"Spider Robinson - C7 - Callahan' s Legacy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

It was a good climax, at least.
Well, okay, maybe that's a silly statement. Perhaps you feel that there is no such thing
as a bad climax; that some are better than others, is all. 1 could argue the point, but! won't.
Let's just agree with Woody Allen that 'The worst one! ever had was right on the money," stipulate
that they're all at least okay, and try to quantify the matter a bit.
On a scale of ten, then, rating "the least enjoyable orgasm I've ever had" as a One, and
"reaching the culmination of hours of foreplay with the sexiest partner imaginable after years of
celibacy" as a Ten, the climax I'm speaking of now was probably about a Nine-Five.
This despite the fact that every one of the ingredients I've named for a Ten were present
The foreplay had been so extensive and inventive (Groucho, leering:"...and the aftplay wasn't so
bad either...) that the sun was coming up by the time I was going in the other direction; my
partner was the sexiest woman on the planet, my darling Zoey Berkowitz; and she was my first real
lover (as opposed to mere sexer) in more years than I cared to think about. True, we had already
been lovers for several months, by then.. . but the honeymoon was by no means over. (In fact, it



file:///F|/rah/Spider%20Robinson/TXT%20-%20Spi...Robinson%20-%207%20-%20Callahan's%20Legacy.txt (1 of 89) [8/28/03 12:12:31 AM]
 file:///F|/rah/Spider%20Robinson/TXT%20-%20Spider%20Robinson%20-%207%20-%20Callahan's%20Legacy.txt

still isn't. The way I see it, our relationship is really just a single contirniojis ongoing act
of lovemaking, a dance so complex and subtle that we often disengage bodies completely for hours
at a time.) My father used to say, "Familiarity breeds, content," and that's always been my
experience.
No, what brought the meter down as low as Nine-Five was merely a matter of mechanics Zoey-
thank God-has never been a ~malI woman, not since the sixth grade, any' way, and she was nine and
a half months pregnant at the time all this happened, in the late fall of 1988. Indeed, if I could
travel in time like Mike Callahan, and went far enough back into hominid history, I think I could
prove my theory that pregnancy is responsible for the evolution of Man As Engineer. (This might-
help explain why there are so few female engineers.) A man who has successfully managed the trick
with a mate in the latter stages of pregnancy possesses most of the insights necessary to build a
house-and a strong motivation in that direction, as well. If inventing math were as much fun, we'd
probably own the Galaxy by now.
But I digress...
As Iwas saying, Zoey and I had solved the Riddle of the Sphinx together one more time,
just as enough dawnglow was sneaking past the edges of the curtains to let us see what we already
knew, and neither of us was paying attention to any damn imaginary scoring judges-we were both
well content, if a little fatigued. By the time we had our breath back, the day was well and truly
begun: birds had begun warbling somewhere outside, and traffic was building up to the usual
weekday morning homicidal frenzy out on Route 25A (why are they all in such a hurry to get to a
place they hate and do things they don't care about?), a combination of sounds that always puts me
right to sleep. That's probably just where I'd have gone ifZoey hadn't poked me in a tender spot
and murmured drowsily, ". . . 'cha snickering about?"
I hadn't realized I was. In fact, I wasn't. "I'm not," I said. "I'm chuckling."
She shook her head. "Unh-unh. I like Snickers better'n Chuckles."
I considered a couple of puns having to do with the physical characteristics and
components of the candy named, but left them unspoken. Sexual puns are funnier before you come.
"Chortling, then," I said. "Definitely not a snicker."
Zoey grimaced, her eyes still glued shut. "But why? Are you.,,