"Kim Stanley Robinson - Sixty Days and Counting" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

it.
His transition team worked with an urgency that resembled desperation. Sea level
was rising; temperatures were rising; there was no time to lose. Chase’s good humor
and casual style were therefore welcomed, when they were not reviled—much as it
had been with FDR in the previous century. He would say, “We got ourselves into
this mess and we can get out of it. The problems create an opportunity to remake
our relationship to nature, and create a new dispensation. So—happy days are here
again! Because we’re making history, we are seizing the planet’s history, I say, and
turning it to the good.”
Some scoffed; some listened and took heart; some waited to see what would
happen.



As far as Frank Vanderwal’s personal feelings were concerned, there was something
reassuring about the world being so messed up. It tended to make his own life look
like part of a trend, and a small part at that. A hill of beans in this world. Perhaps
even so small as to be manageable.
Although, to tell the truth, it didn’t feel that way. There were reasons to be very
concerned, almost to the edge of fear. Frank’s friend Caroline had disappeared on
election night, chased by armed agents of some superblack intelligence agency. She
had stolen her husband’s plan to steal the election, and Frank had passed this plan to
a friend at NSF with intelligence contacts, to what effect he could not be sure. He
had helped her to escape her pursuers. To do that he had had to break a date with
another friend, his boss and a woman he loved—although what that meant, given the
passionate affair he was carrying on with Caroline, he did not know. There was a lot
he didn’t know; and he could still taste blood at the back of his throat, months after
his nose had been broken. He could not think for long about the same thing. He was
living a life that he called parcellated, but others might call dysfunctional: i.e.,
semi-homeless in Washington, D.C. He could have been back home in San Diego by
now, where his teaching position was waiting for him. Instead he was a temporary
guest of the embassy of the drowned nation of Khembalung. But hey, everyone had
problems! Why should he be any different?
Although brain damage would be a little more than different. Brain damage meant
something like—mental illness. It was a hard phrase to articulate when thinking about
oneself. But it was possible his injury had exacerbated a lifelong tendency to make
poor decisions. It was hard to tell. He had thought all his recent decisions had been
correct, after all, in the moment he had made them. Should he not have faith that he
was following a valid line of thought? He wasn’t sure.
Thus it was a relief to think that all these personal problems were as nothing
compared to the trouble all life on Earth now faced as a functioning biosphere. There
were days in which he welcomed the bad news, and he saw that other people were
doing the same. As this unpredictable winter blasted them with cold or bathed them
in Caribbean balm, there grew in the city a shared interest and good cheer, a kind of
solidarity.



Frank felt this solidarity also on the premises of the National Science Foundation,
where he and many of his colleagues were trying to deal with the climate problem.