"Fritz Leiber - Gather, Darkness!" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leiber Fritz)

And still the Hierarchy held its hand. Round about the Square priests stood by twos, watching,
doing nothing—wine-dark shadows.
But he fancied he saw a trace of something more than ignorant curiosity and bewildered awe in
two or three of the white faces spread out before him. And, as a man in polar snows nurses the tiny
flame that is all that stands between him and death by cold—cupping his hands around it, breathing
upon it with infinite gentleness, shredding upon it tiny crumbs of tinder—so Jarles nursed that trace
of genuine understanding he fancied he saw, but which might be only a trick of the shadows.
“Some of you heard why Sharlson Naurya was accused of witchcraft. She was ordered to serve
in the Sanctuary and refused. Refused with courage and simple decency. So a priest of the Great
God reached forward those chubby, uncalloused fingers stronger than a smith’s and made
witchmarks on her shoulder before he ripped down her smock.
“All of you must guess why Sharlson Naurya refused. All of you know who lives there.” He
pointed down a dark little street next to the Sanctuary. Eyes followed his ringer. “Fallen sisters,
they’re called. Girls chosen by the Hierarchy for the holy sisterhoods, who then so sinned against
the Great God that they could neither be suffered to remain in the Sanctuary nor permitted to return
home to infect the innocent. So the Great God in his infinite mercy gives them a place where they
may live apart.” His voice was thick with irony. “You know! Some of you have been there
yourselves, when the priests would tolerate it.”
At that, the faintest of murmurings came from the crowd.
 “Who takes your sweetest daughters for the sisterhoods, Commoners of Megatheopolis?
“Who sends you to the fields, the roads, the mines, to waste your years and break your backs?
“Who gives you fake thrills to deaden the pain?”
And now the muttering had become an angry murmuring. Stoneblind resentment, except perhaps
in two or three cases, but dangerous. Around the edges of the square, violet willo’thewisps began to
glow, and there was a slight bulging of the wine-dark shadows. Jarles instantly caught at it.
“See them switch on their inviolability! Puff themselves up for safety. They’re afraid of you,
Commoners of Megatheopolis. Deadly afraid.
“With their holy gadgets the priests could farm the whole world, web it with perfect roads,
honeycomb it with mines. And not one man lift pick or spade.
“There’s another story you’re told. How, when the Hierarchy has finally purified all mankind,
the Great God will usher in another Golden Age, the New Golden Age, the Golden Age without
Dross.
“I ask you—and especially the old ones among you—
doesn’t the New Golden Age get further and further away every year? Don’t the priests keep
pushing it further and further into the future? Until now it’s only a hazy dream, something to lull
your little children to sleep with when they’re half dead from their first day’s work and crying?
“Maybe those Golden Age scientists did intend to restore mankind, when the threat of barbarism
was finally past. I guess they did.
“But now the priests think only one thing. How to hold on to their power as long as mankind
lasts—until the sun darkens and the earth freezes!”
Then he realized that the muttering had died and that the commoners were no longer looking at
him, but upward. An eerie, leaden blue light was illuminating their faces, until they looked like a
crowd of drowned men. And this time his eyes followed theirs.
The Great God had leaned forward, blotting out the first, faint evening stars, until his gigantic
face was peering straight down at them, his blue nimbus blazing in all its deathly glory.
“Behold their greatest trick!” Jarles shouted. “The Incarnate God! The Almighty Automaton!”
But they were not listening to him, and now that he had stopped speaking, his teeth were
chattering from the cold. He hugged his arms to stop the shivering, alone on his little bench that
now seemed very low.
“It has come,” the commoners were thinking. “It was all a test, as we might have known.