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

warpaint that, after a moment, I realized was an improvised sun-block. I watched
her through the habitat's window, and wondered how long she had been at it. Her
flexibility was astonishing.
Leah did not mention what she'd said the night before, and I didn't bring it up.

The task for the day was to gather up shards of the shattered habitat and as
much of the wind-scattered contents as we could find. Leah and I worked mostly
in silence, occasionally pointing out to each other pieces in the distance.
Aerial photos taken as we had landed helped locate the more distant fragments,
but didn't substitute for plain, dogged walking.
The job took a lot of walking. The camp was located on the Syrtisian isthmus.
This was a broad saddle that separated the Hellenian Sea from Gulf of Isidis, a
bay of the Boreal Ocean which covered nearly the entire northern hemisphere of
Mars. To the northwest the land sloped gently upward toward the Syrtis caldera,
an ancient shield volcano, dead now for well over a billion years. An endless
series of lava-etched rilles corrugated the landscape from northwest to
southeast, each with a tiny brown stream at the bottom. The wind that scattered
the pieces of the habitat had, in accord with Murphy's law, been crosswise to
the rilles, meaning that we had to trek up and down innumerable gullies to
collect the fragments.
"It must have been some wind," Leah said. "Blowing pretty constantly from the
Hellenian Sea toward the Gulf, apparently."
The carbon dioxide atmosphere was still now, with barely a trace of breeze.
By local noon we had made a large collection of pieces. I took a break and sat
on a rock by one of the streams. The brook foamed as it rippled over submerged
rocks. Amber bubbles clumped together, then detached and floated downstream. The
stream looked like an alcoholic's vision of paradise: a river of ice-cold beer,
flowing down into a lake of beer, emptying somewhere into a frigid ocean of
beer--
"Well, yes--what did you think that the rivers are?" Leah said, when I mentioned
the thought to her. She was wearing a makeshift sun-bonnet constructed from
piloting charts; even with her face hidden by a rebreather and caked with burn
ointment, she was stunningly beautiful. I wondered what it would be like to peel
off her winter garments, to make love to her right there by the stream. "By any
practical definition, it is a river of beer. Yeast is an anaerobic
microorganism-- the stuff that the ecopoiesis team seeded this planet with will
ferment just about everything. Naturally carbonated, too: five hundred millibars
of carbon-dioxide atmosphere is going to dissolve a hell of a lot of carbonation
into the water at this temperature. I'd bet that if you brought a glass of that
stuff inside it would develop a pretty good head."
"You mean I could drink this stuff?"
Leah looked at it critically. "Hmmm. You know, you just might be able to. Full
of bacteria, I expect, but if our anti-biologicals aren't working, we're already
dead anyway, so I doubt it's a problem. Tell you what." She looked up at me.
"You try it, and let me know."
I didn't.
By mid-afternoon, we had gathered as much of the debris as we could find.
Everything that looked like it might have originally been part of the habitat
pressure vessel, Leah set out in a array next to the site of the explosion. Each
piece was numbered, and then Leah began fitting them together like a jigsaw