"Нейл Стефенсон. Snow Crash (Снежная лавина, англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

kind of radical changes since their first year in college.
But then he went back to visit his father in one of those Army towns
and ran into the high school prom queen. She had grown up shockingly fast
into an overweight dame with loud hair and loud clothes who speed-read the
tabloids at the check-out line in the commissary because she didn't have the
spare money to buy them, who popped her gum and had two kids that she didn't
have the energy or the foresight to discipline.
Seeing this woman at the commissary, he finally went through a belated,
dim-witted epiphany, not a brilliant light shining down from heaven, more
like the brown glimmer of a half-dead flashlight from the top of a
stepladder: Juanita hadn't really changed much at all since those days, just
grown into herself. It was he who had changed. Radically.
He came into her office once, strictly on a business matter. Until this
point, they had seen each other around the office a lot
NEAL STEPHENSON
but acted like they had never met before. But when he came into her
office that day, she told him to close the door behind him, and she blacked
out the screen on her computer and started twiddling a pencil between her
hands and eyed him like a plate of day-old sushi. Behind heron the wall was
an amateurish painting of an old lady, set in an ornate antique frame. It
was the only decoration in Juanita's offIce. All the other hackers had color
photographs of the space shuttle lifting off, or posters of the starship
Enterprise.
"It's my late grandmother, may God have mercy on her soul," she said,
watching him look at the painting. "My role model."
"Why? Was she a programmer?"
She just looked at him over the rotating pencil like, how slow can a
mammal be and still have respiratory functions? But instead of lowering the
boom on him, she just gave a simple answer~ "No." Then she gave a more
complicated answer. "When I was fifteen years old, 1 missed a period. My
boyfriend and I were using a diaphragm, but I knew it was fallible. I was
good at math, I had the failure rate memorized, burnt into my subconscious.
Or maybe it was my conscious, I can never keep them straight. Anyway, I was
terrified. Our family dog started treating me differently-supposedly, they
can smell a pregnant woman. Or a pregnant bitch, for that matter."
By this point, Hiro's face was frozen in a wary, astonished position
that Juanita later made extensive use of in her work. Because, as she was
talking to him, she was watching his face, analyzing the way the little
muscles in his forehead pulled his brows up and made his eyes change shape.
"My mother was clueless. My boyfriend was worse than clue-less-in fact,
I ditched him on the spot, because it made me realize what an alien the guy
was-like many members of your species." By this, she was referring to males.
"Anyway, my grandmother came to visit," she continued, glancing back
over her shoulder at the painting. "I avoided her until we all sat down for
dinner. And then she figured out the whole situation in, maybe, ten minutes,
just by watching my face across the dinner table. I didn't say more than ten
words-'Pass the tortillas.' I don't know how my face conveyed that
information, or what kind of internal wiring in my grandmother's mind
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SNOW CRASH