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

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.
Sometimes he took Dorthy to watch the whales swim into the chute from the bay
where they had been herded. The water in the concrete channel was so shallow
that she could see the rolling eye, so small for so huge a creature, of each
whale that passed, could almost touch, had she dared reach beneath the bar of