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

Maya met him in the lock as he left. 'What - running away?'
'No, no - no - I'm going to have a look at the Scott and
Shackleton huts. A matter of research. I'll be right back.'
Her look showed that she did not believe it. Also that she cared
where he went.
But it was in the nature of research, after all. The little cabins
left behind by the first explorers of Antarctica were the remains of some of
the very few expeditions in human history that resembled in any way what they
were proposing to do on Mars. Though of course all
analogy was false and misleading, and dangerous - this was a new thing they
were thinking, a new event in history, nothing like it before.
Still, the first decades of Antarctic exploration had been some-
what like their planned expedition, he had to admit as the heli-copter landed
on the black rock of Cape Evans, and he followed the other distinguished
visitors to the small snow-slabbed wooden hut above the beach. This was the
nineteenth-century equivalent of their settlement at Lake Vanda, though their
compound was ever so much more uxurious. Here at Cape Evans they had had only
the necessities, all the necessities except for some vitamins, and the company
of the opposite sex. How pale and odd they had become from those lacks, along
with the lack of sunlight itself. Monastic malnourished troglodytes, suffering
from seasonal affective disor-der without knowing what a ferocious
psychological problem this was (so that perhaps it hadn't been). Writing
newspapers, acting out sketches, pumping music rolls through player pianos,
reading books, doing research, and producing some food, by fishing and killing
seals. Yes - they had had their pleasures - deprived as they were, these men
had still lived on Mother Earth, in contact with the cold fringe of her
bounty. On Mars there would be none of those Inuit raptures to pass the time
and ameliorate their confinement.
But the postmodern structure of feeling might already have made them
used to disconnection from Earth. Everyone inhabiting their


own personal spaceship, carrying it mobile with them like a hermit crab's
shell, moving from one component of it to the next: home, office, car, plane,
apartment, hotel room, mall. An indoor life, even a virtual life. How many
hours a day did they spend in the wind? So that perhaps Mars would not feel
very different.
As he considered these matters Michel wandered the big main room of
Scott's hut, looking at all the artifacts in the grey light. Scott had erected
a wall of boxes to separate the officers and scientists from the common
seamen. So many different facets; Michel felt his thoughts ricocheting this
way and that.
They flew up the coast to Cape Royds, where Shackleton's hut stood like
a rebuke to Scott's - smaller, neater, more wind-sheltered. Everyone together.
Shackleton and Scott had fallen out during the first expedition to Antarctica,
in 1902. Similar disagreements were likely to occur in the Martian colony; but
there would be no chance to build a new home elsewhere. At least not at first.
And no going home. At least that was the plan. But was that wise? Here again
the analogy to the first Antarcticans fell apart, for no matter how
uncomfortable they had been in these huts (and Shackleton's 'looked quite