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

bigger than Lee's hand but already sending up a spike laden
 RED DUST
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with purse-shaped flowers, white and yellow against blood-red
rock.

Life. It was delicate and tenacious, mocking the propaganda
of the conchies, the triumph of the inorganic. Mars

was dying, yet still spring stirred the little lives.

"Time to take a break," Guoquiang said.

Lee and Guoquiang sprawled on a tilted slab of sun-warmed
rock and munched dried fish. The bact nibbled at
foliose lichens, tearing them from overhangs with its mobile
lips. Xiao Bing ranged to and fro, too excited to keep still.
He kept taking delicate snorts from his little tube, jolts of
memory enhancer that would let him fix every detail. He
had taken the pledge to die out of this world into the next,
and was remembering details for the niche he was creating
in Heaven, the part of information space that belonged to
the elective dead. Lee had experienced his design: a desert
garden full of reflecting pools and strange half-melted machinery
under a starry sky where five moons swung by.

"Look here, a periwinkle! And here is moss campion, a
very big cushion. But this, I do not know what this is. Wei
Lee!"

Lee asked what it looked like, and Xiao Bing said, "Black
glossy leaves in a big rosette, a fat flower spike covered with,
I don't know, what looks like silver dusting. The spike shines
so bright, and there's a patch of wet soil around the rosette,
crusted with blue-green algae. It's beautiful, like a machine.
Come and see, Wei Lee!"

"I don't need to. It's ice sunflower, one of Cho Jinfeng's
species. It helped melt the polar caps back when. Very common
above three kilometers, I suppose what you have there
is a remnant from the early days."

Guoquiang yawned. "Perhaps it is coming back down
from the mountains. The winters are colder than they once
were."

"Perhaps. Don't you ever sit down, Bing?"

"I've been sitting down all winter. Look at that! There,