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

beginning—a great sign, a great symbol, a great power.

And so we came here. It had been a power; now it became a place.



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“. . . And so we came here. But what they didn’t realize was that by the time we got to
Mars, we would be so changed by the voyage out that nothing we had been told to do
mattered anymore. It wasn’t like submarining or settling the Wild West—it was an entirely
new experience , and as the flight of the Are s went on, the Earth finally became so distant
that it was nothing but a blue star among all the others, its voices so delayed that they
seemed to come from a previous century. We were on our own; and so we became
fundamentally different beings .”

All lies, Frank Chalmers thought irritably. He was sitting in a row of dignitaries,
watching his old friend John Boone give the usual Boone Inspirational Address. It made
Chalmers weary. The truth was, the trip to Mars had been the functional equivalent of a
long train ride. Not only had they not become fundamentally different beings, they had
actually become more like themselves than ever, stripped of habits until they were left with
nothing but the naked raw material of their selves. But John stood up there waving a
forefinger at the crowd, saying “We came here to make something new, and when we
arrived our earthly differences fell away, irrelevant in this new world!” Yes, he meant it all
literally. His vision of Mars was a lens that distorted everything he saw, a kind of religion.

Chalmers stopped listening and let his gaze wander over the new city. They were
going to call it Nicosia. It was the first town of any size to be built free-standing on the
martian surface; all the buildings were set inside what was in effect an immense clear tent,
supported by a nearly invisible frame, and placed on the rise of Tharsis, west of Noctis
Labyrinthus. This location gave it a tremendous view, with a distant western horizon
punctuated by the broad peak of Pavonis Mons. For the Mars veterans in the crowd it was
giddy stuff: they were on the surface, they were out of the trenches and mesas and
craters, they could see forever! Hurrah!

A laugh from the audience drew Frank’s attention back to his old friend. John Boone
had a slightly hoarse voice, and a friendly Midwestern accent, and he was by turns (and
somehow even all at once) relaxed, intense, sincere, self-mocking, modest, confident,
serious, and funny. In short, the perfect public speaker. And the audience was rapt; this
was the First Man On Mars speaking to them, and judging by the looks on their faces they
might as well have been watching Jesus produce their evening meal out of the loaves and
fishes. And in fact John almost deserved their adoration, for performing a similar miracle
on another plane, transforming their tin can existence into an astounding spiritual voyage.
"On Mars we will come to care for each other more than ever before,” John said, which
really meant, Chalmers thought, an alarming incidence of the kind of behavior seen in rat
overpopulation experiments; "Mars is a sublime, exotic and dangerous place,” said
John—meaning a frozen ball of oxidized rock on which they were exposed to about fifteen
rem a year; "And with our work," John continued, "we are carving out a new social order