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

Except Thoreau had been a consumptive, active though he was in his daily life as a
surveyor and wandering botanist. This passage had been written only two years
before he died of tuberculosis, so he must have known by then that his lungs were
compromised, and his trust in having a good body misplaced. For lack of a simple
antibiotic, Thoreau had lost thirty years. Still he had lived the day, and paid ferocious
attention to it, as a very respectable early scientist.
And so up and off! And up Frank would leap, thinking about what the New England
pair had said, and would dress and slip out the door in a frame of mind to see the
world and act in it. No matter how early he went out, he always found some of the
old Khembalis already out in the vegetable garden they had planted in the backyard,
mumbling to themselves as they weeded. Frank might stop to say hi to Qang if she
were out there, or dip his head in the door to tell her whether he thought he would be
home for dinner that night; that was hardly ever, but she liked it when he let her
know.
Then off to Optimodal on foot, blinking dreamily in the morning light, Wilson
Avenue all rumbly and stinky with cars on the way to work. The walk was a little
long, as all walks in D.C. tended to be; it was a city built for cars, like every other
city. But the walk forced him to wake up, and to look closely at the great number of
trees he passed. Even here on Wilson, it was impossible to forget they lived in a
forest.
Then into the gym for a quick workout to get his brain fully awake—or as fully
awake as it got these days. There was something wrong there. A fog in certain areas.
He found it was easiest to do the same thing every day, reducing the number of
decisions he had to make. Habitual action was a ritual that could be regarded as a
kind of worship of the day. And it was so much easier.
Sometimes Diane was there, a creature of habit also, and uneasily he would say hi,
and uneasily she would say hi back. They were still supposed to be rescheduling a
dinner to celebrate the salting of the North Atlantic, but she had said she would get
back to him about a good time for it, and he was therefore waiting for her to bring it
up, and she wasn’t. This was adding daily to his anxiety. Who knew what anything
meant, really.
Then at work, Diane ran them through their paces as they produced the action plan
that she thought was their responsibility to the new president. They were to lay out
the current moment of the abrupt climate change they were experiencing, and discuss
in full whether there was any way back out of it—and if there was, what kind of
policies and activities might achieve it.
One thing that she had no patience for was the idea that having restarted the Gulf
Stream, they were now out of the woods. She shook her head darkly when she saw
this implied in communications from other agencies, or in the media. It did not help
that they were suddenly experiencing a warm spell unlike anything that had happened
the previous year, when the long winter had clamped down in October and never let
up until May. This year, after several hard freezes, they were experiencing a balmy
and almost rain-free Indian summer. Everyone wanted to explain it by the restoration
of the Gulf Stream, and there may even have been some truth to that, but there was
no way to be sure. Natural variation had too great an amplitude to allow for any such
one-to-one correspondence of climatic cause and effect, although unfortunately this
was something the climate skeptics and carbon supporters were also always saying,
so that it was tricky for Diane to try to make the distinction.
But she was persistent, even adamant. “We have to put the Gulf Stream action to
one side, and take a look at all the rest of it,” she commanded. “Chase is going to