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

opponent over and over.

In traffic, at work, in relationships of every kindтАФsocial life was nothing but a series of prisonersтАЩ
dilemmas. Compete or cooperate? Be selfish or generous? It would be best if you could always trust
other players to cooperate, and safely practice always generous; but in real life people did not turn out to
earn that trust. That was one of the great shocks of adolescence, perhaps, that realization; which alas
came to many at an even younger age. And after that you had to work things out case by case, your
strategy a matter of your history, or your personality, who could say.

Traffic was not a good place to try to decide. Stop and go, stop and go, at a speed just faster than
Frank could have walked. He wondered how it was that certain turn-signal indicators managed to
express a great desperation to change lanes, while others seemed patient and dignified. The speed of
blinking, perhaps, or how close the car hugged the lane line it wanted to cross. Although rapid blinking
did look insistent and whiny, while slow blinking bespoke a determined inertia.
 It had been a bad mistake to get on the Beltway in the first place. By and large Beltway drivers were
defectors. In general, drivers on the East Coast were less generous than Californians, Frank found. On
the West Coast they played tit for tat, or even firm but fair, because it moved things along faster. Maybe
this only meant Californians had lived through that many more freeway traffic jams. People had learned
the game from birth, sitting in their baby seats, and so in California cars in two merging lanes would
alternate like the halves of a zipper, at considerable speed, everyone trusting everyone else to know the
game and play it right. Even young males cooperated. In that sense if none other, California was indeed
the edge of history, the evolutionary edge ofHomo automobilicus.

Here on the Beltway, on the other hand, it was always defect. That was what all the SUVs were about,
everyone girding up to get one point in a crash. Every SUV was a defection. Then there were the little
cars that always gave way, the saps. A terrible combination. It was so slow, so unnecessarily,
unobservantly slow. It made you want to scream.

And from time to time, Frank did scream. This was a different primate satisfaction of traffic: you could
loudly curse people from ten feet away and they did not hear you. There was no way the primate brain
could explain this, so it was like witnessing magic, the тАЬtechnological sublimeтАЭ people spoke of, which
was the emotion experienced when the primate mind could not find a natural explanation for what it saw.

And it was indeed sublime to lose all restraint and justcurse someone ferociously, from a few feet away,
and yet have no ramifications to such a grave social transgression. It was not much compared to the
satisfactions of cooperation, but perhaps rarer. It was something, anyway.

He crept forward in his car, cursing. He should not have gotten onto the Beltway. It was often badly
overloaded at this hour. Stop and go, inch along. Curse defectors and saps. Inch along.

It stayed so bad that Frank realized he was going to be late to work. And this was the morning when his
bioinformatics panel was to begin! He needed to get there for the panel to start on time; there was no
slack in the schedule. The panel members were all in town, having spent a boring night the night before,
probably. And the Holiday Inn in the Ballston complex often did not have enough hot water to supply
everyone showering at that hour of the morning, so some of the panelists would be grumpy about that.
Some would be gathering at this very moment in their third floor conference room, ready to go and
feeling that there wasnтАЩt enough time to judge all the proposals on the docket. Frank had crowded it on
purpose, and they had flights home late the next day that they could not miss. To arrive late in this
situation would be bad form indeed, no matter traffic on the Beltway. There would be looks, or perhaps
a joke or two from Pritchard or Lee; he would have to explain himself, make excuses. It could interfere