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

She pummeled his chest; he reached up and pulled her down, instinctively
reducнing his buoyancy to compensate, and they rolled across the bottom of
the pool, kissing.

Elena said, "You know we're the first C-Z to arrive, anywhere? The
Fomalhaut ship was destroyed. So there's only one other pair of us. Back on
Earth."

"So?" Then he remembered. Elena had chosen not to wake if any other version
of her had already encountered life. Whatever fate befell each of the
remaining ships, every other version of him would have to live without her.

He nodded soberly, and kissed her again. "What am I meant to say? You're a
thousand times more precious to me, now?"

"Yes."

"Ah, but what about the you-and-I on Earth? Five hundred times would be
closer to the truth."

"There's no poetry in five hundred."

"Don't be so defeatist. Rewire your language centers."

She ran her hands along the sides of his ribcage, down to his hips. They
made love with their almost-traditional bodiesЧand brains; Paolo was amused
to the point of distraction when his limbic system went into overdrive, but
he remembered enough from the last occasion to bury his self-consciousness
and surrender to the strange hijacker. It wasn't like making love in any
civilized fashionЧthe rate of information exchange between them was
minuscule, for a startЧbut it had the raw insistent quality of most
ancestral pleasures.

Then they drifted up to the surface of the pool and lay beneath the radiant
sunless sky.

Paolo thought: I've crossed twenty-seven light-years in an instant. I'm
orbiting the first planet ever found to hold alien life. And I've
sacrificed nothingЧleft nothing I truly value behind. This is too good, too
good. He felt a pang of regret for his other selvesЧit was hard to imagine
them faring as well, without Elena, without OrpheusЧbut there was nothing
he could do about that, now. Although there'd be time to confer with Earth
before any more ships reached their destinations, he'd decidedЧprior to the
cloningЧnot to allow the unfolding of his manifold future to be swayed by
any change of heart. Whether or not his Earth-self agreed, the two of them
were powerless to alter the criteria for waking. The self with the right to
choose for the thousand had passed away.

No matter, Paolo decided. The others would findЧor constructЧtheir own