"Geoffrey A. Landis - Ecopoiesis" - читать интересную книгу автора (Landis Geoffrey A)

Ecopoiesis



Geoffrey A. Landis




First published in Science Fiction Age May 1997




"I wonder why they call this the red planet?" I asked. The rebreather made my

voice sound funny in my ears. "Looks like the brown planet to me."

"You got a problem with brown, boy?" Tally said. Her voice was muffled by the

rebreather she wore as well.

I turned, but Tally wasn't looking at me; she was watching the opposite

direction, standing in a half crouch. That position surely couldn't be

comfortable, but for her it looked completely easy and natural. Her head turned

with a quick birdlike grace to glance now one way, now the other. Guarding our

backs, I realized. Against what?

"Nothing wrong with brown, my opinion," she said.

The more my eyes got used to the terrain, the more colors came out. Brown, yes,

barren rocky brown plains and brown buttes and a brown stream frothing over a

tiny waterfall. The hills were sharp-edged, looking as if they had been blasted
out of bedrock the day before, barely touched by erosion. But in the brown was

hints of other colors; a sheen of dark, almost purple, echoing the purple-grey

of the cloudy sky, and even patches on the rocks where the amber shaded off to

almost army green.

"It's beautiful, isn't it," said Leah Hamakawa. She was, as always, two steps

ahead of us. She was down on one knee in the dirt, her nose right up against a