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

clanked
down through the Pachinko machine of adolescence, being rejected, at
first
glance, by every Mary and Judy and Jenny and Veronica in Known Space,
going from
the ravishing to the beautiful to the pretty to the cute to the plain
to the
"great personality," until the irresistable force of statistics brought
him
finally into contact with Amy Linderbaum, who could not reject him at
first
glance because she was blind.
The other kids thought it was more than amusing. Besides being blind,
Amy was
about twice as tall as Cletus and, to be kind, equally irregular of
feature. She
was accompanied by a guide dog who looked remarkably like Cletus, short
and
black and pudgy. Everybody was polite to her because she was blind and
rich, but
she was a new transfer student and didn't have any actual friends.
So along came Cletus, to whom Cupid had dealt only slings and arrows,
and what
might otherwise have been merely an opposites-attract sort of romance
became an
emotional and intellectual union that, in the next century, would power
a social
tsunami that would irreversibly transform the human condition. But
first there
was the violin.
Her classmates had sensed that Amy was some kind of nerd herself, as
classmates
will, but they hadn't figured out what kind yet. She was pretty fast
with a
computer, but you could chalk that up to being blind and actually
needing the
damned thing. She wasn't fanatical about it, nor about science or math
or
history or Star Trek or student government, so what the hell kind of
nerd was
she? It turns out that she was a music nerd, but at the time was too
painfully
shy to demonstrate it.
All Cletus cared about, initially, was that she lacked those pesky Y-
chromosomes
and didn't recoil from him: in the Venn diagram of the human race, she
was the
only member of that particular set. When he found out that she was
actually
smart as well, having read more books than most of her classmates put