"Greg Egan - Wang' s Carpets" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

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WANG'S CARPETS

Greg Egan



Here's another story by Australian writer Greg Egan, whose "Luminous"
appears elsewhere in this anthology. Nineteen ninety-five was a good year
for Egan in short fiction, and, like Ursula K. Le Guin and Robert Reed, he
published four or five different stories this year that might well have
made the cut for a best-of-the-year anthology in another year; the story
that follows, though, would be hard to match anywhere for the bravura sweep
and pure originality of its conceptualization, as Egan provides us with a
First Contact story unlike any you've ever read before . . .



Waiting to be cloned one thousand times and scattered across ten million
cubic light-years, Paolo Venetti relaxed in his favorite ceremonial
bathtub: a tiered hexagonal pool set in a courtyard of black marble flecked
with gold. Paolo wore full traditional anatomy, uncomfortable garb at
first, but the warm currents flowing across his back and shoulders slowly
eased him into a pleasant torpor. He could have reached the same state in
an instant, by decreeтАФbut the occasion seemed to demand the complete ritual
of verisimilitude, the ornate curlicued longhand of imitation physical
cause and effect.

As the moment of diaspora approached, a small gray lizard darted across the
courtyard, claws scrabbling. It halted by the far edge of the pool, and
Paolo marveled at the delicate pulse of its breathing, and watched the
lizard watching him, until it moved again, disappearing into the
surrounding vineyards. The environment was full of birds and insects,
rodents and small reptilesтАФdecorative in appearance, but also satisfying a
more abstract aesthetic: softening the harsh radial symmetry of the lone
observer; anchoring the simulation by perceiving it from a multitude of
viewpoints. Ontological guy lines. No one had asked the lizards if they
wanted to be cloned, though. They were coming along for the ride, like it
or not.

The sky above the courtyard was warm and blue, cloudless and sunless,
isotropic. Paolo waited calmly, prepared for every one of half a dozen
possible fates.

An invisible bell chimed softly, three times. Paolo laughed, delighted.

One chime would have meant that he was still on Earth: an anti-climax,
certainlyтАФbut there would have been advantages to compensate for that.
Everyone who really mattered to him lived in the Carter-Zimmerman polis,