[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
Council or, better yet, direct from some Earth agency; making a splash at the
next conference. You could tell they were thinking of themselves when you
interviewed them, much as they tried to dissemble in strained academic
modesty.
When you asked them about their research, their real subject was always the
same: their place in the scheme of things academic. They were generous with
left-handed compliments and veiled put-downs of rival colleagues. The
viciousness of academic politics was matched only by the inconsequentiality of
its victories.
During her initial weeks here, the men on Phobos had seemed an odd lot. The
corporate men were impossible, of course, like ladder climbers on the
mainland. The university men... well, being on the make extended to the
opposite sex, naturally, but in a weird way, because they were mostly physical
scientists:
Page 105
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
geologists, atmospheric chemists, seers of the invisible magnetosphere; a
secretary she had befriended once at a research institute had told her: There
is no such thing as a physical scientist. Anthropologists, maybe, you didn't
know what to expect from them. But not physicists or chemists or, worse yet,
left-brained mathematical theorists, God help us ... Still, she thought, every
once in a while comes along someone whose technical vigor spilled over into a
general vitality that embraced all of life. What set them apart was hard to
put into words.
Academic women ... something unfamiliar to her there. Mainland academe
fostered some attitudes she had heard about from her mother, but which were
outside her experience after her upbringing in Hawaii:
in academia, her friends told her, a woman could not flirt and still be a
serious researcher. Urban and university women, who wanted to be taken as
serious beings, were distinguished by a mode of dress at the opposite end of
the spectrum from the loose, provocative styles that had evolved for leisure
in space cities or in the hedonistic Pacific pleasure grounds of Hawaii, where
men and women consciously dressed to please each other. She had been amused by
this urban primness when she first went to work in mainland city newsrooms.
Philippe had claimed that the unspoken dress code's mandatory vestigial
retro-bow was left over from twentieth-century office culture, and was in turn
a relic of eighteenth-century lacy propriety, when impractical clothes were a
sign that you belonged to the upper class, i.e. you did not have to work.
"Hence the word 'classy,'" Philippe had said. "Everything, it has an origin in
the past."
Yeah, well, she told herself. The business at hand was to find Carter. And
then ... There was the question of how to interact with him. She still didn't
want to think about that.
18
FEBRUARY 55, FRIDAY
Carter Jahns stared at the screen in his cubicle at the Phobos Library.
Glowing back at him was an orbital image of a red volcanic cone, isolated in
the desert like an anthill in a sandbox. He replayed his mental tape of the
trip to the cone: time spent outside in the Martian desert had a disconnected
quality, like dreamtime. He remembered climbing the cone, finding Stafford's
buggy, walking around the crater rim alone. And then what? Then his world had
changed.
He had debated with himself about coming up here on the Phobos shuttle. Not
debated. Rationalized. It was as if he couldn't think anymore at Mars City. He
had a budget of three Phobos trips per year and he hadn't made the trip for
six months, and the data archives in the Phobos Library were rumored to have a
much fuller set of satellite imagery than was down-linked to Mars City.
Intuition had whispered to him:
Don't put in requests for pictures. Go to Phobos; you want something done
right,do it yourself.
Intuition. There had been a time, when he was a student technocrat, that he
would not have admitted the word "intuition" into his internal vocabulary. Too
mystical. Now ... No apology needed. Experience had changed his definitions.
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]