Einstein Intersection. Samuel R. Delany
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the sound was going off.
I swallowed all the bitter things that had risen into my throat and stepped back from the wall.
With a quick walk that became a slow run I followed him under the crumbling vaults.
His sound came from the right.
So I turned right and into a sloping tunnel so low that ahead of me I heard his horns rasp on the ceiling. Stone and scale and old lichen chittered down at his hulking shoulders, then to the ground.
The gutter on the side of the tunnel had coated the stone with fluorescent slime. The trickle became a stream as the slope increased till the frothing light raced me on the left.
Once his hooves must have crossed a metal floor-plate, because for a half-dozen steps orange sparks glittered where he stepped, lighting him to the waist.
He was only thirty meters ahead of me.
Sparks again as he turned a corner.
I felt stone under the soles of my feet, then cold, smooth metal. I passed some leaves, blown here by what wind, that his hooves had ignited. They writhed with worms of fire, glowing about my toes. And for moments the darkness filled with autumn.
I reached the corner, started around—
Facing me, he bellowed.
His foot struck a meter from my foot, and from this close the sparks lit his raw eyes, his polished nostrils.
His hand came between his eyes and me, falling! I rolled backward, grabbing for my machete.
His palm—flat this time, Hawk—clanged on the metal plate where I had been. Then it fell again toward where I was.
I lay on my back with the hilt of the blade on the floor, point up. Very few people, or bulls, can hit a ten-penny nail and drive it to the hilt. Fortunately.
He jerked me from the floor, pinioned to his palm, and I got flung around (holding on to the blade with hands and feet and screaming) an awful lot.
He was screaming too, butting the ceiling and lots of things falling. From twenty feet he flung me loose. The blade pulled free, my flute filled with his blood, and I hurled into the wall and rolled down.
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