"Kim Stanley Robinson - Antarctica" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

ANTARCTICA
Kim Stanley Robinson

"The land looks like a fairytale.
- ROALD AMUNDSEN




1. Ice Planet
2. Science in the Capital
3. In the Antarctic Grain
4. Observation Hill
5. A Site of Special Scientific Interest
6. In the Footsteps of Amundsen
7. Down the Rabbit Hole
8. The Sirius Group
9. Big Trouble
10. Roberts Massif
11. Extreme Weather Event
12. Transantarctica
13. The McMurdo Convergence
14. From the Bottom Up
15. Shackleton's Leap

1. Ice Planet

First you fall in love with Antarctica, and then it breaks your heart.
Breaks it first in all the usual sorry ways of the world, sure-as for instance when you go down to the ice
to do something unusual and exciting and romantic, only to find that your job there is in fact more tedious
than anything you have ever done, janitorial in its best moments but usually much less interesting than
that. Or when you discover that McMurdo, the place to which you are confined by the strictest of
company regulations, resembles an island of traveler services clustered around the offramp of a freeway
long since abandoned. Or, worse yet, when you meet a woman, and start something with her, and go with
her on vacation to New Zealand, and travel around South Island with her, the first woman you ever really
loved; and then after a brief off-season you return to McMurdo and your reunion with her only to have her
dump you on arrival as if your Kiwi idyll had never happened. Or when you see her around town soon
after that, trolling with the best of them; or when you find out that some people are calling you "the
sandwich, " in reference to the ice women's old joke that bringing a boyfriend to Antarctica is like
bringing a sandwich to a smorgasbord. Now that's heartbreak for you.
But then the place has its own specifically Antarctic heartbreaks as well, more impersonal than the
worldly kinds, cleaner, purer, colder. As for instance when you are up on the polar plateau in late winter,
having taken an offer to get out of town without a second thought, no matter the warnings about the
boredom of the job, for how bad could it be compared to General Field Assistant? And so there you are
riding in the enclosed cab of a giant transport vehicle, still thinking about that girlfriend, ten thousand feet
above sea level, in the dark of the long night; and as you sit there looking out the cab windows, the sky
gradually lightens to the day's one hour of twilight, shifting in invisible stages from a star-cluttered black
pool to a dome of glowing indigo lying close overhead; and in that pure transparent indigo floats the
thinnest new moon imaginable, a mere sliver of a crescent, which nevertheless illuminates very clearly the
great ocean of ice rolling to the horizon in all directions, the moonlight glittering on the snow, gleaming