Читать книгу Neon Green - Margaret Wappler - Страница 8

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The spaceship hovers on a thin black line. Above the spaceship is outer space, the black gone depthless, matter stacked until it has exploded into either too much existence or not enough. The void between glistening planets, static with Stardust until punctuated by chaos. To arrive here, the spaceship dodged rock masses, burned-out moons, and light-sucks. But now it waits, parked on the edge of Earth’s atmosphere. Below, the land is partially obscured by gauzy layers of chemical haze and creeping cloud covers. In luxuriating patterns, the layers shift and crisscross, surround and dissolve into one another. People, metal, trees, sand, animals, and water occupy the planet. The people spend their time chopping, building, corralling, killing, harvesting, distilling, melting, commuting. In waves, particles, and sheets, pollution regularly sloughs off into the atmosphere, carried up and up. The chemicals appear to dissipate but instead have settled in the upper regions of the sky, where they trap heat. The spaceship has been waiting for days now, occasionally spinning in circles. Waiting, it stares down, taking in everything it sees.