"Vernor Vinge - Rainbows End" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vinge Vernor)

"Of course."

Keiko and G├╝nberk stayed a few minutes more, but a real caf├й table on C. de Sardenya in the middle of
the festival was not the proper place for virtual tourists. The waiter kept circling back, inquiring if Alfred
needed anything more. They were paying table rent for three, but there were crowds of real people
waiting for the next available seating.

So his Japanese and European colleagues took their leave. G├╝nberk had many loose ends to deal with.
The inquiries at CDD must be gracefully shut down. Misinformation must be layered carefully about,
concealing things both from the enemy and from security hobbyists. Meantime, in Tokyo, Keiko might be
up the rest of the night, pondering Rabbit traps.

Vaz stayed behind, finishing his drink. It was amazing how fast his table space shrank, accommodating a
family of North African tourists. Alfred was used to virtual artifacts changing in a blink of the eye, but a
clever restaurateur could do almost as well with physical reality when there was money involved.

In all Europe, Barcelona was the city Alfred loved the most. The Rabbit was right about this city. But
was there time to be a real tourist? Yes. Call it his annual vacation. Alfred stood and bowed to the table,
leaving payment and tip. Out on the street, the crowds were getting rather extreme, the stilt people
dancing wildly about among the tourists. He couldn't see the entrance of the Sagrada Familia directly, but
tourism info showed the next certain tour slot was ninety minutes away.

Where to spend his time? Ah! Atop Montju├пc. He turned down an alley. Where he emerged on the far
side, the crowds were thin... and a tourist auto was just arriving for him. Alfred sat back in the single
passenger cockpit and let his mind roam. The Montju├пc fortress was not the most impressive in Europe,
and yet he had not seen it in some time. Like its brethren, it marked the bygone time when revolutions in
destruction technology took decades to unfold, and mass murder could not be committed with the press
of a button.

The auto navigated its way out from the octagonal city blocks of the Barcelona basin and ran quickly up
a hillside, grabbing the latch of a funicular that dragged them swiftly up the side of Montju├пc. No tedious
switchback roadway for this piece of automation. Behind him, the city stretched for miles. And then
ahead, as they came over the crest of the hill, there was the Mediterranean, all blue and hazy and
peaceful.

Alfred got out, and the tiny auto whipped around the traffic circle, heading for the cable-car installation
that would take its next customer in an overflight across the harbor.

He was at just the spot he had ordered on the tourist menu, right where twentieth-century guns faced out
from the battlements. Even though these cannon had never been used, they were very much the real thing.
For a fee, he could touch the guns and climb around inside the place. After sundown there would be a
staged battle.

Vaz strolled to the stone barrier and looked down. If he blocked out all the tourism fantasy, he could see
the freight harbor almost two hundred meters below and a kilometer away. The place was an immensity
of freight containers rambling this way and that, chaos. If he invoked his government powers, he could
see the flow of cargo, even see the security certificates that proclaimed тАФ in ways that were validated by
a combination of physical and cryptographic security тАФ that none of the ten-meter boxes contained a
nuke or a plague or a garden-variety radiation bomb. The system was very good, the same as you would
find for heavy freight anywhere in the civilized world. It had been the result of decades of fear, of