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

generations pass, all the members of a biosphere evolve together, adapting to their terrain in a complex
communal response, a creative self-designing ability. This process, no matter how much we intervene in
it, is essentially out of our control. Genes mutate, creatures evolve: a new biosphere emerges, and with it
a new noosphere. And eventually the designers’ minds, along with everything else, have been forever
changed.

This is the process of areoformation.




One day the sky fell. Plates of ice crashed into the lake, and then started thumping on the beach. The
children scattered like frightened sandpipers. Nirgal ran over the dunes to the village and burst into the
greenhouse, shouting, “The sky is falling, the sky is falling!” Peter sprinted out the doors and across the
dunes faster than Nirgal could follow.

Back on the beach great panes of ice stabbed the sand, and some chunks of dry ice fizzed in the water
of the lake. When the children were all clumped around him Peter stood with his head craned back,
staring at the dome so far above. “Back to the village,” he said in his no-nonsense tone. On the way there
he laughed. “The sky is falling!” he squeaked, tousling Nirgal’s hair. Nirgal blushed and Dao and Jackie
laughed, their frosted breath shooting out in quick white plumes.

Peter was one of those who climbed the side of the dome to repair it. He and Kasei and Michel
spidered over the village in sight of all, over the beach and then the lake until they were smaller than
children, hanging in slings from ropes attached to icehooks. They sprayed the flaw in the dome with water
until it froze into a new clear layer, coating the white dry ice. When they came down they talked of the
warming world outside. Hiroko had emerged from her little bamboo stand by the lake to watch, and
Nirgal said to her, “Will we have to leave?”

“We will always have to leave,” Hiroko said. “Nothing on Mars will last.”



But Nirgal liked it under the dome. In the morning he woke in his own round bamboo room, high in
Creche Crescent, and ran down to the frosty dunes with Jackie and Rachel and Frantz and the other
early risers. He saw Hiroko on the far shore, walking the beach like a dancer, floating over her own wet
reflection. He wanted to go to her but it was time for school.

They went back to the village and crowded into the schoolhouse coatroom, hanging up their down
jackets and standing with their blue hands stretched over the heating grate, waiting for the day’s teacher.
It could be Dr. Robot and they would be bored senseless, counting his blinks like the seconds on the
clock. It could be the Good Witch, old and ugly, and then they would be back outside building all day,
exuberant with the joy of tools. Or it could be the Bad Witch, old and beautiful; and they would be stuck
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before their lecterns all morning trying to think in Russian, in danger of a rap on the hand if they giggled or
fell asleep. The Bad Witch had silver hair and a fierce glare and a hooked nose, like the ospreys that