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

And that single axiom made all anomalies disappear, caused things to fall into
place with an almost audible click. I came close to shouting aloud the word,
"Eureka!"
I'll take you through it step by step.
Postulate that my unknown biological mother was at least highly intelligent. Not a
supergenius like me, necessarily, but I can't see her as a dummy. Even now, no one
knows for sure how much of genius is hereditary and how much is environmental,
but grant me the premise.
Admittedly, she lived most of her life during the dark ages just ended.
Provisionally accept the current theory that genius and genius-plus children tend to
be borne by mothers over 30, and say that Mother (as opposed to Mom, who raised
me) was born around 1955. The Stone Age as far as women were concerned.
But even if you assume her luck was minimal, that she was a poverty-stricken
handicapped ugly single-parent in an era which treated single-parents barbarically ...
still and even so, it would seem that she ought to have been able to cope with
parenthood, at least for longer than the week or two she stuck it out.
But suppose the poor bitch birthed twins ...
 Suppose further that my hypothetical identical twin -- let's call her, for the sake of
the argument, "Jay" -- had even fractionally less than my own good luck in foster
parents. Not hard to believe.
Endless studies have uncovered cases in which identical twins raised separately,
unaware that a twin existed, had lived astonishingly similar lives, down to their
professions, IQs, favorite swear words and the names of their spouses and children.
But with even a slight wrinkle in the blueprint, Jay might have grown to maturity
without ever having learned the single most crucial life-lesson I had learned to date:
that it's okay to be selfish.
Supergeniuses who lack that realization cannot love themselves fully. This must
surely inhibit, twist their intelligence. Such a crippled supergenius might well cause
her own marriage to self-destruct, to drive away a loving husband because of her
inevitable contempt for anyone stupid enough to give unconditional love to a
monster like herself.
That list of great comedians I started with? One I left out was marks, who said, "I
could never belong to a club that would have me as a member." He went through
quite a few broken relationships before merciful death eased his magnificent,
needless suffering.
How might such a self-contemptuous woman punish herself for hurting and
driving away a good and loving man?
Well, if she knew or somehow learned that she had a twin, she might be moved to
research her. And if that twin's life was turning out infuriatingly better than her own,
she might just construct an elaborate and cruel hoax to wreck her sister's marriage
too ...
As far as I was concerned the thing was proved. Yet I turned to my terminal. I
intended to finally use some of the awesome clout and access even an ex-relativist
can command to smash through all the bureaucratic barriers against my learning the
name of my mother and the circumstances of my birth and adoption. I had not
planned to do so until I had a working time machine and could act on the information
... but I was aware that Negation and Subsequent Construction is a ladder of dubious
strength, and I wanted this nailed down.
But as my modem program came up on the screen, the door to the lab opened
and Ted came in. He was pushing Jay along before him by brute force; she was