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

"It's a good location," she agreed.
"It will be a great city," Frank predicted. "But where do you live
these days, Maya?"
"In Underhill, Frank, just as always. You know that."
"But you're never there, are you? I haven't seen you in a year or
more."
"Has it been that long? Well, I've been in Hellas. Surely you heard?"
"Who would tell me?"
She shook her head and blue sequins glittered. "Frank." She turned
aside, as if to walk away from the question's implications.
Angrily Frank circled her, stood in her path. "That time on the Ares,"
he said. His voice was tight, and he twisted his neck to loosen his throat,
to make speech easier. "What happened, Maya? What happened?"
She shrugged and did not meet his gaze. For a long time she did not
speak. Then she looked at him. "The spur of the moment," she said.
# # #
And then it was ringing midnight, and they were in the martian time
slip, the thirty-nine and a half minute gap between 12:00:00 and 12:00:01,
when all the clocks went blank or stopped moving. This was how the first
hundred had decided to reconcile Mars's slightly longer day with the
twenty-four hour clock, and the solution had proved oddly satisfactory.
Every night to step for a while out of the flicking numbers, out of the
remorseless sweep of the second hand…
And tonight as the bells rang midnight, the whole city went mad.
Forty minutes outside of time; it was bound to be the peak of the
celebration, everyone knew that instinctively. Fireworks were going off,
people were cheering; sirens tore through the sound, and the cheering
redoubled. Frank and Maya watched the fireworks, listened to the noise.
Then there was a noise that was somehow different: desperate cries,
serious screams. "What's that?" Maya said.
"A fight," Frank replied, cocking an ear. "Something done on the
spur of the moment, perhaps." She stared at him, and quickly he added,
"Maybe we should go have a look."
The cries intensified. Trouble somewhere. They started down
through the park, their steps getting longer, until they were in the martian
lope. The park seemed bigger to Frank, and for a moment he was scared.
The central boulevard was covered with trash. People darted through
the dark in predatory schools. A nerve-grating siren went off, the alarm
that signaled a break in the tent. Windows were shattering up and down
the boulevard. There on the streetgrass was a man flat on his back, the
surrounding grass smeared with black streaks. Chalmers seized the arm of
a woman crouched over him. "What happened?" he shouted.
She was weeping. "They fought! They are fighting!"
"Who? Swiss, Arab?"
"Strangers," she said. "Auslдnder." She looked blindly at Frank.
"Get help!"
Frank rejoined Maya, who was talking to a group next to another
fallen figure. "What the hell's going on?" he said to her as they took off
toward the city's hospital.
"It's a riot," she said. "I don't know why." Her mouth was a straight