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

By the time they retired to the music room for coffee, Lindy liked Cletus very
much, and the feeling was mutual, but Cletus didn't know how much he liked Amy,
really liked her, until she picked up the violin.
It wasn't a Strad--she was promised one if and when she graduated from
Julliard--but it had cost more than the Lamborghini in the garage, and she was
not only worth it, but equal to it. She picked it up and tuned it quietly while
her mother sat down at an electronic keyboard next to the grand piano, set it to
"harp," and began the simple arpeggio that a musically sophisticated person
would recognize as the introduction to the violin showpiece Mщditation from
Massenet's Thaяs.
Cletus had turned a deaf ear to opera for all his short life, so he didn't know
the back-story of transformation and transcending love behind this intermezzo,
but he did know that his girlfriend had lost her sight at the age of five, and
the next year--the year he was born!--was given her first violin. For thirteen
years she had been using it to say what she would not say with her voice,
perhaps to see what she could not see with her eyes, and on the deceptively
simple romantic matrix that Massenet built to present the beautiful courtesan
Thaяs gloriously reborn as the bride of Christ, Amy forgave her Godless universe
for taking her sight, and praised it for what she was given in return, and she
said this in a language that even Cletus could understand. He didn't cry very
much, never had, but by the last high wavering note he was weeping into his
hands, and he knew that if she wanted him, she could have him forever, and oddly
enough, considering his age and what eventually happened, he was right.
He would learn to play the violin before he had his first doctorate, and during
a lifetime of remarkable amity they would play together for ten thousand hours,
but all of that would come after the big idea. The big idea--"Why aren't all
blind people geniuses?"--was planted that very night, but it didn't start to
sprout for another week.
Like most 13-year-olds, Cletus was fascinated by the human body, his own and
others, but his study was more systematic than others' and, atypically, the
organ that interested him most was the brain.
The brain isn't very much like a computer, although it doesn't do a bad job,
considering that it's built by unskilled labor and programmed more by pure
chance than anything else. One thing computers do a lot better than brains,
though, is what Cletus and Lindy had been talking about over their little squids
in tomato sauce: partitioning.
Think of the computer as a big meadow of green pastureland, instead of a little
dark box full of number-clogged things that are expensive to replace, and that
pastureland is presided over by a wise old magic shepherd who is not called a
macroprogram. The shepherd stands on a hill and looks out over the pastureland,
which is full of sheep and goats and cows. They aren't all in one homogeneous
mass, of course, since the cows would step on the lambs and kids and the goats
would make everybody nervous, leaping and butting, so there are partitions of
barbed wire that keep all the species separate and happy.
This is a frenetic sort of meadow, though, with cows and goats and sheep coming
in and going out all the time, moving at about 3 x 108 meters per second, and if
the partitions were all of the same size it would be a disaster, because
sometimes there are no sheep at all, but lots of cows, who would be jammed in
there hip to hip and miserable. But the shepherd, being wise, knows ahead of
time how much space to allot to the various creatures and, being magic, can move