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

Dutch must be desperate indeed if they had been reduced to help like this. She thought things over as she
chewed. “So here you are,” she said. “Have you been to America before?”
Drepung shook his head. “None of us have.”

“It must be pretty overwhelming.”

He frowned at this word. “I have been to Calcutta.”

“Oh I see.”

“This is very different, of course.”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

She liked him: his musical Indian English, his round face and big liquid eyes, his ready smile. The two
men made quite a contrast: Drepung young and tall, round-faced, with a kind of baby-fat look; Rudra
Cakrin old, small and wizened, his face lined with a million wrinkles, his cheekbones and narrow jaw
prominent in an angular, nearly fleshless face.

The wrinkles were laugh lines, however, combined with the lines of a wide-eyed expression of surprise
that bunched up his forehead. Despite his noises and muttering under Drepung’s account, he still seemed
cheerful enough. He certainly attacked his pizza with the same enthusiasm as his young assistant. With
their shaved heads they shared a certain family resemblance.

She said, “I suppose going from Tibet to a tropical island must have been a bigger shock than coming
from the island to here.”

“I suppose. I was born in Khembalung myself, so I don’t know for sure. But the old ones like Rudra
here, who made that very move, seem to have adjusted quite well. Just to have any kind of home is a
blessing, I think you will find.”

Anna nodded. The two of them did project a certain calm. They sat in the booth as if there was no hurry
to go anywhere else. Anna couldn’t imagine any such state of mind. She was always in a tearing hurry.
She tried to match their air of being at ease. At ease in Arlington, Virginia, after a lifetime on an island in
the Ganges. Well, the climate would be familiar. But everything else had to have changed quite
stupendously.

And, on closer examination, there was a certain guardedness to them. Drepung glanced surreptitiously at
their waitress; he looked at the pedestrians passing by; he watched Anna herself, all with a slightly
cautious look, reminding her of the pained expression she had seen earlier in the day.

“How is it that you came to rent a space in this particular building?”

Drepung paused and considered this question for a suprisingly long time. Rudra Cakrin asked him
something and he replied, and Rudra said something more.

“We had some advice there also,” Drepung said. “The Pew Center on Global Climate Change has been
helping us, and their office is located on Wilson Boulevard, nearby.”

“I didn’t know that. They’ve helped you to meet people?”