"Dick, Philip K - Divine Invasion" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dick Phillip K)

Shall I find for a heart that is pure?

These remasterings of the old lute songs, he said to himself; they bind us. Some new thing, for scattered people as flung as if they had been dropped in haste: here and there, disarranged, in domes, on the backs of miserable worlds and in satellites and arks-victimized by the power of oppressive migration, and with no end in sight.

Now the Fox was singing one of his favorites:

Silly wretch, let me rail

At a voyage that is blind.

Holy hopes do require

A flurry of static. Herb Asher grimaced and cursed; the next line had been effaced. Damn, he thought.

Again the Fox repeated the lines.

Silly wretch, let me rail

At a voyage that is blind.

Holy hopes do require

Again the static. He knew the missing line. It went:

Greater find.

Angrily, he signaled the source to replay the last ten seconds of its transmission; obligingly, it rewound, paused, gave him the signal back, and repeated the quatrain. This time he could make out the final line, despite the eerie static.



Silly wretch, let me rail

At a voyage that is blind.

Holy hopes do require

Your behind.

"Christ!" Asher said, and shut his tape transport down. Could he have heard that? "Your behind"?

It was Yah. Screwing up his reception. This was not the first time.

The local throng of Clems had explained it to him when the interference had first set in several months ago. In the old days before humans had migrated to the CY3O-CY3OB star system, the autochthonic population had worshiped a mountain deity named Yah, whose abode, the autochthons had explained, was the little mountain on which Herb Asher's dome had been erected.

His incoming microwave and psychotronic signals had gotten cooked by Yah every now and then, much to his displeasure. And when no signals were coming in, Yah lit up his screens with faint but obviously sentient driblets of information. Herb Asher had spent a long time fussing with his equipment, trying to screen out this interference, but with no success. He had studied his manuals and erected shields, but to no avail.

This, however, was the first time that Yah had wrecked a Linda Fox tune. Which, as far as Asher was concerned, put thematter over a crucial line.

The fact of the matter was, whether it was healthy or not, he was totally dependent on the Fox.