"Baxter, Stephen - Manifold 03 - Origin" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baxter Stephen)

Her helmet clattered against the Plexiglas, as varying acceleration tore at her
stomach, and the brown African plain strobed around her. She was cocooned in the
physical expression of his anger.

She glared at the back of Malenfant's helmeted head, which cast dazzling
highlights from the African sun, with a mixture of fondness and exasperation.
Well, that was Malenfant for you.

And because she was staring so hard at Malenfant she missed seeing the artefact
until it was almost upon them.

Malenfant peeled away suddenly. Once again she glimpsed pale blue-white sky,
dusty brown ground, shafts of glowering sunlight - and an arc, a fragment of a
perfect circle, like a rainbow, but glowing a clear cerulean blue. Then it fell
out of her vision.

'Malenfant - what was that?'

'Damned if I know.' His voice was flat. Suddenly he was concentrating on his
flying. The slaved controls in front of her jerked this way and that; she felt
remote buffeting, some kind of turbulence perhaps, smoothed out by Malenfant's
skilful handling.

He pulled the jet through another smooth curve, and sky and ground swam around
her once more.

And he said, 'Holy shit.'

There was a circle in the sky.

It was facing them full on. It was a wheel of powder-blue, like a hoop of the
finest ribbon. It looked the size of a dinner plate held before her face - but
of course it must be much larger and more remote than that.

Emma saw this beyond Malenfant's head and shoulders and the slim white fuselage.
The jet's needle nose pointed straight at the centre of the ring, so that the
wheel framed her field of view with perfect symmetry, like some unlikely optical
flare. Its very perfection and symmetry made it seem unreal. She had no idea of
its scale - it would seem so close it must be hanging off the plane's nose, then
something in her head would flip the other way and it would appear vast and
distant, like a rainbow. She found it physically difficult to study it, as if it
was an optical illusion, deliberately baffling; her eyes kept sliding away from
it, evading it.

It's beyond my comprehension, she thought. Literally. Evolution has not prepared
me for giant wheels suspended in the air.



Fire: