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

He smiled. "We've got forty-two cesium tanks." I stared at him. "That's right. This is
the biggest theft in history, Emma. At least that's one way to think of it."
"It sure is."
"So, we plan to keep a constant acceleration-deceleration pattern, and create half-Mars
gravity most of the time." We walked up to the food counter and punched out our orders.
Our trays slid out of their slot.
We sat down against the wall away from the mirror wall; I don't like to eat next to the
mirror image of myself. The other three walls of the commons were bright tones of
yellow, red, orange, yellow-green. It was autumn on Rust Eagle.
"We'll keep up the seasonal colors on board the starship," Swann said as we ate.
"Shorten the daylight hours in winter, make it colder, colors all silver and white and black
-- I like winter best. The solstice festival and all."
"But it'll just be a game."
He chewed thoughtfully. "I guess."
"Where will you go?"
"Not sure. No, seriously! There's a planetary system around Barnard's Star. That's nine
light-years. We'll probably check that out, and at least resupply with water and
deuterium, if nothing else."
We ate in silence for a time. At the next table a trio sat excavating their trays, arguing
about the hydrogen-fixing capabilities of a certain Hydrogenomonas eutropha.
Engineering the rebirth of breath. At the next table a young woman reached up to capture
an escaping particle of chicken. The diminution of it all!
"How long?" I asked, eating steadily. Swann's freckle-face took on a calculating look
as he chewed. "We could go a hundred, maybe two hundred years...."
"For God's sake, Eric."
"It's only a quarter of our predicted lifetimes. It's not like generations will live and die
on the ship. We'll have a past on Mars, and a future on some world that could be more
like Earth than Mars is! You act like we're leaving such a natural way of life on Mars.
Mars is just a big starship, Emma."
"It is not! It's a planet. You can go outside and stand on the ground. Run around."
Swann shoved his tray away, sucked on his drink bulb. "Your five-hundred-year
project is the terraforming of Mars," he said. "Ours is the colonization of a planet in
another system. What's the big difference?"
"About ten or twenty light-years."
We finished our drinks in silence. Swann took our trays to the counter and brought
back bulbs of coffee. "Was -- is Charlie one of you?"
"Charlie?" He looked at me strangely. "No. He works for the Committee's secret
police, didn't you know that? Internal security?"
I shook my head.
"That's why you don't see him on miners anymore."
"Ah." Who did I know, I thought unhappily. He was looking beyond me. "I
remember... about 2220 or 21... Charlie dropped by one of our labs with one of his police
friends. This was in Argyre. We had completely infiltrated the Soviet space research labs,
and had requisitioned this particular one for some tests -- reactor-mass conservation, I
think it was. I was visiting to help with a supply problem. They couldn't get all the
cesium they wanted. And then there was Charlie and this woman, him saying hello how
are you Eric, just dropped by to see how you're doing. And I could not tell whether the
woman was his girlfriend and he really was just saying hello to me, or whether they were
checking out the lab as part of their police work. I showed them all around the lab, told
them that we were doing all the work for a Soviet-Arco-Mobil consortium, which of