"Bruce Holland Rogers - Vox Domini" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rogers Bruce Holland)

earth-like atmosphere but with almost no native life forms, the perfect place to colonize. But how had this
wonderful situation come into being? Onazuka's World had evolved over billions of years, just like the
earth. Artifacts and bones only a few hundred years old showed that there had been a rich and varied
biosphere here, the product of an evolutionary process that was just beginning to produce tool makers.
In fact, it seemed there were several tool-making species. And then, just centuries before the first humans
set foot on this world, a massive meteor collided with the planet, cloaking it in dust. The planet froze.
When the dust settled out and the surface warmed again, few native species came back. It was like the
world had been made and wiped clean for humanity to colonize with earth life.
"Benevolence?" Mohr tapped in. "A God who murders a world for our convenience is benevolent?"
"If you are as cynical as you seem," Boursai said, "then why did you enlist in the Planters Corps?"
Because, Mohr thought, I wanted to get out of the Live Free Cluster, out of all of the clusters, if I
could find a way. I wanted to make planetfall. Any planetfall. And because the recruiter showed me the
biggest bag of yellow hex that I had ever seen and said the magic words: Signing bonus. But what he
typed was, "None of your damn business. Give me my hex and get out!"
"You're a good planter," Boursai said. "Until recently, you've always been very careful with your trees.
Whenever I came to see you, you would be at work."
That's because they'll send me back to Onazuka City if I don't do a good job, Mohr thought. Or back
to the clusters. But he had no stomach for explaining things to Boursai. "Come on!" he typed. "Give me
my hex and get out! Out! I want to be left alone!"
Mohr turned to look at the other man. He could read the thought in Boursai's eyes: If I'd left you alone
today, you'd be dead. But Boursai didn't say this. He didn't have a chance, because at that moment, his
wristwatch began to sing in Arabic. His electronic muezzin was calling him to prayer. He excused himself
and went outside, consulting the display on his wrist to see what sector of the sky he should face for his
obeisance to earth, to Mecca.
Mohr staggered to the door to shut it behind the man, but instead he leaned in the doorway to look out
at the blue cliffs, to think of the canyons where he sometimes planted his trees. The coolness of those
streams. The solitude.
While Boursai prayed, Mohr thought of Tireen again, and something stabbed at his heart.
Long ago, when Mohr had gone to the Holy Cluster of the Catholic Church, an old woman named
Sister Sarah Theresa had been assigned to instruct him. She was little more than a body suit stretched
over bones, and her hair was too white and too thin to hide her skull. She was, secretly, a heretic.
The stabbing in his heart made Mohr think of her now. "It's like a worm in your heart, Gabriel," she
had told him. They were floating in the zero-g cathedral-so many religions put their holy places in the
hubs of their clusters, as if weightlessness put them closer to God. Mohr and Sister Sarah Theresa were
in the apse, looking at the statue of the Son of God and Man. Stars wheeled slowly by in the windows
behind the Savior's head.
"The catechism teaches that there is no guilt," the old woman said, looking around to see that she was
not overheard. They were, in fact, alone in the cathedral. "They say now that there is only Affective
Spiritual Dissonance." She chuckled. "They water God down until there is nothing left but psychology."
Then, more seriously, she pointed a bony finger: "There is guilt, Gabriel. It's like a worm eating away at
your heart from the inside. God can take away that worm, but you have to confess. You have to speak
aloud what sin you have committed, in the hearing of another human being."
"Why must it be spoken?" Mohr had asked her.
"Because that's the only way to release what's in your heart. That's the only way God will hear you.
Speak aloud what you have done-- you can't just think it or write it. It's still in your heart, then. You have
to confess. The heart and the tongue are connected. When you confess, you poison that worm in your
heart with truth."
Boursai was finishing his prayer, and Mohr felt the stab in his heart once more. He remembered the
way that Tireen had clawed at his hand on the airlock button, then on the override switch. He
remembered the look in her eyes. The disbelief. He remembered what the vacuum did to her face. Guilt