"Greg Egan - Closer (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

judge. Did memories of being Michael, and memories of being Sian, contain so
much more than the two of them could have put into words and exchanged verbally?
Did I really know anything about the nature of their existence, or was my head
just full of second-hand description - intimate, and detailed, but ultimately as
opaque as language? If my mind were radically different, would that difference
be something I could even perceive - or would all my memories, in the act of
remembering, simply be recast into terms that seemed familiar?
The past, after all, was no more knowable than the external world. Its very



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existence also had to be taken on faith - and, granted existence, it too could
be misleading.
I buried my head in my hands, dejected. I was the closest they could get, and
what had come of me? Michael's hope remained precisely as reasonable - and as
unproven - as ever.
After a while, my mood began to lighten. At least Michael's search was over,
even if it had ended in failure. Now he'd have no choice but to accept that, and
move on.
I paced around the room for a while, flicking the HV on and off. I was actually
starting to get bored, but I wasn't going to waste eight hours and several
thousand dollars by sitting down and watching soap operas.
I mused about possible ways of undermining the synchronisation of my two
copies. It was inconceivable that Bentley could have matched the rooms and
bodies to such a fine tolerance that an engineer worthy of the name couldn't
find some way of breaking the symmetry. Even a coin toss might have done it, but
I didn't have a coin. Throwing a paper plane? That sounded promising - highly
sensitive to air currents - but the only paper in the room was the Escher, and I
couldn't bring myself to vandalise it. I might have smashed the mirror, and
observed the shapes and sizes of the fragments, which would have had the added
bonus of proving or disproving my earlier speculations, but as I raised the
chair over my head, I suddenly changed my mind. Two conflicting sets of
short-term memories had been confusing enough during a few minutes of sensory
deprivation; for several hours interacting with a physical environment, it could
be completely disabling. Better to hold off until I was desperate for amusement.

So I lay down on the bed and did what most of Bentley's clients probably ended
up doing.
As they coalesced, Sian and Michael had both had fears for their privacy - and
both had issued compensatory, not to say defensive, mental declarations of
frankness, not wanting the other to think that they had something to hide. Their
curiosity, too, had been ambivalent; they'd wanted to understand each other,
but, of course, not to pry.
All of these contradictions continued in me, but - staring at the ceiling,
trying not to look at the clock again for at least another thirty seconds - I
didn't really have to make a decision. It was the most natural thing in the
world to let my mind wander back over the course of their relationship, from