"James Patrick Kelly - St. Theresa of the Aliens" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kelly James Patrick)

pray and God would take care of us like he takes care of the birds of the air
or the lilies ..."
"Shut up, Sam." Nicole sounded frightened. "You're drunk."
In fact, I had only had three glasses of wine but she was right. I was
intoxicated with bitterness, high on blasphemy. Like many lapsed Catholics I
had a kind of philosophical blood lust for the delusions of the faithful.
Still, I had only been trying to protect Nicole and for my efforts had earned
her rebuke. I was furious.
"Maybe you two would like to get down on your knees and pray for me?
You'll excuse me if I don't stick around to watch. I'm afraid I might throw
up." I thought I saw a smile tugging at Terry's perpetual frown; I was so mad
I wanted to hit her. Instead I grabbed the half-empty bottle of Pocono
riesling and retreated to the telelink room.
The Catholic Church has no answer to the problem of evil, therefore I
cannot possibly ... Oh, screw the problem of evil. Screw all the dusty ideas,
the dry arguments for and against. There is no single moment when you lose
your faith; it crumbles under a series of little shocks. An alcoholic priest
preaches the "just war" doctrine from the Sunday pulpit. Your friend dies of
leukemia and God pays no attention. A well-meaning nun tells you that
thinking about sex is a sin. You realize the unspeakable cruelty of an eternal
Hell. You read the Bible and then you look at the Church men have made from
it. I lost my faith when I no longer needed ideas to comfort me. I had
Nicole.
I remember that Nicole and I made love that night. Afterward, I tried
to apologize for losing my temper. She hushed me. "It's all right, Sam," she
said. "I understand. She scares me too."
****
That was just about the time that the aliens landed in Sverdlovsk.
It is hard now, after all that has happened, to remember how we all
felt when we first heard the news. For years popular culture had prophesied
the coming of aliens. Despite all the dark visions of monsters and cruel
galactic empires, I think for the most part we longed to meet another
intelligent species. We hoped they would answer all our questions, solve all
our problems. As Nicole said, we were looking for a shortcut to paradise. We
were the new Israelites, waiting for messiahs from space.
None of us expected that the messiahs would be communists. That was, I
think, the hardest thing of all to accept. Not only had the aliens chosen to
land in the U.S.S.R., but they actually called themselves communists. It was,
they said, the best translation of their own name for themselves. Of course,
the name has never really caught on in this country; we are still calling them
"the aliens." A barely civil name. A name that neatly summarizes our
attitude toward them.
Despite what you hear, the aliens do not think much of Marx and Engels
and they are only mildly sympathetic to Lenin. Yes, they hold all property in
common, their economy is planned, they live in collectives. They do not expect
their world state to wither away however, and they are by no means
revolutionaries. You have only to look at their record since landing to see
that they mean to change us by example, not by force. But still the preachers
rail and the politicians lecture and the people do not understand.
It was six months after Sverdlovsk before they even bothered to visit