"Joanna Russ - Female Man" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russ Joanna)

"Send it back," said an operator, climbing out from under the induction helmet at the far end of the shed.
Four others came and stood around the man in the blue suit.

"Is he of steady mind?" said one.

"We don't know."

"Is he ill?"

"Hypnotize him and send him back."

The man in blue—if he had seen them—would have found them very odd: smooth-faced, smooth-
skinned, too small and too plump, their coveralls heavy in the seat. They wore coveralls because you
couldn't always fix things with the mechanical hands; sometimes you had to use your own. One was old
and had white hair; one was very young; one wore the long hair sometimes affected by the youth of
Whileaway, "to while away the time." Six pairs of steady curious eyes studied the man in the blue suit.

"That, mes enfants," said the tractor-driver at last, "is a man.

"That is a real Earth man."

VI

Sometimes you bend down to tie your shoe, and then you either tie your shoe or you don't; you either
straighten up instantly or maybe you don't. Every choice begets at least two worlds of possibility, that is,
one in which you do and one in which you don't; or very likely many more, one in which you do
quickly, one in which you do slowly, one in which you don't, but hesitate, one in which you hesitate and
frown, one in which you hesitate and sneeze, and so on. To carry this line of argument further, there
must be an infinite number of possible universes (such is the fecundity of God) for there is no reason to
imagine Nature as prejudiced in favor of human action. Every displacement of every molecule, every
change in orbit of every electron, every quantum of light that strikes here and not there—each of these
must somewhere have its alternative. It's possible, too, that there is no such thing as one clear line or
strand of probability, and that we live on a sort of twisted braid, blurring from one to the other without
even knowing it, as long as we keep within the limits of a set of variations that really make no difference
to us. Thus the paradox of time travel ceases to exist, for the Past one visits is never one's own Past but
always somebody else's; or rather, one's visit to the Past instantly creates another Present (one in which
the visit has already happened) and what you visit is the Past belonging to that Present—an entirely
different matter from your own Past. And with each decision you make (back there in the Past) that new
probable universe itself branches, creating simultaneously a new Past and a new Present, or to put it
plainly, a new universe. And when you come back to your own Present, you alone know what the other
Past was like and what you did there.

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 Joanna Russ - The Female Man