"Frank Herbert - Destination Void 4 The Ascenscion Factor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

accommodate him nicely. His mouth was so dry from thirst that his lips split every time he
coughed.

In this hungry downslide of his life Jephtha had dared to hope for two things: to join up with
the Shadows, and to glimpse Her Holiness, Crista Galli. He had tried his best with the Shadows.
Here, chained to the rocks overlooking the Director's compound, Jephtha watched the stirrings of
the great household through his darkening vision.

One of them might be her, he thought. He was lightheaded, and he puffed his chest against the
hooks and thought, If I were a Shadow, I'd get her out of there.

Crista Galli was the holy innocent, a mysterious young woman born deep in the wild kelp beds
twenty-four years ago. When Flattery's people blew up a rogue kelp bed five years back, Crista
Galli surfaced with the debris. How she'd been raised by the kelp underwater and delivered back
to humankind was one of those mysteries that Jephtha and his family accepted simply as "miracle."

It was rumored that Crista Galli held the hope for Pandora's salvation. People claimed that she
would feed the hungry, heal the sick, comfort the dying. The Director, a Chaplain/Psychiatrist,
kept her locked away.

"She needs protection," Flattery had said. "She grew up with the kelp, she needs to know what it
is to be human."

How ironic that Flattery would set out to teach her how to be human. Jephtha knew now, with the
clarity of his pain-transcendence, that she was the Director's prisoner down there as much as all
Pandorans were his slaves. Except for now, at the base of the high reaches, Jephtha's chains had
been invisible: hunger chains, propaganda chains, the chain of fear that rattled in his head like
cold teeth.

He prayed that the security would not find Marica and the wots. The settlement sprawled, people
hid people like fish among fish.

Maybe . . .

He shook his head, clink-clinking the terrible hooks and snaffles. He felt nothing except the
cool breeze that wafted up from morning low tide. It brought the familiar iodine scent of kelp
decomposing on the beach.

There! At that port high in the main building . . .

The glimpse was gone, but Jephtha's heart raced. His good eye was not focusing and a new darkness
was upon him, but he was sure that the form he'd seen had been the pale Crista Galli.

She can't know of this, he thought. If she knew what a monster Raja Flattery is, and she could do
it, she would destroy him. Surely if she knew, she would save us all.



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