"Spider Robinson - Orphans of Eden" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

ORPHANS OF EDEN

Well, what would you have done?

Begin at the front part, Spider:
It was just after two in the morning. I was right here in my office (as we call the
dining room in this family), about to write a science fiction story called "Orphans of
Eden" on this loyal senescent Macintosh, when he appeared in the doorway from the
kitchen, right next to my Lava Lamp. I don't mean "came through the doorway and
stopped"; I mean he appeared, in the doorway. He sort of shimmered into
exist-ence, like a Star Trek transportee, or the ball-players disappearing into the corn
in Field of Dreams in reverse. He was my height and age, but of normal weight. His
clothing was crazier than a basketball bat. I never did get the hang of the fashion
assumptions behind it. I'd like to say the first thing I noticed about it was the
ingenious method of fastening, but actually that was the second thing; first I
observed that his clothing pointedly avoided covering either geni-tals or armpits. I
kind of liked that. If you lived in a nice world, why would you want to hide your
smell? He stood with his hands slightly out from his sides, palms displayed, an
expectant look on his extraordinarily beautiful face. He didn't look afraid of me, so I
wasn't afraid of him. I hit command-S to save my changes (title and a handful of
sentences) and forgot that story com-pletely. Forever, now that I think about it.
"When are you from?" I asked him. "Origi-nally, I mean."
I'm not going too fast for you, am I? If a guy materializes in front of you, and
you're sober, he might be the genius who just invented the transporter beam . . . but
if he's dressed funny, he's a time traveler, right? Gotta be. Thank God the kitchen
door was open had been my very first thought.
He smiled, the kind of pleased but almost rueful smile you make when a friend
comes through a practical joke better than you thought he would. "Very good," he
told me.
"It was okay, but that's not a responsive answer."
"I'm sorry," he said. "But I can't say I think a lot of the question itself. Still, if it
really matters to you, I was born in the year 2146 . . . though we didn't call it that at
the time, naturally. Feel better, now?"
He was right: it hadn't been much of a question, just the only one I could come up
with on the spur of the moment. But I thought it small of him to point it out. I mean,
what a spur—what a moment! And the information was mildly interesting, if useless.
"You don't go around pulling this on civilians, do you?" I asked irritably. "You
could give somebody a trauma."
"Good Lord, no," he said. "Why, half the other science fiction writers alive now
would lose sphincter control if I materialized in their workplace like this."
It was some comfort to think that my work might survive at least another hundred
and fifty-five years. Unless, of course, he had run across one of my books in the
middle of next week. "That's because they think wonder is just another tool, like sex
or violence or a sympathetic pro-tagonist."
"Whereas you know it is a religion, a Grail, the Divine Carrot that is the only thing
that makes it possible for human beings to ever get anywhere without a stick across
their ass, yes, it shows in your work. You understand that only by putting his faith in
wonder can a man be a moral being. So you're not afraid of me, or compelled to
disbelieve in me, and you prob-ably hadn't even gotten around to trying to figure out
a way to exploit me until I just mentioned it: you're too busy wondering."