"Barry N. Malzberg - A Galaxy Called Rome" - читать интересную книгу автора (Malzberg Barry N)

chronology is controlled only by the psyche, and Lena has a
thousand full lives and a thousand full deaths), and it is terrible,
of course, but it is also interesting because for every cycle of

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death there is a life, seventy years in which she can meditate
upon her condition in solitude; and by the two hundredth year or
more (or less, each of the lives is individual, some of them long,
others short), Lena has come to an understanding of exactly
where she is and what has happened to her. That it has taken
her fourteen thousand years to reach this understanding is in
one way incredible, and yet it is a land of miracle as well
because in an infinite universe with infinite possibilities, all of
them reconstituted for her, it is highly unlikely that even in
fourteen thousand years she would stumble upon the answer,
had it not been for the fact that she is unusually strong-willed
and that some of the personalities through which she has lived
are highly creative and controlled and have been able to do
some serious thinking. Also there is a carry-over from life to life,



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even with the differing personalities, so that she is able to make
use of preceding knowledge.
Most of the personalities are weak, of course, and not a few
are insane, and almost all are cowardly, but there is a little
residue; even in the worst of them there is enough residue to
carry forth the knowledge, and so it is in the fourteen-
thousandth year, when the truth of it has finally come upon her
and she realizes what has happened to her and what is going on
and what she must do to get out of there, and so it is [then]
that she summons all of the strength and win which are left to
her, and stumbling to the console (she is in her sixty-eighth year
of this life and in the personality of an old, sniveling, whining
man, an ex-ferryman himself), she summons one of the
prostheses, the master engineer, the controller. All of this time
the dead have been shrieking and clanging in her ears, fourteen

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