"St Leibowitz - 02 - St Leibowitz And The Wild Horse Woman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Miller Walter M)

Blacktooth stood up. "Before I get thrown, would you mind telling me how I can find out about the procedure?"
"The procedure for what, to abandon your vows?" Olshuen waited for Blacktooth's nod, then went on: "Well, you turn right when you go out the door. You walk down the hall to the stairway, and then you take it down to the cloister. You go around to the main entrance, and on out into the courtyard. Across the courtyard is the main gate, and outside that, you go to the road. From there, you're on your own. The way to your new future lies open before you." He found it unnecessary to add that Blacktooth would be under excommunication, ineligible for employment in many places, deprived of all right to petition in ecclesiastical courts, cut off from the sacraments, shunned by the clergy and the pious among the laity, and readily victimized by anyone who realized that he was unable to sue in the courts.
"I meant to get out legally, of course."
"There are books on canon law in the library."
"Thank you, Father Prior." Blacktooth started to leave.
"Wait," said the prior, relenting. "Tell me, son—if, after you've finished Boedullus—this is hypothetical, understand?—if, then, you're given a choice of jobs, how would you feel about the other thing?"
The monk hesitated. "I would probably think about the other thing all over again."
"How close are you to being finished?"
"Ten chapters to go."
Olshuen sighed and said, "Sit down again." He rummaged through papers on his desk until he found a sealed envelope. Blacktooth could see his own name on it, written in Dom Jarad's hand. The prior slit it open, unfolded the enclosed note, read it slowly, and looked at Blacktooth. He put his fingertips together again and began tapping them by pairs as before.
"A choice of jobs?"
"Yes—he left you a choice. When you finish The Book of Origins, you can do the same author's Footprints of Earlier Civilizations. Unless you're sick and tired of the Venerable Boedullus."
"I'm sick and tired of the venerable one."
"Then you will be assigned to translate Yogen Duren's Perennial Ideas of Regional Sects."
"Into Nomadic?"
"Of course."
"Thank you, Father Prior."
Blacktooth went down the hall to the stairway, descended to the cloister, left it by the main entrance, crossed the courtyard, and walked out to the road through the main gate. There he stood for a while, gazing uncertainly at the arid landscape. Down the trail lay the village of Sanly Bowitts, and several miles beyond the village arose the flat-topped hill called the Mesa of Last Resort. There were mountains in the distance, with a few hills in the foreground. The land was lightly covered by cactus and yucca, with sparse grass and mesquite growing in the low places. There were distant antelope, and he could see Brother Shepherd leading his flock through the pass, his dog snarling at the heels of a straggler.
A wagon drawn by a swayback mule pulled to a stop, engulfing Blacktooth in a thin cloud of dust. "Going to town, Brother?" asked its grizzled driver from his perch atop a pile of feed sacks.

Blacktooth was tempted to go past the village and climb Last Resort. It was said to be haunted, a place monks sometimes went alone (with permission) for a kind of spiritual ordeal in the wilderness. But after a brief pause he shook his head. "Many thanks, good simpleton."
He walked back through the main gate and headed for the basement vaults. When Saint Leibowitz had founded the Order, tradition said that there had been nothing here except an ancient military bunker or temporary ammunition dump, which he and his helpers had managed to disguise so that one might pass a stone's throw away and never notice its existence. It was in this place that the earliest Memorabilia were preserved. According to Boedullus, no living quarters were constructed on the site until the middle of the twenty-first century. The monks had lived in scattered hermitages and came here only to deposit books and records until the fury of the Simplification had abated and the danger to the precious documents from skinheads and simplifiers had waned. Here, still underground, the ancient Memorabilia and the latter-day Commentaries awaited a destiny which had, perhaps, already come and was swiftly receding.




CHAPTER 3

Let the monks sleep clothed and girded with belts or cords—but not with their knives at their sides lest they cut themselves in their sleep. . . . The younger brethren shall not have beds next to one another, but among those of the older ones.
—Saint Benedict's Rule, Chapter 22











A
N OIL LAMP TOO DIM FOR READING HUNG IN each alcove where books were stored. A light held by hand was needed to locate a title on the shelves. Ordinarily one then carried the book up to the clerestory reading room, but Blacktooth scanned the abstract of Duren's De Perennibus Sententiis Sectarum Rurum, his next assigned project, by the light of a candle held close to the pages. He soon returned the book to the shelf and went to join Brother Torrildo, who was leaning against Kornhoer's old generator of electrical essence, a rusting hulk in an alcove where no light burned.
“Let's sit back here where nobody'll catch us," Torrildo muttered, and stepped into the deep shadows behind the machine. Brother Obohl’s gone out, but I'm not sure where."
Blacktooth hesitated. "I don't need to hide. I have reason for being here, even if I didn't ask permission."
"Shhh! You don't have to whisper, but keep it down. I'm only allowed to come in here to clean. Not that it matters much now."
"What's that door?" Blacktooth nodded toward the rear of the dark alcove.
"Just a closet full of junk. Parts of the machine, I think. Come on.”
The monk hesitated. The machine somehow gave him the creeps. It reminded him of the special chair in the chapel, which was really a holy relic.
With the faster travel and communication made possible by the conquests of Hannegan II, invention had become contagious in a world that was beginning to recover twelve centuries after the Magna Civitas perished in the Flame Deluge. Most inventions, of course, were reinventions, suggested by the few surviving records of that great civilization, but new devices were nonetheless cunning and needed. What was needed at Hannegan City was an efficient and humane method of capital punishment. Thus, the building of a generator of electrical essences at the Abbey of Saint Leibowitz in 3175 A.D. was followed in a few years by the building of a chair of electrical essences at Hannegan City in the Empire of Texark. The first offender to be executed by the new method was a Leibowitzian monk whose crime was carrying a cardinal abbot's offer of sanctuary to a son of the late Thon Taddeo Pfardentrott, an enemy of the Texark state, whose work at Leibowitz Abbey had, nevertheless, made possible many new inventions that benefited the Empire, including the chair of electrical essences.