"Bc10" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry & Pournelle)

Beowulf's Children
Chapter 10

THE FIRST CHURCH OF THE GRENDEL

In thee, O Lord, do I put my trust; let me never be ashamed: deliver me in thy righteousness.
Bow down thine ear to me; deliver me speedily; be thou my strong rock, for an house of defense to save me.
For thou art my rock and my fortress; therefore for thy name's sake lead me, and guide me.
Pull me out of the net that they have laid privily for me: for thou art my strength.
Into thine hand I commit my spirit: thou hast redeemed me, O Lord God of truth.
-Psalm 31:16

Jessica rose only when she was absolutely certain that the others were asleep. On tiptoes, she crept out of the cave. The soft purring snores of sleeping children surrounded her. She felt a delicious synthesis of maternal concern and utter wickedness.
Aaron waited just outside the cave, and held a finger to his lips. "Shhh."
Jessica nodded, understanding the need for secrecy. This wasn't for Justin. Not anymore-he had made his choice, and Jessica had made hers. Her heart thudded in her chest as she followed Aaron down the path. They passed a tree, and it wasn't until they had passed that she realized that it wasn't just a shadow, but Trish, dark as the night. A Bottle Baby.
Trish joined them as they moved silently down the trail. Little Chaka and others drifted into their line until there were seven in all. They came to a small clearing near a very shallow running stream.
"Running water," she observed unnecessarily. "Everything I am, and everything I've learned says to stay away from it."
Aaron nodded. "In mortis veritas," he said.
He pulled a stone away from a cairn of fist-sized, smooth rocks. Then all seven of them were rolling away rocks, until they exposed a small kettle wrapped in transparent plastic.
Trish produced a hot plate and a battery cell. Toshiro brought water from the stream, and filled the small kettle.
Jessica's stomach felt light and fluttery. During the day she watched Aaron studying leaves and plants with the intensity of a trained ethnobotanist. She was one of the very few who knew why he studied so intently. Quietly, without drawing any attention to himself, he had collected the plants that he needed.
He had also collected the grendel's liver.
Speed generates enormous heat. The metabolic byproducts would kill the grendel, just as the by-products of combustion will kill a fire. Its liver and bile ducts-or the grendel versions thereof-are awesome. A grendel can eat anything, and survive the products of its own massive oxidation, because of its efficient cooling and detoxification systems.
At thirteen years of age, Aaron had analyzed grendel bile ducts, livers, and other organs of cleansing with a view to psychopharmacology.
At fourteen he had created the Ritual. Since then, he had indoctrinated ten others into the mysteries of grendel flesh.
"The First Church of the Grendel," Jessica had laughed. Aaron had barely smiled.
The kettle was bubbling now, and would soon be ready. He added a few handfuls of mushroom-looking things, and something that looked like a fern. She nervously contributed her own handful, a few leaves pruned from one of Cadmann's living room cacti. Poisonous, yes. But in very precise combination with certain plants, and the liver of a grendel that had died on speed . . .
She watched the stars. The same, but different stars from those beneath which her ancestors had lived and died, loved and hunted, fought and borne children. But they were her stars. The way to survive is to become one with the environment. The Earth Born still saw Avalon as a place of strangeness, of danger. Every one of them would have to die, the things of Earth would have to die before this planet could be truly conquered. And this ritual, as old as humanity, was the prayer of the hunters and gatherers whose lives were interwoven with the land itself. The Earth Born had come as the Europeans to the new world. Aaron said that they would have to learn the traditions of the Native American peoples in order to survive here. They could not own the land, but they could be a part of it.
Aaron dipped a cup into the brew, and lifted it steaming to his lips. "To us," he said. "To the children of a new world."
He drank. When he was finished, he passed the cup to the left, and the ritual was repeated, and again, until all of them had downed a mouthful of the sour mash.
It smashed into her gut like napalm. She broke into a sweat, her heartbeat rocketing.
For a few foolish moments she prayed that nothing would happen this time . . . then her stomach soured, and she knew there was no use in hoping. It had begun.
During the first grendel ceremony, she had vomited. Since then Aaron had incorporated acid neutralizers and buffering agents, and now the entire experience was, at least physically, much milder.
The psychoactive alkaloids were kicking in now. External sounds were fading. It was not that they weren't there, or that she had gone deaf, it was that her focus of attention was so tight now, so utterly complete that it was as if she was staring down a long, long tunnel. There at the far end were the simmering kettle and the fire. And if she turned the focus of her attention on Aaron, she saw Aaron, and only Aaron, and if she looked up at the stars and the night sky, she could focus on any point of light, bring it up bright and tight, a hot little marble that she could almost hold in her hand. Aaron's voice crooned to her, sounding for all the world like the music of those very spheres:
"We are the inheritors of this world. We own all of this, everything that we can see, everything that there is to own. We are the strong ones. The others call us Merry Pranksters. We do what we do to test our power. To ensure that we can control every aspect of this planet. And then we place a clown's face upon our deeds so that the old ones will feel no fear.
"But one day we may have to take other steps. And when we do we will have to act as one mind, as one body. As the inheritors of this world, with no barriers between intent and action. As one mind. As one body . . ."
She could hear his words, felt them slipping between those bright hot marbles. She was burning up, but sought refuge in the very fire that consumed her. Aaron's hands were on her. And then other hands. And then she was reaching, touching, tasting, consuming and allowing herself to be consumed in the fire raging within her, without her, and in the space between those bright, hot marbles in the sky.