"Kim Stanley Robinson - Mars 1 - Red Mars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

They floated weightlessly around the room. July 20th, 2026: they were moving faster
than anyone in history. They were on their way. It was the beginning of a nine-month
voyageтАФor of a voyage that would last the rest of their lives. They were on their own.

###

Those responsible for piloting the Ares pulled themselves to the control consoles,
and gave the orders to fire lateral control rockets. The Ares began to spin, stabilizing at
four rpm. The colonists sank to the floors, and stood in a pseudogravity of .38 gee, very
close to what they would feel on Mars. Many man-years of tests had indicated that it would
be a fairly healthy gee to live in, and so much healthier than weightlessness that rotating
the ship had been deemed worth the trouble. And, Maya thought, it felt great. There was
enough pull to make balance relatively easy, but hardly any feeling of pressure, of drag. It
was the perfect equivalent of their mood; they staggered down the halls to the big dining
hall in Torus D, giddy and exhilarated, walking on air.

In Torus D's dining hall they mingled in a kind of cocktail party, celebrating the
departure. Maya wandered about, sipping freely from a mug of champagne, feeling
slightly unreal and extremely happy, a mix that reminded her of her wedding reception
many years before. Hopefully this marriage would go better than that one had, she
thought, because this one was going to last forever. The hall was loud with talk. тАЬIt's a
symmetry not so much sociological as mathematic. A kind of aesthetic balance.тАЭ "We're
hoping to get it into the parts per billion range, but it's not going to be easy." Maya turned
down an offered refill, feeling giddy enough. Besides, this was work. She was co-mayor
of this village, so to speak, responsible for group dynamics, which were bound to get
complex. Antarctic habits kicked in even at this moment of triumph, and she listened and
watched like an anthropologist, or a spy.

тАЬThe shrinks have their reasons. We'll end up fifty happy couples.тАЭ

тАЬAnd they already know the match-ups.тАЭ

She watched them laugh. Smart, healthy, supremely well-educated; was this the
rational society at last, the scientifically-designed community that had been the dream of
the Enlightenment? But there was Arkady, Nadia, Vlad, Ivana. She knew the Russian
contingent too well to have many illusions on that score. They were just as likely to end up
resembling an undergraduate dorm at a technical university, occupied by bizarre pranks
and lurid affairs. Except they looked a bit old for that kind of thing; several men were
balding, and many of both sexes showed touches of gray in their hair. It had been a long
haul; their average age was forty-six, with extremes ranging from thirty-three (Hiroko Ai,
the Japanese prodigy of biosphere design) to fifty-eight (Vlad Taneev, winner of a Nobel
Prize in medicine).

Now, however, the flush of youth was on all their faces. Arkady Bogdanov was a
portrait in red: hair, beard, skin. In all that red his eyes were a wild electric blue, bugging
out happily as he exclaimed, "Free at last! Free at last! All our children are free at last!"
The video cameras had been turned off, after Janet Blyleven had recorded a series of
interviews for the TV stations back home; they were out of contact with Earth, in the dining
hall anyway, and Arkady was singing, and the group around him toasted the song. Maya