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

PART THREE Trenchworks A.D. 2190-2340

The Gaijin had a somewhat mathematical philosophy. Malenfant thought it sounded suspiciously like a religion.

The Gaijin believed that the universe was fundamentally comprehensible by creatures like themselves — like humans, like Malenfant. That is, they believed it possible that an entity could exist that could comprehend the entire universe, arbitrarily well.

And they had a further principle that mandated that if such a being could exist, it must exist.

The catch was that they believed there was a manifold of possible universes, of which this was only one. So She may not exist in this universe.

It — She — was the final goal of the Gaijin’s quest.

But until the God of the Manifold shows up, there’s only us, Malenfant thought. And there is work to do. We have to fix the bugs in this universe we’re all stuck in. Hence, we throw a net around a star.

Hence, my sacrifice.

But, almost from the beginning, we fought back. We barely understood a damn thing, and nothing we did alone was going to make a difference, and the whole time we were swept along by historical forces that we could barely understand, let alone control, much as it had always been. We didn’t even know who the bad guys were. But, by God, we tried.

At whatever cost to ourselves.