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

I woke in a hospital bed.
I lay there passively for more than an hour, by the digital
clock on the bedstand, cresting waves of sleep and wondering at
the silence, until I was visited by Candice.
Her name was written on her lapel tag. Candice was a nurse,
with a throaty Jamaican accent and wide, sad eyes.
тАЬYouтАЩre awake,тАЭ she said, barely glancing at me.
My head hurt. My mouth tasted of ashes and quicklime. I
needed to pee, but there was a catheter in the way.
тАЬI think I want to see a doctor,тАЭ I managed.
 тАЬProbтАЩly you do,тАЭ Candice agreed. тАЬAnd probтАЩly you should.
But our last resident went home yesterday. I can take the catheter
out, if thatтАЩs what you want.тАЭ
тАЬThere are no doctors?тАЭ
тАЬHome with their families like everybody else.тАЭ She fluffed
my pillow. тАЬOnly us pathetic lonelyhearts left, Mr. Keller. You
been unconscious ten days.тАЭ
Later she wheeled me down the corridorтАФthough I insisted I
could have walkedтАФto a lounge with a tall plateglass window,
where the wardтАЩs remaining patients had gathered to talk and weep
and watch the fires that burned fitfully through the downtown core.

SoziereтАЩs curse. We becomeтАФor we make ourselvesтАФless
тАЬlikely.тАЭ But itтАЩs not our own unlikeliness we perceive; instead, we
see the world growing strange around us.
The lights are out all over the city. The hospital, fortunately,
has its own generator. I tried to call Deirdre from a hospital phone,
but there was no dial tone, just a crackling hiss, like the last groove
in an LP record.


The previous weekтАЩs newspapers, stacked by the door of the
hospital lounge, were dwindling broadsheets containing nothing
but stark outlines of the impending gamma-ray disaster.
The extraterrestrial warning had been timely. Timely, though
we read it far too late. Apparently it not only identified the
threatening binary neutron starsтАФwhich were spiraling at last into
gaudy destruction, about to emit a burst of radiation brighter than a
billion galaxiesтАФbut provided a calculable time scale.
A countdown, in other words, which had already closed in on
its ultimate zero. Too close to home, a black hole was about to be
born.
 None of us would survive that last flash of annihilating fire.
Or, at least, if we did, we would all become extremely
unlikely.


I remember a spot of blue luminescence roughly the size of a
dinner plate at armтАЩs length, suspended above the burning city: