"Paul J. McAuley - Stars 01 - Four Hundred Billion Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

constellations of indicator lights. Below her, below the ribbed floor, the capsule's ablation shield was
growing hotter, burning red, burning gold, burning white, flowing backward and flaking away. All Dorthy
felt was her increasing weight, seemingly centred between her breasts, pushing down on her heart,
pressing her against the rigid cushion of gel. She couldn't breathe: her cheeks were drawn back in a
ghastly rictus: her eyeballs were flattening in their sockets.

A shocking moment of freefall. She sobbed for breath, but already the weight was building again.

Something shattered. A whole patch of the little lights turned red.

And then it was over. One by one, the red lights returned to their benign green blinking. Dorthy's weight
fell away, became something less than Earth-normal. She could feel the capsule swaying as it traced
slow, wide figures of eight, a Foucault pendulum suspended beneath the blossom of its parachute. There
was a peremptory crackle and then a tinny voice said something in her right ear.

At the same moment the chemical shutter that shielded her from her Talent seemed to dissolve. It was as
if an unfocused incandescence had sprung through the walls of the dropcapsule, qualified here and there
by hard flecks of intelligence, scattered gems burning in the mud of the daedal world. Dorthy was
enmeshed in the routine boredom of the drop controller whose attempts to make contact were nagging in
her ear, in the seething flux of the hundred minds all around his.

This is worse than the ship, she thought, and then she felt something stir beyond the horizon. A nova flare
boiling up, bending its blinding beam towards her. It was too much. She could feel too much and, turned
inside out, pressed raw against the fire, she couldn't shut any of it out. Through a red fog of panic she
tried to remember the calming ritual of her exercises: but the light was too much. Like a dropcapsule on
too steep a trajectory, like Icarus, poor moth, she burned across the burning sky. And went out.

*****

For a long time, Dorthy hung at the shifting border between sleep and wakening just as she had
sometimes hung just beneath the surface of the sea, the sea warm as blood off the Great Barrier Reef. It
was possible to float facedown, the tube that connected her to the world of air piercing the flexing silver
skin just above her head, the blue underwater world spread below: but she had to be careful. Too deep a
breath would send her up and as her weight left the water she would roll, sun dazzling through her mask
and the snorkel dipping upsidedown, turning her next breath into a choking gush. And if she breathed too
shallowly she would sink towards the rounded masses of coral and the patrolling fish, leave the silver skin
for stretches of bare bright sand shelving away into unfathomable darkness.

(A door opened somewhere, bringing an odour not unlike that of the flensing yard. A voice said patiently,
"Not yet, Colonel. No, I don't. Perhaps a reaction to the tranquillizer they give for the descent, perhaps
the allergen inoculations, perhaps something else. I will tell you when she is awake, I promise, but it will
not be for a while." Dorthy tried to open her eyes but the effort was too much; she sank from silver into
darkness.)

Before she had been sent away there had always been the smell of the flensing yard, and the circling
white flecks of the seagulls beyond the flat roofs of the apt blocks that showed you where the yard was.
There, the huge cymbiform carcasses, stripped of hide, were attended by great, slow gantries that sliced
and rendered the blubber and muscle. Later, smaller cranes picked among the bones like brooding
carrion birds. That was where Dorthy's father worked.