"Kim Stanley Robinson - Mars 4 - The Martians" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

kissing in public, watch them or not as one chose. Here there were decisions
to be made. Was it


worse to be a voyeur or a prude? Did one apply to the programme as an
individual or as a part of a couple? Which gave one a better chance? What did
Michel think?
Then during the winter solstice party, June 21st, after everyone had
drunk a glass of champagne and was feeling good about getting past that ebb
tide in the psychological year, Arkady called them out to see the aurora
australis, a filmy electric dance of coloured veils and draperies, soft greens
and blues and a pale pink flowing across the grain of their reality,
shimmering through the black plenum in quick sine waves. And suddenly, in the
midst of this magic, shouting erupted from inside the compound -muffled
shrieks, bellows. Michel looked around and all the hooded ski-masked figures
were looking at him, as if he should have known this was coming and
forestalled it somehow, as if it were his fault - and he ran inside and there
were Sergei and Natasha, literally at each other's throats.
He tried to detach them and got hit in the side of the face for his
trouble.
After that operatic debacle Sergei and Natasha were expelled to McMurdo
- which itself took some doing, both getting the helicopter over during a week
of stormy weather, and getting Sergei and Natasha to agree to leave. And after
that people's trust in Michel was heavily damaged, if not shattered
completely. Even the administrators of the programme, back in the north, were
faintly over-inquisitive when they asked him about it; they noted that records
showed he had had an interview with Natasha the day before the fight, and
asked what they had talked about, and if he could please share his notes on
the meeting, which he declined to do for reasons of professional
confidentiality.

Natasha Romanova: very beautiful. Magnificent posture. The calmest Russian
woman I have ever met. Biologist, working in hydroponic farming. Met Sergei
Davydov and fell in love with him here in the camp. Very happy now.

But everyone knew he had been involved with the investigation of the
incident, and naturally they must have discussed the fact that he was testing
and judging them. And keeping records of course. Mary no longer pressed his
leg with hers, if she ever had, nor even


sat next to him. Maya watched him more closely than ever, without appearing
to. Tatiana continued to seek her peers, speaking always to the person inside
one, or behind one. Or inside her. And Michel wondered more and more, as the
arbitrary divisions of time they called days passed in their cycles - sleep,
hunger, work, Bright Room, tests, relaxation, sleep -whether they could hold
it together, mentally or socially, when they got to Mars.
This of course had been his worry from the start, expressed to the
others on the planning committee only partially, as a nervous joke: Since
they're all going to go crazy anyway, why not send insane people in the first