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

There was an age of war, an obliteration of trillion-year memories, a bonfire of
identity. There was an age of suicide, as even the finest chose self-destruction
against further purposeless time and struggle.

The great rivers of mind guttered and dried.

But some persisted: just a tributary, the stubborn, still unwilling to yield to
the darkness, to accept the increasing confines of a universe growing inexorably
old.

And, at last, they realized that something was wrong. It wasn't supposed to have
been like this.

Burning the last of the universe's resources, the final down-streamers - lonely,
dogged, all but insane - reached to the deepest past...




-I-
WHEEL

Reid Malenfant:

'... Watch the Moon, Malenfant. Watch the Moon!'

So here was Reid Malenfant, his life down the toilet, chasing joky UFO reports
around a desolate African sky. Emma's voice snapped him to full alertness, for
just about for the first time, he admitted to himself, since takeoff.

'What about the Moon?'

'Just look at it!'

Malenfant twisted his head this way and that, the helmet making his skull heavy,
seeking the Moon. He was in the T-38's forward blister. Emma was in the bubble
behind him, her head craned back. The jet trainer was little more than a
brilliant shell around them, white as an angel's wing, suspended in a powder
blue sky. Where was the Moon - the west? He couldn't see a damn thing.

Frustrated, he threw the T-38 into a savage snap roll. A flat brown horizon
twisted around the cockpit in less than a second.

'Jesus, Malenfant,' Emma groaned.

He pulled out into a shallow climb towards the west, so that the low morning sun
was behind him.

... And then he saw it: a Moon, nearly full, baleful and big - too big, bigger