"Robert Charles Wilson - Divided by Infinity" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson Robert Charles)

KellerтАФitтАЩs a horror story!тАЭ
тАЬPardon me?тАЭ
тАЬThink about it! At first it sounds like an invitation to suicide.
You donтАЩt like where you are, put a pistol in your mouth and go
somewhere elseтАФsomewhere better, maybe, even if it is inherently
less likely. But take you for example. YouтАЩre what, sixty years old?
Or so? Well, great, you inhabit a universe where a healthy human
being can obtain the age of sixty, fine, but what next? Maybe you
wake up tomorrow morning and find out they cured cancer, say, or
heart diseaseтАФexcluding you from all the worlds where William
Keller dies of a colon tumor or an aneurism. And then? YouтАЩre a
hundred years old, a hundred and twentyтАФdo you turn into some
kind of freak? So unlikely, in SoziereтАЩs sense, that you end up in a
circus or a research ward? Do they clone you a fresh body? Do you
end up as some kind of half-human robot, a brain in a bottle? And
in the meantime the world changes around you, everything familiar
is left behind, you see others die, maybe millions of others, maybe
the human race dies out or evolves into something else, and you go
on, and on, while the universe groans under the weight of your
unlikeliness, and thereтАЩs no escape, every death is just another rung
up the ladder of weirdness and disorientationтАжтАЭ
I hadnтАЩt thought of it that way.
Yes, the reductio ad absurdum of SoziereтАЩs theory was a kind of
relativistic paradox: as the observerтАЩs life grows more unlikely, he
perceives the world around him becoming proportionately more
strange; and down those unexplored, narrow rivers of mortality
might well lie a cannibal village.
Or the Temple of Gold.
What if Deirdre was too pessimistic? What if, among the all
the unlikely worlds, there was one in which Lorraine had survived
her cancer?
WouldnтАЩt that be worth waiting for?
Worth looking for, no matter how strange the consequences
might be?


News items that night:


NEURAL IMPLANTS RESTORE VISION IN FIFTEEN
PATIENTS
тАЬTELOMERASE COCKTAILтАЭ CREATES IMMORTAL
LAB MICE
TWINNED NEUTRON STARS POSE POTENTIAL
THREAT, NASA SAYS


My sin was longing.
 Not grief. Grief isnтАЩt a sin, and is anyway unavoidable. Yes, I
grieved for Lorraine, grieved long and hard, but I donтАЩt remember