"Kim Stanley Robinson - Mars 03 - Blue Mars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

She stared at him. He must have listened to her more often than she had thought. "Yes."

His eyebrows came together as he thought it over. "It could cause a kind of ice age," he said.

"Good."

He stared at her as he thought about it. She could see him doing it, in quick flashes or bursts: ice age-thinner atmosphere-terraforming slowed-new ecosystems destroyed- perhaps compensate-greenhouse gases. And so on and so forth. It was almost funny how she could read this stranger's face, this hated brother looking for a way out. He would look and look, but heat was the main driver of terraforming, and with the huge orbiting array of mirrors in the soletta gone, they would be at least restricted to Mars's normal level of sunlight, thus slowed to a more "natural" pace. It was possible that the inherent stability of that approach even appealed to Sax's conservatism, such as it was.

"Okay," he said.

"You can speak for these people?" she said, waving disdainfully at the crowd behind them, as if all her oldest companions were not among them, as if they were UNTA technocrats or metanat functionaries....

"No," he said. "I only speak for me. But I can get rid of the soletta."

"You'd do it against their wishes?"

He frowned. "I think I can talk them into it. If not, I know I can talk the Da Vinci team into it. They like challenges."

"Okay."

It was the best she could get from him, after all. She straightened up, still nonplussed. She hadn't expected him to agree. And now that he had, she discovered that she was still angry, still sick at heart. This concession-now that she had it, it meant nothing. They would figure out other ways to heat things. Sax would make his argument using that point, no doubt. Give the soletta to Ann, he would say, as a way of buying off the Reds. Then forge on.

She walked out of the big room without a glance at the others. Out of the warehouses to her rover.

For a while she drove blindly, without any sense of where she was going. Just get away, just escape. Thus by accident she headed westward, and in short order she had to stop or run over the rim's edge.

Abruptly she braked the car.

In a daze she looked out the windshield. Bitter taste in her mouth, guts all knotted, every muscle tense and aching. The great encircling rim of the caldera was smoking at several points, chiefly from Sheffield and Lastflow, but also from a dozen other places as well. No sight of the cable over Sheffield-but it was still there, marked by a concentration of smoke around its base, lofting east on the thin hard wind. Another peak banner, blown on the endless jet stream. Time was a wind sweeping them away. The plumes of smoke marred the dark sky, obscuring some of the many stars that shone in the hour before sunset. It looked like the old volcano was waking again, rousing from its long dormancy and preparing to erupt. Through the thin smoke the sun was a dark red glowing ball, looking much like an early molten planet must have looked, its color staining the shreds of smoke maroon and rust and crimson. Red Mars.

But red Mars was gone, and gone for good. Soletta or not, ice age or not, the biosphere would grow and spread until it covered everything, with an ocean in the north, and lakes in the south, and streams, forests, prairies, cities and roads, oh she saw it all; white clouds raining mud on the ancient highlands while the uncaring masses built their cities as fast as they could, the long run-out of civilization burying her world.







PART TWO




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---Areophany