"Mike Resnick - Death is an Acquired Trait" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

it? Well, crachhm bears a strong resemblance to veal parmesan, only the spices are more subtle and the
cheese is a more delightful color. Do you know what it's like to go almost eight billion years without a bite
of crachhm?
Then there was my krttz. That's a collective noun for wife, but it means a little more, since I had
four of them, one of each sex. Sex among the five of us was never all that easy or simple even when we
had bodies; without them, it was absolutely impossible. Not only is it difficult to get very lustful over a
creature of pure energy, but they appeared just like me. Even to think of sex with them in their new form
seemed sort of perverted, if you know what I mean.
Well, after a while -- a few million years or so -- I began to feel less cheated. After all, I didn't
have the wherewithall to eat or copulate anyway, so it became an exercise of mind over matter, or mind
over the memory of matter, or something like that. Most of us had these initial problems, but we finally
overcame them and turned our thoughts to more important matters.
We probed backward to the dawn of the universe, saw the Primal Atom take form, and
extrapolated the life and death of every star, every planet, every species of sentient and non- sentient
creature, and finally saw the universe come to a total standstill, completely in the thrall of entropy. Then,
since the future has infinite permutations, we explored every possible future, based on every conceivable
action that might be taken anywhere in the universe.
It was fascinating when we first did it, and it's still mildly interesting now, but you must realize our
dilemma: once you've done the universe, there is nothing else.
That's when we began to get bored.
Oh, we fought against it. We explored parallel universes, examined an infinite number of
dimensions, even probed back to the universe that existed before the formation of the Primal Atom. (It
was a pretty dull one: no music, and only 23 elements.) It didn't help much; we were still bored.
So we began extrapolating entirely new universes, based at first upon logical premises, and, later,
based on magic, alchemy, anything we could think of. I can remember extrapolating an entire galaxy
based on the assumption that Donald Duck was God -- and this was five billion years before Walt
Disney was born.
But it was no use. Sooner or later, each and every one of us got bored.
I think Rilias Prannch was the first of us to suggest it, though the rest of us certainly had been
toying with the notion: racial suicide. Ah, what a sweet thought, what a pleasant fancy!
I can still remember the instant that, like lemmings to the sea, we plunged into a nearby star,
prepared to be sizzled to a cinder -- and nothing happened, except that we found out what the inside of a
star looks like.
Then old Klannenn Porbisht suggested turning off all our sensory perceptions...only no one knew
how to do it. I mean, it wasn't as if we had eyelids we could close or anything like that. It simply wouldn't
work.
Finally, Robatt Xazzar tried to extrapolate a heaven and a hell so that we could determine how to
gain admission to either. That was a failure, too.
So we turned our collective brainpower from all other aspects of existence and creation, and
tried to figure out how to bring about our racial death.
We tried just about everything. We tried religion, we tried philosophy, we tried stretching
ourselves so thin that we vanished, we exposed ourselves to every conceivable type of radiation. We
visited planets where Death was worshipped and revered, and we observed nameless ceremonies in
which the living were killed and the dead were made to live again. We poured over the libraries of galaxy
after galaxy, and even sought an answer amongst the quasars and the quarks.
Our conclusion, after some three billion years of trying, was that suicide, while it may well have
been a consumation devoutly to be wished, was still beyond our means.
This only served to spur us on to greater efforts. Every theory, every equation, every lemma,
every prayer, every mystic chant, every hypothesis was examined, explored, analyzed, inverted, and built
upon. Every universe co-existing with ours in different temporal planes, different vibratory rates, and