"Tom Purdom - Canary Land" - читать интересную книгу автора (Purdom Tom)

CANARY LAND
Tom Purdom

тАЬCanary LandтАЭ appeared in the January 1997 issue of AsimovтАЩs with an
illustration by George H. Krauter. Tom Purdom made his first sale in
1957, to Fan-tastic Universe, and has subsequently sold to Analog, The
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Star, and most of the major SF
magazines and antholo-gies; in recent years, heтАЩs become a frequent
con-tributor to AsimovтАЩs Science Fiction, publishing a stream of
sophisticated adventure tales in the mag-azine since his first sale here
in 1988. He is the au-thor of one of the most unfairly forgotten SF novels
of the sixties, the powerful and still timely Reduction in Arms, about the
difficulties of disarmament in the face of the mad proliferation of nuclear
weapons, as well as such novels as I Want the Stars, Tree Lord of
Imeten, Five Against Arlane, and The Barons of Behavior. Purdom lives
with his family in Philadel-phia, where he reviews classical music
concerts for a local newspaper, and is at work on several new novels.

Here he sends a hapless immigrant to a future col-ony on the Moon
that looks like a Utopia on the surface, but which, when you examine its
lower depths (as our reluctant hero is forced to do, both literally and
figuratively), turns out to be less than perfectтАФbut still, perhaps a place
where an immi-grant can make a place for himself, if luck stays with him
long enough to keep him alive, that is. ...

****

Back home in Delaware County, in the area that was gen-erally known as
the тАЬPhiladelphia region,тАЭ the three guys talking to George Sparr would
probably have been de-scended from long dead ancestors who had
immigrated from Sicily. Here on the Moon they were probably the sons of
parents who had been born in Taiwan or Thailand. They had good contacts,
the big one explained, with the union that тАЬrepresentedтАЭ the musicians who
played in eat-eries like the Twelve Sages Cafe. If George wanted to
continue sawing on his viola twelve hours a day, thirteen days out of
fourteen, it would be to his advantage to accept their offer. If he declined,
someone else would take his place in the string quintet that the diners and
lunchers ignored while they chatted.

On Earth, George had played the viola because he wanted to. The
performance system he had planted in his nervous system was
top-of-the-line, state-of-the-art. There had been weeks, back when he had
been a normal take-it-as-it-comes American, when he had played with a
dif-ferent trio or quartet every night, including Saturday, and squeezed in
two sessions on Sunday. Now his perfor-mance system was the only thing
standing between him and the euphoric psychological states induced by
malnu-trition. Live music, performed by real live musicians, was one of the
lowest forms of unskilled labor. Anybody could do it, provided they had
attached the right information molecules to the right motor nerves. It was, in
short, the one form of employment you could count on, if you were an