"Kim Stanley Robinson - Mars 1 - Red Mars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

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Sunset, more than any other time of day, made it clear that they stood on an alien
planet; something in the slant and redness of the light was fundamentally wrong, upsetting
expectations wired into the savannah brain over millions of years. This evening was
providing a particularly garish and unsettling example of the phenomenon. Frank
wandered in its light, making his way back to the city wall. The plain south of the city was
littered with rocks, each one dogged by a long black shadow. Under the concrete arch of
the city's south gate he stopped. No one there. The gates were locked during festivals
like these, to keep drunks from going out and getting hurt. But Frank had gotten the day's
emergency code out of the fire department AI that morning, and when he was sure no one
was watching he tapped out the code and hurried into the lock. He put on a walker, boots,
and helmet, and went through the middle and outer doors.

Outside it was intensely cold as always, and the diamond pattern of the walker's
heating element burned through his clothes. He crunched over concrete and then
duricrust. Loose sand flowed east, pushed by the wind.

Grimly he looked around. Rocks everywhere. A planet sledgehammered billions of
times. And meteors still falling. Someday one of the towns would take a hit. He turned
and looked back. It looked like an aquarium glowing in the dusk. There would be no
warning, but everything would suddenly fly apart, walls, vehicles, trees, bodies. The Aztecs
had believed the world would end in one of four ways: earthquake, fire, flood, or jaguars
falling from the sky. Here there would be no fire. Nor earthquake nor flood, now that he
thought of it. Leaving only the jaguars.

The twilight sky was a dark pink over Pavonis Mons. To the east stretched NicosiaтАЩs
farm, a long low greenhouse running downslope from the city. From this angle one could
see that the farm was larger than the town proper, and jammed with green crops. Frank
clumped to one of its outer locks, and entered.

Inside the farm it was hot, a full sixty degrees warmer than outside, and fifteen
degrees warmer than in the city. He had to keep his helmet on, as the farm air was
tailored to the plants, heavy on CO2 and short on oxygen. He stopped at a work station
and fingered through drawers of small tools and pesticide patches, gloves and bags. He
selected three tiny patches and put them in a plastic bag, then slipped the bag gently into
the walker's pocket. The patches were clever pesticides, biosaboteurs designed to
provide plants with systemic defenses; he had been reading about them, and knew of a
combination that in animals would be deadly to the organism. . . .

He put a pair of shears in the walker's other pocket. Narrow gravel paths led him up
between long beds of barley and wheat, back toward the city proper. He went in the lock
leading into town, unclipped his helmet, stripped off the walker and boots, transferred the
contents of the walker pockets to his coat. Then he went back into the lower end of town.

Here the Arabs had built a medina, insisting that such a neighborhood was crucial to
a cityтАЩs health; the boulevards narrowed, and between them lay warrens of twisted
alleyways taken from the maps of Tunis or Algiers, or generated randomly. Nowhere could
you see from one boulevard to the next, and the sky overhead was visible only in plum