"Donald Moffitt - Mechanical Sky 1 - Crescent in the Sky" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moffitt Donald)

"It's all to do with the politics of the Caliphate Congress." The dapper desk clerk crossed an indolent leg
to show off a foot shod in English leather and looked round the dowdy circle with a condescending smile.
"It's obvious to anyone with an under-standing of these matters."
"And why is that?" Mr. Najib asked politely.
"He wants to complete the hajj before the pan-Islamic sum-mit next year," Mr. Kareem said, as if he
were amused by the subject. "He simply wants to get his decapitation over with. The pilgrimage season is
only two months away, and he'll need time to recover."
"But the Emir has already completed the hajjтАФand more than once, may God reward him for his
devotion," Mr. Fahti pointed out.
"Aha, but only his head has performed the hajj. His current body has not been thus sanctified; the last
time he visited Mecca, he was wearing a different body. And some nitpicking mullah would be sure to
point that out at the conference."
"By heaven, he's right!" burst out one of the regulars, a bearded retiree named Khaled, who was
obscurely related to the landlord. "When you think of it that way, the Emir is a hajji only from the neck up."
Kareem gave a self-satisfied nod. "Exactly. You can imagine the ammunition that would give the Emir's
rivals for the Caliph-ateтАФespecially the Sultan of Alpha Centauri. His lobbyists would be working overtime
to sway the delegates. No, my friends, the Emir is a very smart politician. He's simply moving decisively to
remove any possible shadow from the legitimacy of his can-didacy."
Mr. Fahti looked stricken. "The Emir at least is part hajji. But the Sultan is not a hajji at all, and never will
be, may God destroy him for his evil machinations!"
Mr. Faqoosh, the mullah, scowled under heavy black brows. "The Centaurans are spawn of the devil,
perish their hands and perish they themselves," he rumbled. "They will be dragged screaming to the great
fire whose fuel is men."
"I've met many Centaurans, and I can assure you that they are not devils," Kareem said with a laugh.
"They're like any other star dwellers who stop off at the Savoy on their way to Earth, and a fair number of
them have come to this system to make the pilgrimage to Mecca."
"Assuming it is so that the Emir plans to perform the hajj once more for political reasons," Mr. Najib said,
looking down his nose at the upstart desk clerk, "why is it necessary for him to change bodies? He could
just as well do it with his current prosthesis."
"An impression of vigor is very important in politics," Ka-reem said promptly. "A new, young body will be
an asset in his campaigning. Besides, if he waited too long to make the change, there's always the possibility
that he might be caught short at an inconvenient time."
It was too much for the mullah. "It is forbidden to alter the creations of Allah!" he erupted. "If sculpture is
enjoined by the Prophet, how much greater an abomination is it to sculpt living flesh? Six-legged camels!
Horses with toes! Turbofalcons and three-headed hunting dogs! The production of novelties for the idle
rich! And now the idolaters have not shrunk from dabbling in man himself!"
He sat back, breathing hard and dribbling a little at the corner of the mouth. Faqoosh was a dear, seedy
old thing, and everyone tried to help him out with the odd donation, but there was no denying that his views
were antediluvian; he was one of those extreme fundamentalists who held that Mars was flat, space travel
a hoax perpetrated on the pilgrims, and that Mecca was actually on the other side of the Tharsis Range and
could be reached on foot. He had no regular connection with a mosque and eked out a bare living by
presiding at krayas and filling in at weddings and sacrifices.
Some of the other lodgers looked away in delicate embarrass-ment. Hamid-Jones carefully studied his
fingernails. Poor, se-cretive Mr. Daud cringed in his chair, terrified at being caught in company where the
Emir and his self-cloning program were criticized even by implication.
Mr. Najib moved smoothly to deflect the conversation back toward politics. He dispensed a smile to
Hamid-Jones and said, "Well, here is the young man who ought to know about the ins and outs of such
things. Tell us, ya Abdul, the announcement from the Palace caught all of us by surprise, but you must have
been in on the preparations. What's the inside story? Is the Emir renewing himself because of the hajj?"
"I'm only a junior cloning assistant and not privy to matters of state," Hamid-Jones protested. He saw the