"Spider Robinson - User Friendly" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

hope of immortality and twenty years of your mortal life for ten minutes in bed withтАФand knew just as
clearly that you'd never ever get her, even at that price? God, it's a sweet pain, that is, and I know a lot
more about it than you do. Every man has in his mind an ideal of the Perfectly Beautiful WomanтАФshe
was better looking than that, and better dressed.
"Forgive me, sir," she said.
I guess I should remember that those were the fast words she said to meтАФif you don't count the song
lyric. At the time I remember thinking that I was prepared to forgive her anything whatsoever. It shows
you how wrong you can be.
To my gratified surprise, my voice worked. "Forgive you?"
"I just couldn't help myself."
With an effort I tore my attention from a close examination of her parts and perimeters, and tried to
imagine why she could possibly feel a need to apologize to me. Oh yesтАФshe had put something heavy
on my head. I felt it with my fingertips. It felt like a crown. Reluctantly I took my eyes away from her
and looked in the mirror behind the bar.
Yep, that was a crown on my head, all right. A simple, inch-wide band of gold around my forehead,
elaborately chased but otherwise unadorned. It was so heavy, it had to be real gold or gilded lead.
Alongside the twin miracles of her existence and the fact that she was speaking to me (and calling me
"sir"!), nothing was strange. "That's perfectly all right," I said, quite as though preternaturally beautiful
women put thousands of dollars worth of gold on my brow every third Thursday, and I were becoming
resigned to it. System crash of the brain.
She did something with her face that I don't have a word for. Deep in the shielded core of my heart,
graphite rods slid up out of the fuel mass, and the pile temperature began climbing toward meltdown
point. "It was unforgivable of me to intrude upon your privacy."
She had a faint, indefinable accent; I guessed Middle European of some kind. She was ... well, I'd say
she was beaming at me, but you'd think I only meant she was smiling. I mean she was beaming at me,
the way an airport beams at an approaching plane to guide it. I realized with a start that she was looking

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at me just exactly the same way I was looking at her. Captivated, wistful, yearningтАФno, outright
hungering and thirsting. I'd seen the look before, in movies starring Marilyn Chambers.
I ask you to believe that I am not a complete idiot. My first thought was that it had to be a mistake. But
the light in the bar wasn't bad enough. So my second thought was that it had to be a trick, a trap of some
kind.
That was absolutely fine with me. I tried to visualize the worst possible outcome. Say that, in exchange
for being allowed to touch her, to put my hand somewhere on her skinтАФher shoulder, sayтАФI were to be
beaten, robbed and killed. Okay, fair enough; no problem there. A weird little phrase ran through my
head: I'll be her sucker if she'll be my succor. (I seem now to hear a phantom Kingfish saying, "Boy, you
is de suckee.") Male black widow spiders obviously think they have a good deal going for them.
"It's uncanny," she repeated, and touched my hand. With hers.
"It certainly is," I said, referring to the astonishing discovery that knuckles can be erogenous zones.
"Would you mind standing up, sir?"
That kicked off an ambiguous reaction. If I stood up, the bulge in my trousers would become visible.
Even more embarrassing, it might not become visible enough. Conflicting imperatives paralyzed me.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm being rude again. It's just that I dreamt about you last night. It was a very
pleasant dream."
"I've dreamed about you all my life," I said, "and it has always been pleasant. You're very beautiful." A
happy feeling was growing in me. First, because I had finally managed to say something intelligent and
gallant. And second, because she had just named a barely plausible reason why a woman like her could