Blue Mars. Kim Stanley Robinson

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СКАЧАТЬ around the sun. Black spots swam this way and that. The cable threaded up into the sky. It was too bright to look up. Green hills in the distance.

      He stumbled as they led him to an open car – an antique, small and rounded, with rubber tyres. A convertible. He stood up in the back seat between Sax and Maya, just to see better. In the glare of light there were hundreds of people, thousands, dressed in astonishing costumes, neon silks, pink purple teal gold aquamarine, jewels, feathers, headdresses—

      ‘Carnival,’ someone in the front seat of the car said up to him, ‘we dress in costumes for Carnival, also for Discovery Day, when Columbus arrive on the island. That was just a week ago, so we’ve continued the festival for your arrival too.’

      ‘What’s the date?’ Sax asked.

      ‘Nirgal Day! August the eleventh.’

      They drove slowly, down streets lined with cheering people. One group was dressed like the natives before the Europeans arrived, shouting wildly. Mouths pink and white in brown faces. Voices like music, everyone singing. The people in the car sounded like Coyote. There were people in the crowd wearing Coyote masks, Desmond Hawkins’s cracked face twisted into rubbery expressions beyond what even he could achieve. And words – Nirgal had thought that on Mars he had encountered every possible distortion of English, but it was hard to follow what the Trinidadians said: accent, diction, intonation, he couldn’t tell why. He was sweating freely but still felt hot.

      The car, bumpy and slow, ran between the walls of people to a short bluff. Beyond it lay a harbour district, now immersed in shallow water. Buildings swamped in the water stood in patches of dirty foam, rocking on unseen waves. A whole neighbourhood now a tidepool, the houses giant exposed mussels, some broken open, water sloshing in and out of their windows, rowing boats bobbing between them. Bigger boats were tied to streetlights and power-line poles out where the buildings stopped. Farther out sailboats tilted on the sunbeaten blue, each boat with two or three taut fore-and-aft sails. Green hills rising to the right, forming a big, open bay. ‘Fishing boats still coming in through the streets, but the big ships use the bauxite docks down at Point T, see out there?’

      Fifty different shades of green on the hills. Fish scales and flowers scattered over the road, silver and red. Palm trees in the shallows were dead, their fronds drooping yellow. These marked the tidal zone; above it green burst out everywhere. Streets and buildings were hacked out of a vegetable world. Green and white, as in his childhood vision, but here the two primal colours were separated out, held in a blue egg of sea and sky. They were just above the waves and yet the horizon was so far away! Instant evidence of the size of this world. No wonder they had thought the Earth was flat. The whitewater sloshing through the streets below made a continuous krrrrr sound, as loud as the cheers of the crowd.

      The rank stench was suddenly cut by the smell of tar on the wind. ‘Pitch Lake down by La Brea all dug out and shipped away, nothing left but a black hole in the ground, and a little pond we use locally. See that’s what you smell, new road here by the water.’ Asphalt road, sweating mirages. People jammed the black roadside; they all had black hair. A young woman climbed the car to put a necklace of flowers around his neck. Their sweet scent clashed with the stinging salt haze. Perfume and incense, chased by the hot vegetable wind, tarred and spiced. Steel drums, so familiar in all the hard noise, pinging and panging, they played Martian music here! The rooftops in the drowned district to their left now supported ramshackle patios. The stench was of a greenhouse gone bad, things rotting, a hot wet press of air and everything blazing in a talcum of light. Sweat ran freely down his skin. People cheered from the flooded rooftops, from boats, the water coated with flowers floating up and down on the foam. Black hair gleaming like chitin or jewels. A floating wood dock piled with several bands, playing different tunes all at once. Fish scales and flower petals strewn underfoot, silver and red and black dots swimming. Flung flowers flashed by on the wind, streaks of pure colour, yellow, pink and red. The driver of their car turned around to talk, ignoring the road, ‘Hear the duglas play soaka music, pan music, listen that cuttin’ contest, the best five bands in Port a Spain.’

      They passed through an old neighbourhood, visibly ancient, the buildings made of small, crumbling bricks, capped by corrugated metal roofs, or even thatch – all ancient, tiny, the people tiny too, brown-skinned, ‘The countryside Hindu, the cities black. T‘n’T mix them, that’s dugla.’ Grass covered the ground, burst out of every crack in the walls, out of roofs, out of potholes, out of everything not recently paved by tarry asphalt – an explosive surge of green, pouring out of every surface of the world. The thick air reeked!

      Then they emerged from the ancient district onto a broad asphalt boulevard, flanked by big trees and large marble buildings. ‘Metanat grabhighs, looked big when they first built, but nothing grab as high as the cable.’ Sour sweat, sweet smoke, everything blazing green, he had to shut his eyes so that he wouldn’t be sick. ‘You okay?’ Insects whirred, the air was so hot he couldn’t guess its temperature, it had gone off his personal scale. He sat down heavily between Maya and Sax.

      The car stopped. He stood again, with an effort, and got out, and had trouble walking; he almost fell, everything was swinging around. Maya held his arm hard. He gripped his temples, breathed through his mouth. ‘Are you okay?’ she asked sharply.

      ‘Yes,’ Nirgal said, and tried to nod.

      They were in a complex of raw, new buildings. Unpainted wood, concrete, bare dirt now covered with crushed flower petals. People everywhere, almost all in carnival costume. The singe of the sun in his eyes wouldn’t go away. He was led to a wooden dais, above a throng of people cheering madly.

      A beautiful black-haired woman in a green sari, with a white sash belting it, introduced the four Martians to the crowd. The hills behind bent like green flames in a strong western wind; it was cooler than before, and less smelly. Maya stood before the microphones and cameras, and the years fell away from her; she spoke crisp, isolated sentences that were cheered antiphonally, call and response, call and response. A media star with the whole world watching, comfortably charismatic, laying out what sounded to Nirgal like her speech in Burroughs at the crux point of the revolution, when she had rallied and focused the crowd in Princess Park. Something like that.

      Michel and Sax declined to speak, they waved Nirgal up there to face the crowd and the green hills holding them up to the sun. For a time as he stood there he could not hear himself think. White noise of cheers, thick sound in the thicker air.

      ‘Mars is a mirror,’ he said in the microphone, ‘in which Terra sees its own essence. The move to Mars was a purifying voyage, stripping away all but the most important things. What arrived in the end was Terran through and through. And what has happened since there has been an expression of Terran thought and Terran genes. And so, more than any material aid in scarce metals or new genetic strains, we can most help the home planet by serving as a way for you to see yourselves. As a way to map out an unimaginable immensity. Thus in our small way we do our part to create the great civilization that trembles on the brink of becoming. We are the primitives of an unknown civilization.’

      Loud cheers.

      ‘That’s what it looks like to us on Mars, anyway – a long evolution through the centuries, toward justice and peace. As people learn more, they understand better their dependence on each other and on their world. On Mars we have seen that the best way to express this interdependence is to live for giving, in a culture of compassion. Every person free and equal in the sight of all, working together for the good of all. It’s that work that makes us most free. No hierarchy is worth acknowledging but this one: the more we give, the greater we become. Now in the midst of a great flood, spurred by the great flood, we see the flowering of this culture of compassion, emerging on both the two worlds at once.’

      He sat in a blaze of noise. Then the speeches were over and СКАЧАТЬ