"Kim Stanley Robinson - Mars 1 - Red Mars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

Red Mars
Kim Stanley Robinson


Part One

Festival Night



Mars was empty before we came. That's not to say that nothing had ever
happened. The planet had accreted, melted, roiled and cooled, leaving a surface
scarred by enormous geological features: craters, canyons, volcanoes. But all of that
happened in mineral unconsciousness, and unobserved. There were no
witnesses—except for us, looking from the planet next door, and that only in the last
moment of its long history. We are all the consciousness that Mars has ever had.

Now everybody knows the history of Mars in the human mind: how for all the
generations of prehistory it was one of the chief lights in the sky, because of its redness
and fluctuating intensity, and the way it stalled in its wandering course through the stars,
and sometimes even reversed direction. It seemed to be saying something with all that.
So perhaps it is not surprising that all the oldest names for Mars have a peculiar weight
on the tongue—Nirgal, Mangala, Auqakuh, Harmakhis— they sound as if they were
even older than the ancient languages we find them in, as if they were fossil words from
the Ice Age or before. Yes, for thou sands of years Mars was a sacred power in human
affairs; and its color made it a dangerous power, representing blood, anger, war and the
heart.

Then the first telescopes gave us a closer look, and we saw the little orange disk,
with its white poles and dark patches spreading and shrinking as the long seasons
passed. No improvement in the technology of the telescope ever gave us much more
than that; but the best Earthbound images gave Lowell enough blurs to inspire a story,
the story we all know, of a dying world and a heroic people, desperately building canals
to hold off the final deadly encroachment of the desert.

It was a great story. But then Mariner and Viking sent back their photos, and
everything changed. Our knowledge of Mars expanded by magnitudes, we literally
knew millions of times more about this planet than we had before. And there before us
flew a new world, a world unsuspected.

It seemed, however, to be a world without life. People searched for signs of past or
present Martian life, anything from microbes to the doomed canal-builders, or even
alien visitors. As you know, no evidence for any of these has ever been found. And so
stories have naturally blossomed to fill the gap, just as in Lowell's time, or in Homer's, or
in the caves or on the savannah—stories of microfossils wrecked by our bio-organisms,
of ruins found in dust storms and then lost forever, of Big Man and all his adventures, of
the elusive little red people, always glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. And all of
these tales are told in an attempt to give Mars life, or to bring it to life. Because we are
still those animals who survived the Ice Age, and looked up at the night sky in wonder,
and told stories. And Mars has never ceased to be what it was to us from our very