Morning Child and Other Stories
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0743493184
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A collection of over a half-dozen classic science fiction stories by Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author and editor Gardner Dozois. Includes: "Morning Child," "A Dream at Noonday," "Chains of the Sea," "The Hanging Curve," "The Bride" (with Jack Dann), and "Ancestral Voices" (with Michael Swanwick).
can you bring all this trouble on me? After all that I’ve sacrificed for you, and suffered for you.” Tommy felt as if a vise had been clamped around his head and was squeezing and squeezing, forcing his eyeballs out of his skull. “I can’t stand it!” he shouted. “I’m leaving, I’m leaving! I’m gonna run away! Right now.” And then she was crying louder, and begging him not to leave. Even through his rage and pain, Tommy felt a spasm of intense annoyance— she ought to know that he couldn’t really run
hundreds. There were cats on the surrounding maze of rooftops, and rats in the alleyways and sewers it learned to hunt by night. There was a little park a few blocks from the warehouse, and there among the trees and bushes it learned to take squirrels and field mice and nesting birds of all sorts. People would bring big dogs to the park and unleash them and let them run, and it took several of those, finding them very satisfactory. It needed a good deal of nourishment, fairly frequently, and
been left partly open for years or even decades without anyone ever bothering to get around to straightening it. The creature squeezed through the crack, quick and impossibly fluid, and disappeared into the wall. Slowly, awkwardly, Mrs. Kingsley squatted down, knees almost touching the floor. She laid a hand on her dog’s head. He was dead. “Oh, Iago,” she said. “My little bête noire.” She began to cry. The house was a maze of electric circuits and appliances. They dizzied and blinded it, dazzling
two, and which dimly surprised her, since she would have sworn a moment before that she no longer cared at all if she lived or died. Well, in fact, why struggle anymore? Let it kill her. What did it matter now? She felt resignation begin to glaze over her like a scum of ice forming over a pond, dulling her fear. The creature swayed in the doorway. Dawn was beginning to break, the sun not yet over the horizon, but staining the sky a sullen purple-red. The creature was a black silhouette against
Certainly they would say nothing to him. He went down through the still-silent house like a ghost, and out across the farmyard, through fugitive streamers of mist that wrapped clammy white arms around him and beaded his face with dew. His Uncle Abner was there at the slit trench before him. Abner grunted a greeting, and they stood pissing side by side for a moment in companionable silence, their urine steaming in the gray morning air. Abner stepped backward and began to button his pants. “You