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

The _adin_ Boris Tiban squatted on the rough volcanic ground, ignoring discomfort as he watched his companion Stroganov work. The cold poked fingers through small rips in his worn jumpsuit, but could not penetrate his polymer-insulated skin.
His _adin_ eyes were set deeply under a continuous frilled hood to shield them from the cold and the blowing dust. A transparent plastic membrane covered the eyeballs to prevent them from freezing solid. An additional membrane draped over the broad nostrils to help retain exhaled moisture. A set of auxiliary lungs mounted beneath the shoulder blades and surrounded by artificial diaphragm musculature made the _adins_ look like grotesque hunchbacks. Their skin had a milky cast, nearly dead of feeling due to the long-chain polymers grafted onto the hide, like an insulating suit.
The sculptor cupped a lump of hot mud in one tough palm as he took a final glance at his creation. Touch-up dabs of mud on the towering bust froze into cement within a few moments in the harshness of the Martian high altitudes. Stroganov had to pry the ice-covered scraps from his numb fingers, plopping them back into the steaming bucket at his side.
"Another one finished," Stroganov said, his voice reedy in the thin air. "I apologize for the delay. You can call the others now, Boris. Not that they haven't been watching from the caves...."
Behind Stroganov, like guardians around the volcanic caves where the five surviving _adins_ lived, stood glowering busts of other Russian rebels -- Stepan Razin, Ivan Bolotnikov, Kondrati Bulavin, even Vladimir Ilitch Lenin himself.
Grumbling, Boris had argued against that sculpture of Lenin, since the man had fallen into disfavor with the backlash against communism and the resurgence of nationalism. But Stroganov argued quietly and patiently -- in his teacher's way that always drove Boris to frustration -- that Vladimir Ilitch, too, was a rebel in his time, and that Lenin had also been exiled to Siberia, though his sentence was vastly more pleasant than what the _adin_ volunteers had experienced in the labor camps.
In the gathering twilight Boris used his long titanium staff to haul himself to his feet beside Stroganov's sculptures, digging its hard point into the dirt and making a satisfying scar. Boris had torn the rod from UNSA's transmitting dish ten years before, when he and the other _adins_ revolted against Earth, took whatever equipment they could salvage, and hiked off to higher elevations where they could live more comfortably and breathe the thin air for which they had been created.
Even here on the highest slopes of the enormous volcano Pavonis Mons, the air tasted thick and spoiled to Boris, a flavor of too much oxygen, ripe with airborne algae, tainted with toxic pollutants from the _dva_ mining and excavation settlements that sprang up like mushrooms in the lowlands. The air grew worse each year. Boris wanted to mutter a curse and spit at the ground -- but he and all the _adins_ had learned never to waste valuable moisture in pointless gestures or unheard words.
Brushing red dust from his arms, Boris turned toward the cave mouth to call the others. The shadows of Stroganov's sculpted heads grew longer, like the distorted silhouettes of history. Stroganov stood proudly beside his new creation, anxious to tell another story.
Night fell rapidly on the Pavonis caldera. Stars blazed down, more brilliant than the darkest Siberian night. Knowing where to look, Boris could make out the two tiny moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos -- Greek for "fear" and "dread." The moons were tiny rocks, fossilized potatoes in orbit. Phobos scurried across the sky three times in a single sol, while Deimos hung in nearly the same spot, day after day. Fear and Dread. Boris wondered how two such small pebbles could inspire such terror.
Cora Marisovna, Boris's almond-eyed lover, crouched in the darkness of the cave mouth, unwilling to come outside. Wiry and thin Nikolas, the youngest of their group, came out, hovering beside Nastasia, the _adin_ woman he shared with Stroganov. Since Stroganov had been busy with his new project lately, Nikolas had taken extra turns with Nastasia, who never seemed to know where she was anyway.
She came out beside Nikolas, gasping in amazement at the new sculpture, and as she had done with each of the other faces before, she pointed a blunt _adin_ finger. "I knew him! I remember him!" Nikolas gave her a condescending smile. Boris kept his face expressionless.
There was no real love between Nastasia and Stroganov or Nikolas, because the person who lived within the mind of Nastasia changed from hour to hour. She was one of those who had suffered a defect in the _adin_ augmentations; oxygen had been cut off to parts of her brain during the first few days, before she had somehow adapted and survived. All that remained of her personality were scattered fragments of memories, things she had imagined and things she had experienced, puzzle pieces that did not belong next to each other, but were forced by clumsy hands into a crude interlocking.
