"Gordon R. Dickson - Childe Cycle 03 - Soldier Ask Not" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

perhaps, I might have wondered why she wanted to go there. But in this
instance, even as she suggested it, the prospect struck forth a feeling in me,
deep and heavy as the sudden note of a gongтАФa feeling I had never felt beforeтАФ
of something like dread.
But it was not just dread, nothing so simple as that. It was not even wholly
unpleasant. Mostly, it resembled that hollow, keyed-up sensation that comes
just before the moment of being put to some great test. And yet, it was thisтАФ
but somehow much more as weli. A feeling as of a dragon in my path.
For just a second it touched me; but that was enough. And, because the
Encyclopedia, in theory, represented all hope for those Earth-born and my
тАв Gordon K. Dickson
uncle Mathias had always represented to us all hopelessness, I connected the
feeling with him, with the challenge he had posed me during all the years of
our living together. And this made me suddenly determined to go, overriding
whatever other, little reasons there might be.
Besides, the trip fitted the moment like a celebration. I did not usually take
Eileen places; but I had just signed a trainee work-contract with the
Interstellar News Services at their Headquarters Unit here on Earth. This,
only two weeks after my graduation from the Geneva University of
Communications. True, that University was first among those like it on the
sixteen worlds of men, including Earth; and my scholastic record there had
been the best in its history. But such job offers came to young men straight
out of school once in twenty yearsтАФif that often.
So I did not stop to question my seventeen-year-old sister as to why she might
want me to take her to the Final Encyclopedia, on just that particular day and
hour she specified. I suppose perhaps, as I look back on it now, I told myself
she on!y wanted to get away from the dark house of our uncle, for the day. And
that, in itself, was reason enough for me.
For it had been Mathias, my father's brother, who had taken us in, Eileen and
me, two orphan children after the death of our parents in the same air-car
crash. And it was he who had broken us during our growing years that followed.
Not that he had ever laid a finger on us physically. Not that he had been
guilty of any overt or deliberate cruelty. He did not have to be.
He had only to give us the richest of homes, the choicest of food, clothing
and careтАФand make sure
SOLDIER, ASK NOT тАв
that we shared it all with him, whose heart was as sunless as his own great,
unpierced block of a house, sunless as a cave below the earth's surface that
has never felt the daylight, and whose soul was as cold as a stone within that
cave.
His bible was the writings of that old twenty-first century saint or devil,
Walter BluntтАФwhose motto was "DESTRUCT!"тАФand whose Chantry Guild later gave
birth to the Exotic culture on the younger worlds of Mara and Kultis. Never
mind that the Exotics had always read Blunt's writings with a difference,
seeing the message in them to be one of tearing up the weeds of the present,
so that there would be room for the flowers of the future to grow. Mathias,
our uncle, saw only as far as the tearing; and day by day, in that dark house,
he drummed it into us.
But enough about Mathias. He was perfect in his emptiness and his belief that
the younger worlds had already left us of Earth behind them to dwindle and