Einstein Intersection. Samuel R. Delany

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СКАЧАТЬ there—”

      “Watch it, will you?” I added, avoiding an elbow.

      “—back there! It was stamping, and pawing the rocks—” This from one of them at my hip.

      “Back where?” Lo Hawk asked. “What happened?”

      “Back there by the—”

      “—by the old house near the place where the cave roof falls in—”

      “—the bull came up and—”

      “—and he was awful big and he stepped—”

      “—he stepped on the old house that—”

      “—we was playing inside—”

      “Hold up,” I said and put 3-Bloi down. “Now where was all this?”

      They turned together and pointed through the woods.

      Hawk swung down his crossbow. “That’s fine,” he said. “You boys get back up to the village.”

      “Say—” I caught 2-Bloi’s shoulder. “Just how big was he?”

      Inarticulate blinking now.

      “Never mind,” I said. “Just get going.”

      They looked at me, at Lo Hawk, at the woods. Then they got.

      In silent consensus we turned from the river through the break in the leaves from which the children had tumbled.

      A board, shattered at one end, lay on the path just before us as we reached the clearing. We stopped over it, stepped out between the sumac branches.

      And there were a lot of other smashed boards scattered across the ground.

      A five-foot section of the foundation had been kicked in, and only one of the four supporting beams was upright.

      Thatch bits were shucked over the yard. A long time ago Carol had planted a few more flowers in this garden, when, wanting to get away from the it-all of the village, we had moved down here to the old thatched house that used to be so cozy, that used to be . . . she had planted the hedge with the fuzzy orange blooms. You know that kind?

      I stopped by one cloven print where petals and leaves had been ground in a dark mandala on the mud. My feet fit inside the print easily. A couple of trees had been uprooted. A couple more had been broken off above my head.

      It was easy to see which way he had come into the clearing. Bushes, vines, and leaves had erupted inward. Where he had left, everything sort of sagged out.

      Lo Hawk ambled into the clearing swinging his crossbow nonchalantly.

      “You’re not really that nonchalant, are you?” I asked. I looked around again at the signs of destruction. “It must be huge.”

      Lo Hawk threw me a glance full of quartz and gristle. “You’ve been hunting with me before.”

      “True. It can’t have been gone very long if it just scared the kids away,” I added.

      Hawk stalked towards the place where things were sagging.

      I hurried after.

      Ten steps into the woods, we heard seven trees crash somewhere: three—pause—then four more.

      “Of course, if he’s that big he can probably move pretty far pretty fast,” I said.

      Another three trees.

      Then a roar:

      An unmusical sound with much that was metallic in it, neither rage nor pathos, but noise, heaved from lungs bigger than smelting bellows, a long sound, then echoing while the leaves turned up beneath a breeze.

      Under green and silver we started again through the cool, dangerous glades.

      And step and breathe and step.

      Then in the trees to our left—

      He came leaping, and that leap rained us with shadow and twigs and bits of leaf.

      Turning his haunch with one foreleg over here and a hind- leg way the hell over there, he looked down at us with an eye bloodshot, brown, and thickly oystered in the corners. His eyeball must have been big as my head.

      The wet, black nostrils steamed.

      He was very noble.

      Then he tossed his head, breaking branches, and hunkered with his fists punched into the ground—they were hands with horny hairy fingers thick as my arm where he should have had forehooves—bellowed, reared, and sprang away.

      Hawk fired his crossbow. The shaft flapped like a darning needle between the timbers of his flank. He was crashing off.

      The bark of the tree I’d slammed against chewed on my back as I came away.

      “Come on,” Hawk hollered, as he ran in the general direction the man-handed bull had.

      And I followed that crazy old man, running to kill the beast. We clambered through a cleft of broken rock (it hadn’t been broken the last time I’d come wandering down here through the trees—an afternoon full of sun spots and breezes and Friza’s hand in mine, on my shoulder, on my cheek). I jumped down onto a stretch of moss-tongued brick that paved the forest here and there. We ran forward and—

      Some things are so small you don’t notice them. Others are so big you run right into them before you know what they are. It was a hole, in the earth and the side of the mountain, that we almost stumbled into. It was a ragged cave entrance some twenty meters across. I didn’t even know it was there till all that sound came out of it.

      The bull suddenly roared from the opening in the rock and trees and brick, defining the shape of it with his roaring.

      When the echo died, we crept to the crumbled lip and looked over. Below I saw glints of sunlight on hide, turning and turning in the pit. Then he reared, shaking his eyes, his hairy fists.

      Hawk jerked back, even though the claws on the brick wall were still fifteen feet below us.

      “Doesn’t this tunnel go into the source-cave?” I whispered. Before something that grand, one whispers.

      Lo Hawk nodded. “Some of the tunnels, they say, are a hundred feet high. Some are ten. This is one of the bigger arterioles.”

      “Can it get out again?” Stupid question.

      On the other side of the hole the horned head, the shoulders emerged. The cave-in had been sloped there. He had climbed out. Now he looked at us, crouched there. He bellowed once with a length of tongue like foamy, red canvas.

      Then he leaped at us across the hole.

      He didn’t make it, but we scurried backward. He caught the lip with the fingers of one hand—I saw black gorges break about those nails—and one СКАЧАТЬ