"John Varley - In the Hall of the Martian Kings" - читать интересную книгу автора (Varley John)

110 JohnVarley

making love by postcard." They had another long hysterical laugh over that.

"How bad is it at your place?" he finally asked.

"Not bad at all. Everything we need is humming. I can give you a bath—"

"A bath!" It sounded like the delights of heaven. "I wish you could smell me. No, I'm glad you can't."

"I wish I could. I'm going to run the tub full of hot, hot water, and then I'm going to undress you and
lower you into it, and I'm going to scrub all those things I've been staring at for a year and take my time
with it, and then—"

"Hey, we don't need stories anymore, do we? Now we can do it."

"We need them for another two days. More than ever now, because I can't reach the place that's begging
for attention. But you didn't let me finish. After I get in the tub with you and let you wash me, and before
we head hand in hand for my bedroom, I'm going to get Rock Rogers and Maryjane Peters and the
Black Widow and Mark Antony and Jo-jo and his wild mate and hold their heads under the water until
they drown"

"No you don't. 7 claim the right to drown Rock Rogers."


In the Hall
of the Martian
It took perseverance, alertness, and a willingness to break the rules to watch the sunrise in Tharsis
Canyon. Matthew Crawford shivered in the dark, his suit heater turned to emergency setting, his eyes
trained toward the east. He knew he had to be watchful. Yesterday he had missed it entirely, snatched
away from it by a long, unavoidable yawn. His jaw muscles stretched, but he controlled this yawn and
kept his eyes firmly open.

And there it was. Like the lights in a theater after the show is over: just a quick brightening, a splash of
localized bluish-purple over the canyon rim, and he was surrounded by footlights. Day had come, the
truncated Martian day that would never touch the blackness over his head.

This day, like the nine before it, illuminated a Tharsis radically changed from what it had been over the
last sleepy ten thousand years. Wind erosion of rocks can create an infinity of shapes, but it never gets
around to carving out a straight line or a perfect arc. The human encampment below him broke up the
jagged lines of the rocks with regular angles and curves.

The camp was anything but orderly. No one would get the impression that any care had been taken in the
haphazard arrangement of dome, lander, crawlers, crawler tracks, and scattered equipment. It had
grown, as all human base camps seem to grow, without pattern. He was reminded of the footprints
around Tranquillity Base, though on a much larger scale.

Tharsis Base sat on a wide ledge about halfway up from
112 John Varley