"Spider Robinson - The Mind 3 - Lifehouse" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

time. A DNA double-helix would actually be a
fairly accurate three-dimensional model of it. It
was itself part of a larger, more complicated
structure that had been under creation for nearly
a week, a sort of interwoven pattern of patterns
of pleasure and joy, of which this particular
movement was meant to be the capstone. The
tocsin sounded in both their skulls just as, in the
words of Jake Thackray, "They were getting to a
very important bit . . ." and for two whole
seconds, both honestly mistook it for a
hyperbole of their imaginations. By the time
they understood it was real, a necessity at once
emotional, biological and artistic urged them to
ignore itтАФjust for a moment.
This, in their defense, they did not do. Their
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responsibility was too much a part of who they
were. Orgasm may be the source of all
meaningтАФbut it needs a universe in which to
mean. The instant they realized the alarm was
not a shared hallucination they stopped doing
what they were doing (or more precisely,
stopped paying attention to the fact that they
were doing it), queried the Tar Baby,
downloaded a detailed report of the situation,
and studied it, fully prepared to leap out of bed
and hit the ground running if the emergency
seemed to warrant it.
It did not. Indeed, it seemed to be practically
over. Only one sophont appeared to be
involvedтАФand not a sophisticated one. It carried
only a single (pathetic) weapon, and no data
transmission gear of any kind. The Tar Baby
reported no difficulty at all in investing it, and
was even now reprogramming it. There was
another higher lifeform of some kind present,
about fifty meters away from the Egg, but it did
not display sentience signatures and thus could
not be a significant threat. To top it all off, the
whole nonevent was taking place less than two

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thousand meters away, a distance they could