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[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] Well, but a true rationalist took emotions into account. He could look around him and see how people every-where sought for something greater than any individual existence to love, to belong to, and how tightly they clung to whatever they found. Mars was the Martians' birthright Surely David Ronay had it in his blood and bones. When he wedded Helen Holt and brought her to Sanan-ton, it was to ground that a forebear of his had broken almost four hundred years earlier about seven hundred and fifty of Earth's. Besides running the plantation and other operations of the estate, he was active in civic af-fairs and eventually served as regional deputy to the House of Ethnoi. Besides being his partner, she spent time on the educational net teaching basic linguistics and semantics. She also kept shrewd watch on their invest-ments. Better than most, she saw how this world, thrown on its own resources, was perforce rediscovering, or per-haps reinventing, venture capitalism. Kinna Ronay was born in the medicenter at Eos, but the next day her mother flitted her the hundred-odd ki-lometers back to Sananton. There she grew up. In the course of time she gained a brother and two sisters. (That alone made the home foreign to any on Earth or Luna. The Republic had never tried to limit reproduction. Far from being a threat to this biosphere, humans had created and maintained it. Nor did their ten million or so over-crowd the elobe. Rather, more of them would have been desirable. But economics how many offspring the av-erage couple could afford kept population down. The Ronays were relatively well off.) However, although the family was close-knit, the first of Kinna's siblings came three years after her, and thus she developed more or less independently of them. She was always an independent soul anyway. Regardless, as she grew taller, she got an increasing share of responsibilities in addition to her schooling. She did not resent what to her was simply natural. At its peak, the Martian economy had not been lavishly productive. It must concentrate on the extractive industries and on building the basis of survival. Scant capacity was left overffor robotizing jobs or for social benefits. People must work alongside the machines. It formed habits that stood them in good stead in these leaner times? Not that Kinna was ignorant of the outer universe or shut away from it. The family were regularly in Eos on business or pleasure. They toured the planetr from polar ice dunes to the marts and monuments of Crommelin or the cities clustered in Schiaparelli. They were in telecom-munication with friends everywhere. Kinna gained some familiarity with Earth and Luna too, as part of both her education and her everyday life. From time to time the multiceiver carried a program beamcast directly from the mother world. Otherwise the public database offered text, audiovisuals, music, the en-tire recorded culture of her species and much of the Lu-narian. In the virtuality of the vivifer she experienced rain, sea, forests, a frenetic dance hall, a meditation on a mountainside, the ruins of New York, ascension to the Habitat and onward to Luna ... When her parents judged her old enough, they allowed her a few dreambox ses-sions. Afterward her memory bore, as if it had really happened to her, a day in mythic Avalon, being an eagle and then an owl, an evening (suitably disguised as a male) in the Mermaid Tavern, being (and somehow conscious of it) a planetary system or a molecule, all the ever-changing intricacies. ... But work held ample rewards. Riding about the plan-tation, at first with Father, later by herself, tending the crops and their symbionts, she never found two trips alike. There was bound to be a surprise, problem to solve, challenge to meet, a mutation, a disease, an ecological equilibrium upset. To restore the right order was pro-foundly satisfying. She liked seeing things grow beneath her hands also in the workshop, where she proved to have a gift for fixing machinery and making useful arti-cles. Thrice over the years, a giant dust storm over-whelmed the drift fences. The terror of it, then afterward the complexities and even the toil of digging out and reconstruction, brought her totally alive. Housework it-self could be fun, when two or three tackled it and sang together. Looking after her siblings while the parents were away might get exasperating now and then, but down underneath, it was a joy. The family often made excursions into the Chasma, to hike or climb through its stern magnificence. In adoles-cence, Kinna explored with friends of her age, or alone. When time allowed, she was gone for days at a stretch, inflating a sealtent and activating a heater at night. This often began with a flit to some remote point along the Valles. Wonders were endless; wind-carved stone, min-eral hues, caverns, crystals, ancient watercourses, perhaps a fossil. Such a find was an event, and not just because she got to report it to the museum and help dig it out. To behold that small, strange trace, to sense that after a billion years Mars again bore life Chills ran deliciously up and down her spine. It was enjoyable to poke around in abandoned settle-ments, but also spooky and faintly saddening. Once peo-ple numbered more than they did today, and hopes ran high. They had actually talked of transforming the planet into a new Earth. Here lay the shells of dead dreams. Kinna straightened from them. Her glance went sky-ward. The Ronays were not giving up yet, thank you! Increasingly, however, her flits became the short one over to Capri Chasma and the Lunarian [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |