"Kelly,_James_Patrick_-_St._Theresa_of_the_Aliens" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kelly James Patrick)

Once such an admission would have thrown me into a rage. Now I found the futility of her prayers for my soul touching. It struck me at that moment that many of her prayers probably went unanswered. It was an austere life that she had made for herself; I wondered if she were disappointed with it. She looked weary. I could see that her telelink image was largely a product of makeup and acting.
"Moderator?" she said.
"Me."
She shook her head.
"All I do is keep the time," I said. "It's your show."
"I have to talk it over with the Council. They'll say yes." She pushed the notes to one side. "Why are you doing this, Sam?"
"Have you ever met an alien?"
She frowned. "No."
"I just thought that you should."
I was surprised when Nicole asked to go. My first inclination was to say no; after all, her sympathies were clear. I said yes because I still believed her to be a reasonable person who would be intellectually honest enough to give both sides a fair hearing. I realize now something that I only half understood then. I did not stage the debate for the world; I staged it for my wife. I wanted her to see that her newly-reaffirmed faith was a mistake. I wanted her to doubt because I could never believe. Although on the surface our marriage continued as before, there was an underlying friction that was slowly abrading the base of love and trust between us.
* * * *
In addition to Nicole, the guests from AlienLine included Janet Trumbell, the President of InfoLine, her husband Geoff, and two of InfoLine's corporate lawyers. The rest of the party that boarded the plane at Andrews included three edgy bureaucrats from State, our camera crew and the pro and anti factions. The group had been kept to a minimum in the hope that if the debate proved too controversial it would be that much easier to suppress. Once in the air we were told that we were heading north to Hanscom Defense Force Base, west of Boston.
Had I known the location ahead of time, I might have suspected a trap. There are both civilian and Defense Force runways at Hanscom. The guests remained on the plane while a squad of soldiers escorted the camera crew and me to the bubbletent on the runway where the debate was to be staged. I did not realize at the time that these soldiers were not the troops of the United States Defense Force I had expected; they were members of the Massachusetts Guard. We had landed at the civilian airport, not the military base. I had a telelink show to produce; all I noticed were the guns and riot helmets and the green uniforms. Two of the scientists have claimed that the soldiers who escorted them wore Defense Force uniforms. It is a clear violation of law for state militiamen to pose as federal troops. The Governor of Massachusetts denied that his men switched uniforms. The Governor claimed that they never identified themselves to us at all and therefore broke no laws. The Governor, who took personal charge of the Massachusetts Guard that day, was a Purger.
All we had asked for was one alien. But when the airlock of the red alien silo opened two bodies came out. One identified himself as Twisted Logic. He introduced a banana yellow alien called Awful Truth who was to argue the alien side. All the Purgers except Terry were apoplectic. "How can she debate someone named Truth?" one cried. "It's not that thing's real name, I tell you!" another thundered. "They make their names up to suit the occasion." Terry just sighed her all-purpose sigh. "The Lord will speak today, not me," she said, and managed to make that outrageous statement sound humble. "He knows all the tricks of the devil." That shut them up.
It was about four in the afternoon when the tape started to roll. I introduced them as Sister Theresa of the Brides of Christ and Awful Truth the communist. The opening statements were predictable. Awful Truth gave the digest version of the big bang, planetary formation, organic soup, life, evolution, intelligence. He was more impressive than Twisted Logic, perhaps because he did not giggle so much. I got the impression that he was the alien version of a humorless fanatic, in which case he was well-matched with Terry. She spoke first of Jesus then of the Judeo-Christian tradition and then as a seeming afterthought the other religions of the world. You could tell that Islam was not her favorite word and she did not even distinguish between Hinduism and Buddhism, lumping them together as the "faiths of the East." It sounded as if she were improvising. Round One to the alien.
Terry asked the first question. "Who caused the Big Bang?"
"By cause you mean a sequence of events in time. Time does not exist prior to the Big Bang, therefore no causation is possible."
"Time did not exist!" Terry gave the camera a sly, play-act grin and nodded to the millions of scientific illiterates who might one day be watching. "What may I ask did exist?"
I was not going to allow her to violate the ground rules on the first question, but Awful Truth replied anyway. "As creatures of time, we can never know."
"Then even in your science there are some things you must take on faith?" she said.
"Excuse me," I said firmly, "but you have spoken out of turn, Sister Teresa. Awful Truth, you may now ask a question."
