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

bare skin is slick with sweat. They grunt and yap, expressing tiredness, hunger,
irritation. But they do not speak of the work. They are not thinking as their
hands gather the fire materials. Their hands have done this all their lives.
Their ancestors' hands have done this for hundreds of thousands of years.

Fire waits while they work.

He sees himself.

He is a child with no name. Another cups fire in his hands. He cannot see this
other's face. The adults' huge hands make tinder. Fire is fascinated. They push
him out of the way.

A woman picks him up. It is Sing. Her arms are strong. Her mouth smiles. She
swings him in the air. The leaves are green and big.

... The leaves are small. The leaves are yellow. Sing is lying on the ground.

Fire's hands push into the tinder. He makes his hands put his precious bit of
fire inside the tinder. His mouth blows on the fire. His hands want to come out
of the prickling heat. He makes them stay in the tinder. Flame flickers. The
wood smokes and pops, scorches and burns.

People laugh and hoot at the fire.

Fire pulls out his hands. His hands are sore.



Emma Stoney:

The plane shot almost vertically into the air, and its white nose plunged
through a layer of fine, gauzy cloud. The ground imploded below her, the
rectilinear patterns of the airfield shrinking into insignificance as the
glittering carcass of Joburg itself shouldered over the horizon, agricultural
land beyond showing as patches of greyish green and brown. On the eastern
horizon the sun was unimaginably bright, sending shafts of light spearing
through the cockpit glass, and to the west she spotted the Moon, almost full,
its small grey face peering back at the sun's harsh glare.

Already the sky above was turning a deeper blue, shading to purple.

Emma felt her stomach lurch, but she knew it would pass. One of the many ironies
of their relationship was that Emma was more resistant to motion sickness than
her astronaut husband, who had spent around ten per cent of the time on his two
spaceflights throwing up.

Malenfant banked to the north, and the horizon settled down, sun to right, Moon
to left. As they headed towards the interior of the continent, the land turned
brown, parched, flat.