Blue Mars. Kim Stanley Robinson

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СКАЧАТЬ of the trip the chamber would accelerate until the centrifugal force shifted from Mars equivalent to Earth equivalent, remaining there for almost half the voyage. This was a method that had been worked out over the years, to accommodate emigrants who decided they wanted to return home, diplomats travelling back and forth, and the few Martian natives who had made the voyage to Earth. For everyone it was hard. Quite a few of the natives had fallen sick on Earth; some had died. It was important to stay in the gravity chamber, do one’s exercises, take one’s inoculations.

      Sax and Michel worked out on exercise machines; Nirgal and Maya sat in the blessed baths, commiserating. Of course Maya enjoyed her misery, as she seemed to enjoy all her emotions, including rage and melancholy; while Nirgal was truly miserable, spacetime bending him in an ever more tortuous torque, until every cell of him cried out with the pain of it. It frightened him – the effort it took just to breathe, the idea of a planet so massive. Hard to believe!

      He tried to talk to Michel about it, but Michel was distracted by his anticipation, his preparation; Sax by the events on Mars. Nirgal didn’t care about the meeting back on Pavonis, it would not matter much in the long run, he judged. The natives in the outback had lived the way they wanted to under UNTA, and they would do the same under the new government. Jackie might succeed in making a presidency for herself, and that would be too bad; but no matter what happened, their relationship had gone strange, become a kind of telepathy which sometimes resembled the old passionate love affair but just as often felt like a vicious sibling rivalry, or even the internal arguments of a schizoid self. Perhaps they were twins – who knew what kind of alchemy Hiroko had performed in the ectogene tanks – but no – Jackie had been born of Esther. He knew that. If it proved anything. For to his dismay, she felt like his other self; he did not want that, he did not want the sudden speeding of his heart whenever he saw her. It was one of the reasons he had decided to join the expedition to Earth. And now he was getting away from her at the rate of fifty thousand kilometres an hour, but there she still was on the screen, happy at the ongoing work of the congress, and her part in it. And she would be one of the seven on the new executive council, no doubt about it.

      ‘She is counting on history to take its usual course,’ Maya said as they sat in the baths watching the news. ‘Power is like matter, it has gravity, it clumps and then starts to draw more into itself. This local power, spread out through the tents—’ She shrugged cynically.

      ‘Perhaps it’s a nova.’ Nirgal suggested.

      She laughed. ‘Yes, perhaps. But then it starts clumping again. That’s the gravity of history – power drawn into centres, until there is an occasional nova. Then a new drawing in. We’ll see it on Mars too, you mark my words. And Jackie will be right at the middle of it—’ She stopped before adding the bitch, in respect for Nirgal’s feelings. Regarding him with a curious, hooded gaze, as if wondering what she might do with Nirgal that would advance her never-ending war with Jackie. Little novas of the heart.

      The last weeks of one g passed, and never did Nirgal begin to feel comfortable. It was frightening to feel the clamping pressure on his breath and his thinking. His joints hurt. On the screens he saw images of the little blue-and-white marble that was the Earth, with the bone button of Luna looking peculiarly flat and dead beside it. But they were just more screen images, they meant nothing to him compared to his sore feet, his beating heart. Then the blue world suddenly blossomed and filled the screens entirely, its curved limb a white line, the blue water all patterned by white cloud swirls, the continents peeking out from cloud patterns like little rebuses of half-remembered myth: Asia. Africa. Europe. America.

      For the final descent and aerobraking the gravity chamber’s rotation was stopped. Nirgal, floating, feeling disembodied and balloonlike, pulled to a window to see it all with his own eyes. Despite the window glass and the thousands of kilometres of distance, the detail was startling in its sharp-edged clarity. ‘The eye has such power.’ he said to Sax.

      ‘Hmm,’ Sax said, and came to the window to look.

      They watched the Earth, blue before them.

      ‘Are you ever afraid?’ Nirgal asked.

      ‘Afraid?’

      ‘You know.’ Sax on this voyage had not been in one of his more coherent phases; many things had to be explained to him. ‘Fear. Apprehension. Fright.’

      ‘Yes. I think so. I was afraid, yes. Recently. When I found I was … disoriented.’

      ‘I’m afraid now.’

      Sax looked at him curiously. Then he floated over and put a hand to Nirgal’s arm, in a gentle gesture quite unlike him. ‘We’re here,’ he said.

      Dropping, dropping. There were ten space elevators stranding out from Earth now. Several of them were what they called split cables, dividing into two branching strands that touched down north and south of the equator, which was woefully short of decent socket locations. One split cable Y-ed down to Virac in the Philippines and Oobagooma in western Australia, another to Cairo and Durban. The one they were descending split some ten thousand kilometres above the Earth, the north line touching down near Port of Spain, Trinidad, while the southern one dropped into Brazil near Aripuana, a boomtown on a tributary of the Amazon called the Theodore Roosevelt River.

      They were taking the north fork, down to Trinidad. From their elevator car they looked down on most of the Western Hemisphere, centred over the Amazon basin, where brown water veined through the green lungs of Earth. Down and down; in the five days of their descent the world approached until it eventually filled everything below them, and the crushing gravity of the previous month and a half once again slowly took them in its grasp and squeezed, squeezed, squeezed. What little tolerance Nirgal had developed for the weight seemed to have disappeared during the brief return to microgravity, and now he gasped. Every breath an effort. Standing foursquare before the windows, hands clenched to the rails, he looked down through clouds on the brilliant blue of the Caribbean, the intense greens of Venezuela. The Orinoco’s discharge into the sea was a leafy stain. The limb of the sky was composed of curved bands of white and turquoise, with the black of space above. All so glossy. The clouds were the same as on Mars but thicker, whiter, more stuffed with themselves. The intense gravity was perhaps exerting an extra pressure on his retina or optic nerve, to make the colours push and pulse so hard. Sounds were noisier.

      In the elevator with them were UN diplomats, Praxis aides, media representatives, all hoping for the Martians to give them some time, to talk to them. Nirgal found it difficult to focus on them, to listen to them. Everyone seemed so strangely unaware of their position in space, there five hundred kilometres over the surface of the Earth, and falling fast.

      A long last day. Then they were in the atmosphere, and then the cable led their car down onto the green square of Trinidad, into a huge socket complex next to an abandoned airport, its runways like grey runes. The elevator car slid down into the concrete mass. It decelerated; it came to a stop.

      Nirgal detached his hands from the rail, and walked carefully after all the others, plod, plod, the weight all through him, plod, plod. They plodded down a jetway. He stepped onto the floor of a building on Earth. The interior of the socket resembled the one on Pavonis Mons, an incongruous familiarity, for the air was salty, thick, hot, clangorous, heavy. Nirgal hurried as much as he could through the halls, wanting to get outside and see things at last. A whole crowd trailed him, surrounded him, but the Praxis aides understood, they made a way for him through a growing crowd. The building was huge, apparently he had missed a chance to take a subway out of it. But there was a doorway glowing with light. Slightly dizzy with the effort, he walked out into a blinding glare. Pure whiteness. It reeked of salt, fish, leaves, tar, shit, spices: like a greenhouse gone mad.

      Now his eyes were adjusting. The sky was blue, a turquoise СКАЧАТЬ