"David Langford - The Spear of the Sun" - читать интересную книгу автора (Langford David)

THE SPEAR OF THE SUN
by David Langford
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Taken from: Year's Best SF 2
Edited by David G. Hartwell
Copyright ┬й 1997 by David G. Hartwell
ISBN 0-06-105746-0

eBook scanned & proofed by Binwiped 11-01-2002 [v1.0]




The luxury liner H.M.S. Aquinas sped among the stars, its great engines devouring distance and defying
time. Each porthole offered a lurid glimpse of that colossal pointillist work which God Himself has painted
in subtle yet searing star-points upon the black canvas of creation, too vast for any critic ever to step
back and see entire. In the main lounge, however, the ship's passengers were already jaded by the
splendour of the suns and had found a new distraction. For Astron, high celebrant of the newest religion,
was weaving dazzling circles of rhetoric around a shabby, blinking priest of the oldest.
"Did not a great writer once say that the interstellar spaces are God's quarantine regulations? I think
the blight He had in mind was the blight of men like this, crabbed and joyless celibates who spread their
poisoned doctrines of guilt and fear from planet to planet, world after world growing grey with their
breath ..."
The crabbed and joyless object of these attentions sipped wine and contrived to look remarkably
cheerful. Father Brown was travelling from his parish of Cobhole in England on Old Earth as an emissary
to the colony world Pavonia III, where Astron planned to harvest countless converts and (it is to be
assumed) decidedly countable cash donations for his Universal Temple of Fire.
"For the Church of Fire pays heed to its handmaid Science, and sheds the mouldy baggage of
superstition. The living Church of Fire gives respect to the atomic blaze at the heart of every sun, to the
divine laws of supersymmetry and chaos theory; the dying church of superstition had nothing to say about
either at Vatican III."
The little, pudding-faced priest murmured: "We never needed chaos theory to know that the cycles
of evil run ever smaller and smaller down the scales of measurement, yet always dreadfully self-similar."
But it passed unheeded.
Astron boomed on, remarking that those who obstructed the universal Light would be struck down
by the spear of the sun. Indeed he looked every inch the pagan god, with his great height, craggy features
and flowing flaxen hair now streaked with silver. A golden sunburst of a ring gleamed on his finger. His
acolyte Simon Traill was yet more handsome though less vocal, perhaps a little embarrassed at Astron's
taunting. Both wore plain robes of purest white. The group that pressed around consisted chiefly of
women; Father Brown noted with interest that red-haired Elizabeth Brayne, whom he knew to be the
billionaire heiress of Brayne Interplanetary, pressed closest of all and close in particular to young Traill.
She wore the dangerous look of a woman who thinks she knows her own mind.
"Damn them," said a voice at Brown's ear. "Pardon me, Father. But you heard that Astron saying
what he thinks of celibacy. He chews women up and spits out the pieces. See Signora Maroni back there
with a face like thunder? She's a bit long in the tooth for Mr. Precious Astron, but for the first two nights
of this trip she had something he wanted. Now that something's in his blasted Temple fund, andтАФWell,
perhaps you wouldn't understand."
"Oh, stories like this do occasionally crop up in the confessional," said the dumpling-faced priest
vaguely, eyeing the dark young man. John Horne was a mining engineer, who until now had talked of
nothing but Pavonia III's bauxite and the cargo of advanced survey and digging equipment that was