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

But that night Coyote spoke to Hiroko, when he thought no one was listening. “Roko you got to take
those kids outside and show them the world. Even if it’s only under the fog hood. They’re like moles in a
hole down here, for Christ’s sake.” Then he was gone again, who knew where, off on one of his
mysterious journeys into that other world folded over them.
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Some days Hiroko came into the village to teach them. These to Nirgal were the best days of all. She
always took them down to the beach; and going to the beach with Hiroko was like being touched by a
god. It was her world—the green world inside the white—and she knew everything about it, and when
she was there the subtle pearly colors of sand and dome pulsed with both worlds’ colors at once, pulsed
as if trying to break free of what held them. They sat on the dunes, watching the shore birds skitter and
peep as they charged together up and down the strand. Gulls wheeled overhead and Hiroko asked them
questions, her black eyes twinkling merrily. She lived by the lake with a small group of her intimates,
Iwao, Rya, Gene, Evgenia, all in a little bamboo stand in the dunes. And she spent a lot of time visiting
other hidden sanctuaries around the South Pole. So she always needed catching up on the village news.
She was a slender woman, tall for one of the issei, as neat as the shore birds in her dress and her
movement. She was old, of course, impossibly ancient like all the issei, but with something in her manner
which made her seem younger than even Peter or Kasei—just a little bit older than the kids, in fact, with
everything in the world new before her, pushing to break into all its colors.

“Look at the pattern this seashell makes. The dappled whorl, curving inward to infinity. That’s the shape
of the universe itself. There’s a constant pressure, pushing toward pattern. A tendency in matter to evolve
into ever more complex forms. It’s a kind of pattern gravity, a holy greening power we call viriditas, and
it is the driving force in the cosmos. Life, you see. Like these sand fleas and limpets and krill—although
these krill in particular are dead, and helping the fleas. Like all of us,” waving a hand like a dancer. “And
because we are alive, the universe must be said to be alive. We are its consciousness as well as our own.
We rise out of the cosmos and we see its mesh of patterns, and it strikes us as beautiful. And that feeling
is the most important thing in all the universe—its culmination, like the color of the flower at first bloom on
a wet morning. It’s a holy feeling, and our task in this world is to do everything we can to foster it. And
one way to do that is to spread life everywhere. To aid it into existence where it was not before, as here
on Mars.”

This to her was the supreme act of love, and when she talked about it, even if they didn’t fully
understand, they felt the love. Another push, another kind of warmth in the envelope of cold. She
touched them as she talked, and they dug for shells as they listened. “Mud clam! Antarctic limpet. Glass
sponge, watch out, it can cut you.” It made Nirgal happy just to look at her.

And one morning, as they stood from their dig to do more beachcombing, she returned his gaze, and he
recognized her expression—it was precisely the expression on his face when he looked at her, he could
feel it in his muscles. So he made her happy too! Which was intoxicating.

He held her hand as they walked the beach. “It’s a simple ecology in some ways,” she said as they knelt
to inspect another clam shell. “Not many species, and the food chains are short. But so rich. So
beautiful.” She tested the temperature of the lake with her hand. “See the mist? The water must be warm
today.”