"Frank Herbert - The Godmakers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

He was a short, dark-skinned man in a pale-orange robe that fell to his ankles
in soft folds. His face, narrow and smooth, was dominated by a long nose that
hung like a precipice over a wide, thin-lipped mouth. His head was polished
brown baldness.

"We do not know from what creature or thing the god will be born," the Abbod
said. "It could be one of you."

He gestured to the room full of acolytes seated on the bare floor of an
austere room illuminated by the flat rays of Amel's midmorning sun. The room
was a Psi fortress buttressed by instruments and spells. It measured twenty
meters to the side, three meters floor to ceiling. Eleven windows, five on
one side and six on the other, looked out across the park rooftops of Amel's
central warren complex. The wall behind the Abbod and the one he faced gave
the appearance of white stone laced with thin brown lines like insect tracks -
- one of the configurations of a Psi machine. The walls glowed with pale-
white light as flat as skimmed milk.

The Abbod felt the force flowing between these two walls and experienced the
anticipatory flash of guilt-fear which he knew was shared by the acolyte
class. Officially, this class was called Religious Engineering, but the young
acolytes persisted in their impiety. To them, this was God Making.

And they were sufficiently advanced to know the perils.

"What I say and do here has been planned and measured out with precision," the
Abbod said. "Random influence is dangerous here. That is why this room is so
purposefully plain. The smallest extraordinary intrusion here could bring
immeasurable differences into what we do. I say, then, that no shame attaches
to any one of you who wishes at this time to leave this room and not
participate in the making of a god."

The seated acolytes stirred beneath their white robes, but no one accepted his
invitation.

The Abbod experienced a small, sensation of satisfaction. Thus far, things
went within the range of his predictions. He said:

"As we know, the danger in making a god is that we succeed. In the science of
Psi, a success on the order of magnitude which we project in this room carries
profound reflexive peril. We do, in fact, make a god. Having made a god, we
achieve something paradoxically no longer our creation. We could well become
the creation of that which we create."

The Abbod nodded to himself, reflecting on the god creations in humankind's
history: wild, purposeful, primitive, sophisticated . . . but all
unpredictable. No matter how made, the god went his own way. God whims were
not to be taken lightly.