"C. J. Cherryh - Fever SeasonUC - Compilation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cherryh C J)

The young man was looking at Ito blankly, as if his face were carefully arranged to show no emotion. Doubtless, the hidden emotion was hidden for a reason: outrage, amusement, or skepticism could not be tolerated here.
Well, the lesson Chamoun would learn today would wipe all his carefully contrived sophistication away.
"Come up here, my son." Ito walked to his desk, over in the corner of the small, red-linened room. The youth stood up and came to the other side of the desk, away from the blackboard whose instructions meant nothing to him yet. Beside the desk, catty-corner, was a long couch, which Chamoun would soon need.
The young man awaiting instruction stood easily, not understanding enough to be worried. This would soon change.
"Now, m'ser," Ito explained in a silken voice, "you are about to receive the sacrament of the inner circle. This is a privilege not available to most." Ito reached behind him and from the sideboard took a small, covered silver tray. He put it on the desk and lifted its lid. On the platter were three wafers, each topped with a fillet of deathangel that had been augmented with certain other psychotropic drugs. Once the boy had eaten them, he was going to be devoid of will, though completely consciousЧa good student at last.
And that student was going to get the lesson of his lifeЧof his lives.
"Take the sacrament and devour it," Ito said formally.
"Yes, m'ser Cardinal," Chamoun agreed meekly, and took the first wafer in hesitant fingers.
When the Adventist youth had choked it down, Ito felt a thrill of relief. Even one would do the job. "Now the next,"
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said Ito, watching the widening pupils and the loosening muscies of his prey.
Automaton like, without a blink or a hesitation, Chamoun ate the two remaining wafers.
"Go sit on the couch with your hands on your knees," Ito commanded. The drugged youth obeyed without question.
Knowing the boy would remember only what he was told from this moment onward, Ito sat on his desk and crossed his legs in less than cardinal dignity as he said, "Now, Michael Chamoun, look at your feet. Stare at them even though you feel your body rising. And do not be afraid, for you are floating to the ceiling. You are floating through it. Your mind and your limbs are under my control ..."
Slowly, repetitively, Ito shook his subject loose from the temporal lock of the here-and-now. The young man's body sat limply on the couch, fingers spread on knees. His unblinking eyes stared at his shoes so that, eventually, tears streamed down his face.
Chamoud could neither speak nor move without a command from Ito, such was the power of the hypno-sacrament.
". . . you are floating high in the air, floating through time and space. And now, you are beginning to drift downward. As you descend, you must keep looking at your feet because it is your feet which will take you back, back, back into a life of yours which you will now remember. This previous life of yours will be the one most pertinent to your life among us in Merovingen; it will be the life whose karma you are discharging here. It will be the life that teaches us both what we need to know about you, Michael Chamoun. Nod if you understand me."
The boy on the couch nodded through his tears.
"Close your eyes, now, Michael Chamoun. When you open them, you will see your feet in the shoes of a previous life. Around you will be the greatest moment of that life, and you will tell me everything you see and everything you know which is relevant to your karma and your purpose here."
Chamoun seemed to quiver; then his eyes closed.
Ito started counting the seconds absently, seconds he knew were necessary to wait before he asked the youth questions.
HEARTS AND MINDS 99
In those seconds, his own mind drifted to a cardinal's temporal concerns. The Janes had dumped something in the water, and that something had changed even the smells of the canals. Fever season was upon them differently, this year, and a Jane priestess had shouted from a bridge that there would be no plague. It felt, it seemed, like chemical warfare of some sort, and everyone in the College was worried.
They were even more worried because, at just the wrong moment, old losef Kalugin had decided to show his teethЧa reaction conceived during the aftermath of the Ball's disruption by Sword of God terrorists, no doubt. losef had clamped down with every governmental agency he controlled, policing everythingЧincluding the power-hungry militias of Anastasi and Tatiana; overseeing all of Merovingen personally as he hadn't done for years. Making changes and issuing decrees. Overstating the importance of the opening of Nev Hettek's trade mission in Merovingen, for instance (and the importance of Nev Hettek's ambassador), without even consulting the College for guidance. losef had begun decreeing right and left.
