"Michael Swanwick - Radiant Doors" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swanwick Michael)

Under the circumstances, it was the single most stupid thing I could possibly do.
"Sure," I said. "Why not?"

Later, in his tent, as he was taking off my clothes, I asked, "Just why did your
wife divorce you, Shriver?"

"Mental cruelty," he said, smiling.

Then he laid me down across his cot and I let him hurt me. I needed it. I needed
to be punished for being so happy and well fed and unbrutalized while all about

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 Radiant Doors by Michael Swanwick This story first appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, September 1998


me . . .

"Harder, God damn you," I said, punching him, biting him, clawing up blood.
"Make me pay."

Cause and effect. Is the universe deterministic or not? If everything inevitably
follows what came before, tickety-tock, like gigantic, all-inclusive clockwork,
then there is no hope. The refugees came from a future that cannot be turned
away. If, on the other hand, time is quanticized and uncertain, unstable at every
point, constantly prepared to collapse in any direction in response to totally
random influences, then all that suffering that came pouring in on us over the
course of six long and rainy months might be nothing more than a phantom. Just
an artifact of a rejected future.

Our future might be downright pleasant.

We had a million scientists working in every possible discipline, trying to make it
so. Biologists, chaoticists, physicists of every shape and description. Fabulously
dedicated people. Driven. Motivated. All trying to hold out a hand before what
must be and say "Stop!"

How they'd love to get their mitts on what I had stowed in my desk.

I hadn't decided yet whether I was going to hand it over, though. I wasn't at all
sure what was the right thing to do. Or the smart thing, for that matter.

Gevorkian questioned me on Tuesday. Thursday, I came into my office to
discover three UN soldiers with hand-held detectors, running a search.

I shifted my purse back on my shoulder to make me look more strack, and said,
"What the hell is going on here?"

"Random check, ma'am." A dark-eyed Indian soldier young enough to be if not
my son then my little brother politely touched fingers to forehead in a kind of