"Geoffrey Landis - Ecopoiesis" - читать интересную книгу автора (Landis Geoffrey A)

Ecopoiesis
Geoffrey A. Landis


First published in Science Fiction Age May 1997




"I wonder why they call this the red planet?" I asked. The rebreather made my
voice sound funny in my ears. "Looks like the brown planet to me."
"You got a problem with brown, boy?" Tally said. Her voice was muffled by the
rebreather she wore as well.
I turned, but Tally wasn't looking at me; she was watching the opposite
direction, standing in a half crouch. That position surely couldn't be
comfortable, but for her it looked completely easy and natural. Her head turned
with a quick birdlike grace to glance now one way, now the other. Guarding our
backs, I realized. Against what?
"Nothing wrong with brown, my opinion," she said.
The more my eyes got used to the terrain, the more colors came out. Brown, yes,
barren rocky brown plains and brown buttes and a brown stream frothing over a
tiny waterfall. The hills were sharp-edged, looking as if they had been blasted
out of bedrock the day before, barely touched by erosion. But in the brown was
hints of other colors; a sheen of dark, almost purple, echoing the purple-grey
of the cloudy sky, and even patches on the rocks where the amber shaded off to
almost army green.
"It's beautiful, isn't it," said Leah Hamakawa. She was, as always, two steps
ahead of us. She was down on one knee in the dirt, her nose right up against a
rock. She'd taken both her gloves off and was scraping the surface of the rock
inquisitively with her thumbnail.
I knelt down and scooped up a handful of rocks and dirt in my gloved hand. Close
up, I could see that the brown was an illusion. The rocks themselves were the
color of brick, but clinging to them were blotches of purple algae and tiny,
dark amber specks of lichen. I pulled off one glove so I could feel the texture.
Cold, with a rough grittiness. When I rubbed it between my fingers, the blotches
of purple had a slimy feel. I was tempted to try pulling off the rebreather for
a moment so I could put it right up to my nose and smell it, but decided that,
considering the absence of oxygen in the atmosphere, that would not be wise.
"Beautiful, yeah, right," Tally said. "You got rocks in your head, girl. Stinks.
I seen prettier stinking strip mines."
"It used to be red," Leah said. "Long ago. Before the Age of Confusion; before
the ecopoiesis." She paused, then added "I bet it was beautiful then, too."
I looked at the handful of dirt in my palm. Mars. Yes, perhaps it was beautiful.
In its way.
My ears and the flesh of my face in the places not covered by the rebreather
were getting cold. The temperature was above freezing, but it was still quite
chilly. The air in the rebreather was stale, smelling slightly rotten and
distinctly sulfurous. That indicated a problem with the rebreather; the
micropore filters in the system should have removed any trace of odor from the
recycled air. I thought again about taking the rebreather off and seeing what