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

of the atmosphere; as time passed the surviving structures would be abandoned
and dismantled for salvage, leaving only the tent foundations, and perhaps, a
weather station, and, eventually, the long sunny silence of a mountain summit.
The salt was already in the ground.

A cheerful Tharsis Red named Irishka joined them in a small rover, and led
them through the maze of warehouses and small tents surrounding the
intersection of the equatorial piste with the one circling the rim. As they
followed her she described for them the local situation. Most of Sheffield and
the rest of the Pavonis rim settlements were already in the hands of the
Martian revolutionaries. But the space elevator and the neighborhood
surrounding its base complex were not, and there lay the difficulty. The
revolutionary forces on Pavonis were mostly poorly equipped militias, and they
did not necessarily share the same agenda. That they had succeeded as far as
they had was due to many factors: surprise, the control of Martian space,
several strategic victories, the support of the great majority of the Martian
population, and the unwillingness of the United Nations Transitional Authority
to fire on civilians, even when they were making mass demonstrations in the
streets. As a result the UNTA security forces had retreated from all over Mars
to regroup in Sheffield, and now most of them were in elevator cars, going up
to Clarke, the ballast asteroid and space station at the top of the elevator;
the rest were jammed into the neighborhood surrounding the elevator's massive
base complex, called the Socket. This district consisted of elevator support
facilities, industrial warehouses, and the hostels, dormitories, and
restaurants needed to house and feed the port's workforce. "Those are coming
in useful now," Irishka said, "because even so they're squeezed in like trash
in a compactor, and if there hadn't been food and shelter they would probably
have tried a breakout. As it is, things are still tense, but at least they can
live."
It somewhat resembled the situation just resolved in Burroughs, Ann thought.
Which had turned out fine. It only took someone willing to act and the thing
would be done- UNTA evacuated to Earth, the cable brought down, Mars's link to
Earth truly broken. And any attempt to erect a new cable could be balked
sometime in the ten years of orbital construction that it took to build one.
So Irishka led them through the jumble that was east Pavonis, and their little
caravan came to the rim of the caldera, where they parked their rovers. To the
south on the western edge of Sheffield they could just make out the elevator
cable, a line that was barely visible, and then only for a few kilometers out
of its 24,000. Nearly invisible, in fact, and yet its existence dominated
every move they made, every discussion-every thought they had, almost, speared
and strung out on that black thread connecting them to Earth.

When they were settled in their camp Ann called her son Peter on the wrist. He
was one of the leaders of the revolution on Tharsis, and had directed the
campaign against UNTA that had left its forces contained in the Socket and its
immediate neighborhood. A qualified victory at best, but it made Peter one of
the heroes of the previous month.
Now he answered the call and his face appeared on her wrist. He looked quite
like her, which she found disconcerting. He was absorbed, she saw,
concentrating on something other than her call.