And I remember the way dawn would crack the eastern sky, the rosy blush slowly spreading and staining the black of night, chasing away the darkness, driving away the stars. And I remember the way a woman looks at you when she loves you, and the sound that a kitten makes when it is happy, and the way that snowflakes blur and melt against a warm windowpane in winter. I remember. I remember.
ANCESTRAL VOICES
Gardner Dozois & Michael Swanwick
Like all intelligent creatures, it adapted. Behind it was fire! fear! pain! horror! and it fled from them through madness and roaring chaos, fled for a long nightmarish time through an unfamiliar world, through a phantasmagorical confusion of alien shapes and lights and stinks and noises, fled until its strength was gone and it could flee no more.
After that was the black churning darkness of oblivion.
When it came to itself again, awareness returning bit by incremental bit, it was in a dank and narrow alley between the back of a decaying flophouse hotel and the side of a liquor store, lying still in the deep black shadow behind a mound of overstuffed green garbage bags.
Warily, it surveyed its surroundings, taking in the tall brick walls that rose on either side, the muddy, slime-coated pavement upon which it rested, the dull red light—from an ancient, buzzing neon sign on the corner—that ebbed and flooded rhythmically through the darkness, the thin sliver of alien sky far overhead…and again it was taken by disorientation and fear. It reached instinctively for knowledge, for connection with the flood of data that would tell it location, status, mission, and instead it touched fire! fear! pain! horror! and recoiled from the searing agony of the memory.
Cautiously, it tried again to remember, like an electric linesman testing a live wire by gingerly brushing it with his thumb, and again it was driven back by the sizzling intensity of what lurked in the recesses of its own mind. Again and again it tried to remember, until its mind was ablaze with pain, and shudders ran like waves across the long flat carpet of its body. But nothing would come.
Its past was gone. It had no past—it had been born in that endless moment of pain and red screaming chaos, and before that it could not go. Instinctively it knew that it didn’t belong here, that the world around it was alien, frighteningly wrong, but it couldn’t remember how the world should be, what or where home was, what it was doing here in this place whose wrongness beat in upon its senses from every side.
Trembling, it lay flat in the cold mud of the alley. Each new sound from the unknown world beyond, each metallic roar or shriek or clatter, sent a new pulse of terror through it.
And then something blocked part of the light from the alley-mouth.
A monstrous figure loomed there, huge and dark and terrible.
There was the sound of a can being kicked underfoot, sent clattering away against the wall.
The figure moved slowly closer, down the alleyway, swaying, staggering from side to side, pushing a wave of rich alien stink before it.
“Oblah-dee,” the figure muttered. “Oblahfucking-dee, oblahfucking-blah—” It crashed against the wall, pushed away again. “Life goes fucking onnnn, blah—” The figure coughed, coughed again spasmodically, hawked and spat. “Sonsabitches,” it mumbled. “Think they can tell me…”
Weaving. Coming closer.
It saw the wino with the colorless, directionless perception characteristic of its race, but, more importantly, it felt him, felt the rush and interplay of electrical impulses along the intricate pathways of the wino’s nervous system, felt the cold living fire that pulsed about the cerebrum, felt the sensuous shifting and interweaving of alpha and beta rhythms….
Suddenly, it was hungry.
The hunger rose in a bitter, biting flood, driving away fear, overwhelming everything. For a moment it didn’t know what to do, and then instinct took over, a deep cellular knowledge that sent it rippling silently forward, deeper into the shadow cast by the wall of garbage bags, its mantle stiffening and rising.
It melded itself flat against the cold surface of the bags.
It waited….
The wino had stubbed his toe and was cursing in a low, racking undertone. Then he stumbled forward again. “Wham-bam, thank you ma’am,” he muttered. “Oh yeah. Oh yeah.” He lurched against the garbage bags, almost toppling them, then ripped one open with both hands and began rummaging clumsily, spilling tin cans and bottles and soggy old paper bags to the ground. “You don’t know how lucky they aarrrree, boys…back in the—back in the—shit!” An empty pint crashed to the ground, breaking with a flat, pinpoint spray of glass. He chuckled. “Dead soldier. Don’t make no nevermind. What I should of told her, what I shoulda told her….” He fished an old sneaker out of the trash, examined it, wriggling his fingers through the large hole in the sole. “Oh yeah.” He threw the sneaker aside, leaned forward into the shadow.
The wino’s face filled its field of vision, huge, terrifying, slathered in bristly black whiskers, eyes as big and bloodshot red as harvest moons, the stink of corruption breathing from the slackened lips….