"Kim Stanley Robinson - Mars 3 - Green Mars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

and the hanging bridges connecting them.

The bamboo dorms made a crescent which held most of the rest of the village inside it; each of the big
shoots was five or seven segments high, each segment a room, getting smaller as they got higher. The
children each had a room of their own in the top segments of the shoots—windowed vertical cylinders
that were four or five steps across, like the towers of the castles in their stories. Below them in the middle
segments the adults had their rooms, mostly alone but sometimes in couples; and the bottom segments
were living rooms. From the windows of their top rooms they looked down on the village rooftops,
clustered in the circle of hills and bamboo and greenhouses like mussels in the lake shallows.

On the beach they hunted shells or played German dodgeball, or shot arrows across the dunes into
blocks of foam. Usually Jackie and Dao chose the games, and led the teams if there were teams. Nirgal
and the younger ones followed them, cycling through their various friendships and hierarchies, which were
honed endlessly in the daily play. As little Frantz once crudely explained it to Nadia, “Dao hits Nirgal;
Nirgal hits me; I hit the girls.” Often Nirgal got tired of that game, which Dao always won, and for better
fun he would take off running around the lake, slowly and steadily, falling into a rhythm which seemed to
encompass everything in the world. He could circle the lake for as long as the day lasted when he got in
that rhythm. It was a joy, an exhilaration, just to run and run and run and run…

Under the dome it was always cold, but the light was perpetually changing. In summer the dome glowed
bluish white all the time, and pencils of lit air stood under the skylight shafts. In winter it was dark, and the
dome flared with reflected lamplight, like the inside of a mussel shell. In spring and fall the light would dim
in the afternoon to a gray and ghostly dusk, the colors only suggested by the many shades of gray, the
bamboo leaves and pine needles all ink strokes against the faint white of the dome. In those hours the
greenhouses were like big fairy lamps on the hills, and the kids would wander home crisscrossing like
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gulls, and head for the bathhouse. There in the long building beside the kitchen they would pull off their
clothes and run into the steamy clangor of the big main bath, sliding around on the bottom tiles feeling
heat buzz back into their hands and feet and faces, as they splashed friskily around the soaking ancients
with their turtle faces and their wrinkled hairy bodies.

After that warm wet hour they dressed, and trooped into the kitchen, damp and pink-skinned, queueing
up and filling their plates, sitting at the long tables scattered among the adults. There were, 124 permanent
residents, but usually about 200 people there at any given time. When everyone was seated they took up
the water pitchers and poured each other’s water, and then they tore into the hot food with gusto,
downing potatoes, tortillas, pasta, tabouli, bread, a hundred kinds of vegetables, occasionally fish or
chicken. After the meal the adults would talk about crops or their Rickover, an old integral fast reactor
they were very fond of, or about Earth—while the kids cleaned up and then played music for an hour and
then games, as everyone began the slow process of falling asleep.



One day before dinner a group of twenty-two people arrived from around the polar cap. Their little
dome had lost its ecosystem to what Hiroko called spiraling complex disequilibrium, and their reserves
had run out. They needed sanctuary.