"Kim Stanley Robinson - A Martian Romance" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

once; like her, they have never been on iceboats before, and their eyes are
round at the speeds it achieves during strong gusts over smooth ice. Hans
speculates that the sandy patches mark old pressure ridges, which stood
like long stegosaur backs until the winds ablated them entirely away, leaving
their load of sand and silt behind on the flattened ice. Roger nods. In truth
the whole ocean surface is blowing away on the wind, with whatever sticks
up going the fastest; and the ocean is now frozen to the bottom, so that no
new pressure ridges are being raised. Soon the whole ocean will be as flat
as a table top. Forty years ago, sometimes with him, sometimes without.
When they first came they looked out on a blue sea purled with Whitecaps.
Seldom since has it been free of ice.
 He too is looking at the point, with an expression that makes Eileen
think he might be remembering that time as well. Certainly he would
remember if asked; his incredible memory has still not yet begun to
weaken, and with the suite of memory drugs now available, drugs that have
helped Eileen to remember quite a bit, it might well be that he will never
forget anything his whole life long. Eileen envies that, though she knows he
is ambivalent about it. But by now it is one of the things about him that she
loves. He remembers everything and yet he has remained stalwart, even
chipper, through all the years of the crash. A rock for her to lean on, in her
own cycles of despair and mourning. Of course as a Red it could be
argued he has no reason to mourn. But that wouldnтАЩt be true. His attitude
was more complex than that, Eileen has seen it; so complex that she does
not fully understand it. Some aspect of his strong memory, taking the long
view; a determination to make it well; rueful joy in the enduring land; some
mix of all these things. She watches him as he stares absorbed at the
promontory where he and she once stood together over a living world.

****

How much he has meant to her through the years has become beyond her
ability to express. Sometimes it fills her to overflowing. That they have
known each other all their lives; that they have helped each other through
hard times; that he got her out into the land in the first place, starting her on
the trajectory of her whole life; all these would have made him a crucial
figure to her. But everyone has many such figures. And over the years their
divergent interests kept splitting them up; they could have lost touch
entirely. But at one point Roger came to visit her in Burroughs, and she and
her partner of that time had been growing distant for many years, and
Roger said, I love you Eileen. I love you. Remember what it was like on
Olympus Mons, when we climbed it? Well now I think the whole world is like
that. The escarpment goes on forever. We just keep climbing it until
even-tually we fall off. And I want to climb it with you. We keep getting
together and then going our ways, and itтАЩs too chancy, we might not cross
paths again. Some-thing might happen. I want more than that. I love you.

And so eventually they set up rooms in her co-op in Burroughs. She
continued to work in the Ministry of the Environment, and he continued to
guide treks in the back country, then to sail on the North Sea; but he always
came back from his treks and his cruises, and she always came back from