"Chalker, Jack L - Quintara 1 - The Demons at Rainbow Bridge" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L)

BOOK II:
MIZLAPLAN: THE GOLD TEAM
The Game of Martyr and Murder
THE GRAND GAME

Even after all this time, it was still unsettling to step from a spaceship into a horse-drawn carriage.
The cabbie, a middle-aged cherub with mutton-chop whiskers and a cherry-red, bulbous nose that stood out all the more because of his tiny, deep-set eyes, viewed his potential fare with some distaste. This fellow was simply not the sort that ever strayed from the spaceports, and certainly not on this world. If he was going somewhere on business, he sure didn't dress to impress, either.
The passenger was of medium height but seemed larger; a fellow with a commanding presence, although not of the son that also commanded respect. He was a muscular sort, thin but not looking it; dark, orange-brown skin and Mongol-like features, but with what appeared to be a three-day growth of full beard of the density not associated with Mongol types. That feature alone made him look grungy and not quite right, but added to it was shoulder-length jetblack hair that badly needed combing, loose-fitting cotton shirt and pants that appeared to be what he not only wore daily but also what he slept in, and neglected fingernails as long as claws. Nor, of course, did his incongruous and unnerving steely blue eyes indicate a purity of ethnic background, although spacing tended to be a family enterprise and minor mutations weren't all that uncommon. He even smelted a bit -- well, foul -- and the cabbie wondered if he should take this fellow and risk having to fumigate the cab.
The strange man stopped at the cab door, looked up, and said, "Sainte Gree, cabbie."
The cabbie's bushy eyebrows rose in surprise. "But that is a Holy Retreat!"
"I know. Take the long, scenic route, too, if there is one. I've been cooped up inside a can for a very long time and I need to breathe clean air and see green land and blue sky and horizons without walls."
With that, the spacer got in and settled back in his seat and the cabbie sighed, resigned, and flicked the reins to start off.
It was an open coach, although most cabs were covered; when you waited at or near the spaceport in fair weather like today or the most foul weather, you did so with open coaches for just the reason the grungy passenger had given. You had to love space to keep at that sort of job over the years, but there was something in the human psyche that craved clean air and openness, and when they got the chance they wouldn't take a covered or cloistered ride for anything if they could help it. Every cabbie had tales of spacers sitting in the open, getting soaked through and seeming to enjoy every miserable moment of it.
Still, few of them ever looked as grimy as this fellow; they always dressed up when they made a planetfall. And he couldn't remember any of them ever being interested in visiting a Holy Retreat no matter what they looked like.
The spacer relaxed and sank into the cushioned seat, stretched his legs, then reached inside his tunic and pulled out a battered old case from which he took a long, fat cigar. It was another example of the man's totally antisocial appearance; almost no one smoked, both for health reasons and because tobacco was not readily available even in the few places where smoking was permitted. Spacers, however, did develop some bizarre and even disgusting habits, taking advantage of the dispensations awarded for the kind of life they led.
About half an hour from the spaceport most things modern had been left behind. The road was well-built and maintained, but it was hard-packed dirt, with covered bridges over the rivers and streams. The lush green forest was all around, but now and again there were breaks where he could see rolling hills and neat farms, often with grazing livestock. Out here, nothing was motorized, nothing was powered except by wind, water, or muscle, and nothing at all was prefabricated except the society itself.
He had come from such a society himself. The world was different, the land and climate, vegetation and animals, were different, yet it shared a certain simple sameness with all the other worlds of the Mizlaplan.
One People, One Faith, One Way was easier said than done, particularly the latter, when there was so much distance between and so many differences among the people of the Holy Empire and their worlds, but it was far more consistent than not. One needed only to make allowances for local differences.
The credo was, in fact, comforting to those who lived under it; a unity of culture that included the exact same set of beliefs, language, and attitudes no matter how far from home you strayed.
This world was Terran, like himself; however, other worlds he went to within the Empire were the homes of people with scales, people with tentacles, people who looked like lizards, people who looked like rocks, and people who looked like nothing else had ever looked. To the Mizlaplan, the evolutionary origin of one's species and its biology was irrelevant. Many diverse races, yet One People. That was pretty impressive.
"How far is it to the retreat?" he called to the driver after a while.
