"Will McCarthy - Bloom" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCarty Sarah)

The Temples are quite another matter; the organization's religious nature, which many feel to be a
mask for quasi-legal scientific research, is seen as a provocation, a blatant stab at the moral
foundations of our communities.
"I'm not going to lie to you, "Jeanine Proust tells me with a defiant jutting of the chin. "Most of
our members come to us because they sense a spiritual chasm in their lives, because they sense the
proximity of a presence far greater than themselves, and they want to learn more. Yes, many are
undereducated. Yes, many bring money along with them, and yes, we do funnel quite a lot of that
into our research arm. Exploitation is a very subjective judgment, though, and we're no more
guilty of it than any other large organization.

"Like it or not, the Mycosystem is an enormous reality in our lives, and if the more established
religions have no meaningful observations regarding that, then it is time for the established
religions to give way to a more relevant paradigm. People come to us because unlike those
religions of the past, we're the only ones willing to admit that there's an elephant in the living
room."

Not strictly trueтАФRev. Stacia Holt's Creation Murmurs being the most prominent
counterexampleтАФbut I let the point pass. "Some people," I tell her instead, "accuse the Temples
of going too far. The psychotropics, the fecundity rituals, the Confessions of AweтАж Some suggest
that the Mycosystem has become an object of actual worship among your followers."

She shakes her head. "No, I'm sorry, that would be stating it far too strongly. The spiritual
implications of complexity on so vast a scale are simply not known. If a mycoric soul exists down
there in that fractal wilderness, our apprehension of it must be fragmentary at best, though of
course that doesn't stop us from trying. At this juncture we don't have enough information to
worship the Mycosystem, or God, or anything really. It's a frontier that can only be explored when
we're brave enough to let a bloom run its course, the occurrence of which seems very unlikely in
the current climate. But this is all very easy for outsiders to misunderstand.

"I agree," I say to her, fighting to hold my temper, my impartiality suddenly strained just a bit too
far. "I doubt I've understood you at all. I don't see you people vacationing on Mars. I don't see you
volunteering to die in a bloom. Isn't apprehending spiritual truths a little empty if it isn't backed
up by actual deeds?"

At this, she flashes a kind of disappointed smileтАФI've got her and she knows it. She seems as
familiar with the question as she is uncomfortable, and when she speaks, it's in a humbler, almost
apologetic tone. "Mr. Strasheim, we have decades of study ahead of us. The Immunity focuses its
energies in the wrong direction, in an aggressive and ultimately futile direction, and we would like
to see that changed. But we aren't stupid, and we haven't transcended our inherent human/animal
nature. We live upstairs from the very greatest of unknownsтАФthe inner planets transformed
almost beyond comprehension, the vacuum itself brought elaborately to life. Who can say what
our place is in all of this? Is it so surprising, that deep down we're as afraid as you?"

From Innensburg and the Fear of Failure
┬й 2101 by John Strasheim

Back at the factory, I was greeted with hoots and catcalls as the guys looked up from their machines.
Schmidt, Billings, and Howe.

"Hey!"