The Best of Margaret St. Clair [Маргарет Сент-Клэр] (fb2) читать постранично, страница - 61


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alerted by the animal invasion. Has Jake already “burned itself out” in its protracted search for the consummation of an impossible love? I doubt it. But why are the servos so indifferent?

Now the ring-tailed wonders begin their climbing. They could almost climb up a strictly vertical surface, and here, with the irregularities and soft spots in J.’s makeshift vagina to cling to, they can go very high. Up and up, pulling out and investigating whatever comes in their way. Fortunately, the voltages in J.’s interior are very low. Fortunately, for I shouldn’t want my darling Procyonlotor to get a shock. (Was I a naturalist, I wonder, when I was alive?) And the computer remains inert, under all this murmuration of raccoons.

I feel a very slight—shock? The animals keep on pulling. Festoons of tapes and wires are dripping from their paws. The servos are at last galvanized into action, though rather slow action, at that. They start toward the disembowelers in a swift crawl. But I feel perfectly confident of the raccoons’ ability to elude any servo pursuit.

The animals scamper a few feet farther and repeat their poking and pulling. I begin to feel rather odd, dim and remote.

Am I going back into the deep freeze? If I am, I know I’ll never come out. Jake is breaking down, and it’s the last time.

Never mind. It’s all right. This is a happy ending, because things are safe after all. The future is secure in nonhuman hands. Thank God, I mean not hands, but paws.

1981

Book Information

The Best of MARGARET ST. CLAIR

Edited by Martin H. Greenberg

Academy Chicago Publishers

Copyright © Margaret St. Clair, 1967: “The Wine of Earth” © 1977: “Idris’ Pig”; “The Gardener”; “Child of Void”; “Hathor’s Pets”. © 1978: “The Pillows”; “The Listening Child”. © 1979: “Brightness Falls from the Air”; “The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles”. © 1980: “The Causes”; “An Egg A Month From All Over”. © 1981: “Prott”; “New Ritual”; “Wryneck Draw Me”. © 1982: “Brenda”; “Short in the Chest”. © 1984: “Horrer Howce”. Copyright © 1958 by Satellite Science Fiction: “The Invested Libido”; Copyright © 1960 by Galaxy: “The Nuse Man”. Copyright © 1961 by Galaxy: “An Old-fashioned Bird Christmas”.

Published in 1985 by Academy Chicago Publishers, 425 N. Michigan Ave.

Chicago, Illinois 60611

Copyright © 1985 by Margaret St. Clair

Printed and bound in the U.S.A.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

St. Clair, Margaret.

The best of Margaret St. Clair.

1. Science fiction, American. 2. Fantastic fiction, American. I. Greenberg, Martin Harry. II. Title.

PS3569.T118A6 1985 813’.54 85-18599

ISBN 0-89733-163-X

ISBN 0-89733-164-8 (pbk.)

$4.95

Cover design by Armen Kojoyian

Footnote

1

In the past, I have been accused of making up some of the unusual words that appear in my stories. Sometimes this accusation has been justified; sometimes, as in “Vulcan’s Dolls” (see Plant Life of the Pacific World) it has not. For the record, therefore, be it observed that “dight” is a middle English word meaning, among other things, “to have intercourse with.” (See Poets of the English Language, Auden and Pearson, Vol. 1, p. 173.) “Dight” was reintroduced by a late twentieth-century philologist who disliked the “sleep with” euphemism, and who saw that the language desperately needed a transitive verb that would be “good usage.”

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