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

place, and save them the trouble?
Now, trying to shake the feeling of anxiety growing in him, in the
bright rooms and out in the dark world, the joke got less and less funny.
People were furtive. Relationships were forming, and Michel saw these
relationships now by the absences created by their concealment. Like tracing
footprints in air. People no longer caressed who had before; glances were
exchanged, then avoided; some people never looked at each other any more, and
yet drew toward each other as they passed in the halls out of an internal
magnetism too strong to tell the others about, but also too strong to conceal.
There were trips out into the frigid starry night, often timed so that both
parties were out there together, although they did not leave or return
together, but with other parties. Lookout Point, a knob low on the Dais, could
be observed through night IR goggles, and sometimes one saw two flowing green
bodies delineated out there against the black phosphor background, the two
figures overlapping in a slow dance, a beautiful mime. Michel hummed an old
song in English as he watched, absorbed beyond shame: 'I'm a spy, in the house
of love - I know the things, that you're thinking of . . .'
Some of these relationships might knit the community together, others
might tear it apart. Maya was playing a very dangerous game with Frank
Chalmers now, for instance; she went out on walks with him, they talked late
into the evenings; unselfconsciously she would put a hand to his arm and
laugh, head thrown back, in a way that she never had with Michel. A prelude to
a later intensification, Michel judged, as the two were beginning to look like
the natural leaders of the expedition. But at the same time she was always

_playing him off against the Russian men, with whom she would joke in Russian
about the non-Russians, unaware perhaps that Frank spoke some Russian, as he
did French (atrociously) and several other languages. Frank just watched her,
a small inner smile playing over his lips, even when she joked about him and
he could understand it. He would even glance at Michel, to see if he too
caught what she was doing. As if they were complicit in their interest in
Maya!
And of course she played Michel as well. He could see that. Perhaps just
instinctively, as a matter of habit. Perhaps something more personal. He
couldn't tell. He wanted her to care about him . . :
Meanwhile, other small groups were withdrawing from the main one. Arkady
had his admirers, Vlad his close group of intimates; they were harem keepers,
perhaps. On the other hand, Hiroko Ai had her group, and Phyllis hers, each
distinct; polyandry as well as polygamy, then, or at least it seemed possible
to Michel. They all existed already - in potentiality or in his imagination,
it was hard to tell. But it was impossible not to perceive at least part of
what was going on among them as the group dynamics of a troop of primates,
thrown together all unknown to each other, and therefore sorting things out,
establishing consorts, dominance hierarchies, and so on. For they were
primates; apes shut in cages; and even though they had chosen the cages
themselves, still - there they were. In a situation. Like Sartre's Huis Clos.
No exit. Social life. Lost in a prison of their own devise.

Even the stablest people were affected. Michel watched fascinated as the two
most introverted personalities among them, Ann Clayborne and Sax Russell,