The Martians. Kim Stanley Robinson

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СКАЧАТЬ sketch any face in a dozen strokes, and there they are bare as a pebble. But I don’t think he’s happy.

      Tatiana Durova: very beautiful. A goddess trapped in a motel. She’s looking for a way out. She knows everyone thinks she is beautiful, and therefore trusts none of us. She needs to get back to Olympus, where her appearance would be taken for granted, and she able to get through to someone. To her peers. Perhaps she takes Mars to be Olympus.

      Arkady Bogdanov is a power. A very steady reliable fellow, earnest almost to the point of dullness. One sees everything he’s thinking, he doesn’t bother to conceal it. What I am is enough to get me to Mars, he says in his manner. Don’t you agree? And I do. An engineer, quick and ingenious, not interested in larger issues.

      Marina Tokareva: a beauty. Very serious and intense, no small talk to her. One is forced to think about things. And she assumes you are as quick as she is. So it can be work to follow her. Narrow chiselled features, thick jet-black hair. Sometimes following her glances I think she is one of the homosexuals who must be among us; other times she seems fixated on Vlad Taneev, the oldest man here.

      George Berkovic and Edvard Perrin are paired in their regard for Phyllis Boyle. Yet it is not a competition but a partnership. They both think they like Phyllis, but really what they like is the way the other one mirrors their affection. Phyllis likes this too.

      Ivana is quite beautiful, despite a thin face and an overbite; a goofy smile lights up the face of the classic chemist nerd, and suddenly the goddess is revealed. Shared a Nobel Prize in chemistry, but one has to quash the thought that the smile is what won the prize. It makes one happy to see it. One would give her the Nobel Prize just to see that smile.

      Simon Frazier: a very quiet power. English; public school education from age nine. He listens very closely, speaks well, but he says about one tenth as much as everyone else, which naturally gains him the reputation of a complete mute. He plays with this image, quietly. I think he likes Ann, who is like him in some ways, though not so extreme; in other ways very unlike. Ann does not joke with her image among the others, she is completely unaware of it – American lack of self-consciousness, versus Simon’s Brit irony.

      Janet Blyleven: beautiful. Speaks rapidly, confidently. Friendly. Looks healthy. Nice breasts. Doggy friendship is no friendship at all.

      Ann is a real beauty, though austere. Tall, angular, bony, strong; both body and face. She draws the eye. She certainly does take Mars seriously. People see that in her and like her for it. Or not, as the case may be. Her shadow is very distinct.

      Alexander Zhalin is a power. He likes women with his eyes. Some of them know it, some don’t. Mary Dunkel and Janet Blyleven are both with him a lot. He is an enthusiast. Whatever has taken his fancy becomes the horizon of all interest.

      Nadia Cherneshevsky: at first you think she is plain, then you see she is one of the most beautiful of all. It has to do with solidity – physical, intellectual, and moral. The rock everyone rests on. Her physical beauty is in her athleticism – short, round, tough, skilful, graceful, strong – and in her eyes, as her irises are parti coloured, a dense stippled carpet of colour dots, bits of brown and green mostly, with some blue and yellow, all flecked together in concentric rings of pattern, shot by rays of a different pattern, merging in a casual glance to a colour like hazel. You could dive into those eyes and never come out. And she looks back at you without fear.

      Frank Chalmers: a power. I think. It’s hard not to see him as an adjunct to John Boone. The sidekick, or enabler. On his own out here, not so impressive. Diminished; less an historical character. He’s elusive. Big, bulky, dark-complexioned. He keeps a low profile. He is quite friendly, but it doesn’t seem to one that it is real friendliness. A political animal, like Phyllis; only they don’t like each other. It’s Maya he likes. And Maya makes sure he feels part of her world. But what he really wants is not clear. There’s a person in there one does not know at all.

      More formally, he administered the Revised Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, giving the questionnaires in groups of ten. Hundreds of questions, calibrated to give statistically significant personality profiles. Only one of several different tests he was giving over the winter; testing was one of the main ways they passed the time.

      They were taking this test in the Bright Room, which was lit by scores of high-wattage bulbs, until everything in it seemed incandescent, especially people’s faces. Looking at them as they worked, Michel suddenly felt how absurd it was to be schoolmaster to this brilliant crowd. And he saw very clearly in their glowing faces that they were not answering the questions to tell him what they were like, but rather to say what they thought they should in order to get to go to Mars. Of course reading the answers with that in mind would reveal almost as much as if they were being sincere. Still it was a shock to see it so clearly right there on their faces.

      He shouldn’t have been surprised. Faces revealed mood and much else with extreme precision, in most people anyway. Perhaps all people; a poker face reveals someone who is feeling guarded. No, he thought while watching them, a whole language might be developed from this, if one paid proper attention. Blind people hear actors’ voices as completely artificial and false, and in this world they were all blind to faces, but if he looked at them more closely, it might yield a kind of phrenology of sight. He might become the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.

      So he watched their faces, fascinated. The Bright Room was very bright indeed; time spent in such spaces had been shown to ward off the worst of seasonal affective disorder. In this luminous glare each translucent face seemed not just to be speaking to him, but also to be a complete rebus of that person’s character: variously strong, intelligent, humorous, guarded, whatever, but in any case the entire personality, all right there on the surface. There was Ursula, faintly amused, thinking this was just one of the many silly things psychologists did; she as a medical person recognized that it was both ludicrous and necessary, she knew all the medical sciences were as much art as science. Sax, on the other hand, was taking it all very seriously, as he seemed to take everything: this was a scientific experiment to him, and he trusted that scientists in other disciplines were honestly dealing with the methodological difficulties of that discipline. All right there on his face.

      They were all experts. Michel had studied NDM, or Naturalistic Decision Making; he was an expert on the subject; and he knew that experts took the limited data available to them in any situation and compared it to their vast fund of experiences, and then made quick decisions based on analogies to past experience. Thus now, in this situation, this group of experts were doing what they would do to win a grant, or to win over a committee judging a tenure application package. Something like that. The fact that they had never faced a task quite like this one was problematic but not debilitating.

      Unless they considered the situation to be unstable beyond the point of prediction. Some situations were like that; even the best meteorologists could not well predict hailstorms, even the best battlefield commanders could not predict the course of surprise attacks. For that matter some recent studies had shown that it was much the same with psychologists when they attempted to predict people’s future mental diagnoses from their scores on standard psychological tests. In each case there wasn’t enough data. And so Michel stared intently at their faces, pink or brown summaries of their personalities, trying to read the whole in the part.

      Except it was not really true. Faces could be deceptive, or uninformative; and personality theory was notoriously vexed by deep uncertainties of all kinds. The same events and environments produced radically different results in people, that was the plain fact. There were too many confounding factors to say much about any aspect of personality. All the models of personality itself – the many, many theories – came down to a matter of individual psychologists codifying their guesses. Perhaps all science had this aspect, but it was so obvious in personality СКАЧАТЬ