Climbing Olympus. Kevin J. Anderson

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СКАЧАТЬ adins had been created one step at a time, first the altered cosmetic appearances, the ears, the nostrils, since these were the least risky surgeries. At each step of the process, failures occurred—some fatal. But the volunteers knew the risks. They had signed the waivers and consent forms. She had given many of the preparatory briefings herself. Rachel had pulled no punches, but just by looking into their eyes, she could see how desperate they were. And she was giving them a way out of hell.

      Four of the volunteers developed severe pneumonia or infections after the first round of facial adaptations; one died, and the other three were sent back to their former lives with a stipend and a dismissal that excused them from further labor, but they did have to remain in Neryungri. Though plastic surgeons tried to repair the damage done, those failures were never the same.

      But with a large enough pool of volunteers, she had completed thirty adin subjects for the surface of Mars.

      The adaptations were done under Earth-normal pressure: the skin polymerization, the addition of artificial lungs. Their digestive systems were seeded with harmless bacteria that would help them digest the strains of algae prevalent on the changing Mars; after these alterations, the adin volunteers were fed only algae grown in special tanks on Earth.

      During the 120-day journey across interplanetary space, the air-pressure and temperature were gradually dropped on the cargo vessel to allow the adins to adapt. Their secondary lungs began to function. Two adins died en route.

      The acclimatization process was gradual, and when the transport landed on Mars and the adins stepped out, they could breathe, they could stand upright on Mars, they could walk across the iron oxide sands unaided, turning their naked faces into the thin Martian wind.

      Suddenly there were people living on another planet—and they were Russians. Siberians! As the world reeled in shock, the Sovereign Republics hailed Rachel Dycek as a national hero. She and her team came out of hiding in Siberia and raised their hands to accolades. It had been a dizzying few days, before the outcries from world authorities and demands for explanations grew too loud. Rachel had not been allowed to revel in her glory.

      The Indian delegate continued his questions. “According to the transcripts from the first investigatory team, you claim to have sterilized all of the adins. Made them unable to have children.” He looked up at her, as if to confirm his facts.

      “Yes, that is true. All the males received vasectomies.”

      “Males? Do you mean the men?”

      “Yes. The men.”

      “What about the women? The females?” His voice carried a hint of scorn.

      “If all the … the men were sterilized, we saw no need to perform unnecessary surgery on the women. What would be the point? The failure rate of vasectomies is extremely low, and in a small group the expected success would be one hundred percent. Additional sterilization of the women by laparoscopic tuballigation would have increased the risk of complications—by about three percent—but would have added very little to the overall assurance of sterility. We deemed it unnecessary.”

      “But wasn’t the men’s surgery unnecessary also?” the delegate pounced. “This seems appalling and cruel. I sincerely doubt that adin survival on the planet Mars would depend on whether or not the men were castrated!”

      Rachel nearly shot to her feet, but one of the legal representatives next to her gripped her wrist and squeezed hard enough to deflect her outburst. She took a moment to calm herself.

      “Mr. Ambassador, they received a painless, simple vasectomy, not castration. I would venture to say that a handful of people in this very room—and tens of millions in the viewing audience—have undergone a similar procedure. So please let us not use unprofessional and inflammatory terms.”

      Mr. Unpronounceable Name blinked with an offended expression, but Rachel continued before he could open his mouth again. “Perhaps I had better emphasize a simple point about the adins that you do not seem to understand. The augmented humans were never genetically altered. They were given enhanced abilities to survive the rigors of the Martian environment. They could not pass along those enhancements to their children.

      “Thirty of the adins—men and women—were sent to Mars to live out the rest of their lives. We are not so naive as to think that they will never again indulge their sexual drives. Any children they might conceive would be normal human babies, unadapted to Mars, who would die instantly upon taking their first freezing, oxygen-starved breath. Do you consider it cruel to prevent that from happening, Mr. Ambassador? You have a strange conception of cruelty.”

      Rachel raised her face to the glaring lights, knowing that her expression was being transmitted from Geneva to newsnets around the world, displayed on television monitors and newspaper screens.

      Riding her anger, she turned to the Costa Rican ambassador at the head of the inquisitors’ table. “Madame Chairman, it has been two hours already, and I would like to speak with my counsel. If the Indian delegate has finished this line of questioning, may I request a short recess?”

      In truth, she needed to go to the bathroom.

      But while Rachel Dycek and her fellow team members went before the Geneva hearings day after day, delegates from the Sovereign Republics fought the real battle behind the closed doors of UNSA. They merely let Rachel give the world a show, like a dancing bear in a circus.

      World interest in the Mars project had been flagging for years. The terraforming work had gone on longer than most people had been alive, and the average person could not comprehend the slow but steady progress of algae growth and increasing partial pressures of oxygen. The actual day when people could live on Mars was still dozens of years away. The world economy was suffering, and money spent on the project had become as easy a target as bloated defense spending had been in the late twentieth century. Stop the terraforming work, people said, and just imagine all the good things we could use those funds for!

      But the unexpected appearance of Rachel Dycek’s adins had shocked the world and catapulted Mars into the headlines again. Thirty human test subjects had begun eking out a living on the surface of Mars, setting up terraforming industries, installing automatic factories that would have waited years for the next manned mission. They ingested the algae and lichens they found in the lowlands, they recovered water from underground ice. The adins transmitted progress reports that the whole world watched.

      Because of Rachel’s adins, the Mars project again had a kind of immediacy, a newfound legitimacy that the other nations had not been able to achieve for it.

      And so, in the end Rachel Dycek and her team were vindicated, granted a rather grudging apology. They were allowed to move onto the second phase, the dvas, with research conducted in the open this time, with less-coercive calls for volunteers, with proper controls and techniques exercised.

      But a year later, before the first dvas were completed, Boris Petrovich Tiban’s rebellion of the adins on Mars had been a slap in the face, a demonstration of failure that set the newsnets hounding Rachel again. They accused her of insufficient psychological evaluations, poor choices from the camp volunteers. How could someone with a criminal record like Tiban’s—?

      Six years after that, UNSA had sent her to the austere habitation modules on Mars, and representatives of her government made it clear that she should not refuse the offer. At Lowell Base she would take charge of the two hundred dvas already toiling on the planet’s surface, to keep an eye on them so that they СКАЧАТЬ