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

over concrete and then duricrust. Loose sand flowed east, pushed by the
wind.
Grimly he looked around. Rocks everywhere. A planet
sledgehammered billions of times. And meteors still falling. Someday one
of the towns would take a hit. He turned and looked back. It looked like
an aquarium glowing in the dusk. There would be no warning, but
everything would suddenly fly apart, walls, vehicles, trees, bodies. The
Aztecs had believed the world would end in one of four ways: earthquake,
fire, flood, or jaguars falling from the sky. Here there would be no fire.
Nor earthquake nor flood, now that he thought of it. Leaving only the
jaguars.
The twilight sky was a dark pink over Pavonis Mons. To the east
stretched Nicosia's farm, a long low greenhouse running downslope from
the city. From this angle one could see that the farm was larger than the
town proper, and jammed with green crops. Frank clumped to one of its
outer locks, and entered.
Inside the farm it was hot, a full sixty degrees warmer than outside,
and fifteen degrees warmer than in the city. He had to keep his helmet on,
as the farm air was tailored to the plants, heavy on CO2 and short on
oxygen. He stopped at a work station and fingered through drawers of
small tools and pesticide patches, gloves and bags. He selected three tiny
patches and put them in a plastic bag, then slipped the bag gently into the
walker's pocket. The patches were clever pesticides, biosaboteurs designed
to provide plants with systemic defenses; he had been reading about them,
and knew of a combination that in animals would be deadly to the
organism. . . .
He put a pair of shears in the walker's other pocket. Narrow gravel
paths led him up between long beds of barley and wheat, back toward the
city proper. He went in the lock leading into town, unclipped his helmet,
stripped off the walker and boots, transferred the contents of the walker
pockets to his coat. Then he went back into the lower end of town.
Here the Arabs had built a medina, insisting that such a neighborhood
was crucial to a city's health; the boulevards narrowed, and between them
lay warrens of twisted alleyways taken from the maps of Tunis or Algiers,
or generated randomly. Nowhere could you see from one boulevard to the
next, and the sky overhead was visible only in plum strips, between
buildings that leaned together.
Most of the alleys were empty now, as the party was uptown. A pair
of cats skulked between buildings, investigating their new home. Frank
took the shears from his pocket and scratched into a few plastic windows,
in Arabic lettering, Jew, Jew, Jew, Jew, Jew. He walked on, whistling
through his teeth. Corner cafйs were little caves of light. Bottles clinked
like prospectors' hammers. An Arab sat on a squat black speaker, playing
an electric guitar.
He found the central boulevard, walked up it. Boys in the branches
of the lindens and sycamores shouted songs to each other in
Schwyzerdььtsch. One ditty was in English: "John Boone, Went to the
moon, No fast cars, He went to Mars!" Small disorganized music bands
barged through the thickening crowd. Some moustached men dressed as
American cheerleaders flounced expertly through a complicated can-can