"Greg Egan - Riding the Crocodile" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

Riding the Crocodile
by Greg Egan
This story is set in the same universe as the novel Incandescence, some 300,000 years before Rakesh's
journey to the bulge. It is not a part of the novel itself. Copyright ┬й Greg Egan, 2005. All rights reserved.

1
In their ten-thousand, three hundred and ninth year of marriage, Leila and Jasim began contemplating
death. They had known love, raised children, and witnessed the flourishing generations of their offspring.
They had travelled to a dozen worlds and lived among a thousand cultures. They had educated
themselves many times over, proved theorems, and acquired and abandoned artistic sensibilities and
skills. They had not lived in every conceivable manner, far from it, but what room would there be for the
multitude if each individual tried to exhaust the permutations of existence? There were some experiences,
they agreed, that everyone should try, and others that only a handful of people in all of time need bother
with. They had no wish to give up their idiosyncrasies, no wish to uproot their personalities from the
niches they had settled in long ago, let alone start cranking mechanically through some tedious
enumeration of all the other people they might have been. They had been themselves, and for that they
had done, more or less, enough.

Before dying, though, they wanted to attempt something grand and audacious. It was not that their lives
were incomplete, in need of some final flourish of affirmation. If some unlikely calamity had robbed them
of the chance to orchestrate this finale, the closest of their friends would never have remarked upon, let
alone mourned, its absence. There was no aesthetic compulsion to be satisfied, no aching existential void
to be filled. Nevertheless, it was what they both wanted, and once they had acknowledged this to each
other their hearts were set on it.

Choosing the project was not a great burden; that task required nothing but patience. They knew they'd
recognise it when it came to them. Every night before sleeping, Jasim would ask Leila, тАЬDid you see it
yet?тАЭ

тАЬNo. Did you?тАЭ

тАЬNot yet.тАЭ

Sometimes Leila would dream that she'd found it in her dreams, but the transcripts proved otherwise.
Sometimes Jasim felt sure that it was lurking just below the surface of his thoughts, but when he dived
down to check it was nothing but a trick of the light.

Years passed. They occupied themselves with simple pleasures: gardening, swimming in the surf, talking
with their friends, catching up with their descendants. They had grown skilled at finding pastimes that
could bear repetition. Still, were it not for the nameless adventure that awaited them they would have
thrown a pair of dice each evening and agreed that two sixes would end it all.

One night, Leila stood alone in the garden, watching the sky. From their home world, Najib, they had
travelled only to the nearest stars with inhabited worlds, each time losing just a few decades to the
journey. They had chosen those limits so as not to alienate themselves from friends and family, and it had
never felt like much of a constraint. True, the civilisation of the Amalgam wrapped the galaxy, and a
committed traveller could spend two hundred thousand years circling back home, but what was to be
gained by such an overblown odyssey? The dozen worlds of their neighbourhood held enough variety for
any traveller, and whether more distant realms were filled with fresh novelties or endless repetition hardly
seemed to matter. To have a goal, a destination, would be one thing, but to drown in the sheer plenitude