Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson Read Free Book Online

all, making for a total interior space roughly the equivalent of a large city hotel.
    But would it be enough?

    • • •
    Perhaps it would. After the Antarctic, life on the Ares seemed an expansive, 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 “sunrise.” 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 hall’s long barrel ceiling, which was painted a gray-blue that reminded her of St. Petersburg’s 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 at home. No more waiting, no more mute endurance; they had to take advantage while the instability lasted. “Everything is on the table,” Maya’s mother would exclaim while cooking their meager dinners, “everything but food!”
    And perhaps they had taken advantage. In the Soviet era women had learned to help each other, a nearly self-contained world had come into being, of mothers, sisters, daughters, babushkas, women friends, colleagues, even strangers. In the commonwealth this world had consolidated its gains and thrust even further into the power structure, into the tight male oligarchies of Russian government.
    One of the fields most affected had been the space program. Maya’s mother, slightly involved in space medical research, always swore that cosmonautics would need an influx of women, if only to provide female data for the medical experimentation. “They can’t hold Valentina Tereshkova against us forever!” her mother would cry. And apparently she had been right, because after studying aeronautic engineering at Moscow University, Maya had been accepted in a program at Baikonur, and had done well, and had gotten an assignment on Novy Mir . While up there she had redesigned the interiors for improved ergonomic efficiency, and later spent a year in command of the station, during which a couple of emergency repairs had bolstered her reputation. Administrative assignments in Baikonur and Moscow had followed, and over time she had managed to penetrate Glavkosmos’s little politburo, playing the men against each other in the subtlest of ways, marrying one of them, divorcing him, rising afterward in Glavkosmos a free agent, becoming one of the utmost inner circle, the double triumvirate.
    And so here she was, having a leisurely breakfast. “So civilized,” Nadia would scoff. She was Maya’s best friend on the Ares , a short woman round as a stone, with a square face framed by cropped salt-and-pepper hair. Plain as could be. Maya, who knew she was good-looking, and knew that this had helped her many times, loved Nadia’s plainness, which somehow underlined her competence. Nadia was an engineer and very practical, an expert in cold-climate construction. They had met in Baikonur twenty years before, and once lived