"Fairly far, sir. Another thirty or forty minutes at least."
He felt no guilt at taking the cabbie so far out of town; it was the man's function to do this, just as his function was to be the captain of the Faith of Gorusu, a position he had inherited at least partly on merit and after years of hard work and service. He had been selected for his career after the Examinations at age twelve, and had been sent off to the Space Academy on his thirteenth birthday. After ten years of intensive study and indoctrination in a rigid, monastic setting, with few trips home to visit relatives and no other breaks, he'd been commissioned and assigned as junior on a freight scow going from nowhere to noplace in particular. He hadn't gone home at all after that; his trips home had become less and less frequent with each year away, anyway. That world was a primitive one of nomadic herdsmen in a cold, harsh climate; his world was now computers and high technology, and he and his people no longer had much of anything in common except their genes.
Over the years, too, his competence and abilities had allowed him far too much latitude; they called ones like him bilge rats, from some ancient scourge no longer understood in its historical context. He had become jaded, lax in his personal appearance and habits, a real slob. He knew it was mostly rebellion at all those years of straight-laced conformity, but he didn't care. He'd been to a thousand worlds, seen much of what there was to see. He'd even been over to the heathen -- the Mycohl Empire and the Exchange. The former was always a chilling experience; the latter totally unnerving with its accent on the accumulation of wealth, its freewheeling no-morals societies and its totally materialistic and chaotic bent. About the only thing the Mycohlians and the Mizlaplan had in common, culturally, was the inability to conceive of anybody actually living in the domain of the Exchange -- rootless, foundationless, with nothing and no one but yourself to rely on even in the midst of a city or town.
All three empires, of course, had other things in common. He could remember well the first time he'd seen Terrans not unlike himself who were not of the Mizlaplan, and how people of the same genetic stock could be more alien to one another man those of other racial stock and other worlds.
Terrans were not, of course, the only races to overlap, but they seemed the largest such group. Spacefaring races who'd broken free of their own worlds and spread out and established rather large realms and thought themselves the lords of creation until, of course, they'd run into the Mizlaplan, or the Mycohl, or the Exchange. Space geometry and bad luck had put his own ancestors in the path of all three, with the result that the last thing one could ever trust was form and race.
He'd been somewhat irritated when the orders for this mission had come in. When a captain took on cargo it was an obligation, and having to dump it off enroute and beg other ships to take it was something he hated doing, but you didn't ignore these kinds of orders.
Discovering that most of the Arm was in retreat out here hadn't been helpful, either, considering that the mission sounded urgent. When the Holy Ones were in their retreats, they were cut off from all things modern, which meant a buggy ride in the country and person-to-person contact. This one smelled particularly unpleasant, too. He much preferred the standard missions, where they were checking out a newly discovered world and evaluating its potential and finding its hidden dangers, or perhaps a fragmentary colony, never absorbed into one of the three great empires, that had to be brought into the Mizlaplan fold before it fell into the hands of the heathen and was corrupted.
The cabbie finally couldn't resist some conversation.
"You work with the Holy Ones?" the driver asked, trying to imagine a fellow who looked like that amongst saints.
"I do, when they need me," he replied. "As to why they picked a character like me, I couldn't say, if that's your thinking. They say I give 'em perspective. They spend most of their times in the spiritual world or among the goodfolk, like yourself. I'm a jarring, ever-present reminder to them of what people might become if they don't do their jobs right."
The cabbie half turned, then thought better of it, although he really wanted to get some indication of whether or not his passenger was joking.
They came around a bend and suddenly the Holy Retreat was spread out below them in a shallow, wide valley. The captain had never seen a Holy Retreat before, and he was impressed by the manicured lawns, wooded areas, and impressive facilities. It appeared they would come in by a large athletic field and track that looked as good as any he'd seen; off to one side was a large outdoor swimming pool, along with a number of smaller pools, which, from the rising wisps of steam, suggested hot springs beneath. The place itself was laid out with a large but rustic-looking temple in the center, with dorms and support buildings constructed of wood in a similar style. Had it not been a religious place, he wouldn't have minded spending a week or so there.
There weren't a lot of people around, but those who were seemed to be having fun. It was comforting to see that the saints also had fun now and again, at least to the limit of their own restrictions.
