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

desolation," he said, "the human presence is, well, a remarkable thing"
(they would care for each other more than ever before, a voice in his mind
repeated sardonically). "The planet, taken in itself, is a dead frozen
nightmare" (therefore exotic and sublime), "and so thrown on our own, we
of necessity are in the process of… reorganizing a bit" (or forming a new
social order)—so that yes, yes, yes, he found himself proclaiming exactly
the same lies they had just heard from John!
Thus at the end of his speech he too got a big roar of applause.
Irritated, he announced it was time to eat, depriving Maya of her chance
for a final remark. Although probably she had known he would do that
and so hadn't bothered to think of any. Frank Chalmers liked to have the
last word.
# # #
People crowded onto the temporary platform to mingle with the
celebrities. It was rare to get this many of the first hundred in one spot
anymore, and people crowded around John and Maya, Samantha Hoyle,
Sax Russell and Chalmers.
Frank looked over the crowd at John and Maya. He didn't recognize
the group of Terrans surrounding them, which made him curious. He
made his way across the platform, and as he approached he saw Maya and
John give each other a look. "There's no reason this place shouldn't
function under normal law," one of the Terrans was saying.
Maya said to him, "Did Olympus Mons really remind you of Mauna
Loa?"
"Sure," the man said. "Shield volcanoes all look alike."
Frank stared over this idiot's head at Maya. She didn't acknowledge
the look. John was pretending not to have noticed Frank's arrival.
Samantha Hoyle was speaking to another man in an undertone, explaining
something; he nodded, then glanced involuntarily at Frank. Samantha kept
her back turned to him. But it was John who mattered, John and Maya.
And both were pretending that nothing was out of the ordinary; but the
topic of conversation, whatever it had been, had gone away.
# # #
Chalmers left the platform. People were still trooping down through
the park, toward tables that had been set in the upper ends of the seven
boulevards. Chalmers followed them, walking under young transplanted
sycamores; their khaki leaves colored the afternoon light, making the park
look like the bottom of an aquarium.
At the banquet tables construction workers were knocking back
vodka, getting rowdy, obscurely aware that with the construction finished,
the heroic age of Nicosia was ended. Perhaps that was true for all of Mars.
The air filled with overlapping conversations. Frank sank beneath the
turbulence, wandered out to the northern perimeter. He stopped at a waist-
high concrete coping: the city wall. Out of the metal stripping on its top
rose four layers of clear plastic. A Swiss man was explaining things to a
group of visitors, pointing happily.
"An outer membrane of piezoelectric plastic generates electricity from
wind. Then two sheets hold a layer of airgel insulation. Then the inner
layer is a radiation-capturing membrane, which turns purple and must be
replaced. More clear than a window, isn't it?"