"Wilhelm,_Kate_-_Julian(1)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilhelm Kate)

"If you make a scene," Julian said, "you will be thrown into the pool and kept there by my followers until the police arrive, fifteen minutes, half an hour, however long it takes. There will be cameras, video tapes, witnesses. I will denounce you as a witch, as the devil in human form."
She shuddered. "Again. There is no end to it."
"If you cooperate," Julian went on, ignoring her dread, "you will enter the water exactly like the others. You will allow the ceremony to proceed normally, and you will walk out of the water transformed. A miracle. My followers will take you to a dressing room where you will be helped into clothes. There is a back door. Your car will be waiting for you. No one will follow you."
"I don't believe you."
"As you choose."
She was a bent, shriveled woman when he led her to his car, seated her, and got in to drive into the city for the Memorial Day service. Kim and John followed closely in the camper.
"Where are you from?" Julian asked, gently now, no longer a victim of the pounding surf that had been with him most of his life. She was an old woman near death, not a threat.
"It does not matter where," she said after a long silence. "We developed a disease in space and came here hoping for aid, but we found primitive people, no help. We could not return home. We stayed." Her voice was hesitant, ancient.
"You personally, or your people?"
The silence was prolonged. He reached into the glove compartment and got out a thermos of water and handed it to her. She drank carefully, emptied it.
"You are immortal then?"
She laughed harshly. "We die every day. One by one we have been hunted, tortured, persecuted. We don't dare try to form alliances with your people. We don't dare try to stay in our own group for fear we will all be massacred together. Today there are so few of us."
"I used to try to understand why you were drawn to this city year after year," Julian said, keeping his tone light. He let amusement seep into it as he said, "I imagined you had a spaceship here somewhere and every year you all gathered for a ceremony of some sort."
She looked out the window. They were in the suburbs of the city.
"I stopped thinking that," he went on. "I began to think you were spies from another star, that you came here to transmit information out into space. It isn't anything like that, is it?"
Wearily she said, "In the beginning when we knew we were dying, our bioengineers transformed us, and they erred. There was not enough time to study the humans thoroughly. It was a desperate gamble. If we could become enough like the humans we found, perhaps we could escape the disease. Humans are immune, it does not attack carbon-based organisms..." She sighed and her words were slurring when she went on. "We acquired great wealth. It takes great wealth to pursue scientific study, and we waited until your technology developed to produce the equipment we need. We studied and learned much, and learning much, we found that our disease is incurable. So we die, minute by minute, day by day, and yet we live on and on." Now she looked at him, her mouth twisted in a death's-head grin. "It is a pity we cannot tell our people of our dilemma. They would appreciate the irony."
"Why do you come here every year?" Julian asked gently.
"Our time is not like yours," she said in her croaking voice. "A day, a year, neither is what you experience. In a day we can empty ourselves to each other, all we have learned, all we have gained. And we can fill ourselves, give each other hope enough to continue ... A year, to you so long, is nothing: a blink, and it is gone. Only these shells keep time in a way our brains cannot fathom." She passed her hand over her chest, down her stomach, her thighs. Her hand shook as with palsy. She lifted it and watched it a moment, then let it fall. Suddenly she sat up straight and her voice was louder and firmer when she exclaimed, "You put something in the water, didn't you?"
"Yes. A mild tranquilizer. You won't even fall asleep, but you won't worry and become upset. It won't hurt you, Stella. It will let you relax."
She moaned and made a grab toward the key.
"I thought you might try something on the way in," Julian said kindly, holding her away with one hand. "I thought you might wait until we got on a crowded street and then try to get the key, or try to jump from the car, or call for help. I thought you might tell me pretty stories to distract me, and then make the attempt. Just relax now, Stella. No one is going to hurt you." He talked almost crooningly as he drove, and she slumped back against the seat, her eyes open, but unfocused.
