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

almost did."
That was the idea, Mohr thought. Poison wasn't such a bad idea. If Boursai only knew...
 "You've got to adjust to this world, Gabriel."
Adjust! That's what he had done more than anyone else he knew, adjusting to one cluster after
another. The only place he hadn't really tried to fit in was Holdham, his home cluster, and the only reason
he couldn't fit in there was because he happened to be curious about the wrong things! "Where do you
get those ideas, boy?" his instructors asked him. And when he told them, they'd say something like,
"Those entries ought to be wiped from the encyclopedia. That's ancient history. Useless stuff."
No one else on Holdham was interested in religion. Holdham was a poor cluster, one that barely clung
to existence by making its organic cycle as efficient as could be. "There's no room for nonsense in
Holdham," his teachers said. "If you can't count it, it isn't real. Spend your time studying Life Support.
That's your religion."
But there were questions Mohr wanted answers for, questions that were only half-formed in his mind.
Since no one on Holdham even thought the questions were worth asking, he applied to emigrate.
It wasn't easy to get out. The Holdham Cluster saw Mohr as an investment. Not only was his body a
storehouse of valuable organics, he was the product of long schooling as a Life Support engineer. But he
insisted, and they had to let him go. The laws of the Great Swarm applied to every cluster. Every person
had the right to choose another cluster in the Swarm.
The Catholics were the first to take Mohr in. They paid the cost of ferrying him from the Holdham
Cluster to their own. Most of the religious clusters would pay this expense, happy to have a convert.
Boursai's words were still on the screen: "You've got to adjust to this world, Gabriel."
"I have adjusted," Mohr typed. "I've adjusted to so many worlds that my head spins. I've adjusted to
life on two dozen different clusters, damn it, but I still need my yellow hex!"
He felt uncomfortable having typed this much, and he hadn't revealed anything new. Boursai had
already figured out this much about Mohr's past. Mohr thought of breaking the link, but then he thought
of the yellow hex Boursai had taken. His only hope of getting it back was convincing Boursai of his
need.
"Tell me about that," Boursai prompted.
Nosy bastard, Mohr thought. And then he thought, All right. Maybe-- it wasn't likely-- but maybe it
would even do him some good to write about these things. Some of these things, anyway. There was a
lot he would have to leave out.
"If I tell you more, will you return my hex?" he typed.
"I will do what I believe is proper."
"Hell of a guarantee," Mohr wrote, but then he continued:
"All right, I'll make you see why I need what I need. And then you'll have to do the right thing."
"That is what I have promised: the right thing."
"When I was young," Mohr typed, "I did some wandering. I started with the Holy Cluster, but I didn't
get what I wanted from the Catholics."
Mohr stared at that last word, thinking of the huge, ornate collection of pods and corridors and great
rooms that made up the Holy Cluster.
"What were you looking for?"
"You figure it out, Boursai. Anyway, they weren't it. They weren't anything like the believers I had read
about in some encyclopedia. The Catholics were so rational that they weren't Godly. They weren't
passionate in their beliefs. Their faith was cold and scientific, infected with technologies. It was more
psychology than religion. You didn't go to confession to expiate your guilt, as I had read. No, you went
to a Process Group to work out your Affective Spiritual Dissonance. God wasn't even in the loop. What
mattered in atonement was not that you would make yourself at one with God, but with yourself."
"Faith is tested," came a message from Boursai, "and men speak openly of their doubts. In this way
are religions transformed."
"Transformed to the point of meaninglessness," Mohr fired back. Then he froze. He looked back at