"Michael Swanwick - Moondogs" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swanwick Michael)

He went to a spa where, for a fee, they would drown you
as often as you liked. You wouldn't actually die, because they
put a shunt in your skull and kept the brain oxygenated, but
your body didn't know that and your survival reflexes would
kick in so that you'd choke and gag and fight for oxygen as
you experienced the desperation of approaching death. You
could thrash and struggle for hours. The water was ice-cold
and as dark as tea. If you panicked and did too much damage
to your body, there was a clinic nearby where you could rest
while solicitous friends in white coats cured it.
After they had emptied his lungs, removed the shunt, and
switched on a small fire, the counselors gave Nick a blanket
and withdrew, leaving him alone in the woods to contemplate
the experience in peace.
Shivering, Nick drew the blanket around him. He didn't feel
any better than he had before. He hadn't experienced any
kind of release at all. His mood was as bleak as ever. Life still
felt hopeless.
A while later, he put on the clothing they had left him,
folded up the blanket, switched off the fire, and stood. The
night was quiet and dark, lit only by a low moon. There was a
path over the hill that led to the lodge. He heard two of the
staff laughing quietly over something one had said, just
before their propane torches disappeared. But he didn't feel
like going back to the lodge and their hired warmth and
camaraderie. Not just yet.
Instead, he put the moon to his back and went the other
direction, deeper into the woods, and was quickly lost. He did
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 Moon Dogs
by Michael Swanwick


not care. The woods were tangled and random, a jumble of
tree trunks and deadfall, some lying broken on the ground,
others propped up by other trees. There was no pattern in
them, he reflected, nothing to fix the eye upon. It seemed a
perfect metaphor for everything.
It was then he saw the sycamores, pale in the moonlight.
The sycamores formed a ghostly ring around an empty
darkness. They looked like a Druidic temple. He thought at
first that they were former ornamentals—this had been a
populous suburb not a century ago—marking the perimeter of
a house long fallen to ruin. But then he saw how the ground
within sank downward and realized that the bowl-shaped
depression they marked was carved by the same small