"Walter Jon Williams - Prayers on the Wind" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Walter John)

"All except the crust," Jigme said. "The crystal was instructed to convert most of the planet's material.
That is why our heavy metals have to come from mined asteroids, and why we build mostly in natural
materials. This house was probably of wood and laminated cloth, and it most likely burned in an
accident."
!urq picked up a bit of crystal from the ring of rubble that surrounded the pillar. "And you can store
information in this."
"All the information we have," Jigme said reverently. "All the information in the universe, eventually."
Involuntarily, his hands formed the teaching mudra. "The Library is a hologram of the universe. The
Blessed Bodhisattva Bob Miller was a reflection of the Library, its first Incarnation. The current
Incarnation is the forty-first."
!urq's antennae flickered in the wind. She tossed the piece of crystal from hand to hand. "All the
information you possess," she said. "That is a powerful tool. Or weapon."
"A tool, yes. The original builders of the Library considered it only a tool. Only something to help
them order things, to assist them in governing. They did not comprehend that once the Diamond
Mountain contained enough information, once it gathered enough energy, it would become more than the
sum of its parts. That it would become the Mind of Buddha, the universe in small, and that the Mind, out
of its compassion, would seek to incarnate itself as a human."
"The Library is self-aware?" !urq asked. She seemed to find the notion startling.
Jigme could only shrug. "Is the universe self-aware?" !urq made a series of meditative clicking noises.
"Inside the Diamond Mountain," Jigme said, "there are processes going on that we cannot
comprehend. The Library was designed to be nearly autonomous; it is now so large we cannot keep
track of everything, because we would need a mind as large as the Library to process the information.
Many of the energy and data transfers that we can track are very subtle, involving energies that are not
fully understood. Yet we can track some of them. When an Incarnation dies, we can see the trace his
spirit makes through the Library -- like an atomic particle that comes apart in a shower of short-lived
particles, we see it principally through its effects on other energies -- and we can see part of those
energies move from one place to another, from one body to another, becoming another Incarnation.
!urq's antennae moved skeptically. "You can document this?"
"We can produce spectra showing the tracks of energy through matter. Is that documentation?"
"I would say, with all respect, your case remains unproven."
"I do not seek to prove anything." Jigme smiled. "The Gyalpo Rinpoche is his own proof, his own
truth. Buddha is truth. All else is illusion."
!urq put the piece of crystal in her pocket. "If this was our Library," she said, "we would prove things
one way or another."
"You would see only your own reflection. Existence on the quantum level is largely a matter of belief.
On that level, mind is as powerful as matter. We believe that the Gyalpo Rinpoche is an Incarnation of
the Library; does that belief help make it so?"
"You ask me questions based on a system of belief that I do not share. How can you expect me to
answer?"
"Belief is powerful. Belief can incarnate itself."
"Belief can incarnate itself as delusion."
"Delusion can incarnate itself as reality." Jigme stood in his stirrups, stretching his legs, and then settled
back into his saddle. "Let me tell you a story," he said. "It's quite true. There was a man who went for a
drive, over the pass yonder." He pointed across the valley, at the low blue pass, the Kampa La between
the mountains Tampa and Tsang. "It was a pleasant day, and he put the car's top down. A windstorm
came up as he was riding near a crossroads, and his fur hat blew off his head into a thorn bush, where he
couldn't reach it. He simply drove on his way.
"Other people walked past the bush, and they saw something inside. They told each other they'd seen
something odd there. The hat got weathered and less easy to recognize. Soon the locals were telling
travelers to beware the thing near the crossroads, and someone else suggested the thing might be a