"Kevin J. Anderson - Climbing Olympus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anderson Kevin J) Cora had not known the purpose behind the original questionnaires or medical screening. Unschooled, she had not known anything about planets or orbits or terraforming. Mars was simply a name, a bright orange light in the sky her mother had shown her once.
When the representatives from Moscow came from door to door in the village, Cora filled out the forms her mother and grandmother gave her. After the doctors ran several tests and asked probing questions, someone else from the project came and offered Cora's mother twenty thousand New Rubles for her daughter's participation. There had been no real choice in the matter for her. Never any choice. Cora had not even asked what the doctors were doing until after the first surgery started, and she woke up, looking in the mirror to see her disfigured nose, her ears, her eyebrows. She had not screamed, or wailed, or struck out at the doctors as some of the other subjects had. She had endured. That was her first lesson in learning how to be an _adin_. Thirty _adins_ had been smuggled off to the aging launch complex at Starry Town for the cargo shuttle that would boost them into orbit for rendezvous with a Japanese-made cargo carrier to Mars. Because of the secrecy, they had to use the old facilities at Baikonur instead of newer establishments in the western Sovereign Republics. Head down, Cora had gone where the people in charge told her to, kept quiet unless she was asked a direct question. She waited for it all to end. But it never ended, only changed. The months she spent crowded in zero gravity on the substandard cargo transport had been an uninterrupted nightmare, with nothing to do except wait and listen to the other _adins_ talk of the wide-open spaces across the surface of Mars, vaster than the whole of Siberia. Cora longed to be free, to stretch her legs and run as she had once done through the birch forests. But other _adins_ claimed that conditions on Mars would be worse than anything they had yet experienced. The few _adin_ officers kept themselves isolated from the Neryungri convicts. As weeks passed, the air pressure inside the space vessel dropped lower and lower, the temperature turned colder. The passengers were adapting for the environment of Mars. Cora Marisovna had been one of the last to emerge from the lander, watching other _adins_ as they milled about on the barren sands of a new world. Some frolicked in the low gravity -- Boris Tiban had been one of them. Others stood dazed. A few clutched their throats and retched. They had been told to expect as many as seven of them to die because of failures to adapt, imperfect surgical augmentations, and unforeseen circumstances. But it was worse than that. Ten _adins_, fully a third of their number, perished within the initial week, unable to breathe, unable to metabolize, unable to see. One of the first had been the leader of the mission, Commander Gotenko, who succumbed before camp was even set up. Vice Commander Vadim Dozintsev took over, whipping the other _adins_ into a familiar work-camp routine to establish living quarters -- not comfortable pressurized habitats like the eventual human inhabitants would enjoy, but crude open-air shelters. Month after month, they had worked together in selfless exertion to make Mars a better place. For _themselves_. Many of the _adins_ resented having to make the planet more comfortable for humans who had not gone through the painful _adin_ surgeries. Others argued against continuing an outdated UNSA plan that had been developed without knowledge of the _adins_. The presence of augmented humans should change all schedules and estimates. But Vice Commander Dozintsev insisted, and used draconian measures to squelch any complaints. The work went on for a year, with daily and then weekly informational updates beamed back to Earth. Earth wanted to watch an adventure, the quaint struggle for survival. Before the surgeries, though, all of the _adins_ had been completely cut off from their homes. They had no family, no friends, no one to whom they wanted to wave greetings. When the inflatable components of UNSA's modular base arrived on the surface of Mars, delivered by robot ships, Vice Commander Dozintsev ordered the work details to assemble parts of the initial human outpost several years ahead of schedule. The assembly would be ridiculously easy for the powerful and adapted _adins_. But the _adins_ had grave misgivings about building a pressurized and heated paradise for humans who had not even arrived. Boris Tiban rebelled. He refused to make the slightest effort to help other humans enjoy Mars. He defied Dozintsev's orders to assemble the base components, destroying one irreplaceable component in his anger. Many of the _adins_ grumbled along with him, and Dozintsev tried to force him back into line, to discipline him -- but Boris was stronger, and defeated the vice commander in a low-gravity brawl that left Dozintsev battered and Boris in the leader's role. The other _adins_ stood beside him, expecting their lot to change ... but Boris did not make changes in small increments. In the last official _adin_ transmission to Earth, Boris Tiban had hauled the bloodied vice commander in front of the cameras. With a forty-minute round-trip transmission lag, the _adins_ could be gone from the station before the Earth monitors could even respond. Boris had liked that, using the delayed messages to taunt