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

The visitors agreed. Frank reached out and pushed at the inner
membrane. It stretched until his fingers were buried to the knuckles.
Slightly cool. There was faint white lettering printed on the plastic: Isidis
Planitia Polymers. Through the sycamores over his shoulder he could still
see the platform at the apex. John and Maya and their cluster of terran
admirers were still there, talking animatedly. Conducting the business of
the planet. Deciding the fate of Mars.
He stopped breathing. He felt the pressure of his molars squeezing
together. He poked the tent wall so hard that he pushed out the outermost
membrane, which meant that some of his anger would be captured and
stored as electricity in the town's grid. It was a special polymer in that
respect; carbon atoms were linked to hydrogen and fluorine atoms in such
a way that the resulting substance was even more piezoelectric than quartz.
Change one element of the three, however, and everything shifted;
substitute chlorine for fluorine, for instance, and you had saran wrap.
Frank stared at his wrapped hand, then up again at the other two
elements, still bonded to each other. But without him they were nothing!
Angrily he walked into the narrow streets of the city.
# # #
Clustered in a plaza like mussels on a rock were a group of Arabs,
drinking coffee. Arabs had arrived on Mars only ten years before, but
already they were a force to be reckoned with. They had a lot of money,
and they had teamed up with the Swiss to build a number of towns,
including this one. And they liked it on Mars. "It's like a cold day in the
Empty Quarter," as the Saudis said. The similarity was such that Arabic
words were slipping quickly into English, because Arabic had a larger
vocabulary for this landscape: akaba for the steep final slopes around
volcanoes, badia for the great world dunes, nefuds for deep sand, seyl for
the billion year-old dry river beds. . . people were saying they might as
well switch over to Arabic and have done with it.
Frank had spent a fair bit of time with Arabs, and the men in the plaza
were pleased to see him. "Salaam aleyk!" they said to him, and he replied,
"Marhabba!" White teeth flashed under black moustaches. Only men
present, as usual. Some youths led him to a central table where the older
men sat, including his friend Zeyk. Zeyk said, "We are going to call this
square Hajr el-kra Meshab, 'the red granite open place in town.' " He
gestured at the rust-colored flagstones. Frank nodded and asked what kind
of stone it was. He spoke Arabic for as long as he could, pushing the
edges of his ability and getting some good laughs in response. Then he sat
at the central table and relaxed, feeling like he could have been on a street
in Damascus or Cairo, comfortable in the wash of Arabic and expensive
cologne.
He studied the men's faces as they talked. An alien culture, no doubt
about it. They weren't going to change just because they were on Mars,
they put the lie to John's vision. Their thinking clashed radically with
Western thought; for instance the separation of church and state was
wrong to them, making it impossible for them to agree with Westerners on
the very basis of government. And they were so patriarchal that some of
their women were said to be illiterate—illiterates, on Mars! That was a
sign. And indeed these men had the dangerous look that Frank associated