"Gardner Dozois - The Peacemaker" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

THE PEACEMAKER
byGardner Dozois



Royhad dreamed of the sea, as he often did. When he woke up that morning, the wind was sighing
through the trees out-side with a sound like the restless murmuring of surf, and for a moment he thought
that he was home, back in the tidy brick house by the beach, with everything that had happened undone,
and hope opened hotly inside him, like a wound.

тАЬMom?тАЭ he said. He sat up, straightening his legs, expecting his feet to touch the warm mass that was his
dog, Toby. Toby always slept curled at the foot of his bed, but already everything was breaking up and
changing, slipping away, and he blinked through sleep-gummed eyes at the thin blue light coming in
through the attic window, felt the hardness of the old Army cot under him, and realized that he wasnтАЩt
home, that there was no home anymore, that for him there could never be a home again.

He pushed the blankets aside and stood up. It was bitterly cold in the big attic room-winter was dying
hard, the most terrible winter he could remember-and the rough wood planking burned his feet like ice,
but he couldnтАЩt stay in bed anymore, not now.

None of the other kids were awake yet; he threaded his way through the other cots-accidently bumping
against one of them so that its occupant tossed and moaned and began to snore in a higher register-and
groped through cavernous shadows to the single high window. He was just tall enough to reach it, if he
stood on tiptoe. He forced the window open, the old wood of its frame groaning in protest, plaster dust
puffing, and shivered as the cold dawn wind poured inward, hitting him in the face, tugging with ghostly
fingers at his hair, sweeping past him to rush through the rest of the stuffy attic like a restless child set free
to play.

The wind smelled of pine resin and wet earth, not of salt flats and tides, and the bird-sound that rode in
on that wind was the burbling of wrens and the squawking of bluejays, not the raucous shrieking of
seagulls . . . but even so, as he braced his elbows against the window frame and strained up to look out,
his mind still full of the broken fragments of dreams, he half-expected to see the ocean below, stretched
out to the horizon, sending patient wavelets to lap against the side of the house. Instead he saw the
nearby trees holding silhouetted arms up against the graying sky, the barn and the farmyard, all still lost in
shadow, the surrounding fields, the weathered macadam line of the road, the forested hills rolling away
into distance. Silver mist lay in pockets of low ground, retreated in wraithlike streamers up along the
ridges.

Not yet. The sea had not chased him here-yet.

Somewhere out there to the east, still invisible, were the mountains, and just beyond those mountains
was the sea that he had dreamed of, lapping quietly at the dusty Pennsylvania hill towns, coal towns, that
were now, suddenly, seaports. There the Atlantic waited, held at bay, momentarily at least, by the
humpbacked wall of the Appalachians, still perhaps forty miles from here, although closer now by leagues
of swallowed land and drowned cities than it had been only three years before.

He had been down by the seawall that long-ago morning, playing some forgotten game, watching the
waves move in slow oily swells, like some heavy, dull metal in liquid form\ watching the tide come in . . .
and come in . . . and comeтАЩ in.... He had been excited at first, as the sea crept in, way above the
high-tide line, higher than he had ever seen it be-fore, and then, as the sea swallowed the beach entirely