"Haldeman, Joe - None So Blind" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

will, but they hadn't figured out what kind yet. She was pretty fast with a
computer, but you could chalk that up to being blind and actually needing the
damned thing. She wasn't fanatical about it, nor about science or math or
history or Star Trek or student government, so what the hell kind of nerd was
she? It turns out that she was a music nerd, but at the time was too painfully
shy to demonstrate it.
All Cletus cared about, initially, was that she lacked those pesky Y-chromosomes
and didn't recoil from him: in the Venn diagram of the human race, she was the
only member of that particular set. When he found out that she was actually
smart as well, having read more books than most of her classmates put together,
romance began to smolder in a deep and permanent place. That was even before the
violin.
Amy liked it that Cletus didn't play with her dog and was straightforward in his
curiosity about what it was like to be blind. She could assess people pretty
well from their voices: after one sentence, she knew that he was young, black,
shy, nerdly, and not from Virginia. She could tell from his inflection that
either he was unattractive or he thought he was. She was six years older than
him and white and twice his size, but otherwise they matched up pretty well, and
they started keeping company in a big way.
Among the few things that Cletus did not know anything about was music. That the
other kids wasted their time memorizing the words to inane top-40 songs was
proof of intellectual dysfunction if not actual lunacy. Furthermore, his parents
had always been fanatical devotees of opera. A universe bounded on one end by
peurile mumblings about unrequited love and on the other end by foreigners
screaming in agony was not a universe that Cletus desired to explore. Until Amy
picked up her violin.
They talked constantly. They sat together at lunch and met between classes. When
the weather was good, they sat outside before and after school and talked. Amy
asked her chauffeur to please be ten or fifteen minutes late picking her up.
So after about three weeks' worth of the fullness of time, Amy asked Cletus to
come over to her house for dinner. He was a little hesitant, knowing that her
parents were rich, but he was also curious about that life style and, face it,
was smitten enough that he would have walked off a cliff if she asked him
nicely. He even used some computer money to buy a nice suit, a symptom that
caused his mother to grope for the Valium.
The dinner at first was awkward. Cletus was bewildered by the arsenal of
silverware and all the different kinds of food that didn't look or taste like
food. But he had known it was going to be a test, and he always did well on
tests, even when he had to figure out the rules as he went along.
Amy had told him that her father was a self-made millionaire; his fortune had
come from a set of patents in solid-state electronics. Cletus had therefore
spent a Saturday at the University library, first searching patents and then
reading selected texts, and he was ready at least for the father. It worked very
well. Over soup, the four of them talked about computers. Over the calimari
cocktail, Cletus and Mr. Linderbaum had it narrowed down to specific operating
systems and partitioning schemata. With the Beef Wellington, Cletus and
"Call-me-Lindy" were talking quantum electrodynamics; with the salad they were
on an electron cloud somewhere, and by the time the nuts were served, the two
nuts at that end of the table were talking in Boolean algebra while Amy and her
mother exchanged knowing sighs and hummed snatches of Gilbert and Sullivan.