* * * *
Julian took her to a dressing room where he helped her undress and then laid her on a cot. Gently he washed her, even her hair, and as he ministered to her, she revived, and regained some of her strength. He stopped bathing her when she appeared to be in her mid-sixties. He helped her don a tunic that tied at her shoulders and fell to her thighs in a straight line.
"Soon," he said, "you will feel completely normal. I'll leave two young women with you. They will accompany you to the stage when it is time. What happens then is your decision."
He went to the door and beckoned Corinne and Mary, who silently entered the room and took up their posts. Then he went to the stage.
He talked for an hour. He told his audience they were not machines, but thinking, rational human beings. They were not ciphers, or entries in a file clerk's ledger, or numbers in a computer, but feeling, perceiving human beings. He told them all past was prologue. There was nothing that was not in his book until the last ten minutes. Then he paused, and when he continued, his manner was changed. He had been intense from the start, but now he was like a wire that is charged and taut with suppressed energy.
"When I was a boy," he said, the words ringing, "I had a vision. I became frightened by it and my parents took me to doctors and psychiatrists. They could find nothing wrong with me, but I was changed, and they all knew it. My life was changed. My dreams were changed. I had a vision that has persisted in my head from that day until this, and I have spent my life trying to bring understanding to that vision. I want to share it with you tonight."
He paused again, then went on in a low voice. "In my vision I saw an old woman who had come to realize that her whole life was a monstrous lie. They told her she was insignificant and she believed them. They told her she was a number, that everyone else was a number, that numbers are infinite and go on forever, that none of them matters. And she believed them..."
No one moved in the auditorium. It was so quiet the thousand people there might have been holding their breath. Julian could feel their power become his power and he was the surf, his voice rising and failing, an irresistible force, as he recounted the lies of their lives.
"I had a vision!" he cried. "This woman found the strength to say NO! This woman found herself. She shed her own past, repudiated the lies, refused the self she had become. In my vision this old woman was purified."
He smiled self-deprecatingly. "I was a boy," he said. "I did not understand..."
He spoke of his search for understanding through education, through religion, philosophy, psychology. "And in the spring last year I had a vision once more. In it a door opened onto a path, and I could see all the steps that would lead me to this place on this night. At the end of the path..." His voice fell to a near whisper. "At the end of the path is the light of understanding, the light of acceptance, the light of love, the light of glory. I say to you that tonight you will see that light with me!"
The chorus from a local Unitarian church began the "Ode To Joy" and he quickly left the stage. Kim met him, his cheeks wet with tears.
"How is she?" Julian asked.
"Fine. The tranquilizer has worn off, but she's calm. Will you see the celebrants now?"
It was customary for Julian to greet each person who had come for the purification ceremony. He went from one curtained cubicle to the next, embracing each follower in turn, welcoming them. When he entered the room where Stella Johnson was being held, he stood by the door and did not approach her.
"Are you all right?" he asked.
She nodded. "I heard you, there are loud-speakers. Did you tell me the truth back in the car?"
"Yes. That is the door. Your clothes are here, your car is outside."
She bowed her head. "There are certain patterns," she murmured, "that recur. You are playing a very dangerous game. In the end it will cost you everything." She looked at him. "You will not search for me, for anyone else?"
"Never."
"I will do what you say. And we will part. I shall watch your career with great interest, Julian."
"Good-by, Stella Johnson," he said, and left her room. Outside her door he took a deep breath and started toward the stage to finish it.
"Julian!"
He stopped at the voice, and when he turned, Rachel was there. "I thought you might come," he said.
"You have her, don't you? Julian, there's an FBI man out there. He came to my apartment and asked me questions yesterday. He said she has vanished, that she checked into the motel and then vanished. He'll arrest you. He thinks you're crazy!"
"And you? Do you think that?"
"Julian, please, let her go now. If she's hiding from anything or anyone, she'll not make a scene or cause you trouble if you just let her go! If she is what you think she is, you have to surrender her to the government! Think what it would mean to everyone if we could learn what she can do. They won't let you have this secret all to yourself."
She was very pale and frightened.
"I can't. Don't be so afraid, Rachel."