"Kim Stanley Robinson - Mars 2 - Blue Mars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

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Blue
----------Mars

Kim Stanley Robinson




PART ONE
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---Peacock Mountain
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Mars is free now. We're on our own. No one tells us what to do.
Ann stood at the front of the train as she said this.
But it's so easy to backslide into old patterns of behavior. Break one
hierarchy and another springs up to take its place. We will have to be on
guard for that, because there will always be people trying to make another
Earth. The areophany will have to be ceaseless, an eternal struggle. We will
have to think harder than ever before what it means to be Martian.
Her listeners sat slumped in chairs, looking out the windows at the terrain
flowing by. They were tired, their eyes were scoured. Red-eyed Reds. In the
harsh dawn light everything looked new, the windswept land outside bare except
for a khaki scree of lichen and scrub. They had kicked all Earthly power off
Mars, it had been a long campaign, capped by a burst of furious action
following the great flood on Terra; and they were tired.
We came from Earth to Mars, and in that passage there was a certain
purification. Things were easier to see, there was a freedom of action that we
had not had before. A chance to express the best part of ourselves. So we
acted. We are making a better way to live.
This was' the myth, they had all grown up with it. Now as Ann told it to them
again, the young Martians stared through her. They had engineered the
revolution, they had fought all over Mars, and pushed the Terran police into
Burroughs; then they had drowned Burroughs, and chased the Tenons up to
Sheffield, on Pavonis Mons. They still had to force the enemy out of
Sheffield, up the space cable and back to Terra; there was work still to be
done. But in the successful evacuation of Burroughs they had won a great
victory, and some of the blank faces staring at Ann or out the window seemed
to want a break, a moment for triumph. They were all exhausted.
Hiroko will help us, a young man said, breaking the silence of the train's
levitation over the land.
Ann shook her head. Hiroko is a green, she said, the original green.
Hiroko invented the areophany, the young native countered. That's her first
concern: Mars. She will help us, I know. I met her. She told me.
Except she's dead, someone else said.
Another silence. The world flowed under them.