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

hulking fortresses of flesh.
I was scant yards from home. The Roxy was a big old movie palace, fallen into disrepair and
semiconverted to a skateboarding rink which had gone out of business almost immediately. But it
had been a wonderful place once, and the terra-cotta trim was still there: ribbons and river-gods,
great puffing faces with panpipes, guitars, flowers, wyverns. I crossed the Ridge on a dead
telephone wire, spider-web delicate but still usable.
Almost there.
Then the creature was upon me, with a howl of electromagnetic rage that silenced even the
Sisters for an instant. It slammed into my side, a storm of razors and diamond-edged fury, hooks
and claws extended.
I grabbed at a rusty flange on the side of the Roxy.
Too late! Pain exploded within me, a sheet of white nausea. All in an instant I lost the name
of my second daughter, an April morning when the world was new and I was five, a smoky string of
all-nighters in Rensselaer Polytech, the jowly grin of Old Whatsisface the German who lived on


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LaFountain Street, the fresh pain of a sprained ankle out back of a Banana Republic warehouse,
fishing off a yellow rubber raft with my old man on Lake Champlain. All gone, these and a thousand
things more, sucked away, crushed to nothing, beyond retrieval.
Furious as any wounded animal, I fought back. Foul bits of substance splattered under my
fist. The Corpsegrinder reared up to smash me down, and I scrabbled desperately away. Something
tore and gave.
Then I was through the wall and safe and among the bats and gloom.
"Cobb!" the Corpsegrinder shouted. It lashed wildly back and forth, scouring the brick walls
with limbs and teeth, as restless as a March wind, as unpredictable as ball lightning.
For the moment I was safe. But it had seized a part of me, tortured it, and made it a part of
itself. I could no longer delude myself into thinking it was simply going to go away.
"Cahawahawbb!" It broke my name down to a chord of overlapping tones. It had an ugly, muddy voice.
I felt dirtied just listening to it. "Caw--" A pause. "--awbb!"
In a horrified daze I stumbled up the Roxy's curving patterned-tin roof until I found a
section free of bats. Exhausted and dispirited, I slumped down.
"Caw aw aw awb buh buh!"
How had the thing found me? I'd thought I'd left it behind in Manhattan. Had my flight across
the high-tension lines left a trail of some kind? Maybe. Then again, it might have some special
connection with me. To follow me here it must have passed by easier prey. Which implied it had a
grudge against me. Maybe I'd known the Corpsegrinder back when it was human. We could once have
been important to each other. We might have been lovers. It was possible. The world is a stranger
place than I used to believe.
The horror of my existence overtook me then, an acute awareness of the squalor in which I
dwelt, the danger which surrounded me, and the dark mystery informing my universe. I wept for all
that I had lost.
Eventually, the sun rose up like God's own Peterbilt and with a triumphant blare of chromed
trumpets, gently sent all of us creatures of the night to sleep.

When you die, the first thing that happens is that the world turns upside-down. You feel an
overwhelming disorientation and a strange sensation that's not quite pain as the last strands
connecting you to your body part, and then you slip out of physical being and fall from the