"Space" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baxter Stephen)

PART TWO Travelers A.D. 2061-2186

He told himself: All this — the neutron star sail, the toiling community — is a triumph of life over blind cosmic cruelty. We ain’t taking it anymore.

But when he thought of Cassiopeia, anger flooded him. Why?

It had been just minutes since she had embraced him on that grassy, simulated plain… hadn’t it?

How do you know, Malenfant? How do you know you haven’t been frozen in some deep data store for ten thousand years?

And… how do you know this isn’t the first time you surfaced like this?

How could he know? If his identity assembled, disintegrated again, what trace would it leave on his memory? What was his memory? What if he was simply restarted each time, wiped clean like a reinitialized computer? How would he know?

But it didn’t matter. I did this to myself, he thought. I wanted to be here. I labored to get myself here. Because of what we learned, as the years unraveled: that the Gaijin would be followed by a great wave of visitors, and that the Gaijin were not even the first — just as Nemoto had intuited from the start. And nothing we learned about those earlier visitors, and what had become of them, gave us comfort.

Slowly, as they began to travel the stars, humans learnedto fear the universe, and the creatures who lived in it. Livedand died.