"Paul McAuley - The Book of Confluence 01 - Child of the River" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

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Yama shrugged. There was no point debating such niceties
with Ananda, who had been trained in theology since birth,
but why shouldn't machines at least hear the wishes of those
they passed by? Wishing was only an informal kind of praying
, after all, and surely prayers were heard, and sometimes
even answered. For if praying did not bring reward, then
people would long ago have abandoned the habit of prayer,
as farmers abandon land which no longer yields a crop. The
priests taught that the Preservers heard and saw all, yet chose
not to act because they did not wish to invalidate the free
will of their creations; but machines were as much a part of
the world which the Preservers had created as the Shaped
bloodlines, although of a higher order. Even if the Preservers
had withdrawn their blessing from the world after the affront
of the Age of Insurrection, as the divaricationists believed, it
was still possible that machines, their epigones, might recognize
the justice of answering a particular wish, and intercede.
After all, those avatars of the Preservers which had survived
the Age of Insurrection had spoken with men as recently as
forty years ago, before the heretics had finally silenced them.




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In any event, better the chance taken than that lost and
later regretted. Yama closed his eyes and offered up the quick
wish, hostage to the future, that he be made a soldier and
not a clerk.
Ananda said, "You might as well wish upon a star."
Derev said, "Quiet! I heard it again!"
And Yama heard it too, faint but unmistakable above the
frogs' incessant chorus. A man's angry wordless yell, and
then the sound of jeering voices and coarse laughter.
Yama led the others through the overgrown ruins. Ananda
padded right behind him with his robe tucked into his girdie--4he
better to run away if there was trouble, he said,
although Yama knew that he would not run. Derev would
not run away either; she held her trident like a javelin.
One of the old roads ran alongside the fields. Its ceramic
surface had been stripped and smelted for the metals it had
contained thousands of years ago, but the long straight track
preserved its geodesic ideal. At the crux between the old road
and a footpath that led across the embankment between two
of the flooded fields, by a simple shrine set on a wooden
post, the Constable's twin sons, Lud and Lob, had ambushed