Clarke, Neil (ed.) - Galactic Empires / Кларк, Нил (ред.) - Галактические империи [2017, EPUB, ENG]

Introduction: What's Going On Out There? by Neil Clarke Winning Peace by Paul J. McAuley Night's Slow Poison / Медленный яд ночи by Ann Leckie All the Painted Stars by Gwendolyn Clare Firstborn / Первенец by Brandon Sanderson Riding the Crocodile / Оседлав крокодила by Greg Egan The Lost Princess Man by John Barnes The Waiting Stars by Aliette de Bodard Alien Archeology / Находка в песках by Neal Asher The Muse of Empires Lost by Paul M. Berger Ghostweight by Yoon Ha Lee A Cold Heart by Tobias S. Buckell The Colonel Returns to the Stars by Robert Silverberg The Impossibles / Невозможные by Kristine Kathryn Rusch Utriusque Cosmi by Robert Charles Wilson Section Seven by Jack Campbell (as by John G. Hemry) Invisible Empire of Ascending Light by Ken Scholes The Man with the Golden Balloon by Robert Reed Looking Through Lace by Ruth Nestvold A Letter from the Emperor / Письмо императора by Steve Rasnic Tem The Wayfarer's Advice by Melinda M. Snodgrass Seven Years from Home / В семи годах от дома by Naomi Novik Verthandi's Ring / Кольцо Верданди by Ian McDonald

In their ten thousand, three hundred and ninth year of marriage, Leila and Jasim began contemplating death. They had known love, raised children, and witnessed the flourishing generations of their offspring. They had traveled to a dozen worlds and lived among a thousand cultures. They had educated themselves many times over, proved theorems, and acquired and abandoned artistic sensibilities and skills. They had not lived in every conceivable manner, far from it, but what room would there be for the multitude if each individual tried to exhaust the permutations of existence? There were some experiences, they agreed, that everyone should try, and others that only a handful of people in all of time need bother with. They had no wish to give up their idiosyncrasies, no wish to uproot their personalities from the niches they had settled in long ago, let alone start cranking mechanically through some tedious enumeration of all the other people they might have been. They had been themselves, and for that they had done, more or less, enough. . . .