and frustrate Earthbound observers. Neither UNSA nor the Sovereign Republics could do a damned thing about it. As the others watched, not knowing what this angry rebel intended, Boris snapped Vadim Dozintsev's neck over his knee. Before any of the _adins_ could cry out or argue with him, it was too late. "There, your puppet is executed!" Boris said, grinning into the camera. "Now the workers have taken matters into their own hands. We will make our own home on Mars. You are not welcome here." He then disconnected the transmitting array, snapping the metal spire from the center of the dish and keeping it as his royal staff. A few others fought against him; two died. But the _adins_ really had no other choice, and no one else wanted to battle for the leadership of their small band. Nikolas had been one of Boris's staunchest supporters and helped rally the surviving _adins_ after Dozintsev's execution. Abandoning what he called the decadent and comfortable modules, Boris Tiban had taken his group away from the civilized areas of Mars, away from the prepackaged examples of technology that humans needed to live outside, away from the graves of the fallen _adins_. They needed none of these things. The _adins_ scavenged all the equipment, supplies, and technological items they could carry. Boris took only his long staff, a symbol of his victory over the old masters, and he led the _adins_ to the higher altitudes of Pavonis Mons, to a more suitable climate, where they could live in peace. The _adins_ had been the first true Martians, feeling the soil with their bare feet, breathing the razor-thin air directly into their enhanced lungs. They had set out to conquer a world, and they had succeeded, too well. Now, none of them could breathe the dense air below. The terraforming process was stealing the world they had worked so hard to create. In less than three Martian years, the first _dvas_ arrived. They had been planned to replace the _adins_ all along. -------- JESUS KEEFER Dozens of remote experimental substations lay scattered across the top of the Spine, like a collection of mad-scientist apparatus exposed to the greenish sky. Jesus Keefer and his companions craned forward to peer out _Schiaparelli_'s wide front windowport as Bruce Vickery, their tour guide, brought the rover to a halt. Moving at about fifteen miles per hour even with the vehicle's terrain-gripping mobile legs, Vickery had spent part of the morning toiling along the rugged slope. The crumbling rock looked as if it barely held together in the low gravity. Finally they reached the top, emerging from the morning shadows into the bright wash of light, where the shielded mound of Lowell Base's small power reactor steamed and hissed in the frigid air. To Keefer, the reactor mound looked like a snoring dragon, and his faint gasp echoed inside his helmet. "Would you look at that!" Vickery grinned at them from behind the controls, his blue eyes sparkling. He had reddish hair, a sandy and freckled complexion, and a beard that looked grayer than it should have been. Wide face and ruddy skin gave him an appearance that reminded Keefer of a stereotypical roughneck. Vickery was also the base's undefeated Ping-Pong champion. During the drive up the winding access road both Ogawa and Shen had challenged him to a game later that day in the recreation module. On reaching their destination Vickery directed the AI to shut the vehicle down, then fastened his own helmet. The fizzing sounds of all the O2 regenerator systems made Keefer feel as if they were trapped inside a giant bottle of mineral water. Keefer and Chetwynd passed shoulder-to-shoulder through the sphincter airlock, following Vickery. The other riders waited for their turns to disembark. Encased in his suit, Keefer could not feel the soft Martian wind, though far off he saw red-orange dust devils skirling over the monotonous boulder-strewn flatlands. A bland, scoured Mars that seemed to flaunt itself in the face of the terraforming efforts. The algae and lichens had fixed some of the dust, cutting down erosion, but the effect had so far been minuscule. Outside on the high peaks Keefer stood next to the rover and gawked up at the sky smeared with olive clouds. The rover made tocking noises as it settled into idle mode, retracting its sea-urchin legs. Chetwynd bent down to peer at exposed rocks, running a gloved finger over tendrils of lichen on the sunward surfaces. "A veritable oasis here, I might say." Bruce Vickery marched out to the scattered experimental stations, nets of thermocouples stretched from shadow to sunlight, anemometers, hygrometers, and a varied array of automated atmospheric analysis stations. Keefer followed him, amazed and delighted to see the Lowell Base data-collection array that had been featured in so many online space publications. Standing at the cliff edge looking toward the sun, Keefer raised a gloved hand to his faceplate, then remembered to adjust the polarization to drown out the unwanted glare as he scanned the breathtaking landscape. The crags blocked his view of the full plains of Mars, but he could see incredible distances. The clear thin air did nothing to distort vision. The horizon was foreshortened, swallowing up the beginning jumble of Valles Marineris in the east, but he could see the distant swellings of three parallel volcanoes brushing the horizon to the west, Ascraeus, Pavonis, and Arsia Mons. He had studied the satellite photos and the gazetteer for so many years, waiting and dreaming, that it seemed unreal now to see the actual landmarks. _Amazing!