"Frank Herbert - The White Plague" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

The White Plague

Frank Herbert
1982



To Ned Brown
For his years of friendship




PRECEDE

There's a lust for power in the Irish as there is in every people, a lusting
after the Ascendancy where you can tell others how to behave. It has a
peculiar shape with the Irish, though. It comes of having lost our ancient
ways -- the simpler laws, the rath and the family at the core of society.
Romanized governments dismay us. They always resolve themselves into widely
separated Ascendants and Subjects, the latter being more numerous than the
former, of course. Sometimes it's done with great subtlety as it was in
America, the slow accumulations of power, law upon law and all of it
manipulated by an elite whose monopoly it is to understand the private
language of injustice. Do not blame the Ascendants. Such separation requires
docile Subjects as well. This may be the lot of any government, Marxist
Russians included. There's a peculiar human susceptibility you see when you
look at the Soviets, them building an almost exact copy of the czarist
regimes: the same paranoia, the same secret police, the same untouchable
military, and the murder squads, the Siberian death camps, the lid of terror
on creative imagination, deportation for the ones who cannot be killed off or
bought off. It's like some terrible plastic memory sitting there in the dark
of our minds, ready on the instant to reshape itself into primitive patterns
the moment the heat touches it. I fear for the shape of things which may come
from the heat of O'Neill's plague. Truly, I fear, for the heat is great.

-- Fintan Craig Doheny




May the hearthstone of hell be his bed rest forever!

-- Old Irish Curse

It was an ordinary gray British Ford, the spartan economy model with
right-hand drive customary in Ireland. John Roe O'Neill would remember the
driver's brown-sweatered right arm resting on the car's windowsill in the
cloud-filtered light of that Dublin afternoon. A nightmare capsule of memory,
it excluded everything else in the scene; just the car and that arm.