"Paul J. McAuley - Eternal Light" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

PROLOGUE: PRIMEVAL LIGHT.
IT BEGAN WHEN THE SHOCK WAVE OF A NEAR-BY SUPERNOva
tore apart the red super-giant sun of the Alea home system,
forcing ten thousand family nations to abandon their world and
search for new homes among the packed stars of the Galaxy's
core. Or it began long after one Alea family had slaughtered
most of the others and forced the rest to flee the core, when a
binary star came too close to the black hole at the dead center
of the Galaxy. Or perhaps it began half a million years after that,
when Alea-infesting asteroids girdling the red dwarf star BD
+20' 2465 destroyed a Greater Brazilian flyby drone as it shot
through their adopted system. That's when it began for Dorthy
Yoshida, for instance, although it happened a dozen years before
she was born: the first act in a futile war of misunderstanding
that ended in a gratuitous spasm of genocide.
There are so many beginnings to the complex weave of the
secret history of the Universe. Causation chains merge and
separate and loop like the stacked geodesics of contra-space
that underpin the four dimensions of normal space-time. Half
a million years ago, for instance, just after the double star
encountered the black hole in the center of the Galaxy, the
remnants of what had once been a minor moon of a jovian gas
giant, accelerated close to the speed of light, grazed the second
planet of the star Epsilon Eridani. This, the end of the beginning
of the shaping of modern human destiny, was the final spasm of
an Alea family feud which Dorthy Yoshida would help close out
in the fullness of time.
There is no end to beginnings in the unbounded multi-verse,
no particular beginning to its end.
A beginning chosen at random ... ?
Freeze-frame that shattered world, half its oceans flung into
orbit by multiple impacts, the remainder aboil and washing over
its continents beneath global fire storms. Black clouds wrap it
 from pole to pole, except above the
places where fragments
of moon impacted. Look down from orbit,
through wavering
columns of superheated steam to where
white-hot magma wells
up from the mantle. Now fast forward:
half a million years.
People live on that world, now. They
call it Novaya Rosya;
their ancestors, nomenklatura fleeing an
Islamic Jihad, came
from the lost nation of the Commonwealth
of Soviet Republics,
stacked in cold-coffins in the cargo pods
of slower-than-light
ramscoop ships. People have lived on