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

but not more than we can carry home, huh Joe.тАЭ

Groceries tucked into the backpack pocket under JoeтАЩs butt, and slung in plastic bags from both hands,
Charlie walked Joe back along the empty street to their house, singing тАЬI CanтАЩt Give You Anything but
Love,тАЭ one of JoeтАЩs favorites. Then they were up the steps and home.

Their street dead-ended in a little triangle of trees next to Woodson Ave, a feeder road that poured its
load of cars onto Wisconsin south. It was a nice location, within sight of Wisconsin and yet peaceful. An
old four-story apartment block wrapped around their backyard like a huge brick sound barrier, its
stacked windows like a hundred live webcasts streaming all at once, daily lives that were much too partial
and mundane to be interesting. NoRear Window here, and thank God for that. The wall of apartments
was like a dull screensaver, and might as well have been trees, though trees would have been nicer. The
world outside was irrelevant. Each nuclear family in its domicile is inside its own pocket universe, and for
the time it is together it exists inside a kind of event horizon: no one sees it and it sees no one. Millions of
pocket universes, scattered across the surface of the planet like the dots of light in nighttime satellite
photos.

On this night, however, the bubble containing the Quiblers was breached. Visitors from afar, aliens!
When the doorbell rang they almost didnтАЩt recognize the sound.

Anna was occupied with Joe and a diaper upstairs, so Charlie left the kitchen and hurried through the
house to answer the door. Four men in off-white cotton pants and shirts stood on the stoop, like visitors
from Calcutta; only their vests were the maroon color Charlie associated with Tibetan monks. Joe had
run to the top of the stairs, and he grabbed a banister to keep his balance, agog at the sight of them. In
the living room Nick was struck shy, his nose quickly back into his book, but he was glancing over the
top of it frequently as the strangers were ushered in and made comfortable around him. Charlie offered
them drinks, and they accepted beers, and when he came back with those, Anna and Joe were
downstairs and had joined the fun. Two of their visitors sat on the living room floor, laughing off AnnaтАЩs
offer of the little couches, and they all put their beer bottles on the coffee table.

The oldest monk and the youngest one leaned back against the radiator, down at JoeтАЩs level, and soon
they were engaged with his vast collection of blocksтАФa heaping mound of plain or painted cubes,
rhomboids, cylinders and other polygons, which they quickly assembled into walls and towers, working
with and around JoeтАЩs Godzilla-like interventions.

The young one, Drepung, answered AnnaтАЩs questions directly, and also translated for the oldest one,
named Rudra Cakrin. Rudra was the official ambassador of Khembalung, but while he was without
English, apparently, his two middle-aged associates, Sucandra and Padma Sambhava, spoke it pretty
wellтАФnot as well as Drepung, but adequately.

These two followed Charlie back out into the kitchen and stood there, beer bottles in hand, talking to
him as he cooked. They stirred the unkilled pasta to keep the pot from boiling over, checked out the
spices in the spice rack, and stuck their noses deep into the saucepot, sniffing with great interest and
appreciation. Charlie found them surprisingly easy to talk to. They were about his age. Both had been
born in Tibet, and both had spent years, they did not say how many, imprisoned by the Chinese, like so
many other Tibetan Buddhist monks. They had met in prison, and after their release they had crossed the
Himalayas and escaped Tibet together, afterward making their way gradually to Khembalung.

тАЬAmazing,тАЭ Charlie kept saying to their stories. He could not help but compare these to his own
relatively straightforward and serene passage through the years. тАЬAnd now, after all that, youтАЩre getting