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

nearby. Next door was a U.S. Marine Corps rifle training facility. The oceanographers asked the
Marines for the land, and the Marines said yes. Donated land, just like Washington, D.C., but in this case
a eucalyptus grove on a sea cliff, high over the Pacific.

The University of California, San Diego.

By then California had become a crossroads, east and west all met together, San Francisco the great
city, Hollywood the dream machine. UCSD was the lucky child of all that, Athena leaping out of the tall
forehead of the state. Prominent scientists came from everywhere to start it, caught by the siren song of a
new start on a Mediterranean edge to the world.

They founded a school and helped to invent a technology: biotech, AthenaтАЩs gift to humankind.
University as teacher and doctor too, owned by the people, no profit skimmed off. A public project in an
ever-more-privatized world, tough and determined, benign in intent but very intent. What does it mean to
give?




FRANK CONSIDERED adding a postscript to Yann PierzinskiтАЩs Form Seven, suggesting that he
pursue internal support at Torrey Pines Generique. Then he decided it would be better to work through
Derek Gaspar. He could do it in person during the trip he was making to San Diego to prepare for his
move back.

A week later he was off. On the first flight west he fell asleep watching a DVD. Transfer at Dallas, a
good people-watching airport, then up into the air again, and back to sleep.

He woke when he felt the plane tilt down. They were still over Arizona, its huge baked landforms
flowing by underneath. A part of Frank that had been asleep for much longer than the nap began to wake
up too: he was returning to home ground. It was amazing the way things changed when you crossed to
the dry side of the ten-inches-of-rain-a-year isobar. Frank put his forehead against the inner window of
the plane, looked ahead to the next burnt range coming into view. Thought to himself, IтАЩll go surfing.

The pale umber of the Mojave gave way to Southern CaliforniaтАЩs big scrubby coastal mountains. West
of those suburbia hove into view, spilling eastward on filled valleys and shaved hilltops: greater San
Diego, bigger all the time. He could see bulldozers busy scraping platforms of flat soil for the newest
neighborhood. Freeways glittering with their arterial flow.

FrankтАЩs plane slowed and drifted down, past the last peaks and over the city proper. DowntownтАЩs
cluster of glassy skyscrapers came into view immediately to the left of the plane, seemingly at about the
same height. Those buildings had been FrankтАЩs workplace for a time when he was young, and he
watched them as he would any old home. He knew exactly which buildings he had climbed; they were
etched on his mind. That had been a good year. Disgusted with his advisor, he had taken a leave of
absence from graduate school, and after a season of climbing in Yosemite and living at Camp Four, he
had run out of money and decided to do something for a living that would require his physical skills and
not his intellectual ones. A young personтАЩs mistake, although at least he had not thought he could make
his living as a professional climber. But the same skills were needed for the work of skyscraper window
maintenance; not just window washing, which he had also done, but repair and replacement. It had been
an odd but wonderful thing, going off the roofs of those buildings and descending their sides to clean
windows, repair leaking caulk and flashing, replace cracked panes, and so on. The climbing was