"Metabolism - a short story by Scott Nicholson" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nicholson Scott)

Forget it, Elise. Maybe it reads minds. And you don't want to let it know
what you're up to. You can keep a secret as well as it can.
She turned her gaze down to the tips of her shoes. There, just like a good
city dweller is supposed to do. Count the cracks. Blend in. Be small.
Ignore the windowfront of the adult bookstore you pass. Don't see the
leather whips, the rude plastic rods that gleam like eager rockets, the
burlesque mockery of human flesh displayed on the placards. And the next
window, plywooded and barred like an abandoned prison, "Liquor"
hand-painted in dull green letters across the dented steel door beside it.

All to keep us drugged, dazed with easy pleasure. Elise knew. If it let us
have our little amusements, then we wouldn't flee. We'd stay and graze on
lust and drunkenness, growing fat and sleepy and tired and dull.
She flicked her eyes to the sky overhead, ignoring the sharp spears of the
building-tops, with their antennae for ears. The low red haze meant that
night was falling. The city constantly exhaled smog, so thick now that the
sun barely peeped down onto the atrocities that were committed under its
yellow eye. Even from the vigilant universe, the city kept its secrets.
Elise felt only dimly aware of the traffic that clogged the streets. Not
streets. The arteries of the city. The cars rattled past, with raspy
breath and an occasional growl of impatience. In the distance, somewhere
on the far side of the city, sirens wailed. Sirens, or the screams of
victims, face-to-face with the horrible thing that had crouched around
them for years, cold and stone-silent one moment but alive and hungry the
next.
Can't waste pity on them. The unwritten code of city life. Inbred
indifference. Ignorance is bliss. A natural social instinct developed from
decades of being piled atop one another like coldcuts in a grocer's
counter. Or was the code taught, learned by rote, instilled upon them by a
stern master who had its own best interests at heart?
And what would its heart be like? The sewers, raw black sludge snaking
through its veins? The hot coal furnaces that huffed away in basements,
leaking steam from corroded pipes? Or the electrical plant, a Gorgon's wig
of wire sprouting from its roof, sending its veins into the apartments and
office towers and factories so that no part of the city was untouched?
Or was it, as she suspected, heartless? Just a giant meat-eating cement
slab of instinct?
She had walked ten blocks now. Not hurriedly, but steadily and with
purpose. Perhaps like a thirty-year-old woman out for a leisurely stroll,
headed to the park to watch from a bench while the sun set smugly over the
jagged skyline. Maybe out to the theater, for an early seat at a
second-rate staging of Waiting For Godot. Not like someone who was trying
to escape.
No. Don't think about it.
She hadn't meant to, but now that the thought had risen from the murky
swamp of subconsciousness, she turned it over in her mind, mentally
fingering it like a mechanic checking out a carburetor.
No one escaped. At least no one she knew. They all slid, bloody and soft
and bawling, from their mother's wombs into the arms of the city. Fed on
love and hopes and dreams. Fed on lies.