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

Stroganov usually ended his story there, without telling of the inevitable dissension in the rebel army between Cossacks who wanted to free all the peasants, and gentry who wanted them kept in service. The strife weakened Bolotnikov enough to bring about his defeat. Much later, though, during the Soviet years in the twentieth century, Ivan Bolotnikov had been glorified as a popular hero, one of the few acceptable folk legends that promulgated proper Communist party ideals.
In the bleak afternoon he looked at his other monuments outside the cave mouth. So many rebels, so many dreams in the history of the Sovereign Republics. Stepan Razin, whom Pushkin had called "the one poetic figure in Russian history"; Bulavin, even Lenin. And all of the revolts had failed in similar ways. Even Lenin's Communist revolution lasted only a few generations before it, too, crumbled.
Stroganov knew that Boris Tiban pictured himself as one of those great heroes, the first Russian rebel on the planet Mars. But Boris was a pale shadow of these others. Stroganov recognized that easily, yet Boris seemed to have convinced himself. Though he had led the _adins_ in their rebellion against UNSA, Boris was no charismatic, brilliant general like Bolotnikov or Pugachev. Boris had a tendency to lash out at anything just to ease his feelings of helplessness. He did not understand that the simple ability to destroy did not make a man powerful.
Boris made no secret that he wished Stroganov would erect a sculpture of him, to stand with the other proud rebels. Each time he began a new work, Stroganov felt the silent pressure, hints that Boris thought were subtle. And each time Stroganov chose someone else.
Now he had to make another decision. Gorbachev or Yeltsin? Peter the Great? Stroganov had already found the best vacant spot to erect a new face. He had already laid down a sturdy base, erected a tall cairn of rocks mortared together into a solid structure that would provide a framework. After the storm season, Stroganov would apply mud to form the features of a face.
He smiled as he put down the now-cold bucket of touch-up mud. He would have to melt it again down by the steam vents just so he could clean out the debris. Scraping his coated hand against a rough boulder to rub off the ash, he went over to the site he had chosen for the new sculpture. Kicking loose rock aside with his hardened foot, Stroganov etched out an approximate outline for the base of rocks.
He would indeed create an _adin_ sculpture this time, making no secret of the distortions of the face, the features altered by the augmentation surgeries; and that would keep Boris happy.
But the sculpture would bear the face of Nikolas, not Boris.
Since setting foot on Mars, Elia Stroganov had chosen never again to use his first name. His family name was sufficient, he thought, and a proud family name it was.
The Stroganovs had been a wealthy merchant family, dispatched in 1581 by Ivan the Terrible with a small mercenary army of Cossacks to move across the Urals, across the steppes into Siberia. Within two years, the Stroganovs founded a great commercial empire on salt and Siberian furs, defeating even the Mongol Khan Kuchum. The Stroganovs' wealth and power grew so great that during the Time of Troubles they actually made a large loan to the Moscow treasury. Centuries later, Count Paul Stroganov was deputy minister of the interior and close adviser to Tsar Alexander I, who defeated Napoleon in his invasion of Moscow.
The _adin_ Stroganov had fixated upon the importance of his family name, telling anyone who would listen, dismayed that most people remembered the surname only for a sour-cream-and-beef dish one family member had created.
In Siberia, in the city of Novosibirsk, Stroganov taught in the Akademgorodok, the center for scientific research built as a suburb by the old Soviet Union. Despite the famed scientists and engineers trained in the Akademgorodok, Novosibirsk was primarily an industrial city, manufacturing steel and heavy equipment that was then exported down the Ob River.
In his classes, Stroganov deified the ancient Russian rebels, emphasizing history and culture to the detriment of the physical sciences curriculum. But most of Stroganov's students were the children of factory workers who had no interest in the broad social implications of long-ago failures. Stroganov was reprimanded repeatedly; he backed down only until the education committee members changed, then he started all over again.
One night he got into a drunken brawl, arguing with another teacher over whether people like Stepan Razin or Pugachev were heroes or villains. In the reckless fight, Stroganov knocked one of his colleagues over a chair. The awkward fall snapped the man's spine and left him paralyzed for the rest of his life.
