"Jack Williamson - Afterlife" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)

JACK WILLIAMSON

AFTERLIFE
"WE LIVE ON FAITH," MY father used to say. "The afterlife is all we have."

I wasn't sure of any afterlife. My questions troubled my father, who was pastor of our little
church. He made me kneel with him to pray and listen to long chapters from the Bible on
the altar. That sacred book, he said, had come from the holy Mother Earth. It looked old
enough, the brittle yellow pages breaking loose from the cracked leather binding, but if its
miracles had ever really happened, that had been a hundred light-years away and long
millennia ago.

"If there is a God," I told him, "and if he heard our prayers, we'd all be dead before we ever
got his answer."

With an air of tragic sorrow, he warned me that such reckless words could put my immortal
soul in danger.

"We ourselves are miracles," he told me, "happening every day. Our whole planet was the
Lord's miraculous answer to the prayers of the first Earthmen to land here. They found it
rich in everything, and spoiled it with their own greed and folly."

I heard the history of that from our one-legged schoolmaster. Our first dozen centuries had
been a golden age. We settled both great continents, harvested the great forests, loaded
fleets of space freighters with precious hardwoods and rare metals. All that wealth was
gone two thousand years ago.

Sadly, he showed us a few precious relics he kept in the dusty cupboard he called a
museum. There was a little glass tube that he said had shone with the light of a hundred
candles when there was power to make it burn, and a dusty telephone that once had
talked around the world.

We were born poor, in a poor little village. On the Sabbaths, my father preached in the
adobe-walled church. On weekdays, he got into his dusty work clothes and ground corn
on a little grist mill turned by a high waterwheel. His pay was a share of the meal.

Wheat grew on the flat land down in the valley below us, but the soil in our hill country had
eroded too badly for wheat. Through most of the week we ate cornmeal mush for
breakfast and corn pones for bread. Sometimes my mother made white bread or even
honey cakes, when church members from the valley gave us wheat flour.

On the Sabbaths she played a wheezy old organ to accompany the hymns. I used to love
the music and the promise of a paradise where the just and good would live happily
forever, but now I saw no reason to believe it. With no life here at home, I longed to get
away into the wider universe, but I saw no chance of that.

It's seven light-years to the nearest settled star system. The trade ships quit coming long
ago, because we had nothing left to trade. There's only the mail ship, once every Earth
year. It arrives nearly empty and leaves with every sling filled with those lucky people who
find money for the fare.