"Gordon R. Dickson - The Pritcher Mass" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

head forward again. A little later, the car attendant came
pushing amongst their close ranks, vertically unwinding a
roll of thin, silver, floor-to-ceiling privacy curtain; weaving it
in and out among the upright shapes of the harnessed
commuters to enclose those who would join in the gathering.
"Both of you here?" the attendant asked Chaz and the
woman.
"Not me," said Char. The attendant took the curtain back
on the far side of the woman into the rows behind them; and
returned a little later to bring the curtain forward around her
other side; so that—in theory at least she and Chaz now
occupied separate quarters aboard the packed railway car.
Chaz hung in his harness, watching the landscape, letting
his mind drift. Muffled to faintness by the sound-absorption
qualities of the privacy curtain, he could hear the gathering
getting under way. They had already chosen a Speaker, who
was lecturing now.
… remembering the words of the Reverend Michael Brown,
twenty-three years ago: 'You are all a generation of Jobs, in
sin and pain equally deserving—therefore, if your fellow
seems to suffer and not yourself do not think he or she is
more guilty than you, or you more lucky, but only that your
own share and time are merely delayed. They will be
coming.' Accordingly, in this gathering, all of us here
recognize and admit our guilt toward a sick and polluted
Earth, acknowledging that we are no better and no different
from that infected and exiled fellow human, who just now
would have made us like himself. In token of which we will
now commence by singing Job's Doggerel Hymn. Together,
now—


"The bitter fires of hell on Earth
Burn inward from periphery,
On tainted soil the world around,
The breeding grounds of Job's-berry."


"Pray we to God of years forgot,
We pray to wood and stone.
Pray we escape from living rot.
Nor do we pray alone."


"In Neopuritanic cell,
In sealed room and city street …"


… Chaz ceased to listen. It was one way to shut out the
emotion the hymn evoked. It was not that he was less