Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [31]
Perhaps, Maya thought, Arkady had defused the one with the other. If so it had been cleverly done, but Arkady was a clever man. She thought back. Actually it had been John Boone who had changed the subject. He had in effect flown to the ceiling and come to Arkady’s rescue, and Arkady had seized the chance. They were both clever men. And it seemed possible they were in some sort of collusion. Forming a kind of alternative leadership, perhaps, one American, one Russian. Something would have to be done about that.
She said to Michel, “Do you think it’s a bad sign we all consider ourselves such liars?”
Michel shrugged. “It’s been healthy to talk about it. Now we realize we’re more alike than we thought. No one has to feel they were unusually dishonest to get aboard.”
“And you?” Arkady asked. “Did you present yourself as a most rational and balanced psychologist, hiding the strange mind we have come to know and love?”
A small smile from Michel. “You’re the expert in strange minds, Arkady.”
Then the few still watching the screens called out. The radiation count had started to fall. After a while it slipped back to just a little above normal.
Someone returned the Pastoral to the moment of the horn call. The last movement of the symphony, “Glad and Grateful Feelings After the Storm,” poured from the speaker system, and as they left the shelter and fanned out through the ship like dandelion seeds on a breeze, the beautiful old folk melody was broadcast throughout the Ares, elaborating itself in all its Brucknerian richness. While it played, they found that the ship’s hardened systems had survived intact. The thicker walls of the farm and the forest biome had afforded the plants some protection, and although there would be some die-offs, the seed stocks were not harmed. The animals could not be eaten either, but presumably would give birth to a healthy next generation. The only casualties were some uncaptured songbirds from D’s dining hall; they found a scattering of them dead on the floor.
As for the crew, the shelter’s protection had shielded them from all but about six rem. That was bad for a mere three hours, but it could have been worse. The exterior of the ship had taken over 140 rem, a lethal dose.
• • •
Six months inside a hotel, with never a walk outside. Inside it was late summer, and the days were long. Green dominated the walls and ceilings, and people went barefoot. Quiet conversations were nearly inaudible in the hum of machinery, the whoosh of ventilators. The ship seemed empty somehow, whole sections of it abandoned as the crew settled down to wait. Small knots of people sat in the halls in toruses B and D, talking. Some stopped their conversations when Maya wandered by, which she naturally found disturbing. She was having trouble falling asleep, trouble waking up. Work made her restless; all the engineers were only waiting, after all, and the simulations had gotten nearly intolerable. She had trouble gauging the passage of time. She stumbled more than she used to. She had gone to see Vlad, and he had recommended overhydration, more running, more swimming.
Hiroko told her to spend more time on the farm. She gave it a try, spending hours weeding, harvesting, trimming, fertilizing, watering, talking, sitting on a bench, looking at leaves. Spacing out. The farm rooms were max chambers, their barrel roofs lined with bright sunstrips. The multi-leveled floors were crowded with crops, many new since the storm. There was not enough space to feed the crew entirely on farm food, but Hiroko disliked that fact and struggled against it, converting storage rooms as they emptied