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

One moment there had been no bee on his flesh. Now, it stood there as though flung into
creation by a spray of sunlight, brushed by leaf shadow, the shape of it across a vein,
darkness of the spirit against dark skin.
A shadow across his being.
He saw Bee with intense clarity: the swollen abdomen, the stretched gossamer of wings,
the pollen dust on the legs, the barbed arrow of the stinger.
 The message of this moment floated through his awareness, a clear flute sound. If the
spirit went away peacefully, that would signal reprieve. He could return to the university.
Another year, in the week of his twenty-sixth birthday, he would take his doctorate in
anthropology. He would shake off this terrifying wildness which had invaded him at
Janiktaht's death. He would become the imitation white man, lost to these mountains and
the needs of his people.
This thought saddened him. If the spirit left him, it would take both of his souls. Without
souls, he would die. He could not outlast the sorrows which engulfed him.
Slowly, with ancient deliberation, Bee turned short of his knuckles. It was the movement
of an orator gauging his audience. Faceted eyes included the human in their focus. Bee's
thorax arched, abdomen tipped, and he knew a surge of terror in the realization that he had
been chosen ...
The stinger slipped casually into his nerves, drawing his thoughts, inward, inward ...
He heard the message of Tamanawis, the greatest of spirits, as a drumbeat matching the
beat of his heart: 'You must find a white. You must find a total innocent. You must kill an
innocent of the whites. Let your deed fall upon this world. Let your deed be a single, heavy
hand which clutches the heart. The whites must feel it. They must hear it. An innocent for all
of our innocents.'
Having told him what he must do, Bee took flight.
His gaze followed the flight, lost it in the leafery of the vine maple copse far upslope. He
sensed then a procession of ancestral ghosts insatiate in their demands. All of those who
had gone before him remained an unchanging field locked immovably into his past, a field
against which he could see himself change.
Kill an innocent!
Sorrow and confusion dried his mouth. He felt parched in his innermost being, withered.
The sun crossing over the high ridge to keep its appointment with the leaves in the
canyon touched his shoulders, his eyes. He knew he had been tempted and had gone
through a locked door into a region of terrifying power. To hold this power he would have to
come to terms with that cither self inside him. He could be only one person -- Katsuk.
He said: 'I am Katsuk.'
The words brought calm. Spirits of air and earth were with him as they had been for his
ancestors. He resumed climbing the slope. His movements aroused a flying squirrel. It glided
from a high limb to a low one far below. He felt the life all around him then: brown
movements hidden in greenery, life caught suddenly in stop-motion by his presence.
He thought: Remember me, creatures of this forest. Remember Katsuk as the whole
world will remember him. I am Katsuk. Ten thousand nights from now, ten thousand
seasons from now, this world still will remember Katsuk and his meaning.
From a wire story, Seattle dateline:
The mother of the kidnap victim arrived at Six Rivers Camp about 3:30 P.M. yesterday.
She was brought in by one of the four executive helicopters released for the search by
lumber and plywood corporations of the northwest. There were tearstains on her cheeks as
she stepped from the helicopter to be greeted by her husband.
She said: 'Any mother can understand how I feel. Please, let me be alone with my
husband.'