Stroganov was sent to the Neryungri penal camp. It was a bitter irony to be exiled deeper into Siberia, which his ancestors had conquered.
Stroganov had volunteered for the _adin_ testing after he realized that it was his duty as a Stroganov to be among the pioneers and explorers on Mars, one of the _adins_, one of the first. But the landscape of Mars was bleaker than any part of Siberia his ancestors had ever seen.
Now, his arms laden with enormous rocks he could never have lifted in Earth's gravity, Stroganov began to pile up the base for his bust of Nikolas. To the north the air held the murky haze of an impending storm. The sun had already gone behind the caldera, spreading long shadows. Overhead, stars swarmed through the deepening sky.
As he dropped the rocks in a pile, they clacked together like children's building blocks. Kneeling in the reddish dirt, he began to arrange them, placing the largest on the bottom and scooping out depressions to mount them. He could already visualize what the sculpture would look like: Nikolas with his head tilted upward, gazing at the sky with hooded _adin_ eyes -- either looking to the stars, or back toward Earth. Stroganov considered, shaping the lines until the picture of the monument stood large and sharp in his mind. He wouldn't use any real mud or mortar until tomorrow, unless the storm came first.
Stroganov stopped, then turned to listen. He heard an approaching mechanical noise, tinny in the thin air. The stillness of the falling night was so absolute that even a faint far-away sound caught his attention. The glowering stone faces blocked his view of the lower slope -- but he clearly heard a sound he had not encountered in a long while.
Leaving the rocks and his cold bucket in place, Stroganov walked through his towering sculptures. Emerging from the shadow of the last stone face, he looked down the slope and saw an orangish-red cloud of dust raised by an approaching vehicle. An UNSA rover scrambling up the rock-spattered path -- one of the vehicles from Lowell Base.
"Boris!" Stroganov shouted. His breath spurted cold steam into the air. He stumbled back toward the cave, still miscalculating his running footsteps even after so many years in the low gravity. He caught himself just in time to keep from fetching up against the edge of the cave opening.
Already the other _adins_ had heard it. Boris Tiban ran out of the grotto where he had been brooding, his body glistening with diamonds of frozen vapor. He held the pointed titanium staff in his hand like a spear, a warrior ready to defend his home against invaders.
"They are coming to get us," Boris said. "At last."
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RACHEL DYCEK
_Percival'_s AI piloting system helped Rachel choose the best uphill course. The screens automatically downlinked weathersat data, as well as updates from the five human bases, two of which were already inundated by the storm.
Once again, _Percival_ asked her if she wanted to turn the locator beacon back on to reestablish contact with Lowell Base. Once again, Rachel assured it that, no, she did not. She was glad it did not ask her what she intended to do; Rachel was not yet ready to articulate it, even to herself.
The rover's guidance mechanisms scoped out the obstacles ahead, seeking a shallower gradient for the climb, warning her of possible precipices or loose soil. Like multiple teeth, the articulated legs chewed the dust and swallowed up the distance.
Rachel sat in silence, staring out the viewport and munching a bland snack of sugar wafers from the supply bin. She didn't quite want tea badly enough to swing back to the galley and heat herself a cup. Perhaps later. She listened to the rumble of the methane engines, the slow vibration of the vehicle's flurry of legs.
As the afternoon dimmed with the rapidly setting sun, she kept her eyes scanning for any trace of the _adins_. The broad path up the conical volcano seemed to be leading her upward like a giant funnel. Hints of lichen and algae on the rocks grew scarcer, and a thin embroidery of frost appeared in the shadows of sharp outcroppings. But she saw no sign of any primitive encampment.
Rachel opted to follow a gaping chasm like a slice out of the shield volcano's outer shell. The chasm was one of the only landmarks she found on the vast uphill plain. She rode as close to the edge as _Percival_'s safety algorithms would allow.
