"John Kessel - Sunlight or Rock" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kessel John)

тАЬClaro. The deadly Mr. P.тАЭ

He could not pay the rent. Anadem Benet had loaned him cash for two weeks
now. Perhaps it was that he was an immigrant from the Society of Cousins, and she
liked quizzing him about life in what she persisted in thinking was a dictatorship of
women. The first time she had seen his penis, sheтАЩd asked him why it wasnтАЩt bigger.
She had the idea that Erno had been born in a male harem, genetically engineered to
give sexual pleasure. ErnoтАЩs descriptions of everyday life among the Cousins only
disappointed her. тАЬCousins are a gender-differentiated anarcho-social democracy,тАЭ
he insisted, тАЬnot a role-reversed sexual tyranny. The founders were women and
men; first chair Nora Sobieski saidтАФтАЭ

тАЬSo why were you exiled?тАЭ

тАЬIтАФI made a mistake. Because of it, someone died.тАЭ

тАЬAh.тАЭ It was the only time he had ever impressed her. The deadly Mr. P.
Maybe that was why she had let him ride so long. Anadem claimed she came from
one of the wealthiest families on the moon, graced with pre-natal mods that gave her
lightning intellect and catlike balance. It was only through an unlikely series of
investment reverses, and the malice of her great aunt Amelia, Anadem allowed, that
she had come to manage the Hotel Gijon. Erno found the story hard to reconcile
with her lank hair and spotty skin, and as for preternatural balance, the only evidence
Erno had seen of that was when she dodged out the back of the lobby whenever
Felix Menas came down Calle Viernes looking for her.

Erno headed up the boulevard. The Mayer lava tube had been sealed with
foamed basalt when it was pressurized seventy years earlier, and painted with white
titanium dioxide. But where Erno lived the last paint upgrade had to have been thirty
years before, and the alleys were draped in shadows. Calle Viernes, along with
Calles Sabado and Domingo, was one of these short side streets. Hotel Gijon stood
at the streetтАЩs far end; one wall of the building was constructed of the face of the
lava tube. Across Calle Viernes were another flophouse and a RIOP rental shop;
next to it a loan shark and a gambling arcade, and on the corner the Caf├й Royale.
 As the boulevard wound its way through the heart of the lava tube, in places it
broke into a flight of broad steps or ramps to negotiate rises or falls in the natural
floor that the colony designers had deliberately retained. That, and the fact that the
older buildings were decorated with red, blue, and yellow ceramic tiles, gave the
place its old European look. The vistas were broken by the curve of the gray stucco
buildings. Above, from the bright roof with its nest of catwalks, heliotropes fed
sunlight down. From the roof of the hotel you could see a considerable way down
the tube through hazy, high-CO2 air until it twisted away, a ten-kilometer-long city
stretched inside the hollow snakeskin that ancient lunar vulcanism had discarded
several billion years ago.

The first place Erno had gone after he had been exiled from the Society of
Cousins had been the scientific station at Tsander, but all they had there was a
battery of radio and gamma ray telescopes and a crew of Aspergered scientists.
There was no work for an undocumented eighteen-year-old biotech apprentice. But