"Card, Orson Scott - Cruel Miracles" - читать интересную книгу автора (Card Orson Scott)

were all clearly recognizable as churches.

Mosques. Cathedrals. Shrines. Synagogues. Temples. All unmistakably
churches.

But no congregation was invited, though any person who came to such a place
was welcomed by whatever aliens happened to be there at the time, who
engaged in charming discussion totally related to the person's own
interests. Farmers conversed about farming, engineers about engineering,
housewives about motherhood, dreamers about dreams, travelers about
travels, astronomers about the stars. Those who came and talked went away
feeling good. Feeling that someone did, indeed, attach importance to their
lives-- had come trillions of kilometers through incredible boredom (five
hundred years in space, they said!) just to see them.

And gradually life settled into a peaceful routine. Scientists, it is true,
kept on discovering, and engineers kept on building according to those
discoveries, and so changes did come. But knowing now that there was no
great scientific revolution just around the corner, no tremendous discovery
that would open up the stars, men and women settled down, by and large, to
the business of being happy.

It wasn't as hard as people had supposed.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Willard Crane was an old man, but a content one. His wife was dead, but he
did not resent the brief interregnum in his life in which he was solitary
again, a thing he had not been since he came home from the Vietnam War with
half a foot missing and found his girl waiting for him anyway, foot or no
foot. They had lived all their married lives in a house in the Avenues of
Salt Lake City, which, when they moved there, had been a shabby,
dilapidated relic of a previous century, but which now was a splendid
preservation of a noble era in architecture. Willard was in that
comfortable area between heavy wealth and heavier poverty; enough money to
satisfy normal aspirations, but not enough money to tempt him to
extravagance.

Every day he walked from 7th Avenue and L Street to the cemetery, not far
away, where practically everyone had been buried. It was there, in the
middle of the cemetery, that the alien building stood-- an obvious mimic of
old Mormon temple architecture, meaning it was a monstrosity of conflicting
periods that somehow, perhaps through intense sincerity, managed to be
beautiful anyway.

And there he sat among the gravestones, watching as occasional people
wandered into and out of the sanctuary where the aliens came, visited,
left.

Happiness is boring as hell, he decided one day. And so, to provoke a