"Spider Robinson - And Subsequent Construction" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

which freed me to appreciate his sexual greediness, whenever the wind blew from
that direction, and all the other kinds of delicious mutual greediness as well.
My smug contentment at owning a marriage so good that we didn't feel the need
to keep books on each other was so pervasive, that evening, that there was no room
left in my heart for frustration at how poorly my work was going --
-- until my car, counting off broken-white-lines traversed, concluded it had
reached its required coordinates, shut itself down, scanned the area for unfriendlies,
and unlocked my door. At the sight of my lab, sitting amid endless hectares of
cemetery like the millionaire's mausoleum it might yet become one day, I did an
instant emotional one-eighty and became depressed.
What use, I asked myself, are genius, wealth, fame, and one of the great
marriages of the Solar System ... if your work won't work? I actually tried to slam
the car door.
This funk persisted while I persuaded the lab door I was me, entered the building,
stripped in the antechamber (unlike most people these days, I dislike driving nude),
and entered the lab proper -- whereupon sadness vanished.
Standing at the far end of the room was someone I recognized at once. I part my
hair in the middle, so it was the breasts that confirmed the identification: right
noticeably larger than the left. This was no mirror-reversed image.
My visitor was me.
"Thank the Nameless," I cried happily, and then, "What took me so long?"
Me grinned at I.
The profession he created was ideal for me. It paid the highest salary in human
history -- in return for which I was required to spend days at a time meditating on
the imaginary distinctions between mathematics, physics, philosophy and religion. In
itself, that should have contented any supergenius ... but one relativistic "day," as I
was contemplating the second of Ikimono-roshi's three splendid 4-D jukugo, drugged
to the eyeballs with don't-sleep (somewhere between Sol and Sirius A/B -- going to
the dogs, that is), I achieved the insight that should have made time-travel practical.
Which caused me to shut down the engine, forfeiting my pay for that trip, and go
look up a passenger named Teodor I'd met during turnover and drag him off to bed
with me, which helped us finish beginning to fall in love, which inspired him to write
a song so good it forced us to get married -- yes, he's that Teodor -- but these are
other stories. Another time.
It took Ted and me four agonizing years to force the government to let me retire -
- hell, I understand their position; there were only forty-six relativists alive and sane
at that time -- but finally I was free to chase my chimera full-time. Perhaps my
motivation will seem inadequate to you, especially if you're one of the hundreds who
debarked at the Sirius System two weeks later than you expected, but it was
sufficient for me: I wanted to go backward in time and meet my biological (as
opposed to my "real") mother. Emotional considerations aside, it would have been
useful to finally know rather than deduce my medical and genetic history. But only a
fool puts emotional considerations aside: above all, I needed to know whether I
forgave her.
In any case, there finally came a time when I was able to enter my ideal
laboratory/zendo and put my full attention on time travel for ten hours a night. (I
wish the biophyzzle folks would buckle down and solve immortality; 200-odd years
just isn't enough time for a person to get any serious thinking done. There's always
something, you know?)
What ensued was two solid months of frustration ... which got worse as time