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

He said: 'You are Kwatee, the Changer.'
'And what are you?'
'I am Katsuk.'
'What are you?' The question thundered at him.
He put down terror, thought: Thunder is not angry. What frightens animals need not
frighten a man. What am I?
The answer came to him as one of his ancestors would have known it. He said: 'I am one
who followed the ritual with care. I am one who did not really expect to find the spirit
power.'
'Now you know.'
All of his thinking turned over, became as unsettled as a pool muddied by a big fish. What
do I know?
 The air around him continued full of dappled sunlight and the noise and spray from the
creek. The mushroom-punk smell of a rotten log filled his nostrils. A stately, swaying leaf
shadow brushed purple across the bee on his hand, withdrew.
He emptied his mind of everything except what he needed to know from the spirit poised
upon his hand. He lay frozen in the-moment-of-the-bee. Bee was graceful, fat, and funny.
Bee aroused a qualm of restless memories, rendered his senses abnormally acute. Bee ...
An image of Janiktaht overcame his mind. Misery filled him right out to the skin. Janiktaht
-- sixty nights dead. Sixty nights since she had ended her shame and hopelessness in the
sea.
He had a vision of himself moaning besides Janiktaht's open grave, drunk with anguish,
the swaying wind of the forest all through his flesh.
Awareness recoiled. He thought of himself as he had been once, as a boy heedlessly
happy on the beach, following the tide mark. He remembered a piece of driftwood like a
dead hand outspread on the sand.
Had that been driftwood?
He felt the peril of letting his thoughts flow. Who knew where they might go? Janiktaht's
image faded, vanished as though of its own accord. He tried to recall her face. It fled him
through a blurred vision of young hemlocks ... a moss-floored stand of trees where nine
drunken loggers had dragged her to ... one after another, to ...
Something had happened to flesh which his mind no longer could contemplate without
being scoured out, denuded of everything except a misshapen object that the ocean had
cast up on a curve of beach where once he had played.
He felt like an old pot, all emotion scraped out. Everything eluded him except the spirit on
the back of his hand. He thought:
We are like bees, my people -- broken into many pieces, but the pieces remain
dangerous.
In that instant, he realized that this creature on his hand must be much more than
Changer -- far, far more than Kwatee.
It is Soul Catcher!
Terror and elation warred within him. This was the greatest of the spirits. It had only to
sting him and he would be invaded by a terrible thing. He would become the bee of his
people. He would do a terrifying thing, a dangerous thing, a deadly thing.
Hardly daring to breathe, he waited.
Would Bee never move? Would they remain this way for all eternity? His mind felt drawn
tight, as tense as a bow pulled to its utmost breaking point. All of his emotions lay closed up
in blackness without inner light or outer light -- a sky of nothingness within him.
He thought: How strange for a creature so tiny to exist as such spirit power, to be such
spirit power -- Soul Catcher!