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

dropped down into Torus G. There were rooms of all shapes and sizes,
right up to the largest, which occupied entire tanks. The floor in one of
these she passed through was set just below the halfway mark, so its
interior resembled a long Quonset hut. But the majority of the tanks had
been divided up into smaller rooms. She had heard there were over five
hundred of them in all, making for a total interior space roughly the
equivalent of a large city hotel.
But would it be enough?
# # #
Perhaps it would. After the Antarctic, life on the Ares seemed an
expansive, labyrinthine, airy experience. Around six every morning the
darkness in the residential toruses would lighten slowly to a gray dawn,
and around six-thirty a sudden brightening marked "sunrise." Maya woke
to it as she had all her life. After visiting the lavatory she would make her
way to torus D's kitchen, heat a meal, and take it into the big dining hall.
There she sat at a table flanked by potted lime trees. Hummingbirds,
finches, tanagers, sparrows and lories pecked underfoot and darted
overhead, dodging the creeping vines that hung from the hall's long barrel
ceiling, which was painted a gray-blue that reminded her of St.
Petersburg's winter sky. She would eat slowly, watch the birds, relax in
her chair, listen to the talk around her. A leisurely breakfast! After a
lifetime of grinding work it felt rather uncomfortable at first, even
alarming, like a stolen luxury. As if it were Sunday morning every day, as
Nadia said. But Maya's Sunday mornings had never been particularly
relaxed. In her childhood that had been the time for cleaning the one-room
apartment she had shared with her mother. Her mother had been a doctor
and like most women of her generation had had to work ferociously to get
by, obtaining food, bringing up a child, keeping an apartment, running a
career; it had been too much for one person, and she had joined the many
women angrily demanding a better deal than they had gotten in the Soviet
years, which had given them half the money jobs while leaving them all
the work at home. No more waiting, no more mute endurance; they had to
take advantage while the instability lasted. "Everything is on the table!"
Maya's mother would exclaim while cooking their meager dinners;
"everything but food!"
And perhaps they had taken advantage. In the Soviet era women had
learned to help each other, a nearly self-contained world had come into
being, of mothers, sisters, daughters, babushkas, women friends,
colleagues, even strangers. In the commonwealth this world had
consolidated their gains and thrust even further into the power structure,
into the tight male oligarchies of Russian government.
One of the fields most affected had been the space program. Maya's
mother, slightly involved in space medical research, always swore that
cosmonautics would need an influx of women, if only to provide female
data for the medical experimentation. "They can't hold Valentina
Tereshkova against us forever!" her mother would cry. And apparently she
had been right, because after studying aeronautic engineering at Moscow
University, Maya had been accepted in a program at Baikonur, and had
done well, and had gotten an assignment on Novy Mir. While up there she
had redesigned the interiors for improved ergonomic efficiency, and later