（外文电子版资料）Wangs.Carpets.docVIP

WANGS CARPETS Greg Egan Heres another story by Australian writer Greg Egan, whose Luminous appears elsewhere in this anthology. Nineteen ninety-five was a good year for Egan in short fiction, and, like Ursula K. Le Guin and Robert Reed, he published four or five different stories this year that might well have made the cut for a best-of-the-year anthology in another year; the story that follows, though, would be hard to match anywhere for the bravura sweep and pure originality of its conceptualization, as Egan provides us with a First Contact story unlike any youve ever read before . . . Waiting to be cloned one thousand times and scattered across ten million cubic light-years, Paolo Venetti relaxed in his favorite ceremonial bathtub: a tiered hexagonal pool set in a courtyard of black marble flecked with gold. Paolo wore full traditional anatomy, uncomfortable garb at first, but the warm currents flowing across his back and shoulders slowly eased him into a pleasant torpor. He could have reached the same state in an instant, by decree—but the occasion seemed to demand the complete ritual of verisimilitude, the ornate curlicued longhand of imitation physical cause and effect. As the moment of diaspora approached, a small gray lizard darted across the courtyard, claws scrabbling. It halted by the far edge of the pool, and Paolo marveled at the delicate pulse of its breathing, and watched the lizard watching him, until it moved again, disappearing into the surrounding vineyards. The environment was full of birds and insects, rodents and small reptiles—decorative in appearance, but also satisfying a more abstract aesthetic: softening the harsh radial symmetry of the lone observer; anchoring the simulation by perceiving it from a multitude of viewpoints. Ontological guy lines. No one had asked the lizards if they wanted to be cloned, though. They were coming along for the ride, like it or not. The sky above the courtyard was warm and blue, cloudless and sunless, isotro