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

"You were not here, Commissioner!" Evrani said, his pecan-brown eyes wide, as if Rachel had somehow forgotten about being gone all day. "I had to accept the transmission myself from Commissioner Keefer in the orbiter. How could you forget? Why were you gone at a time like this?"
"So what did he want?" She walked to her desk screen and activated it. Leaning over the clutter in her personal area, Rachel read the message herself even as Evrani summarized it.
"They have reached orbital insertion on schedule and all systems have checked out. They will deploy the lander at our local sunup -- "
" -- tomorrow morning," Rachel said, on top of his words. "Then everything is on schedule and routine? No problems?" She glared at him with cold gray eyes. "So what are you so upset about?"
Evrani shook his narrow, big-knuckled finger at her. "You should not go out of sight alone in a rover. We are on the buddy system. Those are the regulations."
Rachel scowled at him. "I will take your words under advisement, Dr. Evrani." In the back of her mind, she wondered how Evrani had ever passed all the human factors tests. Cooped up together under pressure on Lowell Base, the fifty people had broken into a bunch of insulated cliques, and Evrani had become the tattletale.
Tomorrow morning, Commissioner Jesus Keefer would land, and she had to prepare to be rotated home. After two weeks Captain Rubens would have refueled his interplanetary shuttle from the oxygen mining station on Phobos and prepared for the launch window to return to Earth. Rachel Dycek and five others would be rotated back home. Settling into her retirement, she would sit back in a comfortable dacha on Earth, maybe go on a speaking tour, maybe write her memoirs of the days of the _adin_ project, or publish a final report on the success of the _dva_ phase of human augmentation.
Though her work on Mars had been superseded by other terraforming concerns, Rachel did not want to go back home. Adapted humans had always been intended as a short-term phase in the overall scheme. But she was having trouble adjusting to that reality.
Erasing her screen, Rachel shut down the terminal. Feeling claustrophobic in the confined module, she envied the _dvas_ out there in the open, breathing the air, feeling Martian breezes against polymer-insulated skin. "Excuse me, Dr. Evrani. I have a lot of preparations to make before tomorrow."
Rachel made her way to the tiny cramped cabin that had been her private quarters for a decade -- "cozy," the habitation engineers had called it. No doubt they would have said the same thing about a coffin.
Rachel folded down her bunk and snapped it out from the wall with a tight clack to lock it into place, then adjusted the controls to soften the mattress. She lounged back on the thin, spongy layer and pulled a thermal blanket over herself to keep warm. As she closed her eyes, Rachel thought back, trying to count how much of her life she had wasted on augmentation projects.
For twenty-one years of her career she had been involved with the concept, initially as an assistant, then section leader, then overall head of the _adin_ project while hiding in a secret installation built within the Neryungri labor camp. She had started the job when she was twenty-nine, rosy-cheeked and idealistic, with enough stamina to surpass her competitors and no politics to speak of -- nothing to offend the changing groups in control of the Sovereign Republics. She had excelled in medical school, practiced surgery for two years, before her real work had begun. Separating from her husband Sergei after a lackluster marriage, Rachel had vanished into the labor camps at the far edge of the Earth.
As she worked her way up, she learned all phases of the project, supervising specialists who took care of the specific details in each area -- artificial lungs, mechanical secondary diaphragm muscles, long-chain polymer skin insulation, genetically modified hemoglobin molecules to process precious oxygen more efficiently. She studied autopsies on the failures to improve the process for next time.
In the cold isolation of Siberia, under the gray skies of incessant winter, she had fallen into a brief affair with one of the other doctors. But the intensity of Rachel's personality, her single-mindedness, had driven off close relationships all her life; the doctor had requested a transfer shortly afterward.
Throughout her career, Rachel marched straight ahead in a lockstep that allowed for no distraction, no deviation. Now she felt as if she had taken three steps beyond a precipice before realizing that the bridge was out beneath her feet. The _adins_ and the _dvas_, were her life: her substitute for everything she had left behind along the way.
