"Hamilton, Peter F - Softlight Sins" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Peter F)

Why are there no memories of what happens between his lives? God's
censorship? Or is it simply that the afterlife cannot be interpreted
through human senses, the brain cannot hold it? Maybe Dr Elliot will chose
that as his next area of study. If he does, I'd like him to fail utterly.
Even before this we regarded life too cheaply. Now Softlight will reduce
its value still further. In that respect it has already been a tragic
failure. Perhaps that is our punishment for meddling with the substance of
our own souls. But what kind of God would that give us? One who shows
little compassion, one who will hold us to account for each of our actions
on this Earth, one who is prepared to turn us away from the gates of the
Holy City. An Old Testament God. He cannot be like that. He cannot.

The evening wore on without respite, one tale of woe following another as
the incarnations came and went.
When Douglas stood beside the window wall he could see the tiny yellow
flames of the candles the LIFE! women were using for their vigil, a small
dim galaxy lost at the end of time. Their flames held an unknowing
poignancy; if they had lit one for every mortal death Adrian's soul had
undergone they would have the number about right.
Douglas strode over to the chair as Dr Elliot was lowering the Softlight
imprinter over Decius Tactus, a Roman centurion, and Christian, condemned
to death by a local magistrate. His family had been butchered by soldiers,
blaming the bad harvest on their alien God.
The man's eyes gazed back at him through a hazy chemical veil.
"What did he do?" Douglas whispered hoarsely. He met the blank faces of
the others.
"Christians were blamed for everything," Barbara Johnson said. "It was
convenient."
"No, not Tactus. Originally. What sin could possibly be so bad, so brutal,
to deserve this?"
"What do you mean 'originally' Douglas?" Judge Hayward asked, there was a
degree of petulance in the question. It was midnight, they had been in the
laboratory for a straight fourteen hours.
"This man's soul has been sent back from the afterlife forty times in two
thousand years. And each time he has suffered the most appalling
degradations, known nothing but war, pestilence, and slavery; seen his
families murdered, his homes razed, whole cultures wiped out. Torment
without end. This is Hell for him, not Dante's Inferno, Hell on Earth.
Every single time. Why? What did he do that God would subject him to
this?"
He saw Judge Hayward and Harvey Boden exchange a heavy glance.
"Look, Douglas- " Harvey Boden began.
"Don't," he said angrily. "Don't you tell me it's been a long day, don't
tell me I need to go home and get some sleep."
"Probability," said Dr Elliot. "That's all it is, Douglas. So far we've
seen less than ten per cent of his incarnations. Apart from the last
couple of centuries the vast majority of the human race has lived short
miserable lives in unhygienic squalor. In any given historical era the
number of aristocrats is a minute fraction. It always has been."
"No. He did something. Something terrible." Douglas could sense the