"Rusch-WithoutEnd" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

He tensed. She didn't talk about the cancer much, and when she did, it often
presaged a deep depression. "You wonder if what's going on inside of you?"

"If somewhere, deep down, two tiny beings are lying on the equivalent of a dock
on the equivalent of a lake, watching cells die."

"We're watching history," he said. "The cells are dying inside you now."

"But who knows how long it takes the message to reach those two tiny beings on
the lake equivalent? If the sun died now, we wouldn't know for another eight
minutes. So to us, the sun would still be alive, even though it was dead."

Her words sent a shudder through him. He imagined himself, talking to her,
listening to her response, even though she was already dead.

"We think about it wrong, you know," she said, breaking into his reverie. She
was alive and breathing, and snuggled against him. He would know when she died.

"Think about what wrong?"

"Time. We act as if it moves in a linear fashion, straight from here on as if
nothing would change. But our memories change. The fact that we have memories
means that time is not linear. String theory postulates twenty-five dimensions,
and we can barely handle the three we see. We're like cats and dogs and doors."

"And if we could think in time that wasn't linear, how would it be?"

He could feel her shrug, sharp shoulder bones moving against his ribcage. "I
don't know. Maybe we would experience everything at once. All our life, from
birth to death, would be in our minds at the same time. Only we wouldn't look at
it as a line. We look at it like a pond, full of everything, full of us."

Her words washed over him like a wave, like tiny particles he could barely feel.
"Geneva." He kept his voice quiet, like the lapping of the water against the
dock. "What are you saying?"

She sat up then, blocking his view of the meteor showers, her face more alive
than it had been in weeks. "I'm saying don't mourn for me. Mourning is a
function of linear time."

"Geneva," he said with a resolution he didn't feel. "You're not going to die."

"Exactly," she said, and rested her head on his chest.

He pulled open the heavy oak doors and went inside. The chancel smelled vaguely
of candle wax and pine branches, even though it wasn't Christmas. A red carpet
ran down the aisles between the heavy brown pews. The altar stood at the front
like a small fortress. He hadn't been inside a church since he was a teenager,
and inside this one now, he felt small, as if that former self remained, waiting
for a moment like this.