"C. Sanford Lowe & G. David Nordley - The Small Pond" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lowe C Sanford)

around him, and he thought about Moses on the mountain, viewing the Promised
Land. That reminded him of the New Israel space colony, orbiting Proxima, and Ben
Shalom, the messianic anti-Moses who had led so many of the orthodox to the stars.
The debates about that had filled the coffee houses of Ashqelon in David’s
childhood. It had been the first of what were now over a thousand exclusive ethnic
or religious settlements among the nearby stars, and not everyone was happy about
it. Children raised in such places faced the same kinds of survival challenges as
youngsters in cults faced on Earth.
Liz touched him and pointed.
He looked in that direction and saw a small rustic cabin by a stream between
waterfalls—the first sign of human habitation he’d seen.
“Getting warmer,” Liz shouted. Their weight increased as they moved farther
from Minot’s rotational axis, and the shuttle’s fans got louder as they revved up to
carry the load.
David smelled the pine forest—now yielding to the more deciduous trees. “It
looks a lot less settled than the space colonies around Sol,” he shouted over the fan
noise.
Liz smiled and pointed to her head.
David opened his address.
Only about five thousand people so far, Liz sent. L-5 Grissom has fifty-seven
million, and its area is a little smaller.
The land lay mostly flat below them now, a calico patchwork of forests and
fields, some tended by cultivating robots.
A herd of kangaroos! Liz noted.
Roger Gunheim is Australian, David sent. A town is coming up. A broad,
winding river circled the inside of the habitat at its widest part. A large clearing with
wide, low, modernistic architecture lay ahead of them on a thumb of land.
That’s Lenore, Judi sent. Named forLenore Lebois. She was the first system
exec, and she died mysteriously. I guess you have to die to get something named
for you.
Judi, what do you think happened? Liz asked.
Gunheim had his way with her all the way out. They’d just finished the
colony when his buddy, DeRoot, arrived with another thousand passengers. That
was forty years ago. The two of them got a council formed that made Gunheim the
executive. Lenore objected and she was found dead in the river near the town, not
three weeks after it started flowing.
Suicide? David asked.
Ruled an accident. But her personnel files disappeared.
This isn’t all on the net.
That’s right, Judi said. Then she leaned forward in her seat so he could hear
her voice over the buzz of the shuttle’s fans. “DeRoot told me. Trying to scare me, I
think. It worked.”
David shivered.
The shuttle passed over a town that would not have appeared out of place in
Australia four centuries ago, and settled onto a well-manicured grass field. A group
of horseback riders came out to meet them with spare mounts. DeRoot, who’d
come in earlier, and Gunheim were among them along with a Eurasian woman.
“G’day and welcome to Lenore,” Gunheim shouted, all ebullience and smiles.
“Mount up! It’s Suits-off Day; thirty-nine years since we moved in here. There’s roo
on the barbie for you.”