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

Afterwards… we should meet."
"Yes."
"In the park, then, the southernmost path. Around eleven."
Selim nodded.
Chalmers transfixed him with a stare. "Talk means nothing," he said
brusquely, and walked away.
# # #
The next boulevard Chalmers came to was crowded with people
clumped outside open-front bars, or kiosks selling cous-cous and
bratwurst. Arab and Swiss. It seemed an odd combination, but they
meshed well.
Tonight some of the Swiss were distributing face masks from the door
of an apartment. Apparently they were celebrating this stadtfest as a kind
of Mardi Gras, Fassnacht as they called it, with masks and music and
every manner of social inversion, just as it was back home on those wild
February nights in Basel and Zьrich and Luzern. . . . On an impulse Frank
joined the line. "Around every profound spirit a mask is always growing,"
he said to two young women in front of him. They nodded politely and
then resumed conversation in guttural Schwyzerdььtsch, a dialect never
written down, a private code, incomprehensible even to Germans. It was
another impenetrable culture, the Swiss, in some ways even more so than
the Arabs. That was it, Frank thought; they worked well together because
they were both so insular that they never made any real contact. He
laughed out loud as he took a mask, a black face with studded with red
paste gems. He put it on.
A line of masked celebrants snaked down the boulevard, drunk,
loose, at the edge of control. At an intersection the boulevard opened up
into a small plaza, where a fountain shot sun-colored water into the air.
Around the fountain a steel drum band hammered out a calypso tune.
People gathered around, dancing or hopping in time to the low bong of the
bass drum. A hundred meters overhead a vent in the tent frame poured
frigid air down onto the plaza, air so cold that little flakes of snow floated
in it, glinting in the light like chips of mica. Then fireworks banged just
under the tenting, and colored sparks fell down through the snowflakes.
# # #
Sunset, more than any other time of day, made it clear that they stood
on an alien planet; something in the slant and redness of the light was
fundamentally wrong, upsetting expectations wired into the savannah brain
over millions of years. This evening was providing a particularly garish
and unsettling example of the phenomenon. Frank wandered in its light,
making his way back to the city wall. The plain south of the city was
littered with rocks, each one dogged by a long black shadow. Under the
concrete arch of the city's south gate he stopped. No one there. The gates
were locked during festivals like these, to keep drunks from going out and
getting hurt. But Frank had gotten the day's emergency code out of the fire
department AI that morning, and when he was sure no one was watching
he tapped out the code and hurried into the lock. He put on a walker,
boots, and helmet, and went through the middle and outer doors.
Outside it was intensely cold as always, and the diamond pattern of
the walker's heating element burned through his clothes. He crunched