"Frank Herbert - Soul Catcher" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

I take an innocent of your people to sacrifice for all of the innocents you have murdered.
The Innocent will go with all of those other innocents into the spirit place. Thus will sky and
earth balance.
I am Katsuk who does this to you. Think of me only as Katsuk, not as Charles Hobuhet. I
am something far more than a sensory system and its appetites. I am evolved far beyond
you who are called hoquat. I look backward to see you. 1 see your lives based on cowardice.
Your judgments arise from illusions. You tell me unlimited growth and consumption are
good. Then your biologists tell me this is cancerous and lethal. To which hoquat should I
listen? You do not listen. You think you are free to do anything that comes into your minds.
Thinking this, you remain afraid to liberate your spirits from restraint.
Katsuk will tell you why this is. You fear to create because your creations mirror your true
selves. You believe your power resides in an ultimate knowledge which you forever seek as
children seek parental wisdom. I learned this while watching you in your hoquat schools. But
now I am Katsuk, a greater power. I will sacrifice your flesh. I will strike through to your
spirit. I have the root of your tree in my power.
On the day he was to leave for camp, David Marshall had awakened early. It was two
weeks after his thirteenth birthday. David thought about being thirteen as he stretched out
in the morning warmth of his bed. There was some internal difference that came with being
thirteen. It was not the same as twelve, but he couldn't pin down the precise difference.
For a time he played with the sensation that the ceiling above his bed actually fluttered as
his eyelids resisted opening to the day. There was sunshine out in that day, a light broken
by its passage through the big-leaf maple which shaded the window of his upstairs bedroom.
Without opening his eyes, he could sense the world around his home -- the long, sloping
lawns, the carefully tended shrubs and flowers. It was a world full of slow calm. Thinking
about it sometimes, he felt a soft drumbeat of exaltation.
David opened his eyes. For a moment, he pretended the faint shadow marks in the
ceiling's white plaster were a horizon: range upon range of mountains dropping down to
drift-piled beaches.
Mountains ... beaches -- he'd see such things tomorrow when he went to camp.
David turned, focused on the camp gear piled across chair and floor where he arid his
father had arranged the things last night: sleeping bag, pack, clothing, boots ...
There was the knife.
The knife stimulated a feeling of excitement. That was a genuine Russell belt knife made
in Canada. It had been a birthday gift from his father just two weeks ago.
A bass hum of wilderness radiated into his imagination from the knife in its deer-brown
scabbard. It was a man's tool, a man's weapon. It stood for blood and darkness and
independence.
His father's words had put magic in the knife:
 'That's no toy, Dave. Learn how to use it safely. Treat it with respect.'
His father's voice had carried subdued tensions. The adult eyes had looked at him with
calculated intensity and there had been a waiting silence after each phrase.
Fingernails made a brief scratching signal on his bed-room door, breaking his reverie. The
door opened. Mrs Parma slid into the room. She wore a long blue and black sari with faint
red lines in it. She moved with silent effacement, an effect as attention-demanding as a
gong.
David's gaze followed her. She always made him feel uneasy.
Mrs Parma glided across to the window that framed the maple, closed the window firmly.
David peered over the edge of the blankets at her as she turned from the window and
nodded her awareness of him.
'Good morning, young sir.'