only "name" it had was a scent-signature composed of pheromones and
excretions from its scent-glands, the tang of its breath, and the hot rich smell of its anus; so it had no
name that could be even approximately rendered in human terms, nor would the human concept of a
name, with all the freight of implications that go with it, have meant anything to it.

The rat emerged from the alley, and shrank back as a car flashed by in a sudden burst of light and wind
and the perception of hurtling mass, and a stink of rubber and burning gasoline you could smell coming
blocks away. One of its litter-mates had been killed by one of these monsters back in the summer, almost
half a lifetime ago, and the rat had been wary of them ever since. When the car had passed, leaving the
night quiet again in its wake, the rat reared up to sniff the air for a moment, then lowered itself down to
follow the curb, keeping its shoulder brushing against it as it ran.

At the corner of a side street, an inch-wide hole had been gnawed under one of the concrete sidewalk
slabs. The rat paused to collapse its skeleton and change the shape of its head, and then squeezed
through the hole into the tunnel beyond.

(It wouldn't do to leave you with the impression that there was anything unusual about this. The rat wasn't
a mutant or a shapeshifting alienтАФit was just a rat. All of its millions of brethren had this ability, as did
many other rodents, their skulls not being plated together like those of other mammals, so that they could
squeeze themselves through an opening three-quarters of an inch wide, or smaller, depending on the size