"Kevin J. Anderson - Climbing Olympus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anderson Kevin J)
_That phase of the project is over_, UNSA had said. After all her work she found herself at an impasse, perplexed as well as depressed. Regardless of how stimulating and glorious the work had seemed at first, it was still a dead end. Everyone could see that now. Rachel had never bothered to prepare herself for this day.
A long time ago she had had a choice: to feed the flames of possibility or to live her life in the comfort of obscurity. Sergei had wanted no fame, no glory, no triumph for the Sovereign Republics -- just a simple, satisfying, and unchallenging life. Now, at the end of her career, she had spent four months waiting for Jesus Keefer and wondering if she had made the wrong decision.
But if the _adins_ had somehow survived after so many years, perhaps it wasn't so empty after all.
The apartment Rachel and Sergei shared was small and compact, cramped but no worse than anyone else's in the district, since everyone had the same model. The suburbs of Moscow had been battling housing shortages for a hundred years, still with no visible progress. Living conditions had changed little in decades.
Prefab buildings went up in ever-widening rings around Moscow. The number of workers taking the monorail to the inner city and the office buildings surrounding the old Kremlin doubled every five years. But demand for housing continued to exceed supply as if through some bizarre government plot, and nothing seemed to help.
Rachel and Sergei had resolved not to have children, ostensibly to keep a greater share of space for themselves; but the truth was that neither of them had any emotional energy left for little boys or girls.
She remembered a grayish spring day, warm enough to thaw the ice on the sidewalks but with a stiff breeze to chill anyone who went outside. Sergei finished his online newspaper, flipped through the stations on the satellite TV before switching it off in disgust, and as a last resort attempted to talk to Rachel.
She sat at the kitchen table that doubled as her private desk between meals. On her tabletop computer, plugged into the wall socket to maintain its battery charge, she toyed with biochemical models, trying to find optimal oxygen-absorption configurations for the membranes in artificial lung tissue, given the parameters of the new modified hemoglobin-Y molecules. In a university lab, her team had made the new alveoli as efficient as possible -- but different statistical methods of packing them into the lung membrane could increase their oxygen-transfer capability by as much as thirty percent.
Since the _adin_ project was supposedly secret, Rachel could bring only the most innocuous research home to pore over on Sunday afternoons, though she had occasionally taken a few obscure but classified computer codes home when deadlines got too tight and security seemed lax enough.
Sergei never knew the difference; he never even showed an interest.
"That work you are doing is too risky, Rachel," he said without any sort of preamble. "It makes me uneasy."
She looked up at him, and made the response. "You don't know anything about my work."
It didn't matter to him. It never did. Already, she knew what he was going to say; she just didn't know what tack he would take this time.
"Rachel, I have spoken to my friend Barakov. He says they still need someone to work at the new geriatric medical center. Your qualifications are exactly what they need. With a recommendation from him you could get the job, certainly." Sergei's voice held little enthusiasm, since they had had the fight so many times. Barakov made the same offer every month.
Rachel frowned at him, but took the time to store the file on her computer before responding. She couldn't think of any clever new research twists right now anyway, and Sergei would not relent until they had had The Fight. It seemed to satisfy him somehow.
"What if I like my current job, Sergei? Why should I want to leave?" Though she could not tell him about it, she had just been promoted to the position of section leader, with a corresponding increase in pay. She had outlasted many of her initial colleagues in the project, and through her own forced schedules, the _adin_ work surpassed all of its expected milestones. Already, her superiors talked about moving the work out to a new, secret installation somewhere in Siberia, which Rachel herself would administer.
"This government research! How can you trust the government? You never know where tomorrow's funding is going to come from. What if someone challenges your results? What if there is an accident in your facility? Perhaps the Americans or the French have their own 'man plus' project and will place somebody on Mars long before you ever get finished -- and then where will you be? No one in the Republics will continue your funding! I will be stuck supporting us both."
She crossed her arms over her chest, knowing she was closing herself off from him. She was amazed at how much he knew about her project, but if she overreacted, it would confirm any doubts he might still have. "The work is too important to drop simply for political reasons, Sergei."
Sergei cocked an eyebrow and covered his mouth to muffle a small belch. "Oh? And what is wrong with political reasons? Remember our own space plans! The Soviet cosmonaut program was trying to get the first man on the Moon -- but when the American Apollo spacecraft got there first, what happened to us? Nothing! Apollo-Soyuz? A public relations show! Our program vanished like the wind, with the Red Army taking all the spare parts, and later selling them to the Americans just to keep _their_ space program afloat. I don't like gambling with ideas -- your job has no guarantee like mine does. Why not become a regular doctor? Think of the people you could help!"
Sergei worked as a minor functionary on the new Moscow stock exchange, one of the few occupations -- along with farmers and doctors -- that were indeed protected by the government, which considered a conversion to capitalism of paramount importance, though they were still talking about it a hundred years after they had started. Russian society was somehow not equipped to adjust to rapid changes.
"Frankly, I am willing to take the risk," she said. "It's important to me."
"But _I_ am taking the risk, too! Think of how we will have to live if you lose your employment. If your project fails in disgrace." As if to emphasize his point, Sergei stood up and took a two-man bottle of vodka out of the freezer. He yanked the cap off as if he were brawling with it and poured himself a glass. His fingers left dark spots on the coating of frost that blanketed the outside of the bottle. The oily clear liquid swam on the bottom of the glass as he swished it, needing no ice cubes. This time, surprisingly, Sergei had not started the fight with a drink already in hand. "We could lose our apartment, our lifestyle."
