"Dan Simmons - The rise of Endymion" - читать интересную книгу автора (Simmons Dan)

along the extra expenses bit by bit once construction has started and the structure is taking
shape. He said that was beyond the point of no return, so the client was hooked like a trout on a
six-pound line."
Both A. Bettik and I laughed. It was not a disrespectful laugh -- the Old Architect had been
one of those rare creatures, a true genius combined with an overpowering personality -- but even
when thinking of him with sadness and affection, we could recognize the selfishness and
deviousness that had also been part of his personality. And I don't mean to be coy here by
referring to him only as the Old Architect: the cybrid's personality template had been
reconstructed from a pre-Hegira human named Frank Lloyd Wright who had worked in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, A.D. But while everyone at the Taliesin Fellowship had referred to him
respectfully as Mr. Wright, including even those older apprentices who were his age, I had always
thought of him as the Old Architect because of things Aenea had said about her future mentor
before we came here to Old Earth.
As if thinking along these same lines, A. Bettik said, "It's odd, isn't it?"
"What's that?" said Aenea.
The android smiled and rubbed his left arm where it ended at a smooth stump just below the
elbow. It is a habit he had developed over the past few years. The autosurgeon on the dropship
that had carried us through the farcaster from God's Grove had kept the android alive, but his
chemistry had been sufficiently different to prevent the ship from growing him a new arm. "I
mean," he said, "that despite the ascendancy of the Church in the affairs of humankind, the
question of whether human beings have a soul which leaves the body after death has yet to be
definitely answered. Yet in Mr. Wright's case, we know that his cybrid personality still exists
separate from his body -- or at least did for some time after the moment of his death."
"Do we know that for sure?" I said. The tea was warm and good. Aenea and I bought it -- traded
for it actually -- at the Indian market located in the desert where the city of Scottsdale should
have been.


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It was Aenea who answered my question. "Yes. My father's cybrid personality survived the
destruction of his body and was stored in the Schr├╢n Loop in Mother's skull. Even after that, we
know that it had a separate existence in the megasphere and then resided in the Consul's ship for
a time. A cybrid's personality survives as a sort of holistic wave front propagated along the
matrices of the datumplane or megasphere until it returns to the AI source in the Core."
I had known this but never understood it. "Okay," I said, "but where did Mr. Wright's AI-BASED
personality wave front go? There can't be any connections to the Core out here in the Magellanic
Cloud. There are no dataspheres here."
Aenea set down her empty mug. "There has to be a connection, or Mr. Wright and the other
reconstructed cybrid personalities assembled here on Earth couldn't have existed. Remember, the
TechnoCore used the Planck space between the farcaster portals as their medium and hiding place
before the dying Hegemony destroyed the farcaster openings to it."
"The Void Which Binds," I said, repeating the phrase from the old poet's Cantos.
"Yeah," said Aenea. "Although I always thought that was a dumb name."
"Whatever it's called," I said, "I don't understand how it can reach here ... a different
galaxy."
"The medium the Core used for farcasters reaches everywhere," said Aenea. "It permeates space
and time." My young friend frowned. "No, that's not right, space and time are bound up in it ...
the Void Which Binds transcends space and time."