"Her beliefs are invalid. Asking questions in this context equates her unsupportable opinions with theories which can be verified empirically. Therefore there are no questions. I am content to respond."
I was as dumbfounded as the audience. I wondered if I should stop the cameras and explain the debate to the alien again. I wondered if I should just stop the camera, period. While I wondered, Terry spoke up.
"Thank you, Mr. Truth. Many of those who believe in God wonder how you aliens are able to tell the difference between good and evil. Some, in fact, claim that you do not care. Do you?"
"We do not recognize such absolutes in the universe. Good and evil are emotional attitudes; they have no truth value."
"Is that why you were attracted to Russia? Without God, there is no reason to be concerned with human rights. You don't have to recognize such minor problems as repression, torture, political murder ..."
"Sister!" I had to interrupt. "Is this a speech or a question?"
She sighed. "A question, Mr. Crimmins."
"Our anthropologists," said Awful Truth, "are most interested in this aspect of religion. Some believe that you have invented your gods to generate an ethics. We do not understand why you should need such an elaborate machinery. We recognize ethical concerns but we do not deceive ourselves into believing that they are woven into the fabric of space-time. Ethics cannot pre-exist intelligence. They must be created by each thinking species using the tools of logic. To pretend otherwise is to license such acts of intolerance as you have mentioned."
Most of this last speech I have reproduced from tape. Just as Awful Truth started to speak, Laszlo, down in our telelink truck, whispered through my earphone. "Sam, I've got a general on the satellite line. Claims he's Defense Force. Wants to know what the fuck we're doing. Something stinks about this setup; you smell it up there?"
I held up my hands to both debaters. "Excuse me. I'm sorry but I've just heard from my production crew. Tape problems. If you'll just be patient for a moment I'm sure it won't take long to fix. Thank you."
Actually the tape was still rolling. On it you can see Terry glare at her side of the audience and shake her head. I had to step away to get any privacy. "Okay, Laszlo, what is it?"
"You tell me. Guy claims he's in charge of alien security. Says he's been getting bad information from State and he's got three of his own staff kneeling in his office saying Our Fathers. He thinks we must be on the civilian side of Hanscom; doesn't know who our soldiers are but they're not taking orders from him. He's talking major-league conspiracy, Sam; he says to get the aliens the hell out. This is Purge country."
Twisted Logic waddled to my side almost before I could wave him over. He had plenty of experience with terrorism. "Something is wrong?" He was not giggling.
"The debate's over. Get back to your ship; there may be danger."
As the two aliens conferred the audience stirred uneasily. When Awful Truth climbed down from his high chair, someone cried, "Take them!" The Purgers surrounded the aliens and began to pray. Guardsmen appeared at the exits. "Stop this, stop!" I shouted at Terry. Their escape seemingly cut off, the aliens tucked their heads close to their squat bodies and sliced through the crowd with a nightmarish agility. The soldiers raised their guns and sighted but did not fire. With a whoosh the aliens punched through the walls. There was an eerie second of silence as we all rushed to the plastic windows of the sagging bubbletent to see what had happened. The aliens had bounced, once, twice and come up bounding like frightened kangaroos. Awful Truth jumped clear over the telelink truck on his way to the red silo down the runway.
"To the ship," called a Purger.
"Go, go!"
The tent emptied. As Terry brushed past me I grabbed her and spun her around. "What are you doing?"
"I'm going to unmask the devil."
"What?"
"We're boarding the ship."
I shook her, probably too hard. "Stop them, do you hear me. For God's sake, stop them now!"
She turned her sad face up toward mine and sighed as if this were all my fault. "For God's sake," she said, "I can't."
I could have hit her then. Her treachery had stripped away the veneer of fair-minded reason; I was a raging fanatic. We were two of a kind, I saw at last, and neither of us were saints.
"Let her go, Sam."
I turned to Nicole and saw something in her then that I had tried for months not to see. She was, like Terry and I, a zealot. But while the fire that burned in Terry's soul made her sad, while mine made me angry, Nicole's burned with joy. Perhaps that was why I had missed it. I realized that I had lost her.
Shaken, I let Terry go. For a moment we three stood looking at each other in the now-empty room. We had known each other for fifteen years and we were strangers.
"Let's go, Nicole," Terry said.
"Don't," said I, knowing better.