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

Copyright © 1992 by Kim Stanley Robinson. All rights reserved. Published under arrangement
with Bantam Books, a division of Bantam/Doubleday/Dell Publishing Group Inc. For the personal
use of those who have purchased the ESF 1993 Award anthology only.

Red Mars

Kim Stanley Robinson


Part One

Festival Night

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Mars was empty before we came. That's not to say that nothing had
ever happened. The planet had accreted, melted, roiled and cooled,
leaving a surface scarred by enormous geological features: craters,
canyons, volcanoes. But all of that happened in mineral unconsciousness,
and unobserved. There were no witnesses—except for us, looking from
the planet next door, and that only in the last moment of its long history.
We are all the consciousness that Mars has ever had.
Now everybody knows the history of Mars in the human mind: how
for all the generations of prehistory it was one of the chief lights in the sky,
because of its redness and fluctuating intensity, and the way it stalled in its
wandering course through the stars, and sometimes even reversed
direction. It seemed to be saying something with all that. So perhaps it is
not surprising that all the oldest names for Mars have a peculiar weight on
the tongue—Nirgal, Mangala, Auqakuh, Harmakhis— they sound as if
they were even older than the ancient languages we find them in, as if they
were fossil words from the Ice Age or before. Yes, for thou sands of years
Mars was a sacred power in human affairs; and its color made it a
dangerous power, representing blood, anger, war and the heart.
Then the first telescopes gave us a closer look, and we saw the little
orange disk, with its white poles and dark patches spreading and shrinking
as the long seasons passed. No improvement in the technology of the
telescope ever gave us much more than that; but the best Earthbound
images gave Lowell enough blurs to inspire a story, the story we all know,
of a dying world and a heroic people, desperately building canals to hold
off the final deadly encroachment of the desert.
It was a great story. But then Mariner and Viking sent back their
photos, and everything changed. Our knowledge of Mars expanded by
magnitudes, we literally knew millions of times more about this planet than
we had before. And there before us flew a new world, a world
unsuspected.
It seemed, however, to be a world without life. People searched for
signs of past or present Martian life, anything from microbes to the
doomed canal-builders, or even alien visitors. As you know, no evidence
for any of these has ever been found. And so stories have naturally
blossomed to fill the gap, just as in Lowell's time, or in Homer's, or in the