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

and began to lap patiently against the base of the seawall, he had become uneasy, and then, as the sea
continued to rise up to-ward the top of the seawall itself, he had begun to be afraid.... The sea had just
kept coming in, rising slowly and inexorably, swallowing the land at a slow walking pace, never stopping,
always coming in, always rising higher. . . . By the time the sea had swallowed the top of the seawall and
begun to creep up the short grassy slope toward his house, sending glassy fingers probing almost to his
feet, he had started to scream, and as the first thin sheet of water rippled up to soak his sneakers, he had
whirled and run frantically up the slope, screaming hysterically for his parents, and the sea had followed
patiently at his heels.

A тАЬmarine transgression,тАЭ the scientists called it. Ordinary people called it, inevitably, the Flood.
Whatever you called it, it had washed away the old world forever. Scientists had been talking about the
possibility of such a thing for years-some of them even pointing out that it was already as warm as it had
been at the peak of the last interglacial, and getting warmer-but few had suspected just how fast the
Antarctic ice could melt. Many times during those chaotic weeks, one scientific King Canute or another
had predicted that the worst was over, that the tide would rise this high and no higher . . . but each time
the sea had come inexorably on, pushing miles and miles further inland with each successive high-tide,
rising almost 300 feet in the course of one disastrous summer, drowning lowlands around the globe until
there were no lowlands any-more. In the United States alone, the sea had swallowed most of the East
Coast east of the Appalachians, the West Coast west of the Sierras and the Cascades, much of Alaska
and Hawaii, Florida, the Gulf Coast, East Texas, taken a big wide scoop out of the lowlands of the
Mississippi Valley, thin fingers of water penetrating north to Iowa and Illinois, and caused the St.
Lawrence and the Great Lakes to overflow and drown their shorelines. The Green Mountains, the White
Mountains, the Adirondacks, the Poconos and the Catskills, the Ozarks, the Pacific Coast Ranges-all
had been trans-formed to archipelagos, surrounded by the invading sea.

The funny thing was . . . that as the sea pursued them relentlessly inland, pushing them from one
temporary refuge to another, he had been unable to shake the feeling that he had caused the Hood: that
he had done something that day while playing atop the seawall, inadvertently stumbled on some magic
ritual, some chance combination of gesture and word that had untied the bonds of the sea and sent it
sliding up over the land . . . that it was chasing him, personally.

A dog was barking out there now, somewhere out across the fields toward town, but it was not his dog.
His dog was dead, long since dead, and its whitening skull was rollingalong the ocean floor with the tides
that washed over what had once been Brigantine, New Jersey, three hundred feet down.

Suddenly he was covered with gooseflesh, and he shivered, rubbing his hands over his bare arms. He
returned to his cot and dressed hurriedly-no point in trying to go back to bed, Sara would be up to kick
them all out of the sack in a minute or two anyway. The day had begun; he would think no further ahead
than that. He had learned in the refugee camps to take life one second at a time.

As he moved around the room, he thought that he could feel hostile eyes watching him from some of the
other bunks. It was much colder in here now that he had opened the window, and he had inevitably
made a certain amount of noise getting dressed, but although they all valued every second of sleep they
could scrounge, none of the other kids would dare to complain. The thought was bittersweet, bringing
both plea-sure and pain, and he smiled at it, a thin, brittle smile that was almost a grimace. No, they
would watch sullenly from their bunks, and pretend to be asleep, and curse him under their breath, but
they would say nothing to anyone about it. Certainly they would say nothing to him.

He went down through the still-silent house like a ghost, and out across the farmyard, through fugitive
streamers of mist that wrapped clammy white arms around him and beaded his face with dew. His uncle