"Justina Robson - Quantum Gravity 01 - Keeping it Real" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robson Justina)

and letters spun themselves around. It wasn't possible for Lila to read what he saw, but she'd been
provided with Zal's brief report on it. The letter read:

Return by the lost way or not at all, Return by the longest day or not at all:
Else be lost and ever wander, Life and limb and spirit squander.

It was a general kind of magical threat that any of the non-Otopian realms might have employed, but
unlike most spellcast items it bore no telltales of its origin that Incon's aetherial forensics had been able to
decipher. Since magic was created through the spirit of the creator, it was technically not possible to
have traceless magic. Magic bore the signatures of the maker all through it, like a hallmark. But the letter
had proven completely flavourless.
The lost way part referred to the elf-only gateway out of Otopia to Alfheim. The longest day was easy:
that was Midsummer Solstice, two days away. The rest of it seemed to indicate less favourable
conditions. Other Incon agents had been dispatched into Alfheim to see if they could find out whether it
had come from someone there. Lila, glad to be in Otopia, didn't know what she was looking for now, so
she looked for anything.
The studio was set up in an underground room, insulated for sound. Above that, on the ground level, the
administrative offices filled the space. Most of the areas were populated, so Lila used her day clearance
pass on the Fire Escape door and went up another flight. Through the concrete and steel of the walls it
was hard to obtain any accurate scans but she did her best, searching another empty office, a storage
cup-board, a room full of old equipment. It was here that she detected a trace of illegitimate radio
transmission-Inside, junk was stacked to the roof. Lila lifted boxes and crates and old packaging. It was
covered in dust and soon she was quite filthy but she persisted. The transmitter was behind a filing
cabinet which was full to the top with broken mikes, old amplifier stacks and lumps of electronics that
must have been made before Lila was bom. She couldn't be bothered to unpack it for its trip to the
corridor so, after checking that nobody was near, she engaged her internal hydraulics and lifted the entire
thing, sliding it along the carpet on one edge until it snagged on the lintel. Breathing out, sucking her
stomach in, Lila sneaked past it into the corner of the room, felt a tug against her leg and heard a ripping
sound.
'Ah, crap,' she said and looked down at the burst stitches on her new pants. It was just a whole day of
too-late, she thought.
With more force than necessary she bent down and yanked up the carpet. In a billow of dust and dead
flies she sneezed and reached down, carefully letting the little finger of her right hand rest against the tiny
object which looked like a pebble. Intricate receptors housed where a knucklebone would have been
identified it as a Faery device, part silicon and part metal. It was using bounce-retort techniques to get a
reasonably clear sound pickup from the studio, and was broadcasting on a coded frequency to
somewhere quite local. It must have been here a long time for its battery power was almost exhausted.
Lila listened through the bug for a moment or two.
She could hear Zal and the band. The raw energy of the music reached up and caught her. Zal's voice
was a shamanic, self-destructive growl - the pleasure is to play, makes no difference what you say ...
It made a strange, dark exultation rise in her chest, the sensation so clear and quick that she jerked in
surprise. Her Al-self picked up frequencies that her human ears couldn't hear. She wondered for a split
second if there were lots of dogs and cats in the intended audience, but her AI
corrected her. Zal's anomalous sounds were in the sub-audible band, not the high pitches of specialized
whistles.
Lila stored the information to send back to the lab later, in case it was an important slice of data, and
took her finger away from the bug, deciding to let it lie there for the time being. It took a few minutes to
replace all the crap where it had been. When she'd done she dusted herself down and tried washing in
the Ladies. The soap and water did a reasonably good job but there was nothing to be done about the
tiny tear she'd made in the outside seam of her trousers where it had caught against the corner of the filing