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

lettering printed on the plastic: Isidis Planitia Polymers . Through the sycamores over his
shoulder he could still see the platform at the apex. John and Maya and their cluster of
terran admirers were still there, talking animatedly. Conducting the business of the planet.
Deciding the fate of Mars.

He stopped breathing. He felt the pressure of his molars squeezing together. He
poked the tent wall so hard that he pushed out the outermost membrane, which meant that
some of his anger would be captured and stored as electricity in the town's grid. It was a
special polymer in that respect; carbon atoms were linked to hydrogen and fluorine atoms
in such a way that the resulting substance was even more piezoelectric than quartz.
Change one element of the three, however, and everything shifted; substitute chlorine for
fluorine, for instance, and you had saran wrap.

Frank stared at his wrapped hand, then up again at the other two elements, still
bonded to each other. But without him they were nothing!

Angrily he walked into the narrow streets of the city.

###

Clustered in a plaza like mussels on a rock were a group of Arabs, drinking coffee.
Arabs had arrived on Mars only ten years before, but already they were a force to be
reckoned with. They had a lot of money, and they had teamed up with the Swiss to build a
number of towns, including this one. And they liked it on Mars. “It's like a cold day in the
Empty Quarter,” as the Saudis said. The similarity was such that Arabic words were
slipping quickly into English, because Arabic had a larger vocabulary for this landscape:
akaba for the steep final slopes around volcanoes, badia for the great world dunes,
nefuds for deep sand, seyl for the billion year-old dry river beds. . . people were saying
they might as well switch over to Arabic and have done with it.

Frank had spent a fair bit of time with Arabs, and the men in the plaza were pleased
to see him. “Salaam aleyk !” they said to him, and he replied, “Marhabba !” White teeth
flashed under black moustaches. Only men present, as usual. Some youths led him to a
central table where the older men sat, including his friend Zeyk. Zeyk said, “We are going
to call this square Hajr el-kra Meshab , ‘the red granite open place in town.' " He gestured
at the rust-colored flagstones. Frank nodded and asked what kind of stone it was. He
spoke Arabic for as long as he could, pushing the edges of his ability and getting some
good laughs in response. Then he sat at the central table and relaxed, feeling like he
could have been on a street in Damascus or Cairo, comfortable in the wash of Arabic and
expensive cologne.

He studied the men’s faces as they talked. An alien culture, no doubt about it. They
weren’t going to change just because they were on Mars, they put the lie to John’s vision.
Their thinking clashed radically with Western thought; for instance the separation of church
and state was wrong to them, making it impossible for them to agree with Westerners on
the very basis of government. And they were so patriarchal that some of their women
were said to be illiterate—illiterates, on Mars! That was a sign. And indeed these men
had the dangerous look that Frank associated with machismo , the look of men who
oppressed their women so cruelly that naturally the women struck back where they could,
terrorizing sons who then terrorized wives who terrorized sons and so on and so on, in an