"John Meaney - Sanctification (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Meaney John)

looked
younger than Zenshara. They talked and played competitive games on a
terminal until the early morning. When they grew too tired, they
eventually fell asleep side by side on the thin matting.

It was a year before Mark was ready to become a Saint. Neither Zenshara
nor Zhiang saw anything of him during the final weeks before the
ceremony.
On that morning, they and all the other alpha-group acolytes dressed in
formal robes, and filed silently into the Great Hall. They knelt down
at
the rear of the vast stone chamber, beneath its domed ceiling and
sweeping
buttresses. They sat back on their heels and waited. Even for those
used
to it, it was a posture which would become painful during the long
hours
of the ceremony.
Teachers and Administrators sat on small stools to one side of the
hall.
The focus was a wooden dais on which an emerald rug lay, the place
where
Mark would kneel to make his Wish. There was no sign of him yet.
Zenshara
tried to imagine what he was feeling right now.
There were archways along both sides of the hall, connecting it to the
side corridors. In each archway was a bowman, kneeling on one knee with
his tall asymmetric bow in front of him, already strung. The archers
were
in light blue robes with ornate designs, and their bows were striped in
primary colours. They wore tall formal hats of black and gold, tied
under
their chins with black ribbon.
Behind the dais, at the end of the hall, was a giant flat-screen
display:
currently blank, a neutral grey.
The early part of the ceremony involved silent meditation, while eerie
dissonant music floated through the hall. For the kneeling acolytes,
the
difficulty was ignoring the pain in their knees. Different Teachers
stood
up in turn to recite poems or mathematical treatises. The Teacher who
spent most time with Zenshara was the last to stand. He talked simply,
of
the history of the monasteries on all the inhabited worlds, and their
role
in maintaining the social order while continuing the expansion of
humankind throughout the universe.
There was little ritual involved in the actual sanctification of Mark.
He