"Alexei Panshin - New Celebrations" - читать интересную книгу автора (Panshin Alexei)

since. He was Son of the Sun, and born of a virgin on the 25th of December. But then, so was
everybody else. He died for the sins of all mankind and was reborn at the spring equinox. That’s
standard, too, as are the rest of the clutch: baptism, communion, and the promise of eternal life. Perhaps
the one best point of the religion is this: the violet is sacred to Mithra, and consequently the cultivation of
flowerbeds is encouraged.

Mithraism spent more than fifteen hundred years underground or as a minor element in other religions
before its modern revival in the schisms of schisms and the loss of belief that ruined Christianity for a
thousand years.

Mithraism is a good religion, if not a great religion. It certainly deserved better than Augustus Srb saw fit
to give it in the face of Torve’s earnestly presented case for some primitive brand of mumbo jumbo:

“See you, then, thewholeness so far?”

“Wholeness? Oh, yes, yes. I am attending you with interest. Continue, if you will.”

“Wholeness is everything that exists. Outside is nothingness. But nothingness is ripe, ready to
nourishmentalize fruit, and existence is reborn. See you?” Torve asked earnestly.

“Oh, yes.” Srb nodded.

“Wholeness is born and grows, moving through nothingness and feeding on nothingness.”
“Yes.”

“Eventualistically, nothingness can no longer feed wholeness. Movement slows, then stops. Is like great
heaviness in stomach after large meal. When movement stops, all collapses. In eye blink, wholeness
shrinks to size of seed and all is stasis. Only in great by-and-by is nothingness ready to nourishmentalize
again. Has happened seventeen times since wholeness invented itself. Do you see?”

“No. I must confess that I don’t. Perhaps we had better work onnothingness for a while.”

“Oh, nothingness is simple. Is nothing.”

Why did Srb continue to sit quietly listening to this? I suppose because he was given an equal chance to
explicate Mithraism—but then he didn’t take proper advantage of that. Perhaps because it was a way of
passing the time. And then, how would it have looked for him to step out on a round of shoptalk?
Appearances.

The other ship bound for Star Well was not publicly scheduled to stop there, and only a few people
knew of its imminent arrival. It was a blackness against the blackness. It announced its presence in no
way. It moved swiftly and certainly, and nobody aboard was fuzzed on Fibrin.
***

When Villiers rose that morning, he dressed himself and cursed happily at the difficulties of inducing a
drapeau to hang correctly behind him without other hands to help. In addition to being decorative, and
impressing people, servants had a certain usefulness in delicate and chancy matters like these. Villiers
owned an odd and secret gaiety and he enjoyed this exercise of his capacity for wishing bad cess that he
might the better spend the rest of the day being his normal good-humored, but reserved, self.
He put unfortunate wrinkles in three drapeaus and discarded them all. On the fourth try he finally