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

sealed against the vacuum and feeding on nothing but light took some getting used to, but so did the
customs and climate of any unfamiliar region back on Earth. Demanding the right to eat and excrete, here,
would have been as crass as insisting on slavish recreations of her favorite childhood meals, while a guest
at some terrestrial facility.

A circular tunnel, slightly wider than her height, connected her spartan quarters to a chamber where she
could interact with the software she'd brought from Earth, and through it the Mimosans themselves. She
bounced down the borehole, slapping the wall with her hands and feet, bumping her head and elbows
deliberately.

As she entered the chamber, she seemed to emerge from the mouth of a burrow to float above a lush,
wide meadow beneath a cloud-dappled sky. The illusion was purely audiovisual--the sounds encoded in
radio waves--but with no weight to hold her against the ceramic hidden beneath the meadow, the force
of detail was eerily compelling. It only took a few blades of grass and some chirping insects to make her
half-believe that she could smell the late-summer air.

Would it really have been an act of self-betrayal, if this landscape had stretched all the way inside
her--right down to the sensations of inhabiting her old, two-meter body, gorging on a breakfast of fruit
and oats after swimming across Chalmers Lake? If she could drift in and out of this soothing work of art
without losing her grip on reality, why couldn't she take the process a few steps further?

She pushed the argument aside, though she was glad that it never stopped nagging at her. When the
means existed to transform yourself, instantly and effortlessly, into anything at all, the only way to maintain
an identity was to draw your own boundaries. But once you lost the urge to keep on asking whether or
not you'd drawn them in the right place, you might as well have been born Homo sapiens, with no real
choices at all.

A short distance from the burrow stood a marble statue of Rainzi, arms folded, smiling slightly. Cass
gestured at the messenger and it came to life, the white stone taking on the hue and texture of skin. Rainzi
himself was several generations removed from anyone who'd bothered to simulate a living dermis, let
alone possess one, but Cass was not equipped to make sense of the Mimosans' own communications
protocols, so she'd chosen to have everything translated into the visual dialect used back on Earth.

"We'll give you our decision at nine o'clock, as promised," the messenger assured her. "But we hope you
won't mind if we precede this with a final review session. Some of us feel that there are matters that have
yet to be entirely resolved. We'll begin at half past seven." The messenger bowed, then froze again,
expecting no reply.

Cass tried not to read too much into the sudden change of plan. It was unnerving to discover that her
hosts still hadn't been able to reach a verdict, but at least they weren't going to keep her waiting any
longer than she'd expected. The fact that she'd alread briefed them in detail on every aspect of the
experiment that had crossed her mind during three decades of preparation, and they now hoped to hear
something new and decisive from her in twenty minutes' time, was no reason to panic. Whatever loose
ends they'd found in her analysis, they were giving her the chance to put things right.

Her confidence was shaken, though, and she couldn't stop thinking about the prospect of failure. After a
month here, she still wasn't lonely, or homesick; that was the price she'd pay upon returning. Even at the
leisurely pace of the embodied, seven hundred and forty years cut a deep rift. It would be millennia
before the changes that her friends on Earth had lived through together would cease to set her apart from
them. Millennia, if ever.