"Kim Stanley Robinson - Fifty Degrees Below" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

working desperately to extricate himself from an ill-conceived and poorly executed
break-and-enter job. He had been trying and failing to recover a badly worded
resignation letter he had left for Diane Chang, the NSF director. It was an incident he
would really rather forget.
But there the mobile hung, at the new angle which Frank had given to it and which no
one had noticed, perhaps a reminder to—to what? To try not to do stupid things. To
think things through before attempting them. But he always tried to do that, so the
reminder was unnecessary. Really, the mobile outside his window was a disadvantage.
But drapes could be installed.
There was room for a short couch against one wall, if he moved the bookcase there to
the opposite corner. It would then be like a kind of living room, with the computer as
entertainment center. There was an ordinary men's room around the corner, a coffee
nook clown the hall, the showers downstairs. All the necessities. As Sucandra had
remarked, at dinner once at the Quiblers', tasting spaghetti sauce with a wooden spoon:
Ahhhh—what now is lacking?
Same answer: Nothing.
It had to be admitted that it made him uneasy to be contemplating this idea.
Unsettled. It was deranged, in the literal sense of being outside the range. Typically
people did not choose to live without a home. No home to go home to; it was perhaps a
little crazy.
But in some obscure way, that aspect pleased him too. It was not crazy in the way that
breaking into the building through the skylight had been crazy; but it shared that act's
commitment to an idea. And was it any crazier than handing well over half of your
monthly take-home income to pay for seriously crappy lodging?
Nomadic existence. Life outdoors. So often he had thought about, read about, and
written about the biological imperatives in human behavior—about their primate
nature, and the evolutionary history that had led to humanity's paleolithic lifestyle,
which was the suite of behaviors that had caused their brains to balloon as rapidly as
they had; and about the residual power of all that in modern life. And all the while,
through all that thinking, reading, and writing, he had been sitting at a desk. Living like
every other professional worker in America, a brain in a bottle, working with his
fingertips or his voice or simply his thoughts alone, distracted sometimes by daydreams
about the brief bursts of weekend activity that would get him back into his body again.
That was what was crazy, living like that when he held the beliefs he did.
Now he was considering acting in accordance with his beliefs. Something else he had
heard the Khembalis say at the Quiblers, this time Drepung: If you don't act on it, it
wasn't a true feeling.
He wanted these to be true feelings. Everything had changed for him on that day he
had gone to the Khembali ambassador's talk, and then run into the woman in the
elevator, and afterward talked to Drepung at the Quiblers' party, and then, yes, broken
into the NSF building and tried to recover his resignation. Everything had changed! Or
so it had felt; so it felt still. But for it to be a true feeling, he had to act on it.

Meaning also, as part of all these new behaviors, that he had to meet with Diane
Chang, and work with her on coordinating NSF's response to the climate situation that
was implicated in the great flood and many other things.
This would be awkward. His letter of resignation, which Diane had never directly
acknowledged receiving, was now an acute embarrassment to him. It had been an
irrational attempt to burn his bridges, and by all rights he should now be back in San
Diego with nothing but the stench of smoke behind him.