"Walter Jon Williams - Surfacing (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Walter John)

She looked from Anthony to his boat and back. "That's all right," she said. "I shouldn't have talked to you last night. Not when you were ill."


Anger flickered in his mind. She'd heard him being sick, then.


"Too much to drink," he said. He jumped back into the boat and got his gear.


"Have you eaten?" she asked. "Somebody told me about a place called the Villa Mary."


He threw his bag over one shoulder. Dinner would be his penance. "I'll show you," he said.


"Mary was a woman who died," Anthony said. "One of the original Knight's Move people. She chose to die, refused the treatments. She didn't believe in living forever." He looked up at the arched ceiling, the moldings on walls and ceiling, the initials ML worked into the decoration. "Brian McGivern built this place in her memory," Anthony said. "He's built a lot of places like this, on different worlds."


Philana was looking at her plate. She nudged a ichthyoid exomembrane with her fork. "I know," she said. "I've been in a few of them."


Anthony reached for his glass, took a drink, then stopped himself from taking a second swallow. He realized that he'd drunk most of a bottle of wine. He didn't want a repetition of last night. }


With an effort he put the glass down.


"She's someone I think about, sometimes," Philana said. "About the ! choice she made."


"Yes?" Anthony shook his head. "Not me. I don't want to spend a hundred years dying. If I ever decide to die, I'll do it quick."


"That's what people say. But they never do it. They just get older and older. Stranger and stranger." She raised her hands, made a gesture that took in the room, the decorations, the entire white building on its cliff overlooking ' the sea. "Get old enough, you start doing things like building Villa Marys all over the galaxy. McGivern's an oldest-generation immortal, you know. Maybe the wealthiest human anywhere, and he spends his time immortaliz- I ing someone who didn't want immortality of any/ kind." \


Anthony laughed. "Sounds like you're thinking of becoming a Diehard."


She looked at him steadily. "Yes."


SURFACING 15


Anthony's laughter froze abruptly. A cool shock passed through hrm. He had never spoken to a Diehard before: the only ones he'd met were people who mumbled at him on streetcorners and passed out incoherent religious tracts.


Philana looked at her plate. "I'm sorry," she said.