The chasm suggested days long past when liquid water had spilled downhill from melting ice on the mountaintop. Or perhaps the enormous volcano had split its seams from below in a last spasm. Rachel didn't know. Geology was not her area of expertise.
Jesus Keefer was a geologist, though.
Gauges showed the outside air pressure dropping as she ascended the mountain. The wind speed picked up, bringing gusts that carried enough muscle to rattle the rover's double hull. Behind her reeled a curving swath of chewed dust and sand marking the path of her rover. The tracks would be erased when the storm hit -- certainly before anyone thought to come looking for her. She wondered if anyone back at the base had yet noticed that she was gone.
As the crown of Pavonis Mons cut off the horizon in front of her, a pragmatic part of Rachel's mind pondered what exactly she intended to do to herself when she got to the top. Park the rover on the caldera's edge and embrace the storm when it arrived, strain for a glory she could never reach?
Nonsense. She was a biomedical researcher, thoroughly familiar with the effects of the Martian environment on the human body. The dust storm would claw at her environment suit until the faceplate or the fabric was breached. If she happened to be lucky, the wind might hurl her to the rocks at the bottom of the eight-kilometer-deep caldera. More likely, her suit would simply rupture, leaving her to breathe air as sharp as knives and cold as ice, her mouth and nose clogged with rust. Her lungs would be flayed from the inside out; she would cough freezing blood.
And thanks to all the progress of the UNSA terraforming, she could live through it all for five minutes, perhaps longer.
No, suicide on Mars was a childish, cinematic fantasy. She had known it all along, despite her anger at being replaced as commissioner. There would be nothing noble about her surrender.
She had never looked far enough ahead. She had thought the low point of all this work was enduring the UN hearings over the _adins_ -- but that had only been practice. Everything should have improved once the governments exonerated her of wrongdoing and allowed her to continue with her work. The perpetual optimist.
"You always think everything will work out happily, Rachel," Sergei had told her once, with his back turned, as he stared into the shadows of their apartment. "You are too much of a dreamer -- and dreams do not usually happen. You will never learn anything else until you learn that."
Her priority now was to find the _adins_, to learn what had happened to her dreams.
Ahead, Rachel saw the concave mountain peak, dotted with the hollow pores of what looked like ancient volcanic steam vents, lava tubes, and jagged teeth of black rock rotten with cavities from blowing dust. Sunset shadows oozed like dark oil spilling down the slope.
As _Percival_ approached, one cluster of the towering columns looked different: curiously shaped, but of a uniform size, arranged in rows. Gathered in the brittle enhanced contrasts of sunset they appeared to be ... faces. Human faces carved out of volcanic rock.
An eerie chill ran down her back as she drove closer and switched on the piercing blue-white spotlights. The monuments were indeed sculptures -- tall stone heads like the angular prehistoric faces found on Easter Island. This was impossible! Superstitious awe made her mouth feel dry. Each visage was different, most of them sporting beards, sharp noses, wide-open eyes that stared at her as she approached. She had found what she sought.
She slowed _Percival_ and leaned forward until her neck and shoulders ached. A cold sweat prickled her body like the tingle of a faint electric shock, making her jumpsuit feel clammy. If she stopped here she knew what she would discover.
Just then, burly misshapen figures stepped away from the rocks, emerging from the shadows. They moved quickly, taking cover again, growing bolder and peeping out to stare at her. Human figures -- no, not quite human. The breath caught in her throat. In the fading light she recognized them.
_Adins_.
Though the _adins_ had been assumed dead years ago, Rachel knew better than any other person how versatile and enduring her creations were. The hope had remained with her always, died down to a flicker after ten years, but still there. Twenty or so _adins_ had vanished after the rebellion. The _adins_ had gone into hiding for all these years, but the two renegades who had attacked the _dva_ pumping station had not been alone. This appeared to be an entire settlement!
Rachel saw two of them at first, hiding beside the sculptured faces, and then a third _adin_ stepped out of the darkness of the lava tube. This one carried a long metal staff.
Boris Tiban himself. How could she not recognize him even after so many years? Her chapped lips curved in a smile.