"Peter Watts - Bethlehem" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watts Peter)

This showed up in Tesseracts 5, edited by Yves Meynard and
Robert Runté, one of a semiregular antho series put out by
Tesseracts Books of Edmonton (now engulfed and incorporated
into Edge Books, of Calgary). It basically uses a failed
relationship as a vantage point on global ecological collapse,
through the eyes of a failed academic who's learned that quantum
mechanics can be used for things beyond the usual parallel worlds
and DVD players.

Denial, for instance...


Bethlehem
by
Peter Watts


It was her own damn fault.
No. No, that's not right. But Christ, look at this place; what did
she expect, living here?
A dried blood stain smears a meter of sidewalk, a rusty
backdrop for broken bottles and the twisted skeleton of an old ten-
speed. Everything is too big. All this jagged structure, so solid
and visible, frightens me. I focus on the stain, search for some hint
of its unseen complexity. I want to throw myself down through
familiar orders of magnitude and see inside; dead erythrocytes,
molecules of ferrous haemoglobin, single atoms dancing in
comforting envelopes of quantum uncertainty.
But I can't. It's just a featureless brown blot, and all I can see is
that it was once part of someone like me.
She's not answering. I've been buzzing for five minutes now.
I'm the only one in sight, sole occupant of a narrow window in
time: all the victims have made for cover, and the monsters aren't
out yet. But they're coming, Darwin's agents, always ready to weed
out the unfit.
I push the buzzer again. "Jan, it's Keith." Why doesn't she
answer? Maybe she can't, maybe someone got in, maybe...
Maybe she just wants to be alone. That's what she said on the
phone, isn't it?
2 Bethlehem

So why am I here? It's not that I didn't believe her, exactly. It's
not even that I'm worried about her safety. It's more a matter of
procedure; when your best friend has been raped, you're supposed
to be supportive. That's the rule, even these days. And Janet is my
friend, by any practical definition of the term.
Glass breaks somewhere in the distance.
"Jan--"
If I leave now I can still make it back before it gets too late. The
sun doesn't go down for at least another twenty minutes. This was