"Paul Mcauley - Red Dust" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

crusted with leached iron salts. Every footstep threw up a
rotten salty stench, and the three cadres walked with their
kerchiefs drawn over nose and mouth. Only the bact seemed
unaffected; its black lips drawn back in a perpetual sneer as
it padded behind Lee.
But while the others grumbled about the stink of the
sours, Lee saw it for what it was: a co-operative ecological
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PAUL J. MCAULE┬е


structure which had once forced the Martian desert slowly
to yield to wetland ecology. The roots of black willows
reached deep down into the frozen regolith; and special
strands in their bark cambium conducted heat to melt and
mine the permafrost. Soldier grasses wove a net of stolons
through the dusty soil, holding it together. Fungi broke the
chemical bonds of the thin surface crust of iron oxides, bindg
the iron to more stable forms, releasing the oxygen.
Rainbow slicks on the black mud in the clogged ditches were
a sign that bacteria were multiplying in the anaerobic muck,
slowly turning it into soil that would grow crops.

A slow tide of life feeding on the Martian regolith, feeding
on itself, processing red dust into oxygen and water and life-filled
muck. And the whole system crippled by the imbalance
which was locking three grams of water in the polar icecaps
for every two produced. The battle fading. Crumbs of water
spilled into thirsty sand. The front line where once unre-claimed
Martian desert had grudgingly given way to pioneer
vegetation was now a festering wound circling the danwei's
fifty-kilometre perimeter.

As the three men moved farther from the danwei, the black
willows grew smaller. Thickly clumped stands thinned out.
Tussocks of soldier grass had tails of red sand, each miniature
sand dune pointing in the same direction, away from the dan-wei
and the winds that blew off the Plain of Gold. The men's
boots kept breaking through a duricrust of hydrated minerals,
making a soft creaking sound with each step.

But there was life there, too. Succulent green spears were
pushing through the crusted soil, tipped with transparent
cells which focused light down to deeply buried corms. The
bact flared its nostrils hungrily, and Lee had to keep jerking
at its bridle to remind it that it wasn't there to look for
lunch. A few bees were out, commuting between widespread
patches of yellow-flowered rock vetch. A patch of frosty soil
had gathered in the lee of two weather-split boulders, and a
lupin had rooted there, its spread of half a dozen leaves no