"William Gibson - Hinterlands" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gibson William)

"Thanks, Toby. Get up here to the Heavenside elevator in five minutes or I'll send those Russian
nurses down to help you. The male ones."

I just swung there in my hammock and played the game called Toby Halpert's Place in the Universe.
No egotist, I put the sun in the center, the lumiary, the orb of day. Around it I swung tidy
planets, our cozy home system. But just here, at a fixed point about an eighth of the way out
toward the orbit of Mars, I hung a fat alloy cylinder, like a quarter-scale model of Tsiolkovsky
1, the Worker's Paradise back at L-5. Tsiolkovsky 1 is fixed at the liberation point between
Earth's gravity and the moon's, but we need a lightsail to hold us here, twenty tons of aluminum
spun into a hexagon, ten kilometers from side to side. That sail towed us out from Earth orbit,
and now it's our anchor. We use it to tack against the photon stream, hanging here beside the
thing the point, the singularity we call the Highway.

The French call it le metro, the subway, and the Russians call it the river, but subway won't
carry the distance, and river, for Americans, can't carry quite the same loneliness. Call it the



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Tovyevski Anomaly Coordinates if you don't mind bringing Olga into it. Olga Tovyevski, Our Lady of
Singularities, Patron Saint of the Highway.

Hiro didn't trust me to get up on my own. Just before the Russian orderlies came in, he turned the
lights on in my cubicle, by remote control, and let them strobe and stutter for a few seconds
before they fell as a steady glare across the pictures of Saint Olga that Charmian had taped up on
the bulkhead. Dozens of them, her face repeated in newsprint, in magazine glossy. Our Lady of the
Highway.

Lieutenant Colonel Olga Tovyevski, youngest woman of her rank in the Soviet space effort, was en
route to Mars, solo, in a modified Alyut 6. The modifications allowed her to carry the prototype
of a new airscrubber that was to be tested in the USSR's four-man Martian orbital lab. They could
just as easily have handled the Alyut by remote, from Tsiolkovsky, but Olga wanted to log mission
time. They made sure she kept busy, though; they stuck her with a series of routine hydrogen-band
radio-flare experiments, the tail end of a lowpriority Soviet-Australian scientific exchange. Olga
knew that her role in the experiments could have been handled by a standard household timer. But
she was a diligent officer; she'd press the buttons at precisely the correct intervals.

With her brown hair drawn back and caught in a net, she must have looked like some idealized
Pravda cameo of the Worker in Space, easily the most photogenic cosmonaut of either gender. She
checked the Alyut's chronometer again and poised her hand above the buttons that would trigger the
first of her flares. Colonel Tovyevski had no way of knowing that she was nearing the point in
space that would eventually be known as the Highway.

As she punched the six-button triggering sequence, the Alyut crossed those final kilometers and
emitted the flare, a sustained burst of radio energy at 1420 megahertz, broadcast frequency of the
hydrogen atom. Tsiolkovsky's radio telescope was tracking, relaying the signal to geosynchronous
comsats that bounced it down to stations in the southern Urals and New South Wales. For 3.8
seconds the Alyut's radio-image was obscured by the afterimage of the flare.