"Robert F. Young - L'Arc de Jeanne" - читать интересную книгу автора (Young Robert F)

hers," he muttered. "And if she wants to be Joan of Arc so bad, we'll let her be Joan of Arc." He
stomped out of the room.
When she heard the voices for the first time, Jeanne Marie Valcouris was twelve years old.
There were two of them, and after a while, they told her whose voices they were. The gentle one was
St. Rachel de Feu's; the authoritative one, Joseph Eleemosynary the almsgiver's. Joseph Eleemosynary
was the founder of the Psycho-Phenomenalist Church and had been dead for one hundred and twenty
years. Rachel de Feu was the first Psycho-Phenomenalist saint. She had been dead for seventy-six
years.
In the beginning the voices were disembodied, but it wasn't long before they acquired faces. As
Jeanne Marie had never seen a picture of either Rachel or Joseph, it is not surprising that neither visage
bore the slightest resemblance to the original. As Jeanne Marie "saw" it, Rachel's face was round and
sweet, with gentle blue eyes and lips that loved to smile. Joseph's face was young and
handsomeтАФdashing in a boyish sort of way. He had curly black hair and disturbing dark eyes. His
complexion was slightly swarthy but very very clear. Sometimes it was hard for Jeanne Marie to tell
which face she liked best.
Go into Le Bois Ferique, Joseph "said" when they became better acquainted, and Rachel de Feu
and I will find a cave for you to live in and help you fix it up like a little house and show you how to do all
sorts of wonderful things.
Jeanne Marie didn't even hesitate. She didn't like it at the orphanage. She never had. She missed her
father too much and kept thinking about him all the time and couldn't keep up with her lessons. So she
went into the woods and Joseph and Rachel found a cave for her and showed her how to turn it into a
regular little house by thinking through her hands. They called the process "psychotelluricism," but she
thought of it as "think-making." It was an ability that the inner hierarchs had developed shortly before
O'Riordan the Reorganizer had seized power from the Psycho-Phenomenalist Church and massacred
them with radiation guns, Rachel de Feu explained. O'Riordan, when he heard about the process, had
scoffed at it, saying that he didn't believe anyone could create solid objects by intellectual power alone to
say nothing of semi-solid objects that could affect a person's emotions; but just the same, Rachel added,
Jeanne Marie must be sure not to tell anyone that she had the ability.
After they showed her how to think-make the cave-house, they showed her how to think-make
things to put in it тАФchairs, tables, dressers, rugs, drapes, lamps, a teleradio set, an escritoire, a
self-regulating stove for the kitchen, a fireplace-furnace for the living room, a washer-drier for the utility
roomтАФand, most important of all, how to think-make things to eat. Oh, it was the most marvelous
experience she had ever had! It was as though her fingers had little minds of their own and as though her
hands were little factories that could produce anything under the sun. Rachel de Feu said that that wasn't
the way it worked at allтАФthat it was the energy she and Joseph Eleemosynary furnished her with that did
the trick. This psychic energy, Rachel said, drew the necessary elements out of the ground and the air,
combined them, and turned them into whatever Jeanne Marie wanted to make.
When the officials of the orphanage came into Le Bois Feerique and tried to get Jeanne Marie to
return with them to the orphanage, Rachel and Joseph helped her to make gouts of smoke of the most
horrendous shapes imaginable appear out of thin air and caused sparks to shoot from her fingers and fire
to come out of her ears. The officials were so startled they nearly jumped out of their shoes and Jeanne
Marie had never seen anyone run so fast in all her born days. After that, they left her alone, and people
began calling her a witch. She didn't mind being called a witch, and if what she was, was a witch, she was
glad of it. She had never had so much fun in her life.
When she was fifteen, Rachel and Joseph put her to work making a bow and arrows. The bow
turned out to be the most beautiful thing imaginable. It was like a shaft of sunlight that someone had bent
and strung with a bowstring made of morning mist. The arrows were scarcely less beautifulтАФand a good
deal more remarkable. They were silver in hue, and so tenuous you had to look hard just to see them.
She must take the bow with her everywhere she went, Joseph told her, and the arrows too. She made a
little quiver out of daylight, darkness, sand, dust, time, hopes, dreams, wood, metal and a dozen other