"God is an Iron by Spider Robinson" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

I went to shut off the phone, and my hand was shaking so bad I missed, spinning the volume knob to minimum. "Sharon, you gotta believe me," he hollered from far far away. "I'm into rape fantasy. I'm not into rape!" And then I had found the right switch and he was gone.

I got up very slowly and toddled off to the liquor cabinet, and I stood in front of it taking pulls from different bottles at random until I could no longer see his face, his earnest, baffled,

half-ashamed face hanging before me.

Because his hair was thin sandy blond, and his jaw was a bit too square, and his nose was a trifle hooked, and his blue eyes were just the least little bit too far apart. They say everyone has a double somewhere. And Fate is such a witty little motherfucker, isn't he?

I don't remember how I got to bed.

I woke later that night with the feeling that I would have to bang my head on the floor a couple of times to get my heart started again. I was on my makeshift doss of pillows and blankets beside her bed, and when I finally peeled my eyes open she was sitting up in bed staring at me. She had fixed her hair somehow, and her nails were trimmed. We looked at each other for a long moment. Her color was returning somewhat, and the edge was off her bones.

"What did Jo Ann say when you told her?"

I said nothing.

"Come on, Jo Ann's got the only other key to this place, and she wouldn't give it to you if you weren't a friend. So what did she say?"

I got painfully up out of the tangle and walked to the window. A phallic church steeple rose above the low rises, a couple of blocks away.

"God is an iron," I said. "Did you know that?"

I turned to look at her, and she was staring. She laughed experimentally, stopped when I failed to join in. "And I'm a pair of pants with a hole scorched through the ass?"

"If a person who indulges in gluttony is a
glutton, and a person who commits a felony is a felon, then God is an iron. Or else He's the dumbest designer that ever lived."
Of a thousand possible snap reactions she picked the most flattering and hence most irritating. She kept silent, kept looking at me, and thought about what I had said. At last she said, "I agree. What particular design fuckup did you have in mind?"
"The one that nearly left you dead in a pile of your own shit," I said harshly. "Everybody talks about the new menace, wireheading, fifth most common cause of death in only a decade. Wireheading's not new-it's just a technical refinement."
"I don't follow."
"Are you familiar with the old cliche `Everything I like in the world is either illegal, immoral, or fattening'?"
"Sure."
"Didn't that ever strike you as damned odd? What's the most nutritionally useless and physiologically dangerous `food' substance in the world? Sugar. And it seems to be beyond the power of the human nervous system to resist it. They put it in virtually all the processed food there is, which is next to all the food there is, because nobody can resist it. And so we poison ourselves and whipsaw our depositions and rot our teeth. Isn't that odd? There is a primitive programming in our skulls that rewards us, literally overwhelmingly, every time we do something damned silly. Like smoke a poison, or eat or drink or snort or shoot a poison. Or

overeat good foods. Or engage in complicated sexual behavior without procreative intent, y which if it were not for the pleasure would be m pointless and insane. And which, when pursued for the pleasure alone, quickly becomes pointless and insane anyway. A suicidal brain-reward system is built into us."
"But the reward system is for survival."
"So how the hell did ours get wired up so that survival-threatening behavior gets rewarded best g of all? Even the pro-survival pleasure stimuli are wired so that a dangerous overload produces the ; maximum pleasure. On a purely biological level Man is programmed to strive hugely for more ; than he needs, more than he can profitably use.
"The error doesn't show up as glaringly in other animals. Even surrounded by plenty, a stupid animal has to work hard simply to meet his needs. But add in intelligence and everything goes to hell. Man is capable of outgrowing any ecological niche you put him in-he survives at , all because he is the animal that moves. Given half a chance he kills himself of surfeit."
My knees were trembling so badly I had to sit down. I felt feverish and somehow larger than myself, and I knew I was talking much too fast. She had nothing whatever to say, with voice, face, or body.
"Given Man's gregarious nature," I went on, fingering my aching nose, "it's obvious that . kindness is more pro-survival than cruelty. But which feels better? Which provides more pleasure? Poll any hundred people at random and you'll find at least twenty or thirty who
know all there is to know about psychological torture and psychic castration-and maybe two that know how to give a terrific back rub. That business of your father leaving all his money to the Church and leaving you a hundred dollars, the going rate-that was artistry. I can't imagine a way to make you feel as good as that made you feel rotten. That's why sadism and masochism are the last refuge of the jaded, the most enduring of the perversions; their piquancy is-"
"Maybe the Puritans were right," she said. "Maybe pleasure is the root of all evil. But God! life is bleak without it."
"One of my most precious possessions," I said, "is a button that my friend Slinky John used to hand-paint and sell below cost. He was the only practicing anarchist I ever met. The button reads: 'GO, LEMMINGS, GO!' A lemming surely feels intense pleasure as he gallops to the sea. His self-destruction is programmed by nature, a part of the very small life force that insisted on being conceived and born in the first place. If it feels good, do it." I laughed, and she flinched. "So it seems to me that God is either an iron, or a colossal jackass. I don't quite know whether to be admiring or contemptuous."
All at once I was out of words, and out of strength. I yanked my gaze away from hers and stared at my knees for a long time. I felt vaguely ashamed, as befits one who has thrown a tantrum in a sickroom.

After a time she said. "You talk good on your feet."
I kept looking at my knees. "I was an economics teacher for a year once."
"Will you tell me something?"
"If I can."
"What was the pleasure in putting me back together again?"