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

Future-Ted presumably had what seemed to him good and sufficient reasons to
withhold his love from Future-Iris, from Jay. Therefore Jay's actions constituted rape,
seduction-by-guile. Ted would see that at once if he learned the truth --
-- and I, present-I, Iris, his trusted wife, had collaborated in his rape --
Dear Nameless -- had I destroyed my own marriage? No wonder he was going to
divorce me: I had betrayed his trust. In order to do a favor for Jay, for my self.
Without thinking ...
Only a supergenius could have been so stupid! To confirm the awful inevitable, I
phoned home.
There was no answer -- the answer I'd half-expected -- so I punched in my
override code to activate the home-camera anyway. It showed our ... what had been
our ... bedroom, empty, sheets snarled by illicit love. There was something visible on
the floor; I zoomed in on it.
It was a sheet of paper, handwritten; dear Ted was so old fashioned. At max
magnification I could read what was written on it.
The best song he'd written in his life. So good that even the best melody could not
have added much to it. More than a song: a poem. I can reproduce it from memory:
Iris by Ted Rowe
Tending to tension by conscious intent, declining declension, disdaining dissent,
into the dementia dimension we're sent: we are our content, and we are content.
Incandescent invention and blessed event; tumescent distention, tumultuous
descent; our bone of convention again being spent,
I am your contents, and I am content to be living ... to be trying ... to be crying
... to be dying ... I want to be giving ... to be making ... to be breaking ... to be
taking all you have ...
Assuming Ascension, Assumption, assent, all of our nonsense is finally non-sent
... with honorable mention for whatever we meant; you are my content, and I am
content
How glorious, to see such a song, with my name on it.
How terrible, to see that the sheet of paper on which it was written had been torn
nearly in half and flung to the floor.
Jay had made some slip; he had guessed.
I broke the connection and buried my head in my hands.
My next conscious thought, an indeterminate time later, was:
How could me do this to I?
How could Jay, my very own self, have done this horrid thing -- when she had to
have known it would blow up in our face, that it would precipitate all our mutual
misery?
With that question, my brain woke up and began to think for the first time that
night.
My line of work had required me to study a little astronomy -- an interesting field
for a mathematician -- and one of the few anecdotes from the history of astronomy
which had stuck in my mind was the story of Fritz Zwicky's "Method of Negation and
Subsequent Construction." Zwicky said he began with the absolute certainty that
dwarf galaxies must exist, because Edwin Hubble said they could not ... and thus
certain, was able to prove their existence. This form of reasoning had amused me, so
I'd remembered it.
I employed it now.
I wanted so badly to believe that Jay could not be me -- that not even time and
sustained pain could make me so stupid as to cause that pain -- that I assumed it.