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

тАЬMaybe. But if we had been at Acheron, with the whole crew, and a bioreactor, and all our facilities, I
bet we would have saved him. And then you canтАЩt say how many more years he might have had. I call
that premature.тАЭ

She went off to be by herself.

That night Nirgal could not sleep at all. He kept feeling the transfusions,, seeing every moment of them
and imagining that there had been some kind of backwash in the system, so that he had been infected
with the disease. Or contaminated by touch aтАЩsne, why not? Or just by that last look in SimonтАЩs eye! So
that he had caught the disease they could not stop, and would die. Stiffen up, go mute, stop and go away.
That was death. His heart pounJed and a sweat broke through his skin, and he cried with the fear of it.
There was no avoiding it; and it was horrible. Horrible no matter when it happened. Horrible that the
cycle itself should work the way it didтАФthat it should go around and around and around, while they lived
only once and then died forever. Why live at all? It was too strange, too horrible. And so he shivered
through the long night, his mind gone cyclonic with the fear of death.
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After thathe found it extremely hard to concentrate. He felt as if he was always at a remove from things,
as if he had slipped into the white world and could not quite touch the green one.

Hiroko noticed this problem, and suggested he go with Coyote on one of his trips out. Nirgal was
shocked by the idea, having never been more than a walk away from Zygote. But Hiroko insisted. He
was seven years old, she said, and about to become a man. Time he saw a bit of the surface world.

A few weeks later Coyote dropped by, and when he left again Nirgal was with him, seated in the
copilotтАЩs seat of his boulder car, and goggling out the low windshield at the purple arch of evening sky.
Coyote turned the car around to give him a view of the great glowing pink wall of the polar cap, which
arced across the horizon like an enormous rising moon.

тАЬItтАЩs hard to believe something that big could ever melt,тАЭ Nirgal said.

тАЬIt will take a while.тАЭ

They drove north at a sedate pace. The boulder car was stealthed, covered by a hollowed-out rock
shell that was thermally regulated to stay the same temperature as its surroundings, and it had a no-track
device on the front axle to read the terrain and pass the information to the back axle, where
scraper-shapers plowed their wheel tracks, returning the sand and rock to whatever shape they had had
before their passing. So they could not race along.

For a long time they traveled in silence, though CoyoteтАЩs silence was not the same as SimonтАЩs had been.
He hummed, he muttered, he talked in a low singsong voice to his AI, in a language that sounded like
English but was not comprehensible. Nirgal tried to concentrate on the limited view out the window,
feeling awkward and shy. The region around the south polar cap was a series of broad flat terraces, and
they descended from one to the next by routes that seemed programmed into the car, down terrace after
terrace until it seemed the polar cap must be sitting on a kind of huge pedestal. Nirgal stared into the
dark, impressed by the size of things, but happy too that it was not absolutely overwhelming, as his first