奉献给诸位的圣诞礼物——科幻小说《闪光》

Luminous/闪光
作者：Greg Egan（格雷格·伊根），Australia，1995
类型：Science & Mathematical Fiction
（链接目标不能显示中文的问题已修正）

小说关键词：
陷阱 瑕疵的地图 闪光 超级计算机 上海 业余数学家 局部的真理 边缘 尖刺...

小说片断欣赏：
Alison insisted that we stand guard in shifts. Twenty-four hours earlier, I might have made a joke of it; now I reluctantly accepted the revolver she offered me, and sat watching the door in the neon-tinged darkness while she went out like a light. The hotel had been quiet for most of the evening-but now it came to life. There were footsteps in the corridor every five minutes-and rats in the walls, foraging and screwing and probably giving birth. Police sirens wailed in the distance; a couple screamed at each other in the street below. I'd read somewhere that Shanghai was now the murder capital of the world-but was that per capita, or in absolute numbers? After an hour, I was so jumpy that it was a miracle I hadn't blown my foot off. I unloaded the gun, then sat playing Russian roulette with the empty barrel. In spite of everything, I still wasn't ready to put a bullet in anyone's brain for the sake of defending the axioms of number theory.
艾莉森坚持我俩轮流放哨。要是这是在二十四小时前，我可能会拿这开开涮；现在，我勉强接过她递过的左轮枪，坐在那，盯着黑暗中霓虹微染的大门，而她就像灯火一样熄灭了。 旅馆整晚静悄悄的——但是现在它醒了过来。每隔五分钟，走廊上会传来脚步声——墙内的老鼠，在蹂躏，在榨取，很可能还在生小娃。远处警铃哀号；楼下一对人在街上互喊。我在哪里读到过，上海现在是世界的谋杀之都——到底是人均数？还是绝对数？ 一小时后，我已经紧张的心惊肉跳。我没有把我的脚打爆，还真是奇迹。我卸下子弹，坐在那捣鼓着空枪匣，就像在玩俄罗斯轮盘赌。不管发生什么事，我还是没有准备好把子弹射进任何人的脑袋里，仅仅为了保卫数论公理。

I fell silent, trying to imagine tendrils of contradictory arithmetic reaching down into the everyday world. No doubt IA would aim for surgical precision-hoping to earn themselves a few billion dollars by corrupting the specific mathematics underlying certain financial transactions. But the ramifications would be impossible to predict-or control. There'd be no way to limit the effect, spatially-they could target certain mathematical truths, but they couldn't confine the change to any one location. A few billion dollars, a few billion neurons, a few billion stars . . . a few billion people. Once the basic rules of counting were undermined, the most solid and distinct objects could be rendered as uncertain as swirls of fog. This was not a power I would have entrusted to a cross between Mother Theresa and Carl Friedrich Gauss.
我压根没了声响，试图想象矛盾算法的触须向下探及这平凡的世界中。怪不得工代指望外科手术精准无比——希望通过利用这支撑某些财务往来的特殊数学，赚个盆满钵满。可谁又能预料到或者控制住衍生物呢？没有方法可以控制住结果，这是从空间上讲——他们可以瞄准某些数学真理，但是他们无法限制任何一个位置的变化。几十亿钞票，几十亿神经元，几十亿星球……几十亿人类。一旦计算的基本规则遭到破坏，最可靠最明显的物体都会变得如镜花水月般吃不准。我不能把这种力量委托给德兰修女和卡尔·弗里德里希·高斯的混血儿。

无可置疑，这是一篇非常优秀的小说，无论文笔还是构思，绝对够嗲。但当面对英文原著那“无比巨大”的翻译量的时候，oh god——感谢上海外国语大学的各位友达！！

海鲜就小酒，请在阅读小说时一同欣赏Vangelis的雨淅淅… :)

最后祝大家圣诞节愉快！