"Kim Stanley Robinson - Red Mars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

marriage would go better than that one had, she thought, because this one
was going to last forever. The hall was loud with talk. "It's a symmetry
not so much sociological as mathematic. A kind of aesthetic balance."
"We're hoping to get it into the parts per billion range, but it's not going to
be easy." Maya turned down an offered refill, feeling giddy enough.
Besides, this was work. She was co-mayor of this village, so to speak,
responsible for group dynamics, which were bound to get complex.
Antarctic habits kicked in even at this moment of triumph, and she listened
and watched like an anthropologist, or a spy.
"The shrinks have their reasons. We'll end up fifty happy couples."
"And they already know the match-ups."
She watched them laugh. Smart, healthy, supremely well-educated;
was this the rational society at last, the scientifically-designed community
that had been the dream of the Enlightenment? But there was Arkady,
Nadia, Vlad, Ivana. She knew the Russian contingent too well to have
many illusions on that score. They were just as likely to end up resembling
an undergraduate dorm at a technical university, occupied by bizarre
pranks and lurid affairs. Except they looked a bit old for that kind of thing;
several men were balding, and many of both sexes showed touches of gray
in their hair. It had been a long haul; their average age was forty-six, with
extremes ranging from thirty-three (Hiroko Ai, the Japanese prodigy of
biosphere design) to fifty-eight (Vlad Taneev, winner of a Nobel Prize in
medicine).
Now, however, the flush of youth was on all their faces. Arkady
Bogdanov was a portrait in red: hair, beard, skin. In all that red his eyes
were a wild electric blue, bugging out happily as he exclaimed, "Free at
last! Free at last! All our children are free at last!" The video cameras had
been turned off, after Janet Blyleven had recorded a series of interviews for
the TV stations back home; they were out of contact with Earth, in the
dining hall anyway, and Arkady was singing, and the group around him
toasted the song. Maya stopped to join this group. Free at last; it was hard
to believe, they were actually on their way to Mars! Knots of people
talking, many of them world class in their fields; Ivana had won part of a
Nobel prize in chemistry, Vlad was one of the most famous medical
biologists in the world, Sax was in the pantheon of great contributors to
subatomic theory, Hiroko was unmatched in enclosed biological life
support systems design, and so on all around; a brilliant crowd!
And she was one of their leaders. It was a bit daunting. Her
engineering and cosmonautic skills were modest enough, it was her
diplomatic ability that had gotten her aboard, presumably. Chosen to head
the disparate, fractious Russian team, with the several commonwealth
members—well, that was okay. It was interesting work, and she was used
to it. And her skills might very well turn out to be the most important
ones aboard. They had to get along, after all. And that was a matter of
guile, and cunning, and will. Willing other people to do your bidding! She
looked at the crowd of glowing faces, and laughed. Everyone aboard was
good at their work, but some were gifted far beyond that. She had to
identify those people, to seek them out, to cultivate them. Her ability to
function as leader depended on it; for in the end, she thought, they would
surely become a kind of loose scientific meritocracy. And in a such a