"James Tiptree Jr - The Boy Who Waterskied to Forever" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tiptree James Jr)

The Boy Who
Waterskied To
Forever
by JAMES TIPTREE, Jr.

Her depths are not all hated,
Joyous her minions move;
And human still may trade a soul
For her unhuman love.
And the one she has accepted
May finish out his race
Through portals unsuspected
To another time and place.



This happened the year the coast road finally came through.
For eight years, a trail cut by machete and strewn with piano-sized
rocks had run behind the coco ranch and ended at the boca, the inlet from
lagoon to sea. Now the Yucatecan government had bridged the boca and
pushed a one-lane cut all the way south to the fishing colony at Pajaros
lighthouse. It was an evil deed.
Every evening now the big refrigerator trucks ground past, going south;
in the small hours before dawn they came groaning back, loaded to the
axles with illegal seafood тАУ rare and delicious fish and stone crabs, netted
on the last spawning grounds of the bay for the greedy stomachs of the
tourists a hundred miles north at the new resort of Canc├║n. Small comfort
that this traffic would not last long, for its end would mean that those
species had been fished to extinction. Nightfall for another wild beauty.
But there was a tiny, selfish compensation: the new road did make it
possible for an elderly bicycling gringo to reach a hitherto-inaccessible
small bay. It was a magical, untouched diving paradise that I spotted from
the air. Ferocious reefs barred it from the sea, and once-impenetrable
mangrove swamps guarded it from the land. Twice this year I had cycled
to the vicinity, laboriously hidden my wheel to avoid leaving tracks, and
fought my way to shore, guided by the sound of the sea. But each time I
had come too late to take more than a taste of Eden before I had to start
my exhausting trek back to the rancho.
This day I started early enough. The sun stood just past noon when I
stood on the rocky verge of the enchanting little cove. The water was four
meters of crystal, revealing a rich undersea world. Three pink spoonbills
stared incuriously from the far side as I shucked off shirt and pants, and a
bananaquit investigated my shoes. There was no trace of other visitors or
alien paths, and the snorkel gear I had hidden there last trip was all intact.
I checked the papers and dinero already in their waterproof pouch on my
belt and slipped off the rocks into the warm Caribbean with great delight:
here was a place where snorkeling was the perfect way to go, where I could
forget that age had put scuba dives forever beyond my strength.
Those first hours fled like moments; the reality was even finer than the
promise. I visited first my few familiar spots: the ledge where two