（外文电子版资料）Greg Bear - The Way of All Ghosts.pdf

The Way of All Ghosts (v1.1) A Myth from Thistledown Greg Bear, 1999 1 Probabilities fluctuated wildly, but always passed through zero, and gate openers, their equipment, and all associated personnel within a few hundred meters of the gate, were swallowed by a null that can only be described in terms of mathematics. It became difficult to remember that they had ever existed; records of their histories were corrupted or altered, even though they lay millions of kilometers from the incident. We had tapped into the geometric blood of the gods. But we knew we had to continue. We were compelled. -- Testimony of Master Gate Opener Ry Ornis, Secret Hearings Conducted by the Infinite Hexamon Nexus, On the Advisability of Opening Gates into Chaos and Order The ghost of his last lover found Olmy Ap Sennen in the oldest columbarium of Alexandria, within the second chamber of Thistledown. Olmy stood in the middle of the hall, surrounded by stacked tiers of hundreds of small golden spheres. The spheres were urns, most of them containing only a sample of ashes. They rose to the glassed-in ceiling, held within columns of gentle yellow suspension fields. He reached out to touch a blank silver plate at the base of one column. The names of the dead appeared as if suddenly engraved, one after another. He removed his hand when the names reached Ilmo, Paul Yan. This is where the soldiers from his childhood neighborhood were honored; in this column, five names, all familiar to him from days in school, all killed in a single skirmish with the Jarts near 3 ex 9, three billion kilometers down the Way. All had been obliterated without trace. These urns were empty. He did not know the details. He did not need to. These dead had served Thistledown as faithfully as Olmy, but they would never ret