"Baxter, Stephen - Manifold 03 - Origin" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baxter Stephen)

Manifold
Book #03
Origin

by Stephen Baxter



Emma Stoney:

Do you know me? Do you know where you are? Oh, Malenfant...

I know you. And you're just what you always were, an incorrigible space cadet.
That's how we both finished up stranded here, isn't it? I remember how I loved
to hear you talk, when we were kids. When everybody else was snuggling at the
drive-in, you used to lecture me on how space is a high frontier, a sky to be
mined, a resource for humanity.

But is that all there is? Is the sky really nothing more than an empty stage for
mankind to strut and squabble?

And what if we blew ourselves up before we ever got to the stars? Would the
universe just evolve on, a huge piece of clockwork slowly running down, utterly
devoid of life and mind?

How - desolating.

Surely it couldn't be like that. All those suns and worlds spinning through the
void, the grand complexity of creation unwinding all the way out of the Big Bang
itself... You always said you just couldn't believe that there was nobody out
there looking back at you down here.

But if so, where is everybody?

This is the Fermi Paradox - right, Malenfant? If the aliens existed, they would
be here. I heard you lecture on that so often I could recite it in my sleep.

But I agree with you. It's powerful strange. I'm sure Fermi is telling us
something very profound about the nature of the universe we live in. It is as if
we are all embedded in a vast graph of possibilities, a graph with an axis
marked time, for our own future destiny, and an axis marked space, for the
possibilities of the universe.

Much of your life has been shaped by thinking about that cosmic graph. Your life
and, as a consequence, mine.

Well, on every graph there is a unique point, the place where the axes cross.
It's called the origin. Which is where we've finished up, isn't it, Malenfant?
And now we know why we were alone...