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

is a worm. Guilt is a worm. Confess, Gabriel Mohr!
 But he would have to use words for that, wouldn't he? Spoken words. That's what it would take to
confess.
He reached into his pocket out of reflex. If only he could shut off this chatter in his head, these
memories! His knees had weakened, and as he slid toward the ground, he felt Boursai's grip seize him.
Touching him. Boursai was touching him.
Mohr pulled away, felt the bile rising in his throat. But his stomach was empty. He only gagged. He
thought, half amused, It's nothing personal, Boursai, you thieving bastard. It's just that I can't stand
human beings. He smiled weakly.
"Come back inside," Boursai said. "Lie down." He offered his hand to help Mohr up. Mohr looked at
the hand. No, his reaction to Boursai was more than his ordinary revulsion. There was something about
Boursai that made him cringe.
Mohr got to his feet without help. He went back to the com-link. "You're the problem, Boursai. When
you don't come around, I need one hex a day, maybe two. But you visit and I take four, I take five or
six." He pounded the counter next to the keyboard. "Leave me alone! Give me my hex and go!"
"I will go," Boursai answered, "but I cannot return your drugs to you."
Mohr picked up an empty water jug and hurled it. It went wide of Boursai's head.
"I am sorry for this," Boursai said. Mohr waved angrily, as if to say, Just get the hell out!
The door closed. Mohr waited a few minutes, then went outside. The wind gusted and Mohr flinched.
He didn't like wind. In the clusters, he had never felt more breeze than the gentle exhalations of the
ventilation shafts.
Boursai was already a small figure striding near the horizon.
Mohr went back inside and checked under the convex bottom of one water jug, and then reached into
the space between the counter and the wall, and then checked the hole he had hollowed out from the dirt
floor and covered with a stone. They were all there, his emergency stashes. Boursai hadn't found any of
them, probably hadn't thought to look.
First Mohr refilled his breast pocket, then put a hex between his teeth and cracked it. He inhaled
through his mouth, felt the warmth travel down his throat, into his lungs and body. Then he spit the empty
yellow shell onto the floor.
He looked at the bag and felt his pocket. This supply wouldn't last long. He'd have to convince
Boursai to return the rest. What was it with that man, anyway? Why did he insist on coming around here?
He had his own compound to attend to, his own trees to get into the ground. Maybe Boursai was lonely.
It was just the two of them for a hundred miles in any direction. So what? It wasn't Mohr's fault if Boursai
couldn't take a little solitude.
Mohr closed his eyes, and Tireen's face floated up from his memory. Damn Boursai. Damn him! Mohr
cracked another hex.
The sun wasn't quite setting when Mohr turned on his com-link and opened a channel to Boursai.
Mohr hardly ever turned his unit on, but now he had a reason. He couldn't stop thinking of that bag of
hex.

"Boursai," he transmitted, "bring back my property."
The red contact light came on as Boursai turned on his machine miles away and received the message.
And his reply came an instant later: "You took an overdose."
"That's my damn business," Mohr wrote, then wiped it out and replaced it with, "I need the stuff."
"You think you need it."
"I need it, Boursai. Return it!"
"Why? Why are you convinced you need to poison yourself?"
Mohr stared at the screen for a moment. If Boursai knew even half of Mohr's story, the ways people
had changed him, the things they had done to him, the things he had done...
"It may make you feel good for a little while," Boursai's message continued, "but it could kill you. It