Rachel looked around their dismal quarters and fought to keep herself from laughing at the imagined tragedy. "Sergei, you have nothing to live for as it is. You don't like your job, you don't like your home, you don't like our marriage. Why should you care if I feel passion for what I'm working on? Are you jealous?"
Sergei sat with his back to her in the chair and took a gulp from his glass. He blinked his pale eyes at her, as if he did not see her at all. "I don't like it, that's why. We have little enough as it is. I won't risk losing it. Experiments fail sometimes. Then where will you be? Where will I be?"
"You can't know that, Rachel!"
"I know things because I keep my eyes open." She flipped down the screen on her tabletop computer and disconnected the portable module that contained her data. Even the anger such arguments usually ignited was no longer a part of her. "You don't know because you refuse to pay attention."
Carefully, she patched up the chinks in her emotional wall and turned to Sergei with an unreadable face. "I am going into the facility. I'll get more work done there."
Sergei shrugged and stared back at her with an identically unreadable expression. He poured himself another glass as she pulled a warm shawl over her shoulders and stepped out the door.
_Percival_ continued to toil up the lava slope of Pavonis Mons, its multiple legs like a stampede of arachnids across the terrain. Black lumps of ejecta thrust out like monoliths from the dust, scoured and polished into contorted shapes by furious winds during the seasonal storms, though sheltered patches were muted with the dull greens of clinging life. On the sunward side of some of the rocks she noticed grayish smears of lichen, even a tendril of frost. It made her heart ache. Even the little details signified monumental changes on a planetwide scale.
Siberia had primeval forests of pine and birch, thicker than a brick wall. Up in the permafrost latitudes there were mossy bogs, herds of reindeer, flowers in spring, clouds of mosquitoes as dense as a thunderhead. Even the desolate wasteland of Antarctica had its bright colors, fish swarming in the waters, penguin rookeries, seals.
But here on Mars, a dot of lichen was still a remarkable occurrence.
In that moment Rachel actually caught herself feeling homesick for Earth. But even in Mars's one-third gravity, her body felt old and weak. Returning to Earth, and the extra weight it would make her carry, would be hell for her -- on top of everything else.
If she did not find the _adins_, perhaps it would be enough just to go to the highest point in the area, seventeen kilometers above the Tharsis Plain. On general principles she had considered making the trek to Olympus Mons, the true highest peak in the solar system -- but the chugging _Percival_ could never carry her that far. The top of Pavonis Mons would be high enough for Rachel to watch the storm roll in ... and envelop her.
_Make sure you finish up at the top_, she had always said. And her life's work was indeed finished. Pavonis Mons stood above much of the atmosphere, nearly two times the height of Mount Everest on Earth. Yes, high enough.
Was _that_ what she planned? She flinched away from the thought each time it came to her, but it grew stronger.
On the edge of the forty-kilometer-wide caldera, Rachel Dycek would stand in her laboring environment suit and look out across her new world. She could see the howling red-brown wall seeping closer across the northern sky as airborne dust marched toward the southern hemisphere.
The rover itself might survive the punishment -- those vehicles had been designed to be tough. Someone might eventually find the battered and pitted _Percival_ at the top of the volcano, like a salute to Rachel's surrender.
But the sandstorm would obliterate all traces of _her_.
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CORA MARISOVNA
Steam escaping from a cracked vent filled the chamber deep inside the lava tube with a low snoring sound. Tough, fibrous algae clung to the walls in a thick carpet, smoothing the jagged coarseness of the rock.
Cora Marisovna and Boris Tiban reached the natural sauna by climbing through a winding maze toward the slumbering heart of Pavonis Mons. A buildup of slick frost covered the sloping walls where frigid outside air had halted the steam, forcing it back against the rock.
Cora had difficulty maneuvering her ungainly body down the steep slope, but she wanted to follow Boris. He reached back with one large and powerful hand to help her, gripping her own with a negligent disregard that made her wonder if he really noticed that she followed him. Though she could not feel the texture of his skin against her own plasticized layers, Boris held on with a crushing strength that made her bones ache -- but Cora did not dare pull away.
Boris sat in the sour-smelling, briny steam in sullen silence, wallowing in his anger and his regrets. He brooded inside, not feeling the warmth, his head bowed. Though he would never admit it, Boris needed her right now. Cora could tell.
After waiting an appropriate time, she came up behind him without a word and began rubbing his shoulders, his back. With his thickened _adin_ skin Boris could not enjoy the heavy heat of the volcanic air any more than he could feel the biting Martian cold, but he could feel her massage, squeezing, kneading. She dug in hard with her fingertips, trying to loosen the wire-tight muscles that were roped like a noose around his neck.
She liked to watch herself caress him, transported to an artificial distance by her lost sense of touch. When she pushed down she could feel his skin rough and rubbery, inhuman. Yet she felt a love for Boris Tiban, an awe that this great rebel would select her as his lover, even from the beginning.
"It will be all right, Boris," she said, leaning close to where his ears would have been. Around them, the gurgling hiss of escaping gas made the air smell of brimstone. Mars had been seismically quiet decades earlier, but the two enormous comet strikes caused the planet to snort in its sleep.
Boris sucked in a deep breath of the acrid air and hunkered closer to the floor. Cora knelt beside him. He started to moan, but bit it off quickly.
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