Collected Short Fiction of Greg Egan by Greg Egan

Author:Greg Egan [Egan, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-04-09T16:00:00+00:00

Oceanic

From the online version at the author's website — http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/OCEANIC/Complete/Oceanic.html — First published in Asimov's Science Fiction, August 1998.

* * * * *

1

The swell was gently lifting and lowering the boat. My breathing grew slower, falling into step with the creaking of the hull, until I could no longer tell the difference between the faint rhythmic motion of the cabin and the sensation of filling and emptying my lungs. It was like floating in darkness: every inhalation buoyed me up, slightly; every exhalation made me sink back down again.

In the bunk above me, my brother Daniel said distinctly, “Do you believe in God?”

My head was cleared of sleep in an instant, but I didn’t reply straight away. I’d never closed my eyes, but the darkness of the unlit cabin seemed to shift in front of me, grains of phantom light moving like a cloud of disturbed insects.

“Martin?”

“I’m awake.”

“Do you believe in God?”

“Of course.” Everyone I knew believed in God. Everyone talked about Her, everyone prayed to Her. Daniel most of all. Since he’d joined the Deep Church the previous summer, he prayed every morning for a kilotau before dawn. I’d often wake to find myself aware of him kneeling by the far wall of the cabin, muttering and pounding his chest, before I drifted gratefully back to sleep.

Our family had always been Transitional, but Daniel was fifteen, old enough to choose for himself. My mother accepted this with diplomatic silence, but my father seemed positively proud of Daniel’s independence and strength of conviction. My own feelings were mixed. I’d grown used to swimming in my older brother’s wake, but I’d never resented it, because he’d always let me in on the view ahead: reading me passages from the books he read himself, teaching me words and phrases from the languages he studied, sketching some of the mathematics I was yet to encounter first-hand. We used to lie awake half the night, talking about the cores of stars or the hierarchy of transfinite numbers. But Daniel had told me nothing about the reasons for his conversion, and his ever-increasing piety. I didn’t know whether to feel hurt by this exclusion, or simply grateful; I could see that being Transitional was like a pale imitation of being Deep Church, but I wasn’t sure that this was such a bad thing if the wages of mediocrity included sleeping until sunrise.

Daniel said, “Why?”

I stared up at the underside of his bunk, unsure whether I was really seeing it or just imagining its solidity against the cabin’s ordinary darkness. “Someone must have guided the Angels here from Earth. If Earth’s too far away to see from Covenant … how could anyone find Covenant from Earth, without God’s help?”

I heard Daniel shift slightly. “Maybe the Angels had better telescopes than us. Or maybe they spread out from Earth in all directions, launching thousands of expeditions without even knowing what they’d find.”

I laughed. “But they had to come here, to be made flesh again!” Even a less-than-devout ten-year-old knew that much.

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