Nikolas helped Nastasia squat down beside him on the rocky soil. "Who is it this time, Boris?"
Boris shrugged. "Wait until Stroganov tells you. Somebody you've never heard of, no doubt."
Nikolas nodded. Of all the _adins_, Nikolas looked up to Boris Tiban the most, and Boris considered it his duty to adopt a protege. Back on Earth, Nikolas had been in the Siberian prison camp for a stupid reason -- he had stolen construction equipment for the black market, but got caught when he tried to sell it back to its original owner. Boris had helped the young man survive the rigors of the camp, when he would surely have died in the first year otherwise.
"I give you another hero," Stroganov said proudly, "someone we must not forget from our history." He stood beside the recently completed monument and raised his hands. The new sculpture looked darker and sharper than the others, unworn by abrasive dust. Next to the stylized human face, Stroganov's _adin_ modifications made him look even more of a monstrosity.
Stroganov bent forward, as if to make certain his audience remained attentive. Nastasia could not focus her mind clearly enough, but she made a great show of it. Nikolas raised his watery blue eyes, though, and Cora Marisovna listened from the shadows.
"I give you Emelian Ivanovich Pugachev." Stroganov smiled.
_At last_, Boris thought, _someone we have heard of._
The Sovereign Republics had seen many changes of boundaries and governments, but the people had a common history, common hostilities, occasionally even common cultures. They were tied together by strands much too strong to be severed by the winds of changing politics.
One of the strange consequences of the fall of the Soviet Union among ethnic Russians was that they looked at their Russian imperial history as a golden age, resurrecting tsarist heroes: Ivan the Terrible battling the boyars, Peter the Great and his eccentricities, Alexander I and his wars against Napoleon.
Boris Tiban was Azerbaijani, with a dash of Armenian and Georgian -- but in his foster homes he had been forced to attend Russified schools that taught Tolstoy, Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky. All schoolchildren had heard of the great Pugachev Revolt.
Stroganov began to tell his story: "During the time of Tsarina Catherine II, whom old historians used to call Catherine the Great, Emelian Ivanovich united the Cossacks in a rebellion that stretched from the Urals to the Pacific. Pugachev forged serfs and enslaved ethnic groups into such a powerful army that the tsarina had to conclude an unsatisfactory peace with the Turks so she could turn her military against him.
"Pugachev gathered fifteen thousand supporters, claiming to be the true tsar whose death Catherine had falsely staged thirty years before. But when Catherine sent her full army against him, even Emelian Ivanovich could not survive. The tsarina's army captured him and brought him to Moscow in a cage. Pugachev was beheaded and quartered, and during the following months, peasants in the rebellious villages were hanged and tortured, their homes burned."
Stroganov sighed. "Pugachev was a brave man, but he struck at the wrong time. I think he would have done well on Mars."
"Yes," Nastasia said, "I remember him! I do." Nikolas shushed her.
Boris nodded grimly. "A good choice, Stroganov. Pugachev was one of Russia's greatest heroes."
Boris liked the great rebels. Even their missteps sent ripples through the tsarist governments and the mindset of the Russian people. Boris's own _adin_ rebellion on Mars had caused as great a stir -- for a time -- though now it seemed Earth had forgotten all about his grand gesture.
Caught up in bickering and their own internal ethnic problems, the Sovereign Republics had remained side players in the terraforming of Mars. But all along they had had a surprise up their sleeves that would let them steal the show from the UN Space Agency, and at a relatively low cost.
Thirty _adins_ were shipped to Mars in a cargo transport officially described as "unmanned," filled only with supplies for the eventual human colony. But when the ship landed and opened its doors to a worldwide audience, the transmission showed a human being -- augmented, yes, but wearing no environment suit -- setting foot on Mars. The _adins_ were the showpieces of the Sovereign Republics, displaying an imagination, bravery, and efficiency that no one else in the world expected of them. The uproar could be heard practically across interplanetary space.
Cut off from their Earthly masters, the _adins_ had not meekly tamed a world and bowed to every command transmitted to them, though a few of the _adins_ behaved like cowering serfs instead of pioneers. Sixteen years ago Boris Tiban had led his own bloody rebellion, like Pugachev. He had freed the _adins_ to make their own lives on their own world. Now, though, only five of them remained.
