"mayflies05" - читать интересную книгу автора (O'Donnell Jr Kevin)

He has usurped the 137-SE Common Room, and will permit no one to enter except during designated hours of worship. Should any ignoramus intrude, he gestures with the staff, and reaches for the controls of his console, as though imploring me to strike the peasant dead.
Finally, and explanatory of why pro-self has been hearing the name Figuera uttered like a curse, he insists that those who chance upon him genuflect! He's doing it now, to Rae Ioanni. He nods, beams, and lays his monkey paws on her head. Rae tolerates this, fortunately, as does the superstitious minority, but many others would cheerfully murder him, were murder thinkable these days.
I am going to have to do something about this . . . eventually.
But I'm in no hurry.

On the morning of July 16,2968, Rae Kinney Ioanni folded the orange beach blanket and left the 181 Hawaiian Reef Park. Surf spray glistened on her lovely, smooth-tanned limbs; the wind had swirled her hair into a mound of dark curls.
The kids dawdled in her wake. Thirteen and eight, respectively, Alphonse was slender and adolescently sullen, while plump Betty was good-natured. As the lock closed, Al dragged his sandaled feet. He'd wanted to stay longer; his blue plastic pail was only a quarter full of shells. He pouted so his mother would relent, and let him return alone.
She concealed the smile brought on by his furrowed, salt-streaked forehead. It wouldn't do for him to guess that his sulkiness amused her. Thirteen-year-old boys experience emotions too intensely; they are devastated when they suspect others of taking them lightly. So she bent over, ruffled his stiff black hair, and whispered, "Next time, Al, we'll go by ourselves and you can spend the whole day shelling."
A grunt was his concession to her love. "Why do we have to go see double-great gramps anyway?" he demanded accusingly.
"Because you and Betty need to." It wasn't the full reason, but she wasn't about to tell Al how much she treasured being near God's right hand. At times she even wondered whether she would have married Hugh if he hadn't been Father Figuera's great-grandson. He radiated holiness; he resonated in time with the Lord. When he approached, sanctity hit you like a blast of incensed air.
She sighed the length of the dropshaft. Father Figuera had always been too busy to see her--not that she resented it. He exhausted himself working for God; it was natural that afterhours he wanted only to relax. But today, she had resolved, he would talk with her. And the children.
They'd been fighting lately, squabbling over toys and favorite chairs and her love, quarreling in a way she'd never seen. To his credit, Al was rarely the aggressor, but as soon as Betty had hurled herself at him, pummeling his chest with her pudgy fists, he would retaliate in kind. More than once he'd tossed her into the walls; often the speakers had shouted at him to cease and desist. Just last week a servo had arrived to break it up . . .
Father Figuera's Common Room was at the corner of East and A; the ceiling bulb had been removed and shadows sprawled across its entrance. Gingerly, Ioanni knocked on the closed door.
"Go away," snapped the wall-speaker. "Services aren't till ten."
"It's Rae, Father--Hugh's wife. I'd like to see you."
"I'm busy."
"Let her in, Sangria," came another, less knife-edged, voice.
"But, Lord--"
"I said, let her in."
"Yes, Lord."
Through the metal came a shuffle of feet, a rusty snick, and then a whish as the door slid into the bulkhead. It exposed a frail old man, wrinkled like a prune, mouth pursed as though he'd just bitten into something bad. Patches and stains crawled over his tattered robes. She gave him a tentative smile; he jerked his head to invite her in.
"Let's go, children."
"They stay outside."
"Sangria!" The name fell like a thunderbolt.
"Them, too. Lord?"
"Yes."
He dropped his watery eyes to the floor and hissed, "All right, get them in here and state your business."
Ioanni shooed the children inside and stepped off the door's track so it could close. Shivering in the chill, damp air, she looked around Father Figuera's church. The plastic floor tile had been textured to resemble flagstone; mock-granite pillars marched along the walls, leaving gloomy alcoves where candle-bulbs flickered. At the far end, beyond the rows of empty pews, pulling her gaze with quiet insistence, loomed the altar. A shell of stainless steel that Figuera had burnished to a warm mirror polish, its front panel framed a display screen. On its top lowered a scale model of the Mayflower, ramscoop equipment blurred by darkness. Real candles flanked it with waxy stiffness. She shivered again.
"It's the children. Father," she began, "they've been behaving . . . " She trailed off when he doddered into the sanctuary, where he sat before the display screen and crossed the stick-like legs. A mole dotted his dirty left ankle. His fingers rested on a console set into the floor. "Father Figuera?"
"I'm listening. I'm listening. But I have my duties, too, and I won't stop them just for a pair of spoiled brats."
She cleared reflexive anger from her throat. "Could you explain to the children why they should keep from impinging on each other's rights?"
"Certainly," he bit off. "Because the Lord our God tells us to."
"Ya mean the Ice Bucket?" jeered Al. When he shook his head, sand rained out of his hair. "He's just a computer."
"He holds life in one hand and death in the other," intoned Figuera. "He is our Lord and our God and we must obey because we are His creations."
His hollow voice slid icy fingers down Ioanni's spine. Betty grabbed her mother's leg and squeezed.
"Ma," said Al, "we learned in school that we come from Earth, and that old Cold Cubes was built there to run the ship--how can we be his creations?"
"He will strike you down if you doubt," whispered Figuera.
"You gonna strike me down, CC?" demanded Al of the ceiling.
"Not for doubting," replied the speaker. Irritation clipped off its words, as though a swatted fly had just buzzed. "Hit your kid sister again and I might turn over a servo's wheel, though."
Al's eyes widened. "How did you know I hit my sister?"
"The Lord is omniscient," chanted Figuera, raising his hands and rolling his eyes to the ceiling. "The Lord sees all, knows all, the Lord is our Lord."
"Sangria."
"Lord?"
"Stop it."
"I sing your litany. Lord."
"I don't want a litany."
"Of course you do, Lord, of course you do. You want a litany, a ritual, a sacrifice . . . " His eyes picked their way across the dusty flagstones to Betty, who jumped as though live wires had grazed her. "This little girl would be a fine--no, wait!" His peripheral vision had plucked something off the screen; punching buttons on his console, he rasped gutturals into a microphone.
"What are you doing that for?" roared the speakers.
"You'll see how well I uphold your law. Lord; how truly I worship you." he crooned.
"But what has Prescott Dunn done?"