"Greg Egan - Schild's Ladder" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

Chapter 15
Tchicaya looked out from the Sarumpaet into a lime-green sea.тАж

Chapter 16
Tchicaya looked down through the panes in the floor into aтАж

Chapter 17
The Sarumpaet circumnavigated the xennobe colony, reconnoitering,тАж

Chapter 18
Time was everything, and Tchicaya felt a streak of brutalтАж

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Other Books by Greg Egan

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Part One
Chapter 1

In the beginning was a graph, more like diamond than graphite. Every node in this graph was tetravalent:
connected by four edges to four other nodes. By a count of edges, the shortest path from any node back
to itself was a loop six edges long. Every node belonged to twenty-four such loops, as well as forty-eight
loops eight edges long, and four hundred and eighty that were ten edges long. The edges had no length or
shape, the nodes no position; the graph consisted only of the fact that some nodes were connected to
others. This pattern of connections, repeated endlessly, was all there was.

In the beginning? Waking more fully, Cass corrected herself: that was the version she remembered from
childhood, but these days she preferred to be more cautious. The Sarumpaet rules let you trace the
history of the universe back to the vicnity of the Diamond Graph, and everything you could ask for in a
Big Bang was there: low entropy, particle creation, rapidly expanding space. Whether it made sense to
follow these signposts all the way back, though, was another question.

Cass let the graph's honeycomb pattern linger in the darkness of her skull. Having relinquished her
child's-eye view of the world, she was unable to decide which epoch of her life she actually inhabited. It
was one of the minor perils of longevity: waking could be like to trying to find your way home on a street
with ten thousand houses, all of which had once been your own. That the clues on the other side of her
eyelids might be more enlightening was beside the point; she had to follow the internal logic of her
memories back into the present before she could jolt herself awake.