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

of the rat.)

Once under the sidewalk, the rat entered a world that humans never saw, and which they couldn't have
accessed even if they knew about it: a three-dimensional space wrapped in a madly complex skein
around and under and within the human world, like something from an Escher print, a world composed
of spaces and tunnels under the sidewalks and streets, of subway tunnels (some of them, including whole
lost stations, abandoned for almost a hundred years), of forgotten basements and sub-basements and
sub-sub-basements, of ineffectually boarded-up warehouses and decaying brownstones, of sewers, of
service tunnels through which ran pipes conveying steam or water or electricity or gas, of alleys and
trash-strewn tenement backyards, of disused pipes at construction sites, of runways through the bushes
and deep tangled undergrowth of urban parks and squares, of the maze of low roofs and crumbling
chimneys that broke around the flanks of newer skyscrapers like a scummy brick-and-tarpaper surf
(although the lordly skyscrapers too had places visited by rats, in the deep roots of the buildings where
humans seldom went), and of the crawl-spaces between floors and under the floorboards and inside the
walls of almost every building in the city. The rat rarely ventured more than a few blocks from its burrow,
but if it had wanted to, it could have traveled from tunnel to chamber to tunnelтАФducking out from a
crack in a foundation, up a drain-spout, across a roof, in again at a sewer grateтАФall the way across
Manhattan to the Bronx and back to Brooklyn without ever coming out into the open air for more than a
few seconds at a time.

Now it followed a narrow tunnel down to a widened-out chamber lined with torn-up newspapers and
trash bags and shopping bags, the place where it and a dozen of its brothers and sisters had been born,
and where it still slept many nights with an assortment of other bachelors. It would be
anthropomorphizing again to ascribe human feelings of sentiment or nostalgia to the rat, although as it
paused to sniff the heavy, cloying odors of the burrow, perhaps it's not too much to suggest that it gained
some comfort or a feeling of momentary security from the long-familiar scents. Then it was off again,
down another, longer tunnel that led out, from a hole behind a drainspout, into another alley.

It wasn't looking for anything in particularтАФit was just looking. It had spent most of the nights of its life
like this, restlessly pacing from place to place to place within its range, with no particular goal or
destination in mind, but instantly ready to take advantage of whatever opportunities it came across on the
way.

The rat stopped to lap up some Coke from a tossed-out soft-drink cup, relishing the sudden sharp
sweetness, then ducked into a building through a hole gnawed in the molding, and into the dusty maze of
crawlspaces between floors and ceilings, and behind walls. Whiskers twitching with sudden interest, it
followed the scent of a receptive female, and found her among long-shuttered boxes and shrouded
furniture in an attic, but a bigger ratтАФa veteran almost two years oldтАФhad found her first and was
already mounting her. The bigger rat growled at him over her back without missing a stroke, showing
yellowed fangs, and, resentfully, the rat retreated, back into the interior spaces between walls, then out
onto a roof in the cold night air.

There was a smell of cat here, and while the rat wasn't too worried about cats (few of whom would
tackle a full-grown rat), caution prompted it to move on anyway. It ghosted across a roof, across a
connecting roof, and then into a space left where a brick had fallen out of a long-dead chimney. Down
the chimney shaft to a fireplace which had had a sheet of tin clumsily nailed over it decades before, out
through one sagging corner, and into a room filled with the ghostly, sheet-covered hulks of crumbling,
mildewed Victorian furnitureтАФthe kind of place, if this were a fantasy, where it might have stopped to
consult with a wise old Rat King tied tail to tail to tail, but which in reality contained only the crisscrossing
traceries of tiny footprints in the deep dust of the floor. Into a hole in the kitchen baseboard, out into an