"Kim Stanley Robinson - Mars 2 - Blue Mars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

Earth, and an active aid in Earth's crisis. Nadia said she was in
communication with Derek Hastings, who was now up in New Clarke. Hastings had
abandoned Burroughs without a bloody battle, it was true; and now she claimed
he was willing to compromise. No doubt; his next retreat would not be so easy,
nor would it take him to a very pleasant place, for despite all the emergency
action, Earth was now a world of famine, plague, looting-breakdown of the
social contract, which was so fragile after all. It could happen here too; she
had to remember that fragility when she got angry enough, as now, to want to
tell Kasei and Dao to abandon the discussions and fire away. If she did that
it very likely would happen; a strange sensation of her own power came over
her then, as she looked around the table at the anxious angry unhappy faces.
She could tip the balance; she could knock this table right over.
Speakers were taking five-minute turns to make their case one way or the
other. More were in favor of cutting the cable than Ann would have guessed,
not just Reds, but representatives of cultures or movements that felt most
threatened by the metanat order, or by mass emigration from Earth: Bedouins,
the Polynesians, the Dorsa Brevia locals, some of the cannier natives. Still,
they were in the minority. Not a tiny minority, but a minority. Isolationist
versus interactive; yet another fracture to add to all the others rending the
Martian independence movement.
Jackie Boone stood up and spoke for fifteen minutes in favor of keeping the
cable, threatening anyone who wanted to bring it down with expulsion from
Martian'society. It was a disgusting performance, but popular, and afterward
Peter stood and spoke in the same way, only slightly more subtle. It made Ann
so angry that she stood up immediately after he had finished, to argue for
bringing the cable down. This got her another poisonous look from Peter, but
it scarcely registered-she talked in a white heat, forgetting all about the
five-minute limit. No one tried to cut her off, and she went on and on, though
she had no idea what she was going to say next, and no memory of what she had
already said. Perhaps her subconscious had organized it all like a lawyer's
brief-hopefully so-on the other hand, a part of her thought as her mouth ran
on, perhaps she was just saying the word Mars over and over again, or
babbling, and the audience simply humoring her, or else miraculously
comprehending her in a moment of glossolalic grace, invisible flames on their
heads like caps of jewels-and indeed their hair looked to Ann like spun metal,
the old men's bald pates like chunks of jasper, inside which all languages
dead and living were understood equally; and for a moment they appeared all
caught up together with her, all inside an epiphany of red Mars, free of
Earth, living on the primal planet that had been and could be again.
She sat down. This time it was not Sax who rose to debate her, as it had been
so many times before. In fact he was cross-eyed with concentration, looking at
her open-mouthed, in an amazement that she could not interpret. They stared at
each other, the two of them, eyes locked; but what he was thinking she had no
idea. She only knew she had gotten his attention at last.
This time it was Nadia who rebutted her, Nadia her sister, arguing slowly and
calmly for interaction with Earth, for intervention in the Terran situation.
Despite the great flood, Earth's nations and metanationals were still
incredibly powerful, and in some ways the crisis of the flood had drawn them
together, making them even more powerful. So Nadia spoke of the need to
compromise, the need to engage, influence, transform. It was deeply