"Brian Lumley - Psychomech 03 - Psychamok" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

Psychqsphere
Garrison's dream was now reality, all of its elements fulfilled. But still there were problems. The world was
not ready for a superman, certainly not one whose mind -whose multimind - was flawed and faulted as is
any human mind. (Or any three minds.) Nor would the world be willing to accept a resurrected woman
whose body had lain frozen in death for eight long years!
Perhaps more to the point, men had laws. Prime amongst these and accepted world-wide was this one:
Thou Shalt Not Kill. Terri Garrison and Gareth Wyatt, however, were indisputably dead. And what of Willy
Koenig? No court of law on the entire planet, presented with the facts, would ever accept that Koenig was
not dead. In short, with all Garrison's expanded ESP powers, there was still no way he could reveal himself
to the world.
Not that he considered this of any great importance in itself (in all truth Garrison did not desire to be the
new Messiah), but its implications most definitely were. For if he could not reveal himself, then he must
keep himself hidden. Certainly he must hide his eyes, which were not the eyes of any ordinary human
being; and Vicki must likewise hide hers. This was not difficult: the two remained, as it were, 'blind,' or at
least part-blind, wearing deep/sided, dark-lensed spectacles whenever they were to be seen in public.
A vaster problem far was Garrison's multimind, the fact that he had a Gestalt psyche. The Schroeder facet
was less than satisfied with the 'immortality' he had achieved for himself: while Garrison lived, he 'lived',
yes, but not freely and by no means fully. True, the Schroeder/Koenig facets did occasionally surface and
take ascendancy in their own rights, but usually Garrison himself was master. It was hardly the 'sharing'
Thomas Schroeder had envisioned, but it had to be a great improvement on death! Schroeder had been
there, and he had not liked it.
In Koenig's case matters were far simpler. He had only desired to serve Schroeder and Garrison, and now
as a Gestalt facet he was closer to both men than he had ever dreamed of being. The conflict between the
two, of which he was of course aware, CQuld never blossom into open warfare; there was no way in
which they could spite or harm one another; anything one of them might maliciously engineer in his
ascendancy could certainly be cancelled by the other in hi£, which would only ensure mutual chaos. In short
their relationship was balanced, as all Gestalts are; and all three facets knew that in the event of some
accident, should Garrison die, then that all of them were dead. Yes, and Vicki and Suzy too . . .
But between times:
When Schroeder was ascendant he lived as Schroeder; likewise Koenig. Both sub-facets had their foibles,
their idiosyncrasies. Schroeder kept a woman in London; Koenig, as had always been his way, paid for his
women wherever he found them. Vicki Maler was inviolate: she belonged to Garrison himself.
And yet in Vicki, too, a problem. While she knew it was not Garrison who went off on occasion to seek his
pleasures in other beds, it was Garrison's body. And this created stress in her.
Finally, the greatest problem and by far the most disconcerting was this: ever since Psychomech had given
Garrison's Gestalt mind its powers, those powers had been leaking into the Psychosphere. Each time he or
his sub-facets used those powers, the battery of his mind grew that fraction weaker. For almost two years
Garrison had suspected it, worried about it, before he finally became convinced that it was so.
By that time his financial empire was enormous. If he was not already the richest man the world had ever
known, he soon would be. And yet, paradoxically - and chiefly because he must maintain a low profile - this
was a fact of which the world was la, gely unaware. Certain people did know, however, and t.*"re was one
person in particular who knew very nearly .'11 there was to know about Garrison. That person's name was
Charon Gubwa . . .

Gubwa was a freak, the cumulative result of mutating genes piled one upon the next and passed down by
successive generations.
An obese hermaphrodite albino (in fact of pure African Negro descent, with typically negroid features,
however leprous), Gubwa was also enormously ESP-endowed. Frighteningly so. He had known of
Garrison's 'coming' from the instant Psychomech created the Garri-son/Schroeder Gestalt, for he had 'felt'
the other's presence rending the Psychosphere as a great meteor rends the atmosphere. And Gubwa had