"Mary A. Turzillo - Mars is No Place for Children" - читать интересную книгу автора (Turzillo Mary A)

death hanging over our heads.

If they bought their freedom with nine mears each, eighteen mears together, of labor, if this is what they
had to pay for freedom, why am I not free to stay on the planet I love?
****
Smythe Farm and Laboratories, Summer-February 2 , 2202

Dear Sekou,

It's harder than I expected getting time to record in here. I have to pretend to record in my diary on the
house computer, or Mother will get suspicious (Dad's the trusting type).

I think I'll record a little bit about why I love my home, because if I get sent back to Earth I'll want more
than pictures to remember Mars.

Let's see.

Our home. My bedroom, with its skylight so I can check on the wind and sun and stars anytime, even in
the night. The greenhouses full of Mother and Dad's experiments. The frost flowers we grow in the
low-pressure greenhouse. The patch of oxygen-conserving, antifreeze plants, amazing blades of green in
the sun from Summer-February until Summer-November. Antifreeze plants grow outside on the naked
soil, but unfortunately they don't flower. We have to propagate them from root cuttings. But they impress
Polaricorp, which is the corporation which runs this part of Mars.

The sky. The Winter-June sky, so full of stars. We live near the pole, and for three hundred glorious sols
each mear, the sky is full of jewels so thick I just have to make up stories about the King of the Universe,
who spilled them into our Martian sky.

The slow summer sunset and sunrise, such a delicate blue against the pink sky. The sols in Summer-June
when the sun doesn't bother to set, just floats on the horizon like a glowing silver medallion on a string of
invisible stars. The moons, bright like silver coins. Last mear there was an eclipse, and we waited until
Deimos almost glided over the sun, then stole a peek while one bright bead (because Deimos isn't very
round, it has valleys and humps) sparkled for a moment.

Sekou, you know Earth doesn't even have moons. Well, yes, it has the other planet, which people from
Earth insist on calling The Moon. (Do you call it that?) Can't they see it's way big? It's a planet, called
Luna, for heaven sake!

The huge valley, Valles Marineris. Oh, wouldn't I love to explore the bottom of that one. Maybe that's
where they'll find fossils, little stony pieces of bacteria or (here's a word I learned last week) diatoms.
Maybe I'll go there when I grow up. Maybe I'll be on a team that discovers fossils.

The great high mountains, bigger than the ones on Earth. No one will ever walk all the way to the top of
Olympus Mons, Mother says. But maybe she's wrong. She doesn't know me.

But of course I'm not going to grow up on Mars. They're sending me back, unless I can stop them.

Mother asked me where “the little wrist computer” is. Meaning this computer, my diary. She's not stupid.
She probably figured I'm keeping a diary. So I told her it was lost, I couldn't find it. Ha. As if anything
could get lost in this biome. Every every solar cell, every drainage pipe, every pane of glass, every fork,