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

activity, rapid subsidence, mass wasting, and the disappearance of even a
single surface sample left in its primal condition. Political stress had
skewed nearly everything written about Mars in the past hundred years. The
Journal was the only publication Ann knew of which tried to publish papers
delimiting their inquiries very strictly to reporting areology in the pure
sense, concentrating on what had happened in the five billion years of
solitude; it was the only publication Ann still read, or at least glanced at,
looking through the titles and some of the abstracts, and the editorial
material at the front; once or twice she had even sent in a letter concerning
some detail or other, which they had printed without fanfare. Published by the
university in Sabishii, the Journal was peer-reviewed by like-minded
areologists, and the articles were rigorous, well researched, and with no
obvious political point to their conclusions; they were simply science. The
Journal's editorials advocated what had to be called a Red position, but only
in the most limited sense, in that they argued for the preservation of the
primal landscape so that studies could be carried on without having to deal
with gross contaminations. This had been Ann's position from the very start,
and it was still where she felt most comfortable; she had moved from that
scientific position into political activism only because it had been forced on
her by the situation. This was true for a lot of areologists now supporting
the Reds. They were her natural peer group, really-the people she understood,
and with whom she sympathized.
But they were few; she could almost name them individually. The regular
contributors to the Journal, more or less. As for the rest of the Reds, the
Kakaze and the other radicals, what they advocated was a kind of metaphysical
position, a cult-they were religious fanatics, the equivalent of Hi-roko's
greens, members of some kind of rock-worshiping sect. Ann had very little in
common with them, when it came down to it; they formulated their redness from
a completely different worldview.
And given that there was that kind of fractionization among the Reds
themselves, what then could one say about the Martian independence movement as
a whole? Well. They were going to fall out. It was happening already.
Ann sat down carefully on the edge of the final bench. A good view. It
appeared there was a station of some kind down there on the caldera floor,
though from five thousand meters up, it was hard to be sure. Even the ruins of
old Sheffield were scarcely visible-ah-there they were, on the floor under the
new town, a tiny pile of rubble with some straight lines and plane surfaces in
it. Faint vertical scorings on the wall above might have been caused by fall
of the city in '61. It was hard to say.
The tented settlements still on the rim were like toy villages in
paperweights. Sheffield with its skyline, the low warehouses across from her
to the east, Lastflow, the various smaller tents all around the rim .. . many
of them had merged, to become a kind of greater Sheffield, covering almost 180
degrees of the rim, from Lastflow around to the southwest, where pistes
followed the fallen cable down the long slope of west Tharsis to Amazonis
Planitia. All the towns and stations would always be tented, because at
twenty-seven kilometers high the air would always be a tenth as thick as it
was at the datum-or sea level, one could now call it. Meaning the atmosphere
up here was still only thirty or forty millibars thick.
Tent cities forever; but with the cable (she could not see it) spearing