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

you give a third of that to the government. Your government uses what it takes to build all the roads and
schools and police and pensions, and your boss takes his share and buys a mansion on an island
somewhere. So naturally you complain about your bloated inefficient Big Brother of a government, and
you always vote for the pro-owner party.” He grinned at Frank and Anna. “How stupid is that?”

Anna shook her head. “People don’t see it that way.”

“But here are the statistics!”

“People don’t usually put them together like that. Besides, you made half of them up.”

“They’re close enough for people to get the idea! But they are not taught to think! In fact they’re taught
not to think. And they are stupid to begin with.”

Even Frank was not willing to go this far. “It’s a matter of what you can see,” he suggested. “You see
your boss, you see your paycheck, it’s given to you. You have it. Then you’re forced to give some of it
to the government. You never know about the surplus value you’ve created, because it was disappeared
in the first place. Cooked in the books.”

“But the rich are all over the news! Everyone can see they have more than they have earned, because no
oneearns that much.”

“The only things people understand are sensory,” Frank insisted. “We’re hard-wired to understand life
on the savannah. Someone gives you meat, they’re your friend. Someone takes your meat, they’re your
enemy. Abstract concepts like surplus value, or statistics on the value of a year’s work, these just aren’t
as real as what you see and touch. People are only good at what they can think out in terms of their
senses. That’s just the way we evolved.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” Edgardo said cheerfully. “We are stupid!”

“I’ve got to get back to it,” Anna said, and left. It really wasn’t her kind of conversation.
Frank followed her out, and finally headed home. He drove his little fuel-cell Honda out Old Dominion
Parkway, already jammed; over the Beltway, and then up to a condo complex called Swink’s New Mill,
where he had rented a condominium for his year at NSF.

He parked in the complex’s cellar garage and took the elevator up to the fourteenth floor. His apartment
looked out toward the Potomac—a long view and a nice apartment, rented out for the year by a young
State Department guy who was doing a stint in Brasilia. It was furnished in a stripped-down style that
suggested the man did not live there very often. But a nice kitchen, functional spaces, everything easy,
and most of the time Frank was home he was asleep anyway, so he didn’t care what it was like.

He had picked up one of the free papers back at work, and now as he spooned down some cottage
cheese he looked again at the Personals section, a regrettable habit he had had for years, fascinated as he
was by the glimpse these pages gave of a subworld of radically efflorescing sexual diversity—a
subculture that had understood the implications of the removal of biological constraints in the
techno-urban landscape, and were therefore able and willing to create a kind of polymorphous panmixia.
Were these people really out there, or was this merely the collective fantasy life of a bunch of lonely souls
like himself? He had never contacted any of the people putting in the ads to try to find out. He suspected
the worst, and would rather be lonely. Although the sections devoted to people looking for LTRs,
meaning “long-term relationships,” went far beyond the sexual fantasies, and sometimes struck him with