"Frank Herbert - Destination Void 3 The Lazarus Effect" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

That's my department, he thought. I must be aware for both of us. I am the
storage system, the Ox Gate, which only Vata can open.




There were giants in the earth in those days.

-- Genesis, The Christian Book of the Dead


22 Bunratti, 468.

Why do I keep this journal? This is a strange hobby for the Chief Justice and
Chairman of the Committee on Vital Forms. Do I hope that a historian will
someday weave rich elaborations out of my poor scribblings? I can just see
someone like Iz Bushka stumbling onto my journal many years from now, his mind
crammed full of the preconceptions that block acceptance of the truly new.
Would Bushka destroy my journal because it conflicted with his own theories? I
think this may have happened with other historians in our past. Why else would
Ship have forced us to start over? I'm convinced that this is what Ship has
done.

Oh, I believe in Ship. Let it be recorded here and now that Ward Keel believes
in Ship. Ship is God and Ship brought us here to Pandora. This is our ultimate
trial -- sink or swim, in the most literal sense. Well . . . almost. We
Islanders mostly float. It's the Mermen who swim.

What a perfect testing ground for humankind is this Pandora, and how aptly
named. Not a shard of land left above its sea, which the kelp once subdued.
Once a noble creature, intelligent, known to all creatures of this world as
Avata, it is now simply kelp -- thick, green and silent. Our ancestors
destroyed Avata and we inherited a planetary sea.

Have we humans ever done that before? Have we killed off the thing that subdues
the deadliness in our lives? Somehow, I suspect we have. Else, why would Ship
leave those hybernation tanks to tantalize us in orbit just beyond our reach?
Our Chaplain/Psychiatrist shares this suspicion. As she says, "There is nothing
new under the suns."

I wonder why Ship's imprimatur always took the form of the eye within the
pyramid?

I began this journal simply as an account of my own stewardship on the Committee
that determines which new life will be permitted to survive and perhaps breed.
We mutants have a deep regard for the variations that the bioengineering of that
brilliant madman, Jesus Lewis, set adrift in the human gene pool. From those
incomplete records we still have, it's clear that human once had a much narrower
definition. Mutant variations that we now accept without a passing glance were