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

so much they couldn’t talk clearly. “You kids sure get cold easy,” he said. “All but Nirgal.”

Nirgal was good with cold. He knew intimately all its many stages, and he did not dislike the feel of it.
People who disliked cold did not understand that one could adjust to it, that its bad effects could all be
dealt with by a sufficient push from within. Nirgal was very familiar with heat as well. If you pushed heat
out hard enough, then cold only became a sort of vivid shocking envelope in which you moved. And so
cold’s ultimate effect was as a stimulant, making you want to run.

“Hey Nirgal, what’s the air temperature?”

“Two seventy-one.”

Coyote’s laugh was scary, an animal cackle that included all the noises anything could make. Different
every time too. “Here, let’s stop the wave machine and see what the lake looks like flat.”

The water of the lake was always liquid, while the water ice coating the underside of the dome had to
stay frozen. This explained most of their mesocosmic weather, as Sax put it, giving them their mists and
sudden winds, their rain and fog and occasional snow. On this day the weather machine was almost
silent, the big hemisphere of space under the dome nearly windless. With the wave machine turned off,
the lake soon settled down to a round flat plate. The surface of the water became the same white color
as the dome, but the lake bottom, covered by green algae, was still visible through the white sheen. So
the lake was simultaneously pure white and dark green. On the far shore the dunes and scrub pines were
reflected upside down in this two-toned water, as perfectly as in any mirror. Nirgal stared at the sight,
entranced, everything falling away, nothing there but this pulsing green/white vision. He saw: there were
two worlds, not one—two worlds in the same space, both visible, separate and different but collapsed
together, so that they were visible as two only at certain angles. Push at vision’s envelope, push like one
pushed against the envelope of cold: push.’ Such colors! ...

“Mars to Nirgal, Mars to Nirgal!”

They laughed at him. He was always doing that, they told him. Going off. His friends were fond of him,
he saw that in their faces.

Coyote broke chips of flat ice from the strand, then skipped them across the lake. All of them did the
same, until the intersecting white-green ripples made the upside-down world shiver and dance. “Look at
that!” Coyote shouted. Between throws he chanted, in his bouncing English that was like a perpetual
song: “You kids are living the best lives in history, most people just fluid in the great world machine, and
here you’re in on the birth of a world! Unbelievable! But it’s pure luck you know, no credit to you, not
until you do something with it, you could have been bom in a mansion, a jail, a shantytown in Port of
Spain, but here you are in Zygote, the secret heart of Mars! ‘Course just now you’re down here like
moles in a hole, with vultures above all ready to eat you, but the day is coming when you walk this planet
free of every bond. You remember what I’m telling you, it’s prophecy my children! And meanwhile look
how fine it is, this little ice paradise.”

He threw a chip straight ‘at the dome, and they all chanted Ice Paradise! Ice Paradise! Ice Paradise!
until diey were helpless with laughter.