"Mark W. Tiedemann - Miserond" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tiedemann Mark W)

She squeezed his forearm with her free hand. "Why not? You said you were planning to leave eventually anyway. You could go out with me. At least that way we'd both know someone in the universe."
Gil stared at the displays, stunned mute and embarrassed by his silence. He did not want to hurt Jesca, but he could think of nothing to say. Finally she withdrew her hands. After a few more minutes she left the chamber.


Gil pulled the knife toward him along the groove in the box he cradled in his lap. The delicate coil of wood arced into the corner of his cabin with the other shavings. Gil widened the rut, deepened the stroke. He held the box at arm's length and turned to each face until he brought around the blank surface.
The door sounded. On the monitor Gil saw Ivelor waiting. He frowned and looked down at the box again.
"Let him in or pretend he isn't there?" he asked softly. The door sounded again and he sighed. "Let him in, I suppose. And I thought I'd been ignoring him so well." He flipped the box over to the face he had been working on and set the knife in the groove again. "Come in."
Ivelor stepped into the small cabin. The door closed behind him and he clasped his hands at his waist and surveyed the room. His gaze stopped at the neat pile of wood shavings.
"I didn't know what to expect coming here," Ivelor said then. "I was under the impression that you couldn't see the Hole, but there's a halo around it, dim and bluish."
"It's an illusion. You're seeing something that's not really there." He grinned at Ivelor's puzzled expression. "The glow is the escape of virtual particles from the event horizon."
"You're playing with me."
"No, no! I'm serious. One of the physicists could probably give you a better explanation. It's one of the things they study here. Theory predicts that in any isolated point in the universe, a certain amount of energy is inevitably present for a certain limited amount of time. Where there appears to be nothing concrete to provide that energy, one of two things must be true. Either that point has no property called time or particles will appear spontaneously to fulfill the energy/time requirement. These are virtual particles and they come in paired groupsЧa particle and its antiparticle, oppositesЧand since the universe seems to function according to certain statistical laws, for every cubic meter of space there will be a corresponding occurrence of energy/time pairs. They don't necessarily have to appear uniformly distributed, though, and in fact they aren't. Most of them seem to gather 'round the extremities."
"Black holes."
"Exactly. So what happens is the pairs appear at the event horizon. One plunges into the hole, the other makes good its escape. And that seems to account for the halo you saw."
"But if they're not real, how can they be seen?"
"Transubstantiation."
"Excuse me?"
"Not at all. When the lucky half of the pair manages to get away, the universe rewards it by granting it mass and substance. Of course, now we're in the 'real' universe, and there's no way you can have something for nothing. The mass comes from the hole itself."
Ivelor shook his head. "How is that possible?"
Gil shrugged elaborately. "That's one of the reasons this station was built, to study exactly that phenomenon."
"They don't call it transubstantiation, do they?"
"No, but maybe they should. Maybe if they looked at it that way it might be simpler to solve." He glanced at Ivelor. "You didn't come here to talk to me about theory. Are you really taking Jesca back?"
"No, I'm sending her back. I'm staying."
"Why?"
"That's not something I'm comfortable discussing with you."
"Oh, come on! We're all prisoners here, nothing we say or do has any effect Out There! For all you know the world that sent you is already gone, all the people who gave you orders dead. The only law here is gravity, so it's best not to hold onto things too tightly."
Ivelor cocked an eyebrow. "Statistics?"
"Pragmatics. Information we receive from Out There is meaningless. The only thing that counts is what we send out."
"Like virtual particles? No existence until they make good an escape from a black hole?"
Gil laughed. "Good! Very good! But so what? If you tell me about your mission here, what effect could that have on anything Out There until I leave?"
"Don't be so sure Out There is so disconnected from this place. I'll make a deal with you. You tell me why you're in here, I'll explain my purpose."
Gil peeled another curl off the box and Ivelor watched it trace its path into the corner. He frowned, dismayed, and Gil chuckled.
"Statistics," Gil said cryptically.
Ivelor nodded at the box. "Woodworking seemsЕincongruous. What is this?"
Gil handed it over. "This is me."
Ivelor turned it from face to face, his forehead creased in concentration. Gil watched him anxiously, enjoying this in spite of himself.
Finally Ivelor smiled. He held up a moire' pattern. "Your birth?" Gil nodded. Ivelor turned to a fractal solar system. "Your home." The happy and sad clowns of traditional theatre. "All your joy and sorrow." A yin-yang figure of two people locked in an act of love. "Your love."
Gil nodded, his heart pounding. Ivelor stared at the ring pattern, frowning. Finally he shook his head and handed it back.
Gil tapped the rings. "My salvation."
Ivelor reached out and touched the blank face. "What's going here?"
Gil set the box down and resheathed the carving knife. "Let me show you something." He stood and gestured to the door.


Ivelor craned his neck, eyes wide. Immense ribbing gave the impression that they stood within the belly of a snake. Sharp silvery and blue lines, connecting cables, relays, dark green quasi-organic machineshapes filled the crevices between the large smooth rolls of brownish-black. Gil looked up; his face and Ivelor's stared back, dimly reflected in the transparency that shielded the walkway, pale ghosts, eyeless.
"I always feel I've been swallowed when I come in here," Gil said.
"It's incredible."
"Improbable, at least."
Ivelor pressed his hands against the transparency and stared. "When I found out that I was coming here I was fascinated with the notion that I could step onto a platform, ride it for a while, and step off to find I'd left my old life fifty, sixty, a hundred years behind. I liked that idea, that I could walk awayЧspin awayЧfrom everything."
"Was your life so bad?"
"Complicated. Things are difficult to explain clearly when you're right in the middle of them."