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

Stone's axe clouts Fire on the back of the head. There is a hard sound. Stone
shouts in Fire's face. 'Fire, Fire! Hungry, feed!' His face is split by a scar.
The scar is livid red.

'Fire, Fire,' says Fire quietly. His arms drop and his head bows. He keeps hold
of the fire.

Sing moans. Her eyes are closed. Her dugs are slack. The men pick her up by
shoulders and legs and lift her back on the branches.

Stone and Blue grab the branches. Their legs walk them back the way they had
come.

Fire tells his legs to stand him up. They can't. His hands are still clasped
around the fire. Lights fill his head, more garish than that blue stripe in the
sky. He nearly falls over backwards.

Loud's hand grabs his armpit. Loud lifts him until his legs are straight.

Loud laughs. Loud walks away, fast, after Dig.

Fire's head hurts. Fire's hands hurt. Fire's member wants Dig.

He starts walking. He wants to stop thinking.

He thinks of the blue light.



Emma Stoney:

Emma had accompanied Malenfant, her husband, on a goodwill tour of schools and
educational establishments in Johannesburg, South Africa. It had been a
remarkably dismal project, a throwback to NASA PR malpractices of old, a trek
through mostly prosperous, middle-class-and-up neighbourhoods, with Malenfant
running Barco shows from his two missions to the Space Station before rows of
polite and largely uncaring teenagers.

In darkened classrooms Emma had watched the brilliance of the students' smiles,
and the ruby-red winking of their earpiece phones like fireflies in the night.
Between these children growing up in the fractured, complex, transformed world
of 2015, and Reid Malenfant, struggling worker astronaut, all of fifty-five
years old and still pursuing Apollo dreams from a boyhood long lost, there was a
chasm as wide as the Rift Valley, she thought, and there always would be.

Still, for Emma, it had been a holiday in the African sun - the reason she had
prised herself away from her work as financial controller of OnlineArt - and she
and Malenfant had gotten along reasonably well, for them, even given Malenfant's
usual Earthbound restless moodiness.