Rachel remembered the eleven months of intensive interviews with hardened prisoners who grasped at any sort of straw that might mitigate their sentences. She and her assistants searched for volunteers, conducted endless physiological and psychological tests, preliminary surgical inspections.
The sheer numbers of people were a blur, and she often forgot that they were people -- not specimens. But she gave them hope, and they gave her a chance to make an impact for the Sovereign Republics, which sorely needed something to regain their lost prestige in the international community.
Many types of government had been tried since the fall of communism, and now the loose federation had many different flags, currencies, and languages. But the Sovereign Republics had been weaker many times before. The people viewed the seventy-five years of Communist control as a part of their history, a stumble in the progress of time, much the same as the Mongol invasions, the Polish invasions, the oppression of the Teutonic knights.
The "united Earth" terraforming project had been an enormous drain on the world's treasury, siphoning off resources that -- some said -- might better be spent at home. Fifty years had passed, and still no humans smiled under the olive sky or romped through the rust-colored sands, as UNSA propaganda had promised. People were tired of waiting; the work seemed an unending quest, led by fools. With its own severe economic problems, the Sovereign Republics had declined to take an active role in making Mars fit for human inhabitants.
Officially, that is....
In her quarters, Rachel cracked open her gray eyes and searched for the chronometer on the wall. Tomorrow morning Keefer's lander would be down, bringing another dozen workers for Lowell Base. Twelve hours from now, she would be shaking the hand of her replacement, welcoming him to Mars. She would make the transition in a politically smooth way, helping him to take over his new duties, helping him to take duties away from _her_. Rachel didn't know how she could manage to be cordial. But she would, somehow.
She looked on the wall, at the yellowed hardcopy news clipping she had sandwiched between layers of transparent polymer.
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*'Frankenstein' Doctor Exonerated of Charges by UN Panel:*
*Second Phase to Continue*
The gray-eyed Rachel in the photograph, looking exhausted but ecstatic, seemed no younger than she looked now. Perhaps the Martian environment had stopped her aging, or perhaps she had done all her aging at once during the hearings. Her cinnamon-brown hair had become streaked with metallic gray. Her nose was a bit too large for her face, her lips too full. Her eyebrows traced dark arches highlighting a flinty gaze. She had never managed to be photogenic.
"Frankenstein Doctor" the newsnets had called her. Vivid memories lurched to the front of her mind, like screams from the depths of a nightmare.
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RACHEL DYCEK
The UN hearing chamber in the new Geneva facility was huge. The walls echoed with every footstep, every door slam, every mumbled comment. With muttering whispers and general stirs the audience sounded like a gently snoring beast.
Newsnet camera lights shone like baking suns onto the victims on display, the witnesses about to be dissected. In the midst of it Rachel Dycek felt small and alone; her convictions had hidden from her, leaving only a rigid outside shell. Her attention spiraled down into two points: the livid expression on the Japanese delegate's face and the translator microphone speaking stiff and formal Russian in her ear.
"You have dodged these questions ... for days, Dr. Dycek." The unintelligible words carried truckloads of strident anger; by contrast, the interpreter's voice sounded smooth and relaxed.
With the buzz of other conversations around the vast room, the asynchronous chatter of foreign languages, and the panicking voices in her head, Rachel had to squeeze her eyes shut just to pay attention to what the delegate was saying. The earphones made her breath thunder in her head.
_Calm, calm, calm. Pay attention. Gather your thoughts. They want you to slip, so they can lunge in for the kill. Do not give them the opportunity._
"We ask again, in front of the whole world. You must answer us this time, Dr. Dycek. How can you ... justify creating such distortions -- no, such _perversions_ of the human body? I am reminded of the English novel _Frankenstein_ by Mary Shelley. Have you read it? Did you neglect ... er, did you forget that these are _people_ to whom you have done such a horrible thing?"
Rachel opened her eyes and sat up straighter, feeling anger come to her aid, like a staff propping her up. The man's line of questioning offended her, and she made that quite plain through her tone of voice. She flashed her granite eyes at him until he flinched.
With carefully chosen words she answered in English, not Russian; the legal counsel had told her that speaking English would gain points among the largest portion of the viewing audience, make her seem less of a foreigner, less alien.
