"Kevin J. Anderson - Climbing Olympus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anderson Kevin J)

"For Nikolas it will not be all right," he said. "I should have defended him. Together we could have killed the _dvas_." Boris continued to stare at the broken vent where thin tendrils of steam sighed into the chamber. He refused to raise his misshapen head and look at Cora. "Now the humans and the _dvas_ will hunt us down."
"Then you must protect us, Boris." Cora continued to massage his shoulders. "You always have."
It had taken her a long time to grow accustomed to the abomination of his body, the lumpy alien appearance, the functional adaptations. But now, after ten hard years, Cora Marisovna loved him for what he was. The loss of Nikolas made her wonder what she would ever do without Boris.
As an attractive young woman in Siberia, she had been noticed by the handsome men, but her choices had been limited around Neryungri, especially with her mother and grandmother watching like falcons. On Mars, though, everything had changed.
The first time she and Boris had made love, just after his execution of the vice commander, Boris had taken her under the dull sun, inside a sheltering ring of lava rock that reminded her of a primitive temple. The other _adins_ were out chipping lichens off outcroppings, digging downward to free chunks of permafrost to use for cooking water.
Boris led her away from everyone else. Knowing what was about to happen, Cora could do no more than gaze at him with dazzled, hooded eyes. With his monstrous visage Boris Tiban seemed worse than the foulest criminals from the labor camp. She had just watched him snap the vice commander's neck over his knee. But awed as she was by his presence, she could not help herself. The _adins_ were few, and Boris was their leader.
Cora lay back in the cold, red dust but did not feel the sharp rocks against her padded back, cushioned by the auxiliary set of lungs that made it impossible for her to stretch out flat. When Boris held her and caressed her and settled his body on top of her with quick breaths that whistled out of his nose slits, she could enjoy little of his touch. Too much skin sensitivity had been blocked.
Realizing what she was doing, Cora felt terror and despair. In front of her Boris looked like a caricature with ears and nose removed, thick brow ridges, a swollen hunchback. No doubt she looked as hideous to him, even after a year without seeing a normal human face.
But she drove all such thoughts deeper inside herself.
As Boris touched her, kissed her, Cora closed her eyes, picturing a proud Cossack pirate taking her as his prize, as his queen, as they escaped down the river. She let herself smile at the fantasy, and opened herself to him.
Cora's external skin may have been deadened, but the nerves within had not been changed at all. She felt him enter, large and hard, slipping deep inside and touching all her sleeping nerves, jolting them back awake. The sudden rush of furnace-hot sensitivity made her squirm, and someone made a small noise in the back of her throat. Thin wind whistled around the rocks, but she could hear Boris's breathing, faster and faster, as he thrust repeatedly into her.
They moved and grabbed at each other for a long time as they reveled in the feeling, the reminder of living sensations inside them meaning more than the orgasm itself. Their lovemaking left an indentation in the dust that looked afterward as if a great struggle had occurred.
The _adins_ had no need to be concerned about contraception. The project doctors had made sure their experimental subjects were sterile before dumping them on this planet. Sex was one of the few pleasures they could still enjoy, and Boris encouraged the survivors to enjoy each other in a celebration of their victory against the slave masters from Earth.
Over the years, Cora and Boris had made love often. What did they have to lose? she thought bitterly.
Her thoughts returned to the present as Boris reached up and clasped her hand against his shoulder, forcing her to stop the massage. She waited for him to say something. Finally, he muttered, "Just let me be alone. I am thinking about Nikolas."
Feeling cast aside, Cora left him in the steam, the stench, and his guilt.
Cora spent most of her days in the shadows of the lava tubes, partly out of shyness, partly out of the revulsion she felt toward her changing body. She was not hiding from the _adins_. They could see what had happened to her, though none of them would speak aloud the dread she saw in their sheltered eyes whenever she met their gaze.
Thirteen years ago in Neryungri, her almond eyes had been modified for the wan Martian sunlight. They had been sparkling eyes, like polished ebony, slanted with a trace of her Mongol heritage. Her Martian eyes, though, were set deep within sheltering cheekbones and brow ridges, covered with a thick mesh of lashes.
She remembered her grandmother braiding her hair and singing to her, marveling at what a beautiful little girl Cora was. She had spent hours doing embroidery in a dim room beside the old woman, receiving sharp whacks on the knuckles if she missed a stitch or chose the wrong color of thread.
Seeing Cora now, her grandmother would no doubt run away shrieking, making the three-fingered sign of the Orthodox cross.
Cora looked up as Nastasia danced into the main grotto from her wanderings in the bowl of the Pavonis caldera. Already, she seemed to have forgotten about dead Nikolas.
Nastasia ran over to Cora, holding one hand behind her back. "See what I have found! A great treasure. The stories were true! I went down in the caldera, and look! This was right on the side of one of the rocks."
She held out a delicate green growth, serrated and curled like an oyster shell; lines of purple and orange striated the grayish-green of the main part. It was an unusual type of lichen, one Cora had never seen before -- but the terraforming strains were prone to interbreeding and mixing, adapting to whatever conditions they found.
"That is beautiful, Nastasia," she said.
"It is the fern flower! I found it, so it is mine. You remember what happens to the maiden who finds the fern flower!"
Indeed, Cora did remember the stories about the fern flowers supposedly growing hidden out in the fields. During Siberian summers when she was a little girl, Cora had gone out with the other children during the Festival of the Birch, hunting the tiny mythical plants that would bring magic to anyone who found them.
"Maybe it will bring something special for all of us," Cora said, nodding. "We need as much magic as we can find."
