"Michael Swanwick - Mother Grasshopper" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swanwick Michael)

Afterward we lay together between blankets on the ground, looking up at the
night sky. It came to me then that being taken away from normal life young as I
had been, all my experience with love had come before the event and all my
experience with sex after, and that I'd therefore never before known them both
together. So that in this situation I was as naive and unprepared for what was
happening to us as Victoria was.

Which was how I admitted to myself I loved Victoria. At the time it seemed the
worst possible thing that could've happened to me.

We saw it for the first time that next afternoon. It began as a giddy feeling,
like a mild case of vertigo, and a vague thickening at the center of the sky as
if it were going dark from the inside out. This was accompanied by a bulging up
of the horizon, as if God Himself had placed hands flat on either edge and
leaned forward, bowing it upward.

Then my inner ear knew that the land which had been flat as flat for all these
many miles was now slanting downhill all the way to the horizon. That was the
gravitational influence of all that mass before us. Late into the day it just
appeared. It was like a conjuring trick. One moment it wasn't there at all and
then, with the slightest of perceptual shifts, it dominated the vision. It was
so distant that it took on the milky backscatter color of the sky and it went up
so high you literally couldn't see the top. It was -- I knew this now -- our
destination:

The antenna.

Even driving the pickup truck, it took three days after first sighting to reach
its base.

On the morning of one of those days, Victoria suddenly pushed aside her
breakfast and ran for the far side of the truck. That being the only privacy to
be had for hundreds of miles around.

I listened to her retching. Knowing there was only one thing it could be.

She came back, pale and shaken. I got a plastic collection cup out of my bag.
"Pee into this," I told her. When she had, I ran a quick diagnostic. It came up
positive.

"Victoria," I said. "I've got an admission to make. I haven't been exactly
straight with you about the medical consequences of your...condition."
It was the only time I ever saw her afraid. "My God," she said, "What is it?
Tell me! What's happening to me?"

"Well, to begin with, you're pregnant."

There were no roads to the terminus, for all that it was visible from miles off.
It lay nestled at the base of the antenna, and to look at the empty and
trackless plains about it, you'd think there was neither reason for its