Spider Robinson - Orphans of Eden

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2024-11-23 1 0 49.25KB 8 页 5.9玖币

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ORPHANS OF EDEN

Well, what would you have done?

Begin at the front part, Spider:

It was just after two in the morning. I was right here in my office (as we call the

dining room in this family), about to write a science fiction story called "Orphans of

Eden" on this loyal senescent Macintosh, when he appeared in the doorway from the

kitchen, right next to my Lava Lamp. I don't mean "came through the doorway and

stopped"; I mean he appeared, in the doorway. He sort of shimmered into

exist-ence, like a Star Trek transportee, or the ball-players disappearing into the corn

in Field of Dreams in reverse. He was my height and age, but of normal weight. His

clothing was crazier than a basketball bat. I never did get the hang of the fashion

assumptions behind it. I'd like to say the first thing I noticed about it was the

ingenious method of fastening, but actually that was the second thing; first I

observed that his clothing pointedly avoided covering either geni-tals or armpits. I

kind of liked that. If you lived in a nice world, why would you want to hide your

smell? He stood with his hands slightly out from his sides, palms displayed, an

expectant look on his extraordinarily beautiful face. He didn't look afraid of me, so I

wasn't afraid of him. I hit command-S to save my changes (title and a handful of

sentences) and forgot that story com-pletely. Forever, now that I think about it.

"When are you from?" I asked him. "Origi-nally, I mean."

I'm not going too fast for you, am I? If a guy materializes in front of you, and

you're sober, he might be the genius who just invented the transporter beam . . . but

if he's dressed funny, he's a time traveler, right? Gotta be. Thank God the kitchen

door was open had been my very first thought.

He smiled, the kind of pleased but almost rueful smile you make when a friend

comes through a practical joke better than you thought he would. "Very good," he

told me.

"It was okay, but that's not a responsive answer."

"I'm sorry," he said. "But I can't say I think a lot of the question itself. Still, if it

really matters to you, I was born in the year 2146 . . . though we didn't call it that at

the time, naturally. Feel better, now?"

He was right: it hadn't been much of a question, just the only one I could come up

with on the spur of the moment. But I thought it small of him to point it out. I mean,

what a spur—what a moment! And the information was mildly interesting, if useless.

"You don't go around pulling this on civilians, do you?" I asked irritably. "You

could give somebody a trauma."

"Good Lord, no," he said. "Why, half the other science fiction writers alive now

would lose sphincter control if I materialized in their workplace like this."

It was some comfort to think that my work might survive at least another hundred

and fifty-five years. Unless, of course, he had run across one of my books in the

middle of next week. "That's because they think wonder is just another tool, like sex

or violence or a sympathetic pro-tagonist."

"Whereas you know it is a religion, a Grail, the Divine Carrot that is the only thing

that makes it possible for human beings to ever get anywhere without a stick across

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Spider Robinson - Orphans of Eden

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