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

Laura Andrews has severe congenital brain damage; she can walk and eat, clumsily, but she can't communicate in any
fashion, and the experts say that she understands the world little better than a six-month-old child. Since the age of
five, she's been an in-patient at the local Hilgemann Institute.

Four weeks ago, when an orderly unlocked her room to serve breakfast, she was gone. After a search of the building
and grounds, the police were called in. They repeated and extended the search, and conducted a doorknock of the
surrounding area, to no avail. Laura's room bore no signs of forced entry, and recordings from security cameras proved
unenlightening. The police interviewed the staff at length, but nobody broke down and owned up to spiriting the
woman away.

Four weeks later, nothing. No sightings. No corpse. No ransom demands. The police have not officially abandoned the
case - merely deprioritized it, pending further developments.

Further developments are not anticipated.

My task is to find Laura Andrews and return her safely to the Hilgemann - or locate her remains, if she's dead -and to
gather sufficient evidence to ensure that those responsible for her abduction can be prosecuted.

My anonymous client presumes that Laura was kidnapped, but declines to suggest a motive. Right now, my
judgement is suspended. I'm in no state to hold an opinion on the matter; I have a head full of received knowledge,
coloured by my client's perspective, possibly even tainted with lies.

I open my eyes, then drag myself out of bed and over to the terminal in the corner of the room; I make it a policy never
to deal with financial matters in my head. A few

4

keystrokes confirm that my account has been provisionally credited with a satisfactory down payment; accepting the
deposit will signal to the client that I've taken the case. I pause for a moment to think back over the details of the
assignment, trying to reassure myself that I really do understand it - there's always a hint of dream-logic to these calls,
a faint but implacable suspicion that by morning none of what I've learnt will even make sense -then I authorize the
transaction.

It's a hot night. I step out on to the balcony and look down towards the river. Even at three in the morning, the water is
crowded with pleasure craft of every size, from luminescent sailboards, softly glowing orange or lime green, to
twelve-metre yachts, crisscrossed with spotlight beams brighter than daylight. The three main bridges are thick with
cyclists and pedestrians. To the east, giant holograms of cards, dice and champagne glasses strobe and pirouette
above the casino. Doesn't anyone sleep any more?

I glance up at the empty black sky, and find myself, inexplicably, entranced. There's no moon tonight, no clouds, no
planets, and the featureless darkness refuses to sustain any comforting illusion of scale; I might be staring at infinity,
or the backs of my own eyelids. A wave of nausea passes through me, a contradictory mixture of claustrophobia and a
dizzying sense of The Bubble's inhuman dimensions. I shudder-a single, violent twitch-then the feeling is gone.

A mod-generated hallucination of my dead wife Karen, standing on the balcony beside me, slips an arm around my
waist and says, 'Nick? What is it?' Her touch is cool, and she spreads her fingers wide across my abdomen, like
antennae. I'm on the verge of asking her, by way of explanation, if she ever misses the stars, when I realize how
ludicrously sentimental that would sound, and I stop myself in time.