"Ian McDonald - Verthandi's Ring" - читать интересную книгу автора (McDonald Ian)

frail and trick-ster faculty among the incarnate, took her back to another body, a
wom-anтАЩs body, a woman of the Teleshgathu nation; drawn in wonder and hope and
young excitement up the space elevator to the Clade habitat that had warped into
orbit around her world to repair and restore and reconstitute its radiation shield from
the endless oceans of her world. From that woman of a parochial Waterworld had
sprung three entities, closer than sisters, deeper than lovers. Small wonder they
needed each other, to the point of searching through eighty billion sentients. Small
wonder they could never escape each other. The light was bright now, its unvarying
shadow strict and stark on the wooden deck. Harvest Moon flashed her wings and
rolled away, diving with her new friends deep through layer upon layer of cloud. And
Scented Coolabar felt an unfamiliar twitch, a clench between the legs, a throb of
something already exposed and sensitive becoming superattuned, swinging like a
divinerтАЩs pendulum. Her balls told her, clear, straight, no arguments: sheтАЩs out there.
Rose of Jericho.
 ****

Twenty subjective minutes later, the Clade fleet was eighty light-years into its twelve
hundred objective-year flight to intercept the Enemy advance toward VerthandiтАЩs
Ring, the greatest sentient migration since the big bang. Populations numbered in
logarithmic notation, like outbreaks of viruses, are on the move in two hundred
million habitat-ships, each fifty times the diameter of the Seydatryah Heart-world. Of
course the Seydatryah cluster is outnumbered, of course it will be destroyed down
to the last molecule if it engages the Enemy migration, but the Deep Blue Something
understands that it may not be the biggest or the strongest, but it is the closest and
will be the first. So the culture cluster claws closer toward light-speed; its magnetic
shield furled around it like an aurora, like a cloak of fire, as it absorbs energies that
would instantly incinerate all carbon life in its many levels and ships. And,
nerve-wired into an organic ornithopter, Scented Coolabar drops free from the We
Have Left Undone That Which We Ought to Have Dones launch teats into eighty
kilometers of empty airspace. Scented Coolabar shrieks, then the ornithopterтАЩs
wings scrape and cup and the scream becomes oooh as the biological machine
scoops across the sky.

тАЬWhere away?тАЭ Scented Coolabar shouts. The ornithopter unfolds a
telescope, bending an eye; Scented Coolabar spies the balloon cluster low and
breaking from a clot of cumulus. A full third of the netted balloons are dead,
punctured, black and rotting. The ornithopter reads her intention and dives. A flash
of sun-silver: Harvest Moon rises vertically out of the cloud, hangs in the air,
impossibly elongated wings catching the morning light, then turns and tumbles to
loop over Scented CoolabarтАЩs manically beating wings.

тАЬThat her?тАЭ

тАЬThatтАЩs her.тАЭ You are very lovely, thought Scented Coolabar. Lovely and
alien. But not so alien as Rose of Jericho, incarnated as a colony of tentacled
balloons tethered in a veil of organic gauze, now terminally sagging toward the
claspers and bone blades of Kyce. The ornithopter matched speed; wind whipped
Scented CoolabarтАЩs long yellow hair. A lunge, a sense of the world dropping away,
or at least her belly, and then the ornithopterтАЩs claws were hooked into the mesh.
The stench of rotting balloon flesh assailed Scented CoolabarтАЩs senses. A soft pop,