He had decreed, among other things, that a census be taken. A census of every living soul in Merovingen. A census of all citizens. A census of all foreigners-in-residence and foreigners visiting. He had decreed that all Nev Hettekers must have alien-identification cards and that every one of those must get their cards at Nev Hettek's new embassy. He had done this (Vega Boregy and his patron, Anastasi Kalugin were sure) at the behest of Tatiana Kalugin, to further advance her new lover, Chance Magruder.
But the cardinals did not think that was the reason. losef had done what he had done to throw a wrench in all his children's plans. And to demonstrate once again that absolute power rules absolutely.
The results of thisЧa census, a numbering of the Janes and Adventists and Revenantists in townЧwere unforeseeable. There would be, for the first time, a list of who was who, and where. Nev Hettek's new embassy would have a head count of all the Nev Hettekers in Merovingen; Chance Magruder, if
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HEARTS AND MINDS
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Vega was right, would have an unconscionable advantage over other Nev Hettekers. if he wished to do them harm.
And the Sword of God faction that Anastasi and Vega had fallen in with would be at the mercy of the Nev Hettek Ambassador, unless they refused to be counted. Either way, there was potential here for renegades and infighters, for evil of the first order. And the College didn't like it.
This boy, this spy, this asp whom Cassie Boregy had married, might be of some help, if the College could account him loyal. Thus, the sacrament that no other Boregy had ever received.
A secret sacrament, unknown outside the CollegeЧexcept in the interrogation cells, where its power was used not to explore previous lives and previous transgressions against the law of God, but current lives and current transgressions against the ruling Kalugin hierarchy.
"Michael," Ito said gently, "you will listen only to me; you will hear only my voice." The cardinal, pulling his long nose, caught a glimpse of a man much older than he felt in the mirror behind the desk. He looked away from himself; a man is no older than he feels; a cardinal is no weaker than the call of duty upon him; God would work through Ito Tremaine Boregy, if God there were. If not, the College was^strong enough, and worthy enough, to take the place of a Deity.
Long ago Ito had decided that, if there had been sharrh, there must have been God. He wasn't sure either existed any more, but he had overseen enough regressions of the sort Michael Chamoun was now undergoing to know that there was . . . something.
Something behind the pageantry and ritual. Something behind the crowd-control axioms and the customary reverence that allowed some men to rule over others. Something inherent in a social order that validated its tendency to make some men slaves, some masters; some rich, some poor. ~As something more than mindless chance decreed that one child was lame and blind from birth, and another hale and destined for high estate.
Ito had sired an infirm child, and drowned it on the spot.
His status among the College cardinals would have been undermined if he had not: such horrid karma could only be Retribution for crimes unexpiated, of a degree that a cardinal should not be subject to. Therefore, it had not happened. The wife and the child both died to make that fiction true.
And now, before him, was the piece of trash to whom Vega had decided to marry Cassie. Sweet Cassie, who should have been Ito's wife, by rights. What was forty years, between great houses? The blood-tie was thin enough; the benefit should have been clear enough. And the cardinal needed a young wife of high estate right now, to replace the one he'd had to murder, because of her imperfect child.
But before negotiations could be consummated, in came Chamoun, with Magruder backing him, and the deed was done in such a hurry that there was no time to object. No way.
Ito began gently guiding the helpless psyche of Michael Chamoun down from its perch above its body. Down and down and down, into the body and into a previous time.
Chamoun went rigid as Ito told him to raise his eyes from his feet and look around. Then the boy's face contorted, his hands came up to shield his eyes, and he screamed: "Sharrh! Captain, look out! Sharrh ship, six o'clock!"
And he fainted. Keeled over before Ito could ask the first of many prying questions, designed to compromise and ensnare the young husband of the woman who should have been die cardinal's wife.
Michael Chamoun was on the bridge of a ship, only his name wasn't Chamoun and the ship was like nothing he'd ever seen afloat on Merovin. It wasn't a yacht; it wasn't a riverboat; it wasn't a seagoing vessel.
It was a spacegoing vessel, the memories that weren't Chamoun's were clear on that. On other things, too, though the body was damaged beyond repair, dying on that bridge amid the smoke and the sirens and the emergency lights blinking while panels of electronics shot sparks arid other men who could still move screamed for breathing apparatus and emergency procedures.
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The lower half of his body's face was gone; the pain was a white blanket. The edges of his vision were dark and that dark was encroaching toward the center. As if looking through a telescope, he could still see, though. He could see clearly through a pinhole in the middle of his failing sight. He could see the stars!