"Greg Egan - Oceanic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

climb weighted off the side of the boat at Daniel's behest.
"That will take time," he said softly.
My mind reeled. He was absolutely serious.
I heard him stand and walk over to the ladder. He climbed a few rungs and opened the hatch.
Enough starlight came in to give shape to his arms and shoulders, but as he turned to me I still
couldn't make out his face. "Come on, Martin!" he whispered. "The longer you put it off, the
harder it gets." The hushed urgency of his voice was familiar: generous and conspiratorial,
nothing like an adult's impatience. He might almost have been daring me to join him in a midnight
raid on the pantry -- not because he really needed a collaborator, but because he honestly didn't
want me to miss out on the excitement, or the spoils.
I suppose I was more afraid of damnation than drowning, and I'd always trusted Daniel to warn
me of the dangers ahead. But this time I wasn't entirely convinced that he was right, so I must
have been driven by something more than fear, and blind trust.
Maybe it came down to the fact that he was offering to make me his equal in this. I was ten
years old, and I ached to become something more than I was; to reach, not my parentsтАЩ burdensome
adulthood, but the halfway point, full of freedom and secrets, that Daniel had reached. I wanted
to be as strong, as fast, as quick-witted and widely-read as he was. Becoming as certain of God
would not have been my first choice, but there wasn't much point hoping for divine intervention to
grant me anything else.


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I followed him up onto the deck.
He took cord, and a knife, and four spare weights of the kind we used on our nets from the
toolbox. He threaded the weights onto the cord, then I took off my shorts and sat naked on the
deck while he knotted a figure-eight around my ankles. I raised my feet experimentally; the
weights didn't seem all that heavy. But in the water, I knew, they'd be more than enough to
counteract my body's slight buoyancy.
"Martin? Hold out your hands."
Suddenly I was crying. With my arms free, at least I could swim against the tug of the
weights. But if my hands were tied, I'd be helpless.
Daniel crouched down and met my eyes. "Ssh. It's all right."
I hated myself. I could feel my face contorted into the mask of a blubbering infant.
"Are you afraid?"
I nodded.
Daniel smiled reassuringly. "You know why? You know who's doing that? Death doesn't want
Beatrice to have you. He wants you for himself. So he's here on this boat, putting fear into your
heart, because he knows he's almost lost you."
I saw something move in the shadows behind the toolbox, something slithering into the
darkness. If we went back down to the cabin now, would Death follow us? To wait for Daniel to fall
asleep? If I'd turned my back on Beatrice, who could I ask to send Death away?
I stared at the deck, tears of shame dripping from my cheeks. I held out my arms, wrists
together.
When my hands were tied -- not palm-to-palm as I'd expected, but in separate loops joined by
a short bridge -- Daniel unwound a long stretch of rope from the winch at the rear of the boat,
and coiled it on the deck. I didn't want to think about how long it was, but I knew I'd never
dived to that depth. He took the blunt hook at the end of the rope, slipped it over my arms, then
screwed it closed to form an unbroken ring. Then he checked again that the cord around my wrists