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

deepest past collide with this most unimaginable of futures?

The plane dropped abruptly. For a heartbeat Emma was weightless. Then the plane
slammed into the bottom of an air pocket and she was shoved hard into her seat.

'Sorry,' Malenfant muttered. 'The turbulence is getting worse.' The slaved
controls worked before her. The plane soared and banked.

She suddenly wished she was on the ground, perhaps holed up in her well-equipped
hotel room back in Joburg. The world must be going crazy over this. She would
have every softscreen in the room turned to the coverage, filling her ears and
eyes with a babble of instant commentary. Here, in this bubble of Plexiglas, she
felt cut off.

But this is the real experience, she thought. I am here by the sheerest chance,
at the moment when this vision appeared in the sky like the Virgin Mary over
Lourdes, and yet I pine for my online womb. Well, I'm a woman of my time.

The artefact settled into place before Emma once more, vast, enigmatic, slowly
approaching. Planes criss-crossed before it, puny. Emma spotted that small
private jet, lumbering through the air so much more slowly than the military
vehicles around it. She wondered if anybody had tried to make contact with the
wheel yet - or if it had been fired on.

'Holy shit,' said Malenfant. 'Do you see that?'

'What?'

He lifted his arm and pointed; she could see the gesture through the Plexiglas
blisters that encased them. 'There. Near the bottom of the ring.'

It looked like a very fine dark rain falling out of the ring, like a hail of
iron filings.

Malenfant lifted small binoculars. 'People,' he said bluntly. He lowered the
binoculars. 'Tall, skinny, naked people.'

She couldn't integrate the information. People - thrust naked into the air eight
miles high, to fall, presumably, all the way to the welcoming gorge of bones...
Why? Where were they from?

'Can they be saved?'

Malenfant just laughed.

The plane buffeted again. As they approached the wheel the turbulence was
growing stronger. It seemed to Emma that the air at the centre of the ring was
significantly disturbed; she made out concentric streaks of mist and dust there,
almost like a sideways-on storm, neatly framed by the wheel's electric blue
frame.