Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [13]
The selection committee had thus created some of the very problems it had hoped to prevent. Some of them were aware of this; and naturally they took care to include among the colonists the most qualified psychiatrist they could think of.
So they sent Michel Duval.
1
At first it felt like a shove in the chest. Then they were pushed back in their chairs, and for a second the pressure was deeply familiar: one g, the gravity they would never live in again. The Ares had been orbiting Earth at 28,000 kilometers per hour. For several minutes they accelerated, the rockets’ push so powerful that their vision blurred as corneas flattened, and it took an effort to inhale. At 40,000 kilometers per hour the burn ended. They were free of the Earth’s pull, in orbit to nothing but the sun.
The colonists sat in the delta V chairs blinking, their skin flushed, their hearts pounding. Maya Katarina Toitovna, the official leader of the Russian contingent, glanced around. People appeared stunned. When obsessives are given their object of desire, what do they feel? It was hard to say, really. In a sense their lives were ending; yet something else, some other life, had finally, finally begun. . . . Filled with so many emotions at once, it was impossible not to be confused; it was an interference pattern, some feelings cancelled, others reinforced. Unbuckling from her chair Maya felt a grin contorting her face, and she saw on the faces around her the same helpless grin— all but Sax Russell, who was as impassive as an owl, blinking as he looked over the readouts on the room’s computer screens.
They floated weightlessly around the room. December 21st, 2026: they were moving faster than anyone in history. They were on their way. It was the beginning of a nine-month voyage— or 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 g, very close to what they would feel on Mars. Many man-years of tests had indicated that it would be a fairly healthy g 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. “It’s a symmetry not so much sociological as mathematic. A kind of aesthetic balance.” “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.
“The shrinks have their reasons. We’ll end up fifty happy couples.”
“And they already know the