"Spider Robinson - Copyright Violation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

me. Oh yes—she had put something heavy on my head. I felt it with my fingertips. It
felt like a crown. Reluctantly I took my eyes away from her and looked in the mir-ror
behind the bar.
Yep, that was a crown on my head, all right. A simple, inch-wide band of gold
around my forehead, elaborately chased but otherwise unadorned. It was so heavy, it
had to be real gold or gilded lead.
Alongside the twin miracles of her existence and the fact that she was speaking to
me (and calling me "sir"!), nothing was strange. "That's perfectly all right," I said,
quite as though pre-ternaturally beautiful women put thousands of dollars worth of
gold on my brow every third Thursday, and I were becoming resigned to it. System
crash of the brain.
She did something with her face that I don't have a word for. Deep in the shielded
core of my heart, graphite rods slid up out of the fuel mass, and the pile temperature
began climbing toward meltdown point. "It was unforgivable of me to intrude upon
your privacy."
She had a faint, indefinable accent; I guessed Middle European of some kind. She
was ... well, I'd say she was beaming at me, but you'd think I only meant she was
smiling. I mean she was beaming at me, the way an airport beams at an approaching
plane to guide it. I realized with a start that she was looking at me just exactly the
same way I was looking at her. Captivated, wistful, yearning—no, outright
hun-gering and thirsting. I'd seen the look before, in movies starring Marilyn
Chambers.
I ask you to believe that I am not a complete idiot. My first thought was that it had
to be a mistake. But the light in the bar wasn't bad enough. So my second thought
was that it had to be a trick, a trap of some kind.
That was absolutely fine with me. I tried to visualize the worst possible outcome.
Say that, in exchange for being allowed to touch her, to put my hand somewhere on
her skin—her shoulder, say—I were to be beaten, robbed and killed. Okay, fair
enough; no problem there. A weird little phrase ran through my head: I'll be her
sucker if she'll be my succor. (I seem now to hear a phantom Kingfish saying, "Boy,
you is de suckee.") Male black widow spiders obvi-ously think they have a good
deal going for them.
"It's uncanny," she repeated, and touched my hand. With hers.
"It certainly is," I said, referring to the aston-ishing discovery that knuckles can be
erogenous zones.
"Would you mind standing up, sir?"
That kicked off an ambiguous reaction. If I stood up, the bulge in my trousers
would become visible. Even more embarrassing, it might not become visible
enough. Conflicting imperatives paralyzed me.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm being rude again. It's just that I dreamt about you last
night. It was a very pleasant dream."
"I've dreamed about you all my life," I said, "and it has always been pleasant.
You're very beautiful." A happy feeling was growing in me. First, because I had
finally managed to say something intelligent and gallant. And second, because she
had just named a barely plausible reason why a woman like her could be interested in
a guy like me.
I mean, you have to understand that my father always insisted I wasn't his—until
my sixteenth birthday, when he gave up and apologized to my mother. "It has to be
some kind of mutation," he admitted. "You would never have cheated on me with
someone who looked like that."