The Martian atmosphere grew thicker and warmer. Hundreds of the second-phase _dvas_ swarmed over the surface, trained dogs of the UNSA project. And now unmodified, unwanted normals had established a clumsy foothold with their permanent bases.
The _adins_ were obsolete, no longer needed.
As night fell and the air grew even colder in the star-streaked darkness, Boris squeezed his fist until the reddish rock crumbled into powder, like freeze-dried blood. Taking one last look at the towering statues Stroganov had constructed, he turned and walked without a word into the caves.
Cora backed out of his way. She did not say a word to him. He glared at her, at how her body had betrayed both of them, and felt the long, dull rage eating at his stomach. Without the furnace of anger he kept stoked within him, Boris felt nothing at all.
_I am obsolete, but I am not a museum piece!_ he thought. Statues and trophies gathered dust. But Boris Tiban could still act against his oppressors.
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RACHEL DYCEK
By the time Rachel brought the long-distance rover back to Lowell Base, meandering aimlessly across the Martian landscape as she gathered her thoughts, the distant sun had already fallen behind the line of crags called the Spine.
Operations manager Bruce Vickery was there to meet her at the parking shelter, hands on stocky hips, suited up and ready to clamber into _Percival_ as soon as Rachel opened the airlock. The speakerpatch in Vickery's helmet flattened his annoyance.
"Hey, Rachel, I needed to go out a lot earlier than this. You were scheduled to be back hours ago." Vickery turned his back on her and popped open the rover's storage compartment, slinging in a backpack of tools he had with him. It landed inside the bin with a hollow thunk. "It's going to be damn tough to calibrate those meteorology stations without the sun."
The strong tone in his usually even voice triggered her defensiveness, and she turned to him. The base had two long-distance rovers, after all. "Why couldn't you take _Schiaparelli_?"
"It's being serviced. Al-Somak is using it to meet the lander tomorrow, and he wants it bright and clean. I've been waiting here for you for hours. I wish you wouldn't do this to me, Rachel." Vickery sounded like an exasperated father trying to talk sense into his teenaged daughter. Rachel felt small, and hated herself for feeling that way.
"Take it then. It is all yours." Behind her, she heard Vickery climb through the sphincter airlock. The thousands of small telescoping legs reset themselves with a whisking noise, levering the body of the rover high enough off the ground to clear any obstacles on the terrain. Like an impatient bull, _Percival_ snorted a thin whistle of cold steam as it cleared its exhausts.
Still sluggish from her self-indulgent afternoon, Rachel walked along the packed-dirt path to the outer module's entrance, then let herself through the main airlock into the changing area. She used one of the wall-mounted vacuum hoses to remove as much of the red dust as she could from her suit, then disconnected her helmet. The air smelled sour and metallic, with a musty, carbolic smell from the air-regenerating unit. She switched off the backpack and slipped it from her shoulders, then shucked her suit. Glowing resistance heaters shed small pools of warmth in the changing area, but they could not beat back the ever-present cold of Mars. The changing stool felt like ice against her bare legs as she tucked the suit components in the designated storage cubicle.
With a damp poly-sponge, Rachel rubbed down her body to remove the sweat and grit. The cold dampness made her skin tingle, like sitting in a sauna and then running across the snow in the camp in Siberia where she had secretly performed the _adin_ surgeries.
As she dressed in a clean jumpsuit, Rachel checked her trim and compact body. Even under the one-third gravity, she had not degenerated to flab over ten years. At fifty she looked hard, annealed by the fire of human scorn and the cold of Mars.
Back on Earth, though, in the oppressive gravity of her forced retirement, she would become a fossil soon enough.
Rachel made her way through the bulkhead door into the narrow corridor connecting the inflatable modules. As she passed into the central module that housed the main computers and communications facilities, Dr. Evrani, the meteorologist, burst in on her, waving his hands and simmering in anger. He was a little man, scrawny and hyperactive, as if his body were too small to contain the energy he generated. Even after five years of listening to his loopy Pakistani accent, Rachel still found him hard to follow. He reminded her of the Indian inquisitor that had dissected her on the world newsnets during the UN _adin_ hearings, which might partially account for her dislike of Evrani.