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

"Oh, it's just this silly mental picture I get after we make love," I admitted. "1 keep
seeing little Nameless floating in there, startled awake by this rhythmic earthquake... then
staring in fascination as all these millions of confused, exhausted, disappointed-little wigglers
show up, looking everywhere for an egg. I'll bet they tickle. The little tyke must get
a chuckle out of it."
"Or a chortle," she agreed, chortling sleepily. "I will, too f'now on. Thanks. Neat
image."
She yawned hugely then, so of course I did, too, and we did the little bits of physical
backing and filling necessary to move from Cuddling to Snuggling, and we'd probably both
have been comfortably asleep together in only another minute or two. But we had forgotten about
the Invisible Machines of Murphy.
The universe is full of them, and many of them seem to be simple pressure switches. For
instance, there's one underneath most toilet seats: your weight coming down on the seat somehow-
causes the phone to ring. (Unless you've brought the phone in with you: in that case the switch
cues a Jehovah's Witness to knock on. your door.) There's another one built into most TV remote
controls, wired into the channel select button; if you try to browse, it somehow alerts every
station on the air to go to commercial. The most maddening thing about these switches is that,
being of Murphy, they're unreliable: you can!t be sure whether or just when they will function,
except that it will usually turn out in retrospect to have been at the most annoying possible
moment. So the tiny pair of switches under thy eyelids, sensing that I was just about to di~ off
to sleep, picked now to send out the signal that causes my alarm clock to ring. Excuse me-I mean,
to:BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ! !!!
For the past two weeks that damned thing had been going off at just this ungodly hour-set-
by mine own hand and with Zoey's foreknowledge and consent-and every single time it came as a rude
and ghastly surprise. Neither of us could get used to it. I had been a professional musician for a
quarter of a century until I gave it up to tend bar; Zoey still was one- or had been right up
until carrying both a baby and a bass guitar got to be too much for her; it had been decades since
either of us had willingly gotten up at dawn. Dawn was what you occasionally stayed up as late as.
Sunlight gave you the skin cancer, everybody knew that. Civilians got up at dawn, for heaven's
sake.
Well, so do nine-and-a-half-month-pregnant women. And their partners. No matter what their
nonnal sleep cycle is.


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Being more than nine months pregnant may mean nothing at all. Not even when you get up to
nine and a half months, and the kid hasn't even dropped yet. Maybe you just guessed wrong on the
conception date. We don't want you to worry, Ms. Berkowitz. But maybe, just maybe, something
iswrong in there. Maybe little Nameless doesn't want to come out and play, ready or not. If so, it
is a bad decision, however one might sympathize-~-because once Nameless is ready, he or she will
begin to do what all fully formed babies do best: excrete. And, polluting the womb, will die. And
possibly take you along for company. The chances of this are- iow .-:. but it might be wisest if
you just checked into the hospital now,Ms. Berkowitz, and allowed us to induce labor with a
pitocin drip..
Zoey had awarded that offer an emphatic "Fuck you very much, Doctor," and I was behind her
a hundred percent. At the time. We had both devoured most of the available literature on birthing
as a subversive activity, and were determined to Do This Naturally-not with drugs and