"Is there an angel in residence?" he asked the cabbie.
"Oh, yes, sir," came the response with obvious pride. "I, myself, pray to the Venerated One who is here, dwelling within the main altar of that very temple there."
The captain looked, a bit awed himself at that news, even though there was nothing more to see. He was a cynical, worldly man, a professional sinner and he knew it, but he was nonetheless a true believer. All save the saints lived in sin and would die in sin, and there was no way out of that except the mercy and forgiveness of the gods through their chosen vessels of perfection, the angelic Lords of the Mizlaplan.
For him, any more progress toward salvation would have to wait until the next life at least, since the very thing that was extremely unusual about him and made him the choice of the Arm of Faith for its work prevented him from ever attaining sainthood in this life. Perhaps that was why he had turned out the way he did. Everybody had at least a crack at instant cleansing and perfection; everybody except the very few who were like him. In older times the people had declared those like him accursed, agents of evil, and had killed them, but the later interdiction by the Venerated Ones had saved him and others from that fate, although he'd had to work triple all his life to prove his devotion and faith.
There really was no choice for a logical man. Those races and people of the Exchange paid lip service to a million different gods and deities, almost all clearly invented by cultures in their own images to fit their own needs. Many, if not most, of the people had no real religious beliefs at all.
The Mycohl, on the other hand, worshiped the forces of evil and darkness and served them, for they were a constant, and although it was difficult to see what that had profited them and certainly it wasn't any sort of life he'd ever want for himself, at least it was consistent. People there followed the dark way because they were born into it and raised in it. Those of the Mizlaplan had no doubts or questions, no chaos and no rituals to dark gods who ignored them and did little or nothing in return except give them a lifetime of fear. Quite probably most of them, deep down, had no more commitment or true belief in their deities than did the Exchange, but at least there was no confusion.
Here, though, within the Mizlaplan, no logical person could doubt the truth of his own beliefs and system. Not when true angels lived amongst the faithful and dispensed justice and mercy and were accessible to high and low alike on a day-to-day basis through the saints.
The coach traveled down to the campus, then followed a road alongside the running track, and both he and the cabbie, ordinary mortals, looked over at the saints. The common folk, like the two of them, wore plain baggy clothing that covered them completely; the women wore long, mostly plain dresses as well and little in the way of adornment, to keep down the temptations of the flesh and promote equality rather than envy no matter what their position. The saints, however, presented quite a different picture, having been cleansed of sin and also made incapable of committing future sins.
Not all the sanctified looked as good as these specimens, but these were the cream of the crop, perfect people; the men all strong and virile and handsome -- models of male physical perfection; the women equally strong but stunningly, naturally beautiful, the image of female physical perfection to match the perfection of their souls. Their clothing tended to be close-fitting, often revealing, for they had nothing at all to hide nor were they ever capable of succumbing to temptation.
The cabbie looked with a sigh at a particularly gorgeous, buxom beauty who wore nothing but a skintight pullover and short shorts for running around the track: "I must admit I hate to come up here," he told the captain. "Sights like that awaken in me the most sinful thoughts, and sights like those rippling male muscles there arouse envy within me, and in spite of myself, I keep thinking, 'what a waste.' "
The captain smiled. He knew exactly what the fellow was talking about but it was in his sinful nature to twist knives occasionally, just for the evil pleasure in it.
"Are you suggesting that they are wasted? That becoming a saint and attaining perfection of mind and body is somehow wrong or sinful? They are examples for us to try and emulate, my good man. Their physical perfection is a gift from the gods for mispurpose. Are you suggesting that the ways of the gods are somehow wrong?"
"No, no, good sir!" the cabbie responded, suddenly defensive. "The gods placed our souls in these corrupt bodies, and it was that which was talking. Not being perfect, I cannot always control what it speaks to me."
The captain laughed. "Calm down and be at peace, fellow! I often feel the same way myself. I was just having a bit of fun, that's all. Try being cooped up for long periods in a spaceship with one or more women who look like everything your animal ego ever fantasized in its most sinful moments, and know that they are unattainable. Early on I feared I might go mad, and even now it is by compromise in my mind that I survive it. Tell me -- are you married?"
"Yes, sir. Thirty years next spring."
"Well, do you love her, then?"