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

enclosed tenement yard cluttered with broken chairs and an overturned swing set, all buried in weeds,
out under the bottom of a board fence, and into another dank alley, following now the enticing scent of
food.

This was prime scavenging territory, an alley behind a block that contained three or four restaurants and
fast-food places, always filled with easily gnawed-through green trash bags and overflowing metal
garbage barrels. The rat sniffed around the barrels, nosed half a gnawed hot-dog and some Cheese
Doodles out from under a clutter of plastic trash and cans, swallowed the food hurriedly, and then found
a real prize: a discarded pizza box with two pieces of pizza still inside.

Most rats love pizza, and this rat was no exception. It had just settled down contentedly to gnaw on a
slice of Sicilian when a wave of alien stink and the clatter of heavy, clumsy footsteps told it that a human
was coming. And there it was, lumbering ponderously down the alley, a vast, shambling giant that seemed
to tower impossibly into the sky.

For a moment, the rat held its position defiantly astride the pizza box, but then the human spotted it and
yelled something at it in its huge, blaring, bellowing voice.

The resentment the rat had felt when it had been chased away from the willing female earlier returned,
sharper and hotter and fiercer than ever. The rat was an exceptionally bright rat, but, of course, it was
just a rat, and so it didn't have the words, or the concepts that grew from the words, to articulate the
feelings that roiled within it. If it had had the words, it might almost have been able, for a flickering
moment, to dream of a world where things were different, a day when rats didn't have to give way to
humans, when they could go where they wanted to go and do what they wanted to do without having to
scurry away and hide whenever a human came near.

But it didn't have the words, and so the vision it had almost grasped guttered and died without ever quite
coming into full focus, leaving only the tiniest smoky shard of itself behind in its mind.

The rat stood its ground for a second longer, an act of almost insane bravery in its own context, but then
the human bellowed again and threw a bottle at it, and the rat darted away, leaving the prize behind,
vanishing instantly behind the garbage barrels and away unseen down the alley, keeping to the shadows.

As Fate would have it, it was the very same rat, an hour later, up on another tarpaper tenement roof,
sniffing at a box of Moo Shu Pork spilling out of a green trash bag that the tenants had been too lazy to
take downstairs to the curb, who saw a trail of fire cut suddenly across the winter sky, and who reared
up on its hind legs in time to see the glowing disk of the six-mile-wide asteroid pass over the city, on its
way to a collision with a hillside north of Chibougamau in Northern Quebec.

The rat watched, sitting back on its haunches, as the glowing thing passed below the horizon. A moment
later, the northern sky turned red, a glow that spread from horizon to horizon east to west, as if the sun
were coming up in the wrong place, and then a bright pillar of fire climbed up over the horizon, and grew
and grew and grew. Already the blast-front of the impact was rushing over the ground toward the city at
close to a thousand miles per hour, a blow that wouldultimately wipe the human race as well as the rat
itself and mostтАФbut not allтАФof its kin off the face of the Earth.

Moments from death, the rat had no way to know it, butтАФ after a pause for millions of years of
evolution, and for radiating out to fill soon-to-be-vacated ecological nichesтАФits day had come round at
last.