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

She still believed that she could come to terms with that loss, so long as she had something to weigh
against it. Being a singleton meant accepting that every decision had its cost, but once you understood
that this state of affairs was a hard-won prize, not a plight to rail against, it gave some dignity to all but the
most foolish choices.

If the Mimosans turned her down, though? Maybe there was something daring and romantic in the mere
act of traveling hundreds of light-years, inhabiting the body of a vacuum-dwelling insect, and alienating
herself from the world where she belonged, all in the hope of seeing her ideas tested as rapidly as
possible. But for how long would she be able to take comfort from the sheer audacity of what she'd
done, once that hope had come to nothing?

She curled into a ball and tried to weep. She could not shed tears, and the sobs rebounding against her
membrance-sealed mouth were like the drone of a mosquito. But the shuddering as she worked her
vestigial lungs still provided some sense of release. She had not entirely erased the map of her Earthly
body from her mind; too much of the way she experienced emotions was bound up in its specific form.
So everything she'd amputated lingered as a kind of phantom--nowhere near as convincing as a true
simulation, but still compelling enough to make a difference.

When she was spent, Cass stretched out her limbs and drifted over the meadow like a dandelion seed, as
calm and lucid as she'd been at any time since her arrival.

She knew what she knew about Quantum Graph Theory, backward. Whatever insights she was capable
of extracting from that body of knowledge, she'd extracted long ago. But if the Mimosans had found a
question she couldn't answer, a doubt she couldn't assuage, that in itself would be a chance to learn
something more.

Even if they sent her home with nothing else, she would not be leaving empty-handed.



It was Livia who asked the first question, and it was far simpler than anything Cass had anticipated.

"Do you believe that the Sarumpaet rules are correct?"

Cass hesitated longer than she needed to, a calculated attempt to imbue her response with appropriate
gravity.

"I'm not certain that they are, but the likelihood seems overwhelming to me."

"Your experiment would test them more rigorously than anything that's been tried before," Livia
observed.

Cass nodded. "I do see that as a benefit, but only a minor one. I don't believe that merely testing the rules
one more time would justify the experiment. I'm more interested in what the rules imply, given that they're
almost certainly correct."

Where was this heading? She glanced around at the others, seated in a ring in the meadow: Yann,
Bakim, Darsono, Ilene, Zulkifli, and Rainzi. Her Mediator had chosen appearances for all of them, since
they offered none themselves, but at least their facial expressions and body language were modulated by