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

I shake my head. 'Nothing.'

The grounds of the Hilgemann Institute are as lushly

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green as genetic engineering - and brute-force reticulation - can make them, in the middle of a summer when they ought
to be dead and brown. The lawn glistens in the midmorning heat as if fresh with dew, no doubt constantly irrigated
from just beneath the surface, and I trudge down the main access road in the shade of what looks like a kind of maple.
An expensive image to maintain; the rates for frivolous water use, already punitive, are tipped to double in the next few
months. The third Kimberley pipeline, bringing water from dams twenty-five hundred kilometres to the north, is four
hundred per cent over budget so far, and plans for a desalination plant have been shelved, yet again - apparently, a
glut on the ocean minerals market has undermined the project's viability.

The road ends in a circular driveway, enclosing a lavish flower bed in spectacular polychromatic bloom. The trademark
IS gene-tailored hummingbirds hover and dart above the flowers; I pause for a moment to watch them, hoping - in vain
- to witness just one contravene its programming by straying from the circle.

The building itself is all mock-timber; the layout suggests a motel. There are Hilgemann Institutes around the world,
through no fault of anyone called Hilgemann; it's widely known that International Services paid their marketing
consultants a small fortune to come up with the 'optimal' name for their psychiatric hospital division. (Whether public
knowledge of the name's origin spoils the optimization, or is in fact the strongest basis for it, I'm not sure.) IS also runs
medical hospitals, child-care centres, schools, universities, prisons and, recently, several monasteries and convents.
They all look like motels to me.

I head for the reception desk, but there's no need.

'Mr Stavrianos?'

Dr Cheng - the Deputy Medical Director, whom I spoke with briefly on the phone - is already waiting in the lobby, an
unusual courtesy, which, politely, deprives me of any chance to poke my unsupervised head around corners. No white
coats here; her dress bears an intricate,

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Escher-like design of interlocking flowers and birds. She guides me through a staff only door and a tight maze of corridors
to her office. We sit in padded armchairs, away from her spartan desk.

"Thank you for seeing me at such short notice.'

'Not at all. We're more than happy to cooperate; we're as anxious to find Laura as anyone. But I must say I have no
idea what her sister is hoping to achieve by suing us. It's not going to help Laura, is it?'

I make a sympathetic but non-committal noise. Perhaps the sister, or her law firm, is my client - but if so, why all the
pointless secrecy? Even if I hadn't barged in here and announced myself to the opposition - and I received no
instructions not to - the Hilgemann's lawyers would have taken it for granted that she'd hire an investigator, sooner or
later. They would have hired their own, long ago.

'Tell me what you think happened to Laura.'