"Vonda N. McIntyre-The Mountains of Sunset, the Mountains of Dawn" - читать интересную книгу автора (McIntyre Vonda N)

The Mountains of Sunset, the Mountains of
Dawn
by Vonda N. McIntyre
This story copyright 1979 by Vonda N. McIntyre. This copy was created for Jean Hardy's personal use.
All other rights are reserved. Thank you for honoring the copyright.

Published by Seattle Book Company, www.seattlebook.com.

* * *


The smell from the ship's animal room, at first tantalizing, grew to an overpowering strength. Years
before, the odor of so many closely caged animals had sickened the old one, but now it urged on her
slow hunger. When she was a youth, her hunger demanded satiation, but now even her interior responses
were aging. The hunger merely ached.
Inside the animal room, three dimensions of cages stretched up the floor's curvature, enclosing fat and
lethargic animals that slept, unafraid. She lifted a young one by the back of its neck. Blinking, it hung in
her hand; it would not respond in fear even when she extended her silver claws into its flesh. Its ancestors
had run shrieking across the desert when the old one's shadow passed over them, but fear and speed and
the chemical reactions of terror had been bred out of these beasts. Their meat was tasteless.
"Good day."
Startled, the old one turned. The youth's habit of approaching silently from behind was annoying; it
made her fancy that her hearing was failing as badly as her sight. Still, she felt a certain fondness for this
child, who was not quite so weak as the others. The youth was beautiful: wide wings and delicate ears,
large eyes and triangular face, soft body-covering of fur as short as fur can be, patterned in tan against
the normal lustrous black. The abnormality occurred among the first ship-generation's children. On the
home world, any infant so changed would have been exposed, but on the sailship infanticide was seldom
practiced. This the old one disapproved of, fearing a deterioration in her people, but she had grown used
to the streaked and swirling fur pattern.
"I greet thee," she said, "but I'm hungry. Go away before I make thee ill."
"I've become accustomed to it," the youth said.
The old one shrugged, leaned down, and slashed the animal's throat with her sharp teeth. Warm blood
spurted over her lips. As she swallowed it, she wished she were soaring and eating bits of warm meat
from the fingers of a mate or a lover, feeding him in turn. Thus she, when still a youth and not yet "she,"
had courted her eldermate; thus her youngermate had never been able to court her. Two generations of
her kind had missed that experience, but she seemed to regret the loss more than they did. She
dismembered and gutted the animal and crunched its bones for marrow and brains.
She glanced up. The youth watched, seeming fascinated yet revolted. She offered a shred of meat.
"No. Thank you."
"Then eat thy meat cold, like the rest of them."
"I'll try it. Sometime."
"Yes, of course," the old one said. "And all our people will live on the lowest level and grow strong,
and fly every day."
"I fly. Almost every day."
The old one smiled, half cynically, half with pity. "I would show thee what it is to fly," she said. "Across
deserts so hot the heat snatches thee, and over mountains so tall they outreach clouds, and into the air
until the radiation explodes in thine eyes and steals thy direction and shatters thee against the earth, if thou
art not strong enough to overcome it."
 "I'd like that."
"It's too late." The old one wiped the clotting blood from her hands and lips. "It's much too late." She