"Robert Charles Wilson - The Great Goodbye" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson Robert Charles)

THE GREAT GOODBYE
Robert Charles Wilson

Here's a sly and ingenious little glimpse of what the new
millennium ahead may have in store for humanity, one of a
weekly series of such speculations about the future
commis-sioned by the science magazine Nature. ..

Robert Charles Wilson made his first sale in 1974, to Analog, but little more was
heard from him until the late eighties, when he began to publish a string of ingenious
and well-crafted novels and stories that have since established him among the top
ranks of the writers who came to promi-nence in the last two decades of the
twentieth century. His first novel, A Hidden Place, appeared in 1986. He won the
Philip K. Dick Award for his 1.995 novel Mysterium, and the Aurora Award for his
story "The Perseids". His other books include the novels Memory Wire, Gypsies,
The Divide, The Harvest, A Bridge of Years, Bios and Darwinia. His most recent
book is a new novel, The Chronoliths. He lives in Toronto, Canada.

****

THE HARDEST PART OF THE Great Goodbye, for me, was knowing I wouldn't
see my grandfather again. We had developed that rare thing, a friendship that
crossed the line of the post-evolutionary divide, and I loved him very much.

Humanity had become, by that autumn of 2350, two very distinct human speciesтАФif
I can use that antiquated term. Oh, the Stock Humans remain a "species" in the
classical evolutionary sense: New People, of course, have forgone all that.
Post-evolutionary, post-biological, budded or engineered, New People are gloriously
free from all the old human restraints. What unites us all is our common source, the
Divine Complexity that shaped primordial quark plasma into stars, planets, planaria,
people. Grandfather taught me that.

I had always known that we would, one day, be separated. But we first spoke of it,
tentatively and reluctantly, when Grandfather went with me to the Museum of
Devices in Brussels, a day trip. I was young and easily impressed by the full-scale
working model of a "steam train" in the Machine GalleryтАФan amazingly baroque
contrivance of ancient metalwork and gas-pressure technology. Staring at it, I
thought (because Grandfather had taught me some of his "religion"): Complexity
made this. This is made of Stardust, by Stardust.

We walked from the Machine Gallery to the Gallery of the Planets, drawing more
than a few stares from the Stock People (children, especially) around us. It was
uncommon to see a New Person fully embodied and in public. The Great Goodbye
had been going on for more than a century; New People were already scarce on
Earth, and a New Person walking with a Stock Person was an even more unusual
sightтАФrisque, even shocking. We bore the attention gamely. Grandfather held his
head high and ignored the muttered insults.

The Gallery of the Planets recorded humanity's expansion into the Solar System, and
I hope the irony was obvious to everyone who sniffed at our presence there: Stock