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

years she had been using it to say what she would not say with her
voice,
perhaps to see what she could not see with her eyes, and on the
deceptively
simple romantic matrix that Massenet built to present the beautiful
courtesan
Thaïs gloriously reborn as the bride of Christ, Amy forgave her Godless
universe
for taking her sight, and praised it for what she was given in return,
and she
said this in a language that even Cletus could understand. He didn't
cry very
much, never had, but by the last high wavering note he was weeping into
his
hands, and he knew that if she wanted him, she could have him forever,
and oddly
enough, considering his age and what eventually happened, he was right.
He would learn to play the violin before he had his first doctorate,
and during
a lifetime of remarkable amity they would play together for ten
thousand hours,
but all of that would come after the big idea. The big idea--"Why
aren't all
blind people geniuses?"--was planted that very night, but it didn't
start to
sprout for another week.
Like most 13-year-olds, Cletus was fascinated by the human body, his
own and
others, but his study was more systematic than others' and, atypically,
the
organ that interested him most was the brain.
The brain isn't very much like a computer, although it doesn't do a bad
job,
considering that it's built by unskilled labor and programmed more by
pure
chance than anything else. One thing computers do a lot better than
brains,
though, is what Cletus and Lindy had been talking about over their
little squids
in tomato sauce: partitioning.
Think of the computer as a big meadow of green pastureland, instead of
a little
dark box full of number-clogged things that are expensive to replace,
and that
pastureland is presided over by a wise old magic shepherd who is not
called a
macroprogram. The shepherd stands on a hill and looks out over the
pastureland,
which is full of sheep and goats and cows. They aren't all in one
homogeneous