"Nancy Kress - Wetlands Preserve" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

deforestation, pollution, nuclear radiation, blah blah blah. Or, rather, not blah blah blah; she was
preparing herself to work for the same ends, through scientific ecology. But it all looked different
somehow when you had that actual single child with you day and night, dependent on you, needing your
care and interrupting your sleep and clamoring for your love. You realized that there was no more urgent
job.

There was no way to tell that to Danilo, no way that he would hear. Lisa said only, "I'll get Carlo. The
woman next door takes care of him while I'm at work."

"Is she тАж can she тАж"

"She's had experience with disabled children." And then, cruelly, "She costs most of my grant and all of
my scholarship, of course, between daycare and physical therapy. Nothing left to donate to good
causes."

Danilo didn't answer. Lisa went next door to get Carlo.

It was one of his good days. He laughed and reached up for her, and she knelt by the wheelchair and
hugged him. Undoing all the harnesses that kept him comfortable was a major undertaking. "Mommy! I
drawed a picture!"

"He did, Lisa. Look," Mrs. Belling said, and held up a childish picture of a blue tree, green sun, and red
structure that might have been a house or a car. "He's getting really good with his right foot, aren't you,
Carlo?"

"I'm good," Carlo said, with such innocent grandiosity that Lisa wanted to weep. He was almost five.
Next year he would start school. How long would he keep that pride around other people, people less
kind than Mrs. Belling or Lisa's colleagues? Carlo was intelligent, happy, severely deformed. Both arms
hung truncated at his sides, devoid of any nerves to transmit muscle impulses. His head lolled to one side.
He would never walk. His radiant smile nightly filled her with fear for his future.

Danilo had left her, joined first Students Against Toxins and later Greenpeace, the day Carlo had been
born. Carlo's father blamed the baby's condition on contaminated groundwater in the factory town where
Lisa had grown up. Perhaps he was right. Lisa had gone into shock that Danilo could leave her now,
leave her with a deformed infant, leave her unmarried and about to start graduate school and all but
broke. Selfish! She had screamed at him. Necessary, he had replied, so more Carlos aren't born like this,
and more, and more. She was the selfish one not to see that. It was no different than going off to war. He
was disappointed in her that she couldn't see that.

The horrible thing was, she could. But she was still the one left with Carlo. Whom, now, she wouldn't
trade for anything on Earth.

"Carlo," she said, after lavishing praise on his picture, "Uncle Danilo's here." Her one condition for letting
Danilo see him at all: unclehood, not fatherhood. Fatherhood was something you did, and Danilo never
had.

"Uncle Danilo?" The child frowned, trying to remember. It had been over a year since Danilo's last
will-o'-the-wisp appearance.

"Yes, your Uncle Danilo. You'll remember him when you see him. Let's go, sweetie."