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

painfully after what he was trying to say, and then as often as not came out
with something scarcely coherent.
"The elevator is a, a device. For ... raising up. A ... a tool."
"Not if we don't control it," Ann said to him carefully, as if instructing a
child.
"Control..." Sax said, thinking over the concept as if it were entirely new to
him. "Influence? If the elevator can be brought down by anyone who really
wants to, then ..." He trailed away, lost in his thoughts.
"Then what?" Ann prompted.
"Then it's controlled by all. Consensual existence. It's obvious?"
It was as if he were translating from a foreign language. This was not Sax;
Ann could only shake her head, and try gently to explain. The elevator was the
conduit for the metanationals to reach Mars, she told him. It was in the
possession of the metanats now, and the revolutionaries had no means to kick
their police forces off of it. Clearly the thing to do in such a situation was
to bring it down. Warn people, give them a schedule, and then do it. "Loss of
life would be minimal, and what there was would be pretty much the fault of
anyone so stupid as to stay on the cable, or the equator."
Unfortunately Nadia heard this from the middle of the room, and she shook her
head so violently that her cropped gray locks flew out like a clown's ruff.
She was still very angry with Ann over Burroughs, for no good reason at all,
and so Ann glared at her as she walked over to them and said curtly, "We need
the elevator. It's our conduit to Terra just as much as it's their conduit to
Mars."
"But we don't need a conduit to Terra," Ann said. "It's not a physical
relationship for us, don't you see? I'm not saying we don't need to have an
influence on Terra, I'm not an isolationist like Kasei or Coyote. I agree we
need to try to work on them. But it's not a physical thing, don't you see?
It's a matter of ideas, of talk, and perhaps a few emissaries. It's an
information exchange. At least it is when it's going right. It's when it gets
into a physical thing-a resource exchange, or mass emigration, or police
control- that's when the elevator becomes useful, even necessary. So if we
took it down we would be saying, we will deal with you on our terms, and not
yours."
It was so obvious. But Nadia shook her head, at what Ann couldn't imagine.
Sax cleared his throat, and in his old periodic-table style said, "If we can
bring it down, then in effect it is as if it already were down," blinking and
everything. Like a ghost suddenly there at her side, the voice of the
terraforming, the enemy she had lost to time and time again-Saxifrage Russell
his own self, same as ever. And all she could do was make the same arguments
she always had, the losing arguments, feeling the words' inadequacy right in
her mouth.
Still she tried. "People act on what's there, Sax. The meta-nat directors and
the UN and the governments will look up and see what's there, and act
accordingly. If the cable's gone they just don't have the resources or the
time to mess with us right now. If the cable's here, then they'll want us.
They'll think, well, we could do it. And there'll be people screaming to try."
"They can always come. The cable is only a fuel saver."
"A fuel saver which makes mass transfers possible."
But now Sax was distracted, and turning back into a stranger. No one would pay