"Egan, Greg - Wang's Carpets" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

thousand ships were safely dispatched would have been satisfying, too. And
remaining a member of the wider Earth-based community, plugged into the
entire global culture in real-time, would have been an attraction in
itself.

Two chimes would have meant that this clone of Carter-Zimmerman had reached
a planetary system devoid of life. Paolo had run a sophisticatedЧbut
non-sapientЧ self-predictive model before deciding to wake under those
conditions. Exploring a handful of alien worlds, however barren, had seemed
likely to be an enriching experience for himЧwith the distinct advantage
that the whole endeavor would be untrammeled by the kind of elaborate
precautions necessary in the presence of alien life. C-Z's population would
have fallen by more than halfЧand many of his closest friends would have
been absentЧbut he would have forged new friendships, he was sure.

Four chimes would have signaled the discovery of intelligent aliens. Five,
a technological civilization. Six, spacefarers.

Three chimes, though, meant that the scout probes had detected unambiguous
signs of lifeЧand that was reason enough for jubilation. Up until the
moment of the pre-launch cloningЧa subjective instant before the chimes had
soundedЧno reports of alien life had ever reached Earth. There'd been no
guarantee that any part of the diaspora would find it.

Paolo willed the polis library to brief him; it promptly rewired the
declarative memory of his simulated traditional brain with all the
information he was likely to need to satisfy his immediate curiosity. This
clone of C-Z had arrived at Vega, the second closest of the thousand target
stars, twenty-seven light-years from Earth. Paolo closed his eyes and
visualized a star map with a thousand lines radiating out from the sun,
then zoomed in on the trajectory which described his own journey. It had
taken three centuries to reach VegaЧbut the vast majority of the polis's
twenty thousand inhabitants had programmed their exoselves to suspend them
prior to the cloning, and to wake them only if and when they arrived at a
suitable destination. Ninety-two citizens had chosen the alternative:
experiencing every voyage of the diaspora from start to finish, risking
disappointment, and even death. Paolo now knew that the ship aimed at
Fomalhaut, the target nearest Earth, had been struck by debris and
annihilated en route. He mourned the ninety-two, briefly. He hadn't been
close to any of them, prior to the cloning, and the particular versions
who'd willfully perished two centuries ago in interstellar space seemed as
remote as the victims of some ancient calamity from the era of flesh.

Paolo examined his new home star through the cameras of one of the scout
probesЧand the strange filters of the ancestral visual system. In
traditional colors, Vega was a fierce blue-white disk, laced with
prominences. Three times the mass of the sun, twice the size and twice as
hot, sixty times as luminous. Burning hydrogen fastЧand already halfway
through its allotted five hundred million years on the main sequence.