Читать книгу Time - Stephen Baxter - Страница 21

Afterwards, they shared a cab to the airport.

‘…Remember those arguments we used to have?’

He smiled. ‘Which arguments in particular?’

‘About whether to have kids.’

‘Yeah. We agreed our position, didn’t we? If you have kids you’re a slave to your genes. Just a conduit from past to future, from the primeval ocean to galactic empire.’

‘Right now,’ she said, ‘that doesn’t seem such a bad ambition. And if we did have kids, we might be able to figure it out better.’

‘Figure out what?’

She waved a hand at the New York afternoon. ‘The future. Time and space. Doom soon. I think I’m in some kind of shock, Malenfant.’

‘Me too –’

‘But I think if I had kids I’d understand better. Because those future people who will never exist, except as Cornelius’s statistical phantoms, would have been my children. As it is, they have nothing to do with me. To them I’m just a – a bubble that burst, utterly irrelevant, far upstream. So their struggles don’t mean anything. We don’t mean anything. All our struggles, the way we loved each other and fell out with each other and fought like hell. Our atom of love. None of it matters. Because we’re transient. We’ll vanish, like bubbles, like shadows, like ripples on a pond.’

‘We do matter. You do. Our relationship does, even if it is –’

‘Self-contained? Sealed off?’

‘You aren’t irrelevant to me, Emma. And my life, what I’ve achieved, means a lot to me … But that’s me sublimating. That’s what you diagnosed years ago, isn’t it?’

‘I can’t diagnose anything about you, Malenfant. You’re just a mass of contradictions.’

He said, ‘If you could change history, like Cornelius says the future people are trying to – if you could go back and fix things between us – would you?’

She thought about that. ‘The past has made us what we are. If we changed it we’d lose ourselves. Wouldn’t we? … No, Malenfant. I wouldn’t change a damn thing. But –’

‘Yeah?’

She was watching him, her eyes as black as deep lunar craters. ‘That doesn’t mean I understand you. And I don’t love you.’

‘I know that,’ he said, and he felt his heart tear.