"Michael Swanwick - Radio Waves" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swanwick Michael)

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RADIO WAVES
by MICHAEL SWANWICK


[VERSION 1.1 (Apr 22 04). If you find and correct errors in the text, please update the version
number by 0.1 and redistribute.]


First published in Omni, Winter 1995.


I was walking the telephone wires upside-down, the sky underfoot cold and flat with a few
hard bright stars sparsely scattered about it, when I thought how it would take only an instant's
weakness to step off to the side and fall up forever into the night. A kind of wildness entered me
then and I began to run.
Electric Motors-Controls-Parts. Then, where the slope steepened, along the curving snake of
rowhouses that went the full quarter mile up to the Ridge. Twice I overtook pedestrians, hunched
and bundled, heads doggedly down, out on incomprehensible errands. They didn't notice me, of
course. They never do. The antenna farm was visible from here. I could see the Seven Sisters
spangled with red lights, dependent on the earth like stalactites. "Where are you running to,
little one?" one tower whispered in a crackling, staticky voice. I think it was Hegemone.
"Fuck off," I said without slackening my pace, and they all chuckled.
Cars mumbled by. This was ravine country, however built up, and the far side of the road, too
steep and rocky for development, was given over to trees and garbage. Hamburger wrappings and
white plastic trash bags rustled in their wake. I was running full-out now.
About a block or so from the Ridge, I stumbled and almost fell. I slapped an arm across a
telephone pole and just managed to catch myself in time. Aghast at my own carelessness, I hung
there, dizzy and alarmed. The ground overhead was black as black, an iron roof, yet somehow was as
anxious as a hound to leap upon me, crush me flat, smear me to nothingness. I stared up at it,
horrified.
Somebody screamed my name.
I turned. A faint blue figure clung to a television antenna atop a small, stuccoed brick
duplex. Charlie's Widow. She pointed an arm that flickered with silver fire down Ripka Street. I
slewed about to see what was coming after me.
It was the Corpsegrinder.
When it saw that I'd spotted it, it put out several more legs, extended a quilled head, and
raised a howl that bounced off the Heaviside layer. My nonexistent blood chilled. In a panic, I
scrambled up and ran toward the Ridge and safety. I had a squat in the old Roxy, and once I was
through the wall, the Corpsegrinder would not follow. Why this should be so, I did not know. But
you learn the rules if you want to survive.
I ran. In the back of my head I could hear the Seven Sisters clucking and gossiping to each
other, radiating television and radio over a few dozen frequencies. Indifferent to my plight.
The Corpsegrinder churned up the wires on a hundred needle-sharp legs. I could feel the ion
surge it kicked up pushing against me as I reached the intersection of Ridge and Leverington. Cars
were pulling up to the pumps at the Atlantic station. Teenagers stood in front of the A-Plus Mini
Market, flicking half-smoked cigarettes into the street, stamping their feet like colts, and
waiting for something to happen. I couldn't help feeling a great longing disdain for them. Every
last one worried about grades and drugs and zits, and all the while snugly barricaded within