"James Patrick Kelly - The Propogation of Light in a Vaccuum" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kelly James Patrick)

though; I'm afraid she aspires to reality. I had a real wife once but it wasn't
the same.
(You're an artist. She didn't understand you.)
I don't want to paint too rosy a picture. Like any couple, we have our ups and
downs. Then again, down and up are relative terms which vary with the inertial
frame of the observer. Einstein warned that c is the ultimate limit within
spacetime. Exceed it and you pass out of the universe of logic. Causality loops
around you like a boa; the math is beyond me. Of course, logic and causality are
hardwired into our brains. It makes for some awkward moments.
I was a hero when I began this grand voyage of discovery. Like Columbus. In his
time, the world was flat. People believed that if you sailed too far in any one
direction, you would fall off the planet. My imaginary wife informs me that we
have sailed off the edge of reality. Perhaps that explains our predicament.
(Predicament? Opportunity. Nobody has ever had a chance to invent themselves
like this.)
The problem was that the theoretical framework supporting faster-than-light
travel stopped at c. No one really knew what was beyond the absolute. Oh, there
was extensive testing before any humans were put at risk. The robots, unburdened
by imagination, functioned exactly as expected. The design team accelerated an
entire menagerie: spiders and rats and pigs and chimps. They all came back; the
ones that weren't immediately dissected lived long and uneventful lives. So I
suppose there's hope.
(What he hasn't told you yet is that it wasn't just him. He's embarrassed, but
it's not his fault. There were fifty-one people on this ship. Crew and
colonists. His real wife was one of them. Her name was Varina.)
I remember once Varina made a joke about it. She said that science ended at c.
The other side was fiction. It's not so funny anymore.
I don't know what happened to the others. All I can say is that when the ship
warped, I blacked out. I have my theories. Perhaps there was a malfunction. I
could be dead and this is hell. Maybe the others had reasons for stranding me
here -- maybe they had no choice. When I woke up there was no one else but her
and she's imaginary.
I have no idea how to save myself, or, indeed, if I even need saving. My grasp
of the technology that surrounds me is uncertain at best. Do any of you
understand the dynamics of a particle with a mass of 1019 GeV? You see, most of
us were specialists. Aside from the crew, there were programmers, biologists,
engineers, doctors, geologists, builders. Only the least important jobs went to
people with multiple skills. I'm down on the organization chart as Nutrition
Stylist, but I'm also in a box labeled Mission Artist. Corporations pledged
money, schoolchildren sold candles and the arts lobby worked very hard to create
a place for me on the roster. Of course, it didn't hurt my cause to be married
to a civil engineer. My speciality has always been dabbling. I've spent a lot of
time in front of image processors. It says on my resume that I throw pots but I
haven't spun a wheel for years and who knows if there'll be clay where I'm
going. I write my own songs for the voice synthesizer and can even pluck a few
chords on the guitar. I do some folk dancing and tell stories and can juggle
four balls at once. And now I style food. After I got into the starship program
they sent me on a world tour of cooking schools. Budapest, Delhi, Paris -- more
dabbling. You know, I used to hate to cook; now dinner is all that matters.
What's the point to doing art when you have no audience?