"Greg Egan - Glory" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

GLORY
GREG EGAN
****

THE NEW SPACE OPERA Edited By Gardner Dozois & Jonathan Strahan

v1.0 Scanned By NERDs and Proofed By MadMaxAU
*****
A

s we look back at the century thatтАЩs just ended, itтАЩs obvious that Australian writer Greg Egan was one of
the big new names to emerge in SF in the nineties, and is probably one of the most significant talents to
enter the field in the last several decades. Already one of the most widely known of all Australian genre
writers, Egan may well be the best new тАЬhard-scienceтАЭ writer to enter the field since Greg Bear, and he is
still growing in range, power, and sophistication. In the last few years, he has become a frequent
contributor to Interzone and AsimovтАЩs Science Fiction, and has made sales as well to Pulphouse,
Analog, Aurealis, Eidolon, and elsewhere; many of his stories have also appeared in various Best of the
Year series, and he was on the Hugo Final Ballot in 1995 for his story тАЬCocoon,тАЭ which won the Ditmar
Award and the AsimovтАЩs Readers Award. He won the Hugo Award in 1999 for his novella тАЬOceanic.тАЭ
His first novel, Quarantine, appeared in 1992; his second novel, Permutation City, won the John W.
Campbell Me-morial Award in 1994. His other books include the novels Distress, Diaspora, and
Teranesia, and three collections of his short fiction, Axiomatic, Luminous, and Our Lady of
Chernobyl. His most recent book is the novel SchildтАЩs Lad-der, and he is at work on a new novel. He
has a website at http://www. netspace.netau/^gregegan/.

Egan has pictured galaxy-spanning civilizations in stories such as тАЬBor-der GuardsтАЭ and тАЬRiding the
Crocodile.тАЭ Here he sweeps us along with scientists who are willing to go to enormous lengths (including
changing their species!) and travel across the galaxy in order to investigate a scientific mysteryтАФone that
inimical forces donтАЩt want them to solve.

****

1

An ingot of metallic hydrogen gleamed in the starlight, a narrow cylin-der half a meter long with a mass of
about a kilogram. To the naked eye it was a dense, solid object, but its lattice of tiny nuclei immersed in
an insub-stantial fog of electrons was one part matter to two hundred trillion parts empty space. A short
distance away was a second ingot, apparently identical to the first, but composed of antihydrogen.

A sequence of finely tuned gamma rays flooded into both cylinders. The protons that absorbed them in
the first ingot spat out positrons and were transformed into neutrons, breaking their bonds to the electron
cloud that glued them in place. In the second ingot, antiprotons became antineutrons.

A further sequence of pulses herded the neutrons together and forged them into clusters; the antineutrons
were similarly rearranged. Both kinds of cluster were unstable, but in order to fall apart they first had to
pass through a quantum state that would have strongly absorbed a component of the gamma rays
constantly raining down on them. Left to themselves, the probability of their being in this state would have
increased rapidly, but each time they measurably failed to absorb the gamma rays, the probability fell
back to zero. The quantum Zeno effect endlessly reset the clock, holding the decay in check.
The next series of pulses began shifting the clusters into the space that had separated the original ingots.