"Vernor Vinge - Rainbows End" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vinge Vernor)

ever, the room lights swallowed up in darkness. Cara's bright voice was gone. She was off to study for
her classes, she said. No classes for Robert. The thug was feeding him. He still claimed to be Robert's
son. But he was so big. Afterward there was another ignominious potty stop, more like a police
interrogation than a trip to the can. And then Robert was left mercifully alone, in the darkness. These
people didn't even have television. There was just the silence, and the dim and faraway electric lights.

I should be sleepy. He had a vague memory of nights fading off into nights fading off into years, of
drowsing sleep that came right after dinner. And then later waking, walking through strange rooms and
trying to find home. Arguing with Lena. Tonight was... different. He was still awake. Tonight he was
thinking of things that had just happened. Maybe that was because he had made it partway home. Cara.
So he hadn't found his folks' house on Crombie Street and the bedroom that looked out on the old pine
tree and the little cabin he had built in its branches. But Cara was part of all that, and she was here. He
sat for a long time, his thoughts slowly crunching forward. Across the room, a single lamp was kind of a
whirlpool in the darkness. Barely visible, the thug was sitting by the wall. He was talking to someone, but
Robert couldn't see who.

Robert ignored the guy, and thought hard. After a while he remembered something very scary. Cara Gu
had died in 2006. They hadn't said a word to each other for years before that.

And when she died, Cara had been fifty-one years old.

West Fallbrook had been a handy place in the early years of the century. Busy too. Right next to Camp
Pendleton, it had been the base's largest civilian community. A new generation of marines had grown up
here... and prosecuted a new generation of war. Robert Gu, Jr., had seen the tail end of that frenzy,
arriving at a time when Chinese-American officers were welcomed back to positions of trust. Those had
been high and bittersweet days.
Now the town was bigger, but the marines weren't nearly such a large part of it. Military life had become
a lot more complicated. Between little bits of war, Lieutenant Colonel Gu found that West Fallbrook was
a nice place to raise a daughter.

"I still think it's a mistake for Miri to call him 'Robert.'" Alice Gu looked up from her work. "We've been
over this before, dear. It's how we've brought her up. We're 'Bob' and 'Alice,' not 'Ma' and 'Pa' or
whatever silliness is currently approved. And Robert is 'Robert,' not 'Grandpapa.' " Colonel Alice Gong
Gu was short and round-faced and тАФ when she wasn't deadly stressed тАФ motherly. She had graduated
numero uno from Annapolis, back when being short and round-faced and motherly were definite career
minuses. She'd be a general officer by now except that higher authority had discovered more productive
and dangerous work for her. That accounted for some of her kookie ideas. But not this one; she had
always insisted that Miri address her parents as if they were all just pals.

"Hey, Alice, I've never minded that Miri calls us by our first names. There'll come a time when besides
loving us, the Little General will also be our peer, maybe our boss. But this is just confusing my old man
тАФ " Bob jerked a thumb at where Robert Senior sat, half slumped and staring. "Play back the way Dad
was acting this afternoon. See how he lit up. He thinks Miri is my aunt Cara, when they were little kids!"

Alice didn't answer right away. Where she was, it was midmorning. Sunlight glittered off the harbor
behind her. She was running support for the U.S. delegation in Jakarta. Indonesia was joining the
Indo-European Alliance. Japan was already a member of that bizarrely named club. The joke was that
the "Indo-Europeans" would soon have the world surrounded. There was a time when China and the
U.S.A. would not have taken that as a joke. But the world had changed. Both China and the U.S. were
relieved by the development. It left them with more time to worry about real problems.