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I also note that _The Logic Pool_ is also available in a short story collection of Stephen Baxter's called _Vacuum Diagrams_ http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/baxter/index.htm Quoting from the beginning of the story: This time he would reach the Sky. This time, before the Culling cut him away...
The tree of axiomatic systems beneath him was broad, deep, strong. He looked around him, at sibling-twins who had branched at choice-points, most of them thin, insipid structures. They spread into the distance, infiltrating the Pool with their webs of logic. He almost pitied their attenuated forms as he reached upwards, his own rich growth path assured...
Almost pitied. But when the Sky was so close there was no time for pity, no time for awareness of anything but growth, extension.
Little consciousness persisted between Cullings. But he could remember a little of his last birthing; and surely he had never risen so high, never felt the logical richness of the tree beneath him surge upwards through him like this, empowering him.
Now there was something ahead of him: a new postulate, hanging above him like some immense fruit. He approached it warily, savoring its compact, elegant form.
The fibers of his being pulsed as the few, strong axioms at the core of his structure sought to envelop this new statement. But they could not. They could not. The new statement was undecidable, not deducible from the set within him.
His excitement grew. The new hypothesis was simple of expression, yet .... |