Nastasia stared down at the lichen growth she had picked. "Maybe it will bring Nicholas back to us."
Cora touched her on the shoulder. "Yes, we will miss him. Nikolas was a great friend."
"He was a great tsar!" Nastasia raised her voice. "He was my father -- but the Bolsheviks murdered him! They murdered all of my family. Only I escaped. I ran through the countryside, telling all the peasants that I was Anastasia Romanov, daughter of the tsar. Some of them hid me, but most did not believe. I got away. I am hiding from them here on Mars. The Bolsheviks must never be able to find me!" She stared down at her fern flower with a forlorn expression on her face. "Maybe I can use the magic to keep us safe."
"Don't worry," Cora said. "Nobody will ever find us up here. The _adins_ are safe."
Nastasia stared at her treasure for a few moments -- then she popped it into her mouth and ate it. Forgetting Cora, she wandered back through the cave opening into the late-afternoon sunshine.
Outside, Stroganov had already begun work on another sculpture of someone else. The old Siberian schoolteacher continued to find energy and refused to give in to apathy and despair. Cora could hear him planning and mumbling to himself. She envied his stoic outlook on life.
Deeper in the grotto, she made her way up the sloping passageway to where sunlight warmed the rocks on the caldera rim. The wind picked up as she stepped outside. A storm would be coming soon. The _adins_ would have to huddle in the caves for days, bickering with each other, eating the bit of food they had managed to set aside, perhaps even cracking into one of the few packages of UNSA supplies Boris had hoarded from the first days on Mars.
The cramps in her abdomen struck again, making her hiss in pain. She waited for it to subside, and wondered how long it would be until the next spasm. After bracing herself momentarily against the rock wall, Cora forced herself to keep moving.
Outside, with the shadows lengthening at the end of day, she used her fingers to peel the dusty strands of algae that had clung to the flapping skimmer-screens set up to capture airborne tendrils that drifted around the mountain peak. The _adins_ would cook the algae down, leach out the dirt, and make it into dense, edible wafers.
Placing the collected algae in front of her on a sunny rock, Cora slumped against the rough wall, breathing heavily. She sorted the strands. Her thick fingers worked quickly, as if doing needlework for her grandmother, but her mind wandered far from her activities.
In the tunnels below, Boris continued to sit by himself, simmering with an anger he had not begun to slake. He would not let her comfort him. It had been so long since the last time they had made love. Was he afraid of her now?
She felt tears spring to the corners of her eyes as she thought of that last time, and the months of growing dread that had followed.
Brushing the algae aside, Cora patted her swollen belly and felt the infant kick within her -- the last great practical joke of all.
--------
STROGANOV
Storm seasons had not been kind to the stone visage of Ivan Bolotnikov. The lashing winds and scouring dust weathered away many details on the sculptured face, and smears of hungry lichens made the old Russian warrior look as if he had a skin disease.
Stroganov stood among his sculptures with another bucket of sulfurous mud and ash drawn from the steaming pit deep within the volcano. Subvocalizing the words of a bar song, he made repairs where they seemed most necessary before the next storm came.
Bolotnikov was the first monument Stroganov had constructed up on the mountain, just after Boris Tiban led them to their new home. The _adins_ had felt quite proud of themselves back then, sixteen hard years and many deaths ago. They marched up the side of the volcano, cocky after having successfully thumbed their noses at Earth -- but the place had looked so bleak and forbidding. It had needed guardian angels. Boris's rebels were setting up a kingdom on top of the mountain, and Stroganov wanted to give them a few patron saints.
Bolotnikov had been Stroganov's favorite of the historical heroes he had taught in Russian schools. The man's rugged eyebrows were worn down to the level of the forehead, and the squared-off beard was chipped away. But that could be easily fixed.
Dipping his fingers into the still-hot mud, barely feeling the heat, Stroganov hauled out enough goop to reconstruct the brow ridges. The mud's consistency thickened as its meager water content froze, but he slopped it into place, nudging the hardening cement into the right contours. After it solidified completely he would use a shard of volcanic glass to scratch and chisel hairlines. It was a temporary improvement at best, since the first storm winds would buff away all fine detail, but Stroganov took pride in his work. These were great historical figures from his homeland, and they deserved to be done right, no matter how transient the monuments were, or how few people would actually gaze upon them.
Closing his eyes as he felt the petrified features, Stroganov worked from how he imagined Ivan Bolotnikov must have looked, since he could not recall ever having seen an illustration of the man. His mind brought forth a vivid imaginary portrait of Bolotnikov, who had lived in the early 1600s, gathering his rebellion during the years of turmoil following the death of the usurper Boris Godunov, when Russia had no true tsar but only a series of incompetent pretenders.
Bolotnikov was a Don Cossack, captured in his youth by Tatars and forced to serve as a galley slave for the Turks. Pondering, Stroganov blinked his heavy eyes and reached up to add a long scar to the sculpture's right cheek -- the result, he imagined, of a brawl when Bolotnikov attempted to escape the Turks, killing the galley master, until another treacherous slave smashed him on the side of the head with a loose oar, thus creating the scar. Yes, that made a good story. It had never taken place, of course, but it should have. None of the other _adins_ would realize the embellishment. They believed everything Stroganov told them in his tales. He had been a schoolteacher, after all, and he should know these things.
Bolotnikov had gathered a great revolutionary army of runaway slaves, displaced Cossacks, and serfs. He distributed inflammatory leaflets -- the first time printed propaganda had ever been used in Russia. "Kill the boyars," they said, "kill the merchants and all commercial people and seize their goods." He besieged Moscow, defeating the forces of the puppet tsar.