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

or anything?" Duggins said.
 "That's right," I snapped. "You saw me in the radio room, Duggins. I was as surprised
as anyone by the mutiny."
But Duggins was unconvinced, and the rest of them looked skeptical as well. They all
knew Swann was a considerate person, and it didn't make sense to them that he would
have deceived a good friend so. There was a long, uncomfortable silence. Duggins stood
up. "I'll talk to some of you another time," he said, and left the lounge. Suddenly angry, I
left too. Looking back at the confused, suspicious people in the lounge, grouped in a
disconsolate circle with their colored drink bulbs floating around them, I thought, They
look scared.
When I got back to my room, two people were moving into it. A Nadezhda Malkiv,
and a Marie-Anne Kotovskaya -- both BLSS engineers, both members of the Soviet
branch of the MSA. The other two ships were being emptied so that they could be
worked on freely, they told me. Nadezhda was 124 years old, a specialist in the gas
exchange; Marie-Anne was 108, a biologist whose study was the algae and bacteria in the
waste recycling system. They were both from Lermontov, which, they said, had been in
the asteroid belt nearly four months before the MSA took over, broke radio contact with
Mars, and circled around to the rendezvous behind the sun.
Shocked into a stiff silence by this new development, I went back into the halls, and
then to the small lounge around the corner from my room. There I met the leader of the
non-MSA people from Lermontov, a dour man named Ivan Valenski. He had been the
Committee police leader aboard, until the mutiny. I did not like him -- he was a sort of
dully furious Soviet bureaucrat, a petty man used to giving orders and being obeyed. He
seemed as little impressed by me as I by him. Duggins, I thought, would be more to his
taste. They were men scared by so many years of authority that they actively worked for
its continuance -- to justify their lives up to this point, perhaps. But how was I different
from them?
I returned to my room. My new roommates left me the top bunk; the bottom, which I
had used as a convenient counter, was occupied by Nadezhda. Marie-Anne planned to
sleep in the corner where the walls met the ceiling. Their belongings were strapped all
over the floor. I talked with them for a while in English, with some fumbling attempts on
my part at Russian. They were nice women, and after the earlier meetings of the day I
appreciated the company of calm, undemanding people.
That night Swann came by my room, and asked me if I wanted to eat dinner with him.
After a moment's thought I agreed.
"I'm glad you aren't still angry with me," he babbled, ingenuous as ever. Although I
had to remind myself that he had been high in the councils of the MSA for as long as I'd
known him. So how well had I known him?
"Shut up about that and let's go eat," I said. Somewhat subdued, he led the way to the
dining commons through the dark halls.
Once there I looked around at the place, imagining it as the dining commons of the
starship. People in neutral-toned one-piece suits walked up to the food counter; there they
pushed the buttons for the meal they desired, most of them never looking up at the menu.
The foods grown on ship -- salads, vegetable drinks, fish or scallops or chicken or rabbit,
goat cheese, milk, yoghurt -- were supplemented by non-renewable supplies: coffee, tea,
bread, beef.... They would run out of those things pretty fast. Then it would be the ship-
grown stuff, in enclosed plates, with drinks in bulbs. I watched all the precise forking
going on around me. It had a Japanese tea ceremony atmosphere.
"You'll have to keep accelerating," I said. "You can't stay weightless for long, it would
kill you."