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

me a chunk of rock he had had in his lap. "Look at this Chantonnay." That's a chondrite
that has been shocked into harder rock. "Pretty, isn't it?"
I sat. "Yes," I said. "So what's happening on this trip?"
He blushed. Swann was faster at that than anyone I ever saw. "Not much. Beyond that
I can't say."
"I know that's the official position. But you can tell me here."
He shook his head. "I'm going to tell you, but it has to wait a while longer." He looked
at me directly. "Don't get angry, Emma."
"But other people know what's going on! A lot of them. And they're talking about
me." I told him about the things I had noticed and overheard. "Now why should I be the
most important person on this ship? That's absurd! And why should they know about
whatever it is we're doing, and not me?"
Swann looked worried, annoyed. "They don't all know.... You see, your help will be
important, essential perhaps--" He stopped, as if he had already said too much. His
freckled face twisted as his mouth moved about. Finally he shook his head violently.
"You'll just have to wait a few more days, Emma. Trust me, all right? Just trust me and
wait."
That was hardly satisfactory, but what could I do? He knew something, but he wasn't
going to tell it to me. Tight-lipped, I nodded my good-bye and left.
The mutiny occurred, ironically enough, on my eightieth birthday, a few days after my
talk with Swann. August 5, 2248.
I woke up thinking, now you are an octogenarian. I got out of bed (deceleration-gee
entirely gone, weightless now as we coasted), sponged my face, looked in the mirror. It is
a strange experience to look inside your own retinas; down there inside is the one
thinking, in that other face... it seems as if, if you could get the light right, you could see
yourself.
I grasped the handholds of my exerciser and worked out for a while, thinking about
birthdays. All the birthdays in this new age. One of my earliest memories, now, was my
tenth birthday. My mother took me to the medical station, where I had to drink foul-
tasting stuff and submit to tests and some shots -- just quick blasts of air on the skin, but
they scared me. "You'll appreciate this later," my mom said, with a funny expression.
"You won't get sick and weak when you're old. Your immune system will stay strong.
You'll live for ever so long, Emma, don't cry."
 Yes, yes. Apparently she was right, I thought, looking into the mirror again, where my
image seemed to pulse with color under the artificial lights. Very long lives, young at
eighty: the triumph of gerontology. As always, I wondered what I would do with all the
extra years -- the extra lives. Would I live to stand free on Martian soil, and breathe
Martian air?
Thinking these thoughts I left my room, intent on breakfast. The lounges down the
hall from the bedrooms were empty, an unusual thing. I walked into the last lounge
before the corridor turned, to look out the small window in it, with its view over the
bridge.
And there they were: two silver rectangles, like asteroids crushed into ingots of the
metals they contained. Spaceships!
They were asteroid miners of the PR class, sister ships of our own. I stared at them
motionlessly, my heart thudding like a drum, thinking rendezvous. The ships grew to the
size of decks of cards, very slowly. They were the shape of a card deck as well, with the
mining cranes and drills folded together at their fronts, bridge ceilings just barely bulging
from their sides (tiny crescents of light), rocket exhausts large at their rear, like beads on
their sides and front. Brilliant points of light shone from the windows, like the fluorescent