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

had been different then, more inured to hardship and the long slow hours of
sheer animal existence. Certainly the structure of feeling had changed; that
was culturally


determined; and thus the brain must necessarily have changed too. A century
later their brains depended on great dollops of mediated stimulation, quick-
cut inputs which had not even existed for earlier generations. So that
reliance on inner resources was harder. Patience was harder. They were
different animals from the people in this photo. The epigenetic interplay of
DNA and culture was now changing people so fast that even a century was enough
to make a measurable difference. Accelerated evolution. Or one of the
punctuations in the long tale of punctuated evolution. And Mars would be more
of the same. There was no telling what they would become.

Back to Lake Vanda, and the old huts quickly became like a dream interrupting
the only reality, a reality so cold that spacetime itself seemed to have
frozen, leaving all of them living the same hour over and over again. Dante's
cold circle of hell, the worst of all, as he recalled.
The sensory deprivation was getting to them all. Every 'morning' he
found himself waking up in low spirits. It took hours after waking to work the
weight out of his stomach and focus on the day. After he reached level
neutrality, as it was beginning to turn blue twilight at the windows, he was
able to ask to join whoever was going outside that day. Out there in the
numbing grey or blue or purple twilight he hiked along, trailing the other
thickly-clad figures, who looked like pilgrims in a medieval winter, or
prehistoric people struggling through the Ice Age. One slender bundle might be
Tatiana, her beauty muffled but not entirely blanketed, for she moved like a
dancer over the cracked mirror of the lake, under the high walls of the
valley. Another might be Maya, focused on the others, though quite friendly
and diplomatic to him too. It worried him. Beside her strode Frank, bulky and
muffled.
Tatiana was easier to understand, and so attractive. Across the ice one
day he followed her. On the far shore they stopped to inspect the dead body of
a mummified seal. These disoriented Weddell seals were found far up all the
Dry Valleys, dead for hundreds or thousands of years, frozen all that time,
slowly frittered away by the winds, until the skeleton slowly emerged from the
body like


a soul taking off a fur coat, a soul white and wind-polished and articulated.
Tatiana grabbed his arm, exclaiming at the sight. She spoke French well,
and had spent summers as a girl on the beaches of the Cote d'Azur; just the
thought of that made him melt. Now they spoke, gloved hand in gloved hand,
looking down through ski-masks at the memento mori in the grey light. His
heart beat hard at the thought of the beauty encased in the chrysalis parka
beside him, saying 'It's such a shock to come on one of these poor creatures'
vertebra, out on its own in all the rock, like someone's lost bracelet.'
From across the lake Frank watched them.