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

 Now Joe was flying up and down on the bouncy bridge’s sweet spot. The sad little girl whose nanny
talked on the phone for hours at a time wandered in slow circles around the merry-go-round. Charlie
avoided meeting her eager eye, staring instead at the nanny and thinking it might be a good idea to stuff a
note into the girl’s clothes:“Your daughter wanders the Earth bored and lonely at age two—SHAME!”

Whereas he was virtuous. That would have been the point of such a note, and so he never wrote it. He
was virtuous, but bored. No that wasn’t really true. That was a disagreeable stereotype. He therefore
tried to focus and play with his second-born. It was truly unfair how much less parental attention the
second child got. With the first, although admittedly there was the huge Shock of Lost Adult Freedom to
recover from, there was also the deep absorption of watching one’s own offspring—a living human being
whose genes were a fifty-fifty mix of one’s own and one’s partner’s. It was frankly hard to believe that
any such process could actually work, but there the kid was, out walking the world in the temporary
guise of a kind of pet, a wordless little animal of surpassing fascination.

Whereas with the second one it was as they all said: just try to make sure they don’t eat out of the cat’s
dish. Not always successful in Joe’s case. But not to worry. They would survive. They might even
prosper. Meanwhile there was the newspaper to read.

But now here they were at the park, Joe and Dad, so might as well make the best of it. And it was true
that Joe was more fun to play with than Nick had been at that age. He would chase Charlie for hours,
ask to be chased, wrestle, fight, go down the slide and up the steps again like a perpetuum mobile. All
this in the middle of a D.C. May day, the air going for a triple-triple, the sun smashing down through the
wet air and diffusing until its light exploded out of a huge patch of the zenith. Sweaty gasping play, yes,
but never a moment spent coaxing. Never a dull moment.

After another such runaround they sprawled on the grass to eat lunch. Both of them liked this part. Fruit
juices, various baby foods carefully spooned out and inserted into Joe’s baby-bird mouth, applesauce
likewise, a cheerio or two that he could choke down by himself. He was still mostly a breast-milk guy.

When they were done Joe struggled up to play again.

“Oh God Joe can’t we rest a bit.”

“No!”

Ballasted by his meal, however, he staggered as if drunk. Naptime, as sudden as a blow to the head,
would soon fell him.

Charlie’s phone beeped. He slipped in an earplug and let the cord dangle under his face, clicked it on.
“Hello.”

“Hi Charlie, where are you?”

“Hey Roy, I’m at the park like always. What’s up?”

“Well, I’ve read your latest draft, and I was wondering if you could discuss some things in it now,
because we need to get it over to Senator Winston’s office so they can see what’s coming.”

“Is that a good idea?”