_ he muttered. One day, he vowed, Allan could be here to see it for himself. If only the boy worked hard on his studies, took the right courses, completed the right apprenticeship programs. Keefer would make sure he had every opportunity. It was the least he could do, to make up for being away from him for so many years. Vickery opened _Schiaparelli'_s back storage bay, swinging the flexible aluminum hatch up to display a stack of nested plastic domes. He waved his hands to get everybody's attention. "Okay, stand together for a minute while I talk." His deep voice came out fuzzy through the speakerpatch. "Turns out this is going to be more than a sightseeing trip. I brought you guys up here because I need some help battening the hatches, so to speak. I intended to do most of this work yesterday, but our illustrious Commissioner Dycek wandered off with the rover until late in the day, so I only got the lower tiers done. Now you're going to bail me out before the dust clouds come." Keefer stepped forward, eager to do something hands-on rather than just take tours and review summary reports. "Okay. What do you need us to do, Bruce?" Vickery gestured to the scattered experimental stations. "All those collectors need to be protected from the storm, with the shieldcaps mounted on top of them. I'm not going to let those reflective surfaces get sandblasted." He went over to the nearest station, a small ultralight anemometer whirling in the thin breeze. "Just watch me and figure it out for yourselves. You're smart people." Vickery popped out a lower brace, then disengaged the apparatus. "Okay, now for step two." Returning to the rover, Vickery removed one of the translucent plastic shieldcaps and mounted it in position, snapping the metal edges onto holder pins around the meteorological instrument. "I've had plenty of practice at this, but you all might want to work in pairs." He moved to the next collector in the array and repeated his performance. "We've got a hundred of these puppies to stow -- and if any of you bangs up a single one of them, I'll make you walk back to Earth to get me a replacement. Got it?" Keefer and Chetwynd raised eyebrows at each other behind their faceplates, silently agreeing to be partners. Keefer took a crank from _Schiaparelli_'s storage bay and Chetwynd tucked a stack of the flimsy shieldcaps under his arm before hiking to one section of collectors. Keefer thought of the first manned expedition, when the crew had roughed it in inflated tents, worse than the most unpleasant camping trip on Earth. Now, as he thought of the cluster of modules below, the greenhouse, the meteorological sensors up here, even the water pipelines and the ice mining, he felt renewed awe at the progress humanity had made. They had a planet in the palm of their hands and they were caressing it into life. It was early afternoon by the time they finished the work. Vickery strode around the shielded apparatus like a burly crew boss, checking to make sure nothing would come loose in the high winds. "Good work," he said. "Sincerely. Now, let's go back to base and goof around. You guys deserve a little relaxation." His words met with no complaint. While his companions gathered in the recreation module, Keefer went instead to the single privacy booth in the communications center. He collected his thoughts, wanting to get his videoletter right the first time, since he hated the tedium of editing. On board the Moon-Mars spacecraft, while the others used the exercise equipment or Captain Rubens told tall tales, Keefer had often kept an electronic journal, which he uplinked and transmitted to his son's e-mail address. He had no idea whether Allan read his father's ramblings, but Keefer kept transmitting them anyway. Now, Keefer sat straight in the booth and checked himself in the small courtesy mirror to the side, out of camera range. Sound baffles covered the ceiling and floor like geometrically perfect stalactites made of blue foam. He had already shaved. He straightened his thick dark hair, tried on various expressions, then turned to the image area. He cracked his knuckles in a last nervous gesture and then stepped on the activate button with his right foot. "Hi, Allan! Or should I say, 'Greetings, Earthling, I speak to you from the planet Mars'?" Keefer smiled. In the milky opaque image area, he pictured Allan's face, looking at him with rapt attention. Allan was Keefer's son by a former lover, Gina. Although Gina and he had gone their separate ways back when Allan was only a baby, Keefer had followed his son closely, paying generous child support and helping Allan go to the best schools. He was confident that the boy would one day surpass him by leaps and bounds. "I really wish you could be here, Allan, and someday you will be. I know it." He sighed and gave a wistful smile. "It's been a long time since you and I had a real back-and-forth conversation. There's so much I want to tell you, but right now the transmission lag is about fourteen minutes. We'll have to be content with a videoletter." Relaxing, he chattered about the day's expedition up the side of the Spine and working with the solar panels. He talked about the people on the base, his impressions. With glazed eyes and a distant expression Keefer spoke of the colors in the skies, the lichens on the rocks, the frost in the morning ... all direct results of the UNSA terraforming work. |
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