"Kim Stanley Robinson - Forty Signs of Rain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

budget. When the Arctic ice pack was first measured by nuclear submarines in the 1950’s, it averaged
thirty feet thick in midwinter. By the end of the century it was down to fifteen. Then one August the ice
broke up into large tabular bergs, drifting on the currents, colliding and separating, leaving broad lanes of
water open to the continuous polar summer sunlight. The next year the breakup started in July, and at
times more than half the surface of the Arctic Ocean was open water. The third year, the breakup began
in May.

That was last year.




WEEKDAYS ALWAYS begin the same. The alarm goes off and you are startled out of dreams that
you immediately forget. Predawn light in a dim room. Stagger into a hot shower and try to wake up all
the way. Feel the scalding hot water on the back of your neck, ah, the best part of the day, already
passing with the inexorable clock. Fragment of a dream, you were deep in some problem set now
escaping you, just as you tried to escape it in the dream. Duck down the halls of memory—gone.
Dreams don’t want to be remembered.

Evaluate the night’s sleep. Anna Quibler decided the previous night had not been so good. She was
exhausted already. Joe had cried twice, and though it was Charlie who had gotten up to reassure him, as
part of their behavioral conditioning plan which was intended to convey to Joe that he would never again
get Mom to visit him at night, Anna had of course woken up too, and vaguely heard Charlie’s
reassurances: “Hey. Joe. What’s up. Go back to sleep, buddy, it’s the middle of the night here. Nothing
gets to happen until morning, so you might as well. This is pointless this wailing, why do you do this, good
night damn it.”

A brusque bedside manner at best, but that was part of the plan. After that she had tossed and turned
for long minutes, trying heroically not to think of work. In years past she had recited in her head Edgar
Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven,” which she had memorized in high school and which had a nice soporific
effect, but then one night she had thought to herself, “Quoth the raven, ‘Livermore,’” because of work
troubles she was having with some people out at Lawrence Livermore. After that the poem was ruined as
a sleep aid because the moment she even thought of “The Raven” she thought about work. In general
Anna’s thoughts had a tropism toward work issues.

Shower over, alas. She dried and dressed in three minutes. Downstairs she filled a lunch box for her
older boy. Nick liked and indeed insisted that his lunch be exactly the same every day, so it was no great
trouble to assemble it. Peanut butter sandwich, five carrots, apple, chocolate milk, yogurt, roll of lunch
meat, cheese stick, cookie. Two minutes for that, then throw in a freeze pack to keep it chilled. As she
got the coldpacks out of the freezer she saw the neat rows of plastic bottles full of her frozen milk, there
for Charlie to thaw and feed to Joe during the day when she was gone. That reminded her, not that she
would have forgotten much longer given how full her breasts felt, that she had to nurse the bairn before
she left. She clumped back upstairs and lifted Joe out of his crib, sat on the couch beside it. “Hey love,
time for some sleepy nurses.”

Joe was used to this, and glommed onto her while still almost entirely asleep. With his eyes closed he
looked like an angel. He was getting bigger but she could still cradle him in her arms and watch him curl
into her like a new infant. Closer to two than one now, and a regular bruiser, a wild man who wearied
her; but not now. The warm sensation of being suckled put her body back to sleep, but a part of her
mind was already at work, and so she detached him and shifted him around to the other breast for four