"Greg Egan - Diaspora" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

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DIASPORA
by
Greg Egan
(C) 1998
ISBN: 0-06-105798-3


Part One

Yatima surveyed the Doppler-shifted stars around the polis, following the frozen, concentric waves of
color across the sky from expansion to convergence. Ve wondered what account they should give of
themselves when they finally caught up with their quarry. They'd brought no end of questions to ask, but
the flow of information couldn't all be one-way. When the Transmuters demanded to know "Why have
you followed us? Why have you come so far?", where should ve begin?
Yatima had read pre-Introdus histories told on a single level, bounded by the fictions that individuals
were as indivisible as quarks, and planetary civilizations nothing less than self-contained universes.
Neither vis own history nor the Diaspora's would fit between those imaginary lines. The real world was
full of larger structures, smaller structures, simpler and more complex structures than the tiny portion
comprising sentient creatures and their societies, and it required a profound myopia of scale and
similarity to believe that everything beyond this shallow layer could be ignored. It wasn't just a question
of choosing to bury yourself in a closed world of synthetic scapes; the fleshers had never been immune
to this myopia, nor had the most outward-looking citizens. No
doubt at some time in their history the Transmuters had suffered from it too.
Of Course, the Transmitters would already be aware of the very large, very dead celestial machinery that
had driven the Diaspora to Swift and beyond. Their question would be, "Why have you come so much
further? Why have you left your own people behind?"
Yatima couldn't speak for vis fellow traveler, but the answer for ver lay at the opposite end of the scale,
in the realm of the very simple, and the very small.


1

ORPHANOGENESIS

Konishi polis, Earth
23 387 025 000 000 CST
15 May 2975, 11:03:17.154 UT

The conceptory was non-sentient software, as ancient as Konishi polis itself. Its main purpose was to
enable the citizens of the polis to create offspring: a child of one parent, or two, or twenty formed partly
in their own image, partly according to their wishes, and partly by chance. Sporadically, though, every
teratau or so, the conceptory created a citizen with no parents at all.

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