"Joe Haldeman - None So Blind (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

The rest is history, as they say, and anthropology, as those of us left
who read
with our eyes must recognize every minute of every day. Cletus was the
second
person to have the operation done, and he had to accomplish it while on
the run
from medical ethics people and their policemen. There were four the
next year,
though, and twenty the year after that, and then 2000 and 20,000.
Within a
decade, people with purely intellectual occupations had no choice, or
one
choice: lose your eyes or lose your job. By then the "secondsight"
operation was
totally automated, totally safe.
It's still illegal in most countries, including the United States, but
who is
kidding whom? If your department chairman is secondsighted and you are
not, do
you think you'll get tenure? You can't even hold a conversation with a
creature
whose synapses fire six times as fast as yours, with whole
encyclopedias of
information instantly available. You are, like me, an intellectual
throwback.
You may have a good reason for it, being a painter, an architect, a
naturalist,
or a trainer of guide dogs. Maybe you can't come up with the money for
the
operation, but that's a weak excuse, since it's trivially easy to get a
loan
against future earnings. Maybe there's a good physical reason for you
not to lie
down on that table and open your eyes for the last time.
I know Cletus and Amy through music. I was her keyboard professor once,
at
Julliard, though now of course I'm not smart enough to teach her
anything. They
come to hear me play sometimes, in this rundown bar with its band of
ageing
firstsight musicians. Our music must seem boring, obvious, but they do
us the
favor of not joining in.
Amy was an innocent bystander in this sudden evolutionary explosion.
And Cletus
was, arguably, blinded by love.
The rest of us have to choose which kind of blindness to endure.