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

tanks and pushing them all the way into orbit. Scores of tanks had been launched this
way, then tugged to work sites and put to useтАФwith them they had built two big space
stations, an L5 station, a lunar orbit station, the first manned Mars vehicle, and scores of
unmanned freighters sent to Mars. So by the time the two agencies agreed to build the
Ares, the use of the tanks had become routinized, with standard coupling units, interiors,
propulsion systems and so forth; and construction of the big ship had taken less than two
years.

It looked like something made from a children's toy set, in which cylinders were
attached at their ends to create more complex shapesтАФin this case, eight hexagons of
connected cylinders, which they called toruses, lined up and speared down the middle by
a central hub shaft, made of a cluster of five lines of cylinders. The toruses were
connected to the hub shaft by thin crawl spokes, and the resulting object looked somewhat
like a piece of agricultural machinery, say the arm of a harvester combine, or a mobile
sprinkler unit. Or like eight knobby doughnuts, Maya thought, toothpicked to a stick. Just
the sort of thing a child would appreciate.

The eight toruses had been made from American tanks, and the five bundled lengths
of the central shaft were Russian. Both were about fifty meters long and ten meters in
diameter. Maya floated aimlessly down the tanks of the hub shaft; it took her a long time,
but she was in no hurry. She dropped down into Torus G. There were rooms of all shapes
and sizes, right up to the largest, which occupied entire tanks. The floor in one of these
she passed through was set just below the halfway mark, so its interior resembled a long
Quonset hut. But the majority of the tanks had been divided up into smaller rooms. She
had heard there were over five hundred of them in all, making for a total interior space
roughly the equivalent of a large city hotel.

But would it be enough?

###

After the Antarctic, life on the Ares seemed an expansive,
Perhaps it would.
labyrinthine, airy experience. Around six every morning the darkness in the residential
toruses would lighten slowly to a gray dawn, and around six-thirty a sudden brightening
marked тАЬsunrise.тАЭ Maya woke to it as she had all her life. After visiting the lavatory she
would make her way to torus D's kitchen, heat a meal, and take it into the big dining hall.
There she sat at a table flanked by potted lime trees. Hummingbirds, finches, tanagers,
sparrows and lories pecked underfoot and darted overhead, dodging the creeping vines
that hung from the hallтАЩs long barrel ceiling, which was painted a gray-blue that reminded
her of St. PetersburgтАЩs winter sky. She would eat slowly, watch the birds, relax in her chair,
listen to the talk around her. A leisurely breakfast! After a lifetime of grinding work it felt
rather uncomfortable at first, even alarming, like a stolen luxury. As if it were Sunday
morning every day, as Nadia said. But Maya's Sunday mornings had never been
particularly relaxed. In her childhood that had been the time for cleaning the one-room
apartment she had shared with her mother. Her mother had been a doctor and like most
women of her generation had had to work ferociously to get by, obtaining food, bringing up
a child, keeping an apartment, running a career; it had been too much for one person, and
she had joined the many women angrily demanding a better deal than they had gotten in
the Soviet years, which had given them half the money jobs while leaving them all the work