"Paul McAuley - Interstitial" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

evasion routines. After a while, Basic said that she was only doing it because it helped her think. Even if
they got all the cameras, the soldiers would just send down more.

Echo smiled, tasting blood as his dry lips cracked. "Maybe there's a better way. You got any
construction polymer kit left?"

His voice was a rusty croak; he hadn't spoken since Syntax had showed him where to start work --
more than thirty hours ago. He wondered if the war with the Copernicus Alliance had begun. Somehow,
it didn't seem to matter.

The girl shrugged. "Sure, I guess."

Basic would be pretty, Echo thought, if she was given a couple of baths and about a month's sleep and
another month on a proper diet, if her stringy hair was washed and cut and the sores on her face treated.
Techs weren't allowed to have children -- that was the prerogative of successful soldiers -- but there
were plenty of unofficial marriages amongst them. For the first time, he was aware that he stank like a
pharm goat, that his underalls clung greasily to his greasy skin.

He said, "There's this neat trick I know. Want to help?"

He showed Basic how to mix up the ingredients of construction polymer in proportions that were
radically different from the instructions. Sprayed on to the plastic liner of the crypt, the stuff stayed sticky,
a trap for the roving cameras. Then he and Basic went on a serious bug hunt, and the other techs joined
in. When the soldiers realized what was happening, more cameras were sent crawling down the walls,
but these were trapped in the wide sticky band of polymer. Then the soldiers tried dropping cameras, but
the five techs methodically stomped or zapped the hapless critters before they could find shelter. After
that, a few cameras were lowered on diamond thread, but any that were dropped too low could be
zapped, and the rest were too high up to be able to see much.

After the great bug hunt, the other techs still maintained a frosty politeness towards Echo, but they
relaxed their rule about discussing their work. Sometimes they even talked to each other instead of using
their covert librarian finger language, and Echo (who knew the basics of finger language, but couldn't
follow their practiced, high-speed flurries) began to pick up clues about the Artifact.

It was a chunk of basaltic granite shaped by some high temperature process that had fused its exterior to
a glassy sheen as hard as diamond. A mining team from Little Tokyo had found it by accident, while
digging for the remnants of an iron meteorite. After Little Tokyo had been overrun, the Copernicus
Alliance had either failed to find the Artifact, or hadn't realized what it was. Since most of the Alliance's
population were soldiers, the latter was most likely.

Hundreds of thousands of glyph strings had been cut into the Artifact's surface. The shortest ones had
been deciphered -- basic stuff about Earth and the Solar System, biochemistry, fundamental
mathematical principles. There were pictures, too, decoding into one hundred ninety-two by one hundred
ninety-two pixel grids. Echo persuaded Slash, a dour young man with a badly scarred bald head, to
show him a map extracted from one patch of code, although it didn't look like any map of Earth Echo
had ever seen.

"That's how it was back then," Slash said. "All the continents were lined up in this single band along the
equator. It confirms the dating we got from thermoluminescence and radon decay."