"Kim Stanley Robinson - Mars 3 - Green Mars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

so much noise now thermally and visually, and even over the radio,тАЭ he said. тАЬThey could never check all
the signals theyтАЩre getting.тАЭ

But Sax only said, тАЬAlgorithmic search programs are very effective,тАЭ and Maya insisted on keeping out
of sight, and hardening their electronics, and sending all their excess heat deep into the heart of the polar
cap. Hiroko agreed with Maya on this, and so they all complied. тАЬItтАЩs different for us,тАЭ Maya said to
Peter, looking haunted.

There was a mohole, Sax told them one morning at school, about two hundred kilometers to the
northwest. The cloud they sometimes saw in that direction was its plumeтАФbig and still on some days, on
others whipping off east in thin tatters. The next time Coyote came through they asked him at dinner if he
had visited it, and he told them that he had, and that the great shaft of the mohole penetrated to very near
the center of Mars, and that its bottom was nothing but bubbling molten fiery lava.

тАЬThatтАЩs not true,тАЭ Maya said dismissively. тАЬThey only go down ten or fifteen kilometers. Their floors are
hard rock.тАЭ

тАЬBut hot rock,тАЭ Hiroko said. тАЬAnd twenty kilometers now, I hear.тАЭ

тАЬAnd so they do our work for us,тАЭ Maya complained to Hiroko. тАЬDonтАЩt you think we are parasites on
the surface settlements? Your viriditas wouldnтАЩt get far without their engineering.тАЭ

тАЬIt will prove to be a symbiosis,тАЭ Hiroko said calmly. She stared at Maya until Maya got up and walked
away. Hiroko was the only one in Zygote who could stare Maya down.

Hiroko, Nirgal thought as he regarded his mother after this exchange, was very strange. She talked to
him and to everyone else as an equal, and clearly to her everyone was an equal; but no one was special.
He remembered very keenly when it had been different, when the two of them had been like two parts of
a whole. But now she only took the same interest in him that she took in everyone else, her concern
impersonal and distant. She would be the same no matter what happened to him, he thought. Nadia, or
even Maya, cared for him more. And yet Hiroko was mother to them all. And Nirgal, like most of the
rest of the regulars in Zygote, still went down to her little stand of bamboo when he was in need of
something he couldnтАЩt find from ordinary peopleтАФsome solace, or advice. ...

But as often as not, when he did that he would find her and her little inner group тАЬbeing silent,тАЭ and if he
wanted to stay he would have to stop talking. Sometimes this lasted for days at a time, until he stopped
dropping by. Then again he might arrive during the areophany, and be swept up in the ecstatic chanting of
the names of Mars, becoming an integral part of that tight little band, right in the heart of the world, with
Hiroko herself at his side, her arm around him, squeezing hard.

That was love of a sort, and he cherished it; but it was not as it had been in the old days, when they had
walked the beach together.



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