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

fronts, where the windshields would have been, underneath the rock overhang.
Anyone inside them was dead. She ran on eastward, staying against the tent
wall, heedless of debris underfoot, feeling a rising panic. She was aware that
a single shot from anyone could kill her, but she had to find Kasei. She tried
again over the wrist.
While she was at it, a call came in to her. It was Sax.
"It isn't logical to connect the fate of the elevator with terraforming
goals," he was saying, as if he was speaking to more people than just her.
"The cable could be tethered to quite a cold planet."
It was the usual Sax, the all-too-Sax: but then he must have noticed she was
on, because he stared owlishly into his wrist's little camera and said,
"Listen Ann, we can take history by the arm and break it-make it. Make it
new."
Her old Sax would never have said that. Nor chattered on at her, clearly
distraught, pleading, visibly nerve-racked; one of the most frightening sights
she had ever seen, actually: "They love you, Ann. It's that that can save us.
Emotional histories are the true histories. Watersheds of desire and
devolution-devotion. You're the-the personification of certain values-for the
natives. You can't escape that. You have to act with that. I did it in Da
Vinci, and it proved-helpful. Now it's your turn. You must. You must- Ann-just
this once you must join us all. Hang together or hang separately. Use your
iconic value."
So strange to hear such stuff from Saxifrage Russell. But then he shifted
again, he seemed to pull himself together. "... logical procedure is to
establish some kind of equation for conflicting interests." Just like his old
self.
Then there was a beep from her wrist and she cut Sax off, and answered the
incoming call. It was Peter, there on the Red coded frequency, a black
expression on his face that she had never seen before.
"Ann!" He stared intently at his own wristpad. "Listen, Mother-I want you to
stop these people!"
"Don't you Mother me," she snapped. "I'm trying. Can you tell me where they
are?"
"I sure as hell can. They've just broken into the Arsiaview tent. Moving
through-it looks like they're trying to come up on the Socket from the south."
Grimly he took a message from someone off-camera. "Right." He looked back at
her. "Ann, can I patch you into Hastings up on Clarke? If you tell him you're
trying to stop the Red attack, then he may believe that it's only a few
extremists, and stay out of it. He's going to do what he has to to keep the
cable up, and I'm afraid he's about to kill us all."
"I'll talk to him."
And there he was, a face from the deep past, a time lost to Ann she would have
said; and yet he was instantly familiar, a thin-faced man, harried, angry, on
the edge of snapping. Could anyone have sustained such enormous pressures for
the past hundred years? No. It was just that kind of time, come back again.
"I'm Ann Clayborne," she said, and as his face twisted even further, she
added, "I want you to know that the fighting going on down here does not
represent Red party policy."
Her stomach clamped as she said this, and she tasted chyme at the back of her
throat. But she went on: "It's the work of a splinter group, called the