"Dan Simmons - Endymion" - читать интересную книгу автора (Simmons Dan)

which of mine? There are several from which to choose. Perhaps this final one is appropriate.
Begin at the ending.
I am writing this in a Schrodinger cat box in high orbit around the quarantined world of
Armaghast. The cat box is not much of a box, more of a smooth-hulled ovoid a mere six meters by
three meters. It will be my entire world until the end of my life. Most of the interior of my
world is a spartan cell consisting of a black-box air-and-waste recycler, my bunk, the food-
synthesizer unit, a narrow counter that serves as both my dining table and writing desk, and
finally the toilet, sink, and shower, which are set behind a fiberplastic partition for reasons of
propriety that escape me. No one will ever visit me here. Privacy seems a hollow joke.
I have a text slate and stylus. When I finish each page, I transfer it to hard copy on microvellum
produced by the recycler. The low accretion of wafer-thin pages is the only visible change in my
environment from day to day.
The vial of poison gas is not visible. It is set in the static-dynamic shell of the cat box,



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linked to the air-filtration unit in such a way that to attempt to fiddle with it would trigger
the cyanide, as would any attempt to breach the shell itself. The radiation detector, its timer,
and the isotope element are also fused into the frozen energy of the shell. I never know when the
random timer activates the detector. I never know when the same random timing element opens the
lead shielding to the tiny isotope. I never know when the isotope yields a particle.
But I will know when the detector is activated at the instant the isotope yields a particle. There
should be the scent of bitter almonds in that second or two before the gas kills me.
I hope that it will be only a second or two.
Technically, according to the ancient enigma of quantum physics, I am now neither dead nor alive.
I am in the suspended state of overlapping probability waves once reserved for the cat in
Schrodinger's thought experiment. Because the hull of the cat box is little more than position-
fused energy ready to explode at the slightest intrusion, no one will ever look inside to see if I
am dead or alive. Theoretically, no one is directly responsible for my execution, since the
immutable laws of quantum theory pardon or condemn me from each microsecond to the next. There are
no observers.
But / am an observer. / am waiting for this particular collapse of probability waves with
something more than detached interest. In the instant after the hissing of cyanide gas begins, but
before it reaches my lungs and heart and brain, 7 will know which way the universe has chosen to
sort itself out.
At least, I will know so far as I am concerned. Which, when it comes right down to it, is the only
aspect of the universe's resolution with which most of us are concerned.
And in the meantime, I eat and sleep and void waste and breathe and go through the full daily
ritual of the ultimately forgettable. Which is ironic, since right now I live-if "live" is the
correct word-only to remember. And to write about what I remember.
If you are reading this, you are almost certainly reading it for the wrong reason. But as with so
many things in our lives, the reason for doing something is not the important thing. It is the
fact of doing that remains. Only the immutable facts that I have written this and you are reading
it remain important in the end.
Where to begin? With her? She is the one you want to read about and the one person in my life whom
I wish to remember above everything and everyone else. But perhaps I should begin with the events
that led me to her and then to here by way of much of this galaxy and beyond.