"Space" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baxter Stephen)

PART ONE Foreigners A.D. 2020-2042

…And he felt as if he were drowning, struggling up from some thick, viscous fluid, up toward the light. He wanted to open his mouth, to scream — but he had no mouth, and no words. What would he scream?

I.

I am.

I am Reid Malenfant.

He could see the sail.

It was a gauzy sheet draped across the crowded stars of this place.

Where, Malenfant? Why, the core of the Galaxy, he thought, wonder breaking through his agony.

And within the sail, cupped, he could see the neutron star, an angry ball of red laced with eerie synchrotron blue, like a huge toy.

A star with a sail attached to it. Beautiful. Scary.

Triumph surged. I won, he thought. I resolved the koan, the great conundrum of the cosmos; Nemoto would be pleased. And now, together, we’re fixing an unsatisfactory universe. Hell of a thing.

But if you see all this, Malenfant, then what are you?

He looked down at himself.

Tried to.

A sense of body, briefly. Spread-eagled against the sail’s gauzy netting. Clinging by fingers and toes, monkey digits, here at the center of the Galaxy. A metaphor, of course, an illusion to comfort his poor human mind.

Welcome to reality.

The pain! Oh, God, the pain.

Terror flooded over him. And anger.

And, through it, he remembered the Moon, where it began…