"Yes, they are indeed people, Mr. Ambassador. People who now live and breathe and work on the surface of Mars. Perhaps you are the one who has forgotten the entire" -- a buzz in her ear reminded her to slow down and allow the translator time to catch up -- "the entire mission of the UN Mars Project. We have spent half a century throwing money at an inhospitable planet, to prepare it for just this event. For the day when human beings can survive on the surface of another world. And now the Sovereign Republics have succeeded in this -- for the entire human race I might add, not just our own commonwealth -- I expected celebrations instead of an inquisition."
Rachel took her seat, then watched the weather patterns of expression on the interrogating delegate's face as her answer to his question was translated from English to Japanese. Defiantly, Rachel took a long drink of ice water, avoiding any eye contact with the row of international interrogators crouching like old ravens at the front of the room. At the table beside her sat a Thermos pot of Swiss coffee and an empty mug, but despite the thick rich smell, she avoided pouring herself a cup. These hearings offered little in the way of piss breaks, and she needed to concentrate on the accusations being shot at her, without being distracted by a swollen bladder.
Sitting silently in plush chairs along the table on both sides of her, her army of legal counsel watched with keen eyes and blank expressions. They had put a safe distance between her and themselves, in case she had to take a fall.
A few of her colleagues waited in isolation rooms for their own turns in the interrogation chair, but at the moment everything depended on her. Rachel Dycek was under the microscope. She had been the head of the _adin_ project, and she would be thrown into the roiling waters of inquisition, to "sink or swim" as the Americans said.
Scapegoat.
She had been vivisected on camera as the whole world watched. UN delegates pummeled her with question after question, hauling out details of her failed marriage to Sergei, of disciplinary records in primary school, quoting phrases from essays she had written during her undergraduate days in college.
The questioners from India and Japan were the most vehement, but Rachel saw jealousy in the eyes of the other delegates who would not have an opportunity to question her. The Sovereign Republics had succeeded in something that had been impossible for every other country on Earth. Just like the launch of Sputnik, the first satellite; or Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space; or Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space; or Alexei Leonov, the first man to walk in space. While other nations dickered for years about studies and assessments, Russians simply went ahead and did the task. Rachel had done the same with her _adin_ project.
"Thank you, Madame Chairman," the Indian delegate -- whom Rachel thought of as "Mr. Unpronounceable Name" -- leaned forward and spoke into his microphone. The Japanese delegate, whose turn at interrogation had ended with his last question, sat back with a sour look on his face and keyed comments into his notebook. Someone coughed too close to an open microphone. Other delegates shuffled papers. Mr. Unpronounceable Name, however, seemed to rely entirely on his own memory. He spoke in English.
"Now then, Dr. Dycek, let us pursue this line of questioning further. I would like you to explain for us, in detail, the exact procedures you used to select your _adin_ candidates. The world is concerned about possible human rights violations."
Rachel followed most of his words, though she double-checked them against the buzz of Russian translation in her ear. She took another deep breath. No hurry.
She used their own terminology, since the newsnets seemed set on sticking to the same words. One of the journalists who learned of Rachel's first and second phases of augmentation had dubbed them with the Russian words for "One" and "Two," _adin_ and _dva_, using the _a_ instead of the preferred _o_ transliteration. The plurals should have been _odni_ and _dvoi_, but that had been too much for the newsnets, who simply added the English _s_ plural. She sighed. The more appropriate words for "Firsts" and "Seconds" should have been _perviye_ and _vtoriye_ -- but she realized this would be a losing battle with the media, so she did not fight it. She had enough other battles to fight. So _adins_ and _dvas_ it was.
"The _adin_ candidates were chosen from among prison volunteers in our facility at Neryungri. Every single person was fully briefed on the surgeries they would undergo. They were completely aware of the modifications that would be made to their bodies -- and they knew they would never return to Earth. Every one of them knew all this. We have a release signature from each candidate."
The Indian's gaze bored into her. "But was this not a secret project? Classified government studies? Are you saying that you told every one of these people, these _convicted criminals_, of your country's most sensitive research?"