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

The Sarumpaet rules assigned a quantum amplitude to the possibility of any one graph being followed by
another. Among other things, the rules predicted that if a graph contained a loop consisting of three
trivalent nodes alternating with three pentavalent ones, its most likely successors would share the same
pattern, but it would be shifted to an adjoining set of nodes. A loop like this was known as a photon. The
rules predicted that the photon would move. (Which way? All directions were equally likely. To aim the
photon took more work, superimposing a swarm of different versions that would interfere and cancel
each other out when they traveled in all but one favored direction.)



Other patterns could propagate in a similar fashion, and their symmetries and interactions matched up
perfectly with the known fundamental particles. Every graph was still just a graph, a collection of nodes
and their mutual connections, but the flaws in the diamond took on a life of their own.

The current state of the universe was a long way from the Diamond Graph. Even a patch of near-vacuum
in the middle of interstellar space owed its near-Euclidean geometry to the fact that it was an elaborate
superposition of a multitude of graphs, each one riddled with virtual particles. And while an ideal vacuum,
in all its complexity, was a known quantity, most real space departed from that ideal in an uncontrollable
manner: shot through with cosmic radiation, molecular contaminants, neutrinos, and the endless faint
ripple of gravitational waves.

So Cass had traveled to Mimosa Station, half a light-year from the blue subgiant for which it was named,
three hundred and seventy light-years from Earth. Here, Rainzi and his colleagues had built a shield
against the noise.

Cass opened her eyes. Lifting her head to peer through a portal, still strapped to the bed at the waist, she
could just make out the Quietener: a blue glint reflecting off the hull a million kilometers away. Mimosa
Station had so little room to spare that she'd had to settle for a body two millimeters high, which rendered
her vision less acute than usual. The combination of weightlessness, vacuum, and insectile dimensions did
make her feel pleasantly robust, though: her mass had shrunk a thousand times more than the cross
sections of her muscles and tendons, so the pressures and strains involved in any collision were
feather-light. Even if she charged straight into a ceramic wall, it felt like being stopped by a barricade of
petals.

It was a pity the same magical resilience couldn't apply to her encounters with less tangible obstacles.
She'd left Earth with no guarantee that the Mimosans would see any merit in her proposal, but it was only
in the last few days that she'd begun to face up to the possibility of a bruising rejection. She could have
presented her entire case from home, stoically accepting a sevenhundred-and-forty-year delay between
each stage of the argument. Or she could have sent a Surrogate, well briefed but nonsentient, to plead on
her behalf. But she'd succumbed to a mixture of impatience and a sense of proprietorship, and
transmitted herself blind.

Now the verdict was less than two hours away.

She unstrapped herself and drifted away from the bed. She didn't need to wash, or purge herself of
wastes. From the moment she'd arrived, as a stream of ultraviolet pulses with a header requesting
embodiment on almost any terms, the Mimosans had been polite and accommodating; Cass had been
careful not to abuse their hospitality by pleading for frivolous luxuries. A self-contained body and a safe
place to sleep were the only things she really needed in order to feel like herself. Being hermetically