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

from time to time, to suggest the passing of the seasons on the Ares.
Length of days and nights, weather, and ambient colors were shifted to
accomplish this. Some had maintained their landfall should be a harvest,
others that it should be a new spring; after a short debate it had been
decided by vote of the voyagers themselves to begin with spring, so that
they would travel through a summer rather than a winter; and as they
approached their goal, the ship's colors would turn to the autumn tones of
Mars itself, rather than to the light greens and blossom pastels they had left
so far behind.
So in those first months, as they finished their morning's business,
leaving the farm or the bridge, or staggering out of Arkady's merrily
sadistic simulations, they walked into springtime. Walls were hung with
pale green panels, or mural-sized photos of azaleas, and jacarandas, and
ornamental cherries. The barley and mustard in the big farm rooms
glowed vivid yellow with new blooms, and the forest biome and the ship's
seven park rooms had been stocked with trees and shrubs in the spring of
their cycles. Maya loved these colorful spring blossoms, and after her
mornings' work she fulfilled part of her exercise regimen by taking a walk
in the forest biome, which had a hilly floor, and was so thick with trees one
could not see from one end of the chamber to the other. Here she often
met Frank Chalmers, of all people, taking one of his short breaks. He said
he liked the spring foliage, though he never seemed to look at it. They
walked together, and talked or not as the case might be. If they did talk, it
was never about anything important; Frank didn't care to discuss their work
as leaders of the expedition. Maya found this peculiar, though she didn't
say so. But they did not have exactly the same jobs, which might account
for his reluctance. Maya's position was fairly informal and non-
hierarchical; cosmonauts among themselves had always been relatively
egalitarian, this had been the tradition since the days of Korolyov. The
American program had a more military tradition, indicated even in titles:
while Maya was merely Russian Contingent Co-ordinator, Frank was
Captain Chalmers, and supposedly in the strong sense of the old sailing
navies.
Whether this authority made it more or less difficult for him, he didn't
say. Sometimes he discussed the biome, or small technical problems, or
news from home; more often he just seemed to want to walk with her.
So—silent walks, up and down on narrow trails, through dense thickets of
pine and aspen and birch. And always that presumption of closeness, as if
they were old friends, or as if he were, very shyly (or subtly), courting her.
Thinking about that one day, it occurred to Maya that starting the Ares
in springtime might have created a problem. Here they were in their
mesocosm, sailing through spring, and everything was fertile and
blooming, profligate and green, the air perfumed with flowers and windy,
the days getting longer and warmer, and everyone in shirts and shorts, a
hundred healthy animals, in close quarters, eating, exercising, showering,
sleeping. Of course there had to be sex.
Well, it was nothing new. Maya herself had had some fantastic sex in
space, most significantly during her second stint on Novy Mir, when she
and Georgi and Yeli and Irina had tried every weightless variant
imaginable, which was a great many indeed. But now it was different.