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

year working with her, engaged in interesting discussions in the pursuit of their shared work. No, he liked
her. The discomfort came not from any of her irritating habits, not even the nit-picking or hairsplitting that
made her so strikingly eponymous (though no one dared joke about that to her), habits that she couldn’t
seem to help and didn’t seem to notice—no—it was more the way her hyperscientific attitude combined
with her passionate female expressiveness to suggest a complete science, or even a complete humanity. It
reminded Frank of himself.

Not of the social self that he allowed others to see, admittedly; but of his internal life as he alone
experienced it. He too was stuffed with extreme aspects of both rationality and emotionality. This was
what made him uncomfortable: Anna was too much like him. She reminded him of things about himself he
did not want to think about. But he was helpless to stop his trains of thought. That was one of his
problems.

Halfway around the circumference of the sixth floor, they came to their offices. Frank’s was one of a
number of cubicles carving up a larger space; Anna’s was a true office right across from his cubicle, a
room of her own, with a foyer for her secretary Aleesha. Both their spaces, and all the others in the maze
of crannies and rooms, were filled with the computers, tables, file cabinets, and crammed bookshelves
that one found in scientific offices everywhere. The decor was standard degree-zero beige for everything,
indicating the purity of science.

In this case it was all rendered human, and even handsome, by the omnipresent big windows on the
interior sides of the rooms, allowing everyone to look across the central atrium and into all the other
offices. This combination of open space and the sight of fifty to a hundred other humans made each office
a slice or echo of the savannah. The occupants were correspondingly more comfortable at the primate
level. Frank did not suffer the illusion that anyone had consciously planned this effect, but he admired the
instinctive grasp on the architect’s part of what would get the best work out of the building’s occupants.

He sat down at his desk. He had angled his computer screen away from the window so that when
necessary he could focus on it, but now he sat in his chair and gazed out across the atrium. He was near
the end of his yearlong stay at NSF, and the workload, while never receding, was simply becoming less
and less important to him. Piles of articles and hard-copy jackets lay in stacks on every horizontal
surface, arranged in Frank’s complex throughput system. He had a lot of work to do. Instead he looked
out the window.

The colorful mobile filling the upper half of the atrium was a painfully simple thing, basic shapes in
primary colors, very like a kindergartner’s scribble. Frank’s many activities included rock climbing, and
often he had occupied his mind by imagining the moves he would need to make to climb the mobile.
There were some hard sections, but it would make for a fun route.

Past the mobile, he could see into one hundred and eight other rooms (he had counted). In them people
typed at screens, talked in couples or on the phone, read, or sat in seminar rooms around paper-strewn
tables, looking at slide shows, or talking. Mostly talking. If the interior of the National Science
Foundation were all you had to go on, you would have to conclude that doing science consisted mostly
of sitting around in rooms talking.

This was not even close to true, and it was one of the reasons Frank was bored. The real action of
science took place in laboratories, and anywhere else experiments were being conducted. What
happened here was different, a kind of metascience, one might say, which coordinated scientific activities,
or connected them to other human action, or funded them. Something like that; he was having trouble
characterizing it, actually.