The Einstein Intersection Read Online Free PDF Page B

he wasn’t looking in the right direction.
    I lowered the bow and took up my blade. I brought it to my mouth and blew. Blood bubbled from the holes. Then the note blasted and went reeling through the room.
    He raised his head and stared at me.
    Up went the bow; I aimed through the bars, pulled the trigger-Raging forward with horns shaking, he got bigger and bigger and bigger through the frame of stone. I fell back while the roar covered me, closing my eyes against the sight: his eye gushed about my shaft. He grasped the bars behind which I crouched.
    Metal grated on stone, stone pulled from stone. And then the frame was a lot bigger than it had been. He hurled the crumpled grate across the room to smash into the wall and send pieces of stone rolling.
    Then he reached in and grabbed me, legs and waist, in his fist, and I was being waved high in the air over his bellowing face (left side blind and bloody) and the room arching under me and my head flung from shoulder to shoulder and trying to point the crossbow down-one shaft broke on the stone by his hoof a long way below. Another struck awfully close to the shaft that Lo Hawk had shot into his side. Waiting for a wall of stone to come up and jelly my head, I fumbled another arrow into the slot.
    His cheek was sheeted with blood. And suddenly there was more blood. The shaft struck and totally disappeared in the blind well of bone and lymph. I saw the other eye cloud as though someone had overblown the lens with powdered lime.
    He dropped me.
    Didn’t throw me; just dropped. I grabbed the hair on his wrist. It slipped through my hands, and I slid down his forearms to the crook of his elbow.
    Then his arm began to fall. Slowly I turned upside down. The back of his hand hit the floor, and his hind feet were clacking around on the stone.
    He snorted, and I began to slide back down his fore-arm towards his hand, slowing myself by clutching at the bristles with feet and hands. I rolled clear of his palm and staggered away from him.
    The thing in my thigh that was sprained throbbed.
    I stepped backward and couldn’t step any more.
    He swayed over me, shook his head, splattering me with his ruined eye. And he was grand. And he was still strong, dying above me. And he was huge. Furious, I swayed with him in my fury, my fists clutched against my hips, tongue stifled in my mouth.
    He was great and he was handsome and he still stood there defying me while dying, scoffing at my bruises. Damn you, beast who would be greater than-
    One arm buckled, a hindleg now, and he collapsed away from me, crashing.
    Something in the fistsful of darkness that were his nostrils thundered and roared-but softer, and softer. His ribs rose to furrow his side, fell to rise again; I took up the bow and limped to the bloody tears of his lips, fitted one final shaft. It followed the other two into his brain.
    His hands jerked three feet, then fell (Boom! Boom!) relaxing now.
    When he was still, I went and sat on the base of the computer and leaned against the metal casing. Somewhere inside it was clicking.
    I hurt. Lots.
    Breathing was no fun any more. And I had, somewhere during all this, bitten the inside of my cheek. And when I do that, it gets me so mad I could cry.
    I closed my eyes.
    “That was very impressive,” someone said close to my right ear. “I would love to see you work with a muleta . Ole! Ole! First the veronica, then the paso doble !’
    I opened my eyes.
    “Not that I didn’t enjoy your less sophisticated art.”
    I turned my head. There was a small speaker by my left ear. The computer went on soothingly:
    “But you are a dreadfully unsophisticated lot. All of you.   Young ,   but   tres   charmant .   Well,    you’ve   fought through this far. Is there anything you’d like to ask me?”
    “Yeah,” I said. Then I breathed for a while. “How do I get out of here?” There were a lot of archways in the wall, a lot of choices.
    “That is a problem. Let me see.” The lights