Invasion полностью

We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.

– H. L. Mencken

“And you may rise.”

Joshua Bourjaily rose to his feet, his joints creaking, as the alien priest blessed them and shoed them out of the converted warehouse. The alien religion, Joshua had discovered, required plenty of forward kneeling, a pose that the aliens could hold almost indefinitely, but humans couldn’t hold for long. It was worse for the women; when they knelt, their hands held behind their heads, they pushed their breasts forward into prominence. After a pair of incidents, the aliens had apparently broken one of their own taboos and segregated the sexes for prayer meetings, even though they seemed to worship together. It was hard to tell; they’d seen very few alien females on the streets and they’d never seen the aliens in solo prayer.

He glanced towards the alien priest, thinking dark thoughts that he was careful to keep to himself. A couple of people – an old woman and a young black man – had attempted to challenge the aliens, praying out loud in their own style, only to be mercilessly gunned down. The aliens had regarded it with the same level as horror as most Americans would regard taking a dump on the American flag…and similar incidents had been nipped in the bud. The aliens, it seemed, weren't taking too many chances with their prayers and their flock.

The priest, wearing a simple brown robe, nodded once to him as he left the warehouse. The alien religion was still a thing of mystery, despite the lessons; they were literally teaching him the prayers without bothering to explain the meaning. The only choice he’d had had been a question about which element – fire, water, air or earth – he favoured, a question he’d answered with ‘earth,’ trying to be clever. The aliens hadn’t even noticed; they’d merely ordered him and his fellow ‘earthers’ to report to a certain warehouse, every second day, or see their food supply cut off. Now that the aliens were feeding more of the population, somehow, it was a powerful incentive. A person without a valid feeding card, marked by one of the priest’s servants, simply wouldn’t be fed.

He looked at the card as he waited in line for the mark. It wasn't alien technology, he was sure; they wouldn’t have bothered to bring that level of tech from their homeworld. It was human tech, a simple ID card with a picture, a brief level of detail…and a microchip mounted in the plastic that did whatever the aliens told it to do. He was pretty sure that what was really happening was that the aliens were building up a picture of who went where, and why, in their search for other insurgents. Austin might have been fairly quiet over the last couple of weeks, but there had been a handful of IEDs, several of which had killed alien collaborators. The insurgents were still out there, somewhere, but doing what? Joshua hoped that they were plotting new attacks on the aliens, but ever since the attack on Texas had failed, the population was starting to realise, in the cities at least, that insurgency was only going to get a few thousand more people killed.

It was a different story, he’d been told, out in the countryside; the Internet had been buzzing with stories of mounted Texans fighting the aliens. Joshua had dismissed at least half of that story as exaggeration, but Texas had literally tens of thousands of people who could handle guns and horses…and there might be a nugget of truth in there somewhere. The cities, however, were falling further and further under the alien control…and even those who hated the aliens had to eat, somehow.

“May God be with you,” the alien under-priest said, as he passed Joshua’s card through a scanner. To be fair to the aliens, they didn’t dally about like a drug-supplier lording it over a dependent flock, they just handed over the card with a benediction. “Eat well and give thanks.”