"Jay Lake & Greg van Eekhout - C-Rock City" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lake Jay)

well enough.

Rocky put on his pants. “So. You taking a liber-ty while you’re here?”

“Yeah. I got thirty hours of shore time coming up in a watch or so.” I
planned to spend it touring the slave carvings within the tunnels and on the
exterior of C-Rock City’s three rocks. The visit wasn’t quite illegal, not
technically, but it wasn’t anything I needed Rocky to know about. The
Proctor of Ceres, the petty little tyrant who ran this place, found the carvings
embarrassing, and Rocky had a streak of loyalty as solid as Vestan ore.

My papers said I’d been born here before the Proctor opened the
place to settlement and com-merce. My mother was a slave named
Violet4264. I’d always wanted to see where she’d carved her life in stone. I
figured that was a story just for me.

Rocky frowned. “Mmm. Be careful.”

“Careful? Of what?”

Rocky smiled, but it wasn’t very warm. He fin-ished getting dressed,
gave me an impersonal peck on the cheek, and was quickly gone.

Puzzled, I tried not to be hurt. I told myself that if he’d had more to tell
me, he’d have said it.

****

C-ROCK CITY.

There wasn’t anything like it in the Solar System before or since. It
was carved from a set of three Class C asteroids by blind slaves imported
from the mines of Mercury. The Proctor of Ceres brought them up on the
old atomic cruisers, which finally got scrapped after the Cancer Wars, but
nobody cared about short-life slaves or convict crews.

Those boys and girls went down into tunnels they tore themselves,
with mining lasers and pla-nar explosives, and they shaped a staggering
work of art. The slaves and the bond-engineers bridged the whirling rocks
with cables spun of diamond and buckystring so that a man could walk
bare-foot and shirtless among the stars.

Looking down on the surface in the right light, with the right shadows,
with just the right squint, you could see where the slaves had written the
stories of their lives in high relief. Every time I came to C-Rock City, I was
struck by the whole weird majesty of it.

Hard thing to figure out. The slaves made some-thing beautiful and
more than a little awful, and they never even saw their own work.