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

Finally a tall young woman stood up and walked down the aisle, and gave Ann a
hug. The spell was broken; words were abandoned; they got to their feet and
clustered in the open space at the front of the train, around Ann, and hugged
her, or shook her hand-or simply touched her, Ann Clayborne, the one who had
taught them to love Mars for itself, who had led them in the struggle for its
independence from Earth. And though her bloodshot eyes were still fixed,
gazing through them at the rocky battered expanse of the Tyrrhena massif, she
was smiling. She hugged them back, she shook their hands, she reached up to
touch their faces. It will be all right, she said. We will make Mars free. And
they said yes, and congratulated each other. On to Sheffield, they said.
Finish the job. Mars will show us how.
Except she's not dead, the young man objected. I saw her last month in
Arcadia. She'll show up again. She'll show up somewhere.




At a certain moment before dawn the sky always glowed the same bands of pink
as in the beginning, pale and clear in the east, rich and starry in the west.
Ann watched for this moment as her companions drove them west, toward a mass
of black land rearing into the sky-the Tharsis Bulge, punctuated by the broad
cone of Pavonis Mons. As they rolled uphill from Noctis Labyrinthus they rose
above most of the new atmosphere; the air pressure at the foot of Pavonis was
only 180 millibars, and then as they drove up the eastern flank of the great
shield volcano it dropped under 100 millibars, and continued to fall. Slowly
they ascended above all visible foliage, crunching over dirty patches of wind-
carved snow; then they ascended above even the snow, until there was nothing
but rock, and the ceaseless thin cold winds of the jet stream. The bare land
looked just as it had in the prehuman years, as if they were driving back up
into the past.
It wasn't so. But something fundamental in Ann Clay-borne warmed at the sight
of this ferric world, stone on rock in the perpetual wind, and as the Red cars
rolled up the mountain all their occupants grew as rapt as Ann, the cabins
falling silent as the sun cracked the distant horizon behind them.
Then the slope they ascended grew less steep, in a perfect sine curve, until
they were on the flat land of the round summit plateau. Here they saw tent
towns ringing the edge of the giant caldera, clustered in particular around
the foot of the space elevator, some thirty kilometers to the south of them.




They stopped their cars. The silence in the cabins had shifted from reverent
to grim. Ann stood at one upper-cabin window, looking south toward Sheffield,
that child of the space elevator: built because of the elevator, smashed flat
when the elevator fell, built again with the elevator's replacement. This was
the city she had come to destroy, as thoroughly as Rome had Carthage; for she
meant to bring down the replacement cable too, just as they had the first one
in 2061. When they did that, much of Sheffield would again be flattened. What
remained would be located uselessly on the peak of a high volcano, above most