"John Varley - Gaea 1 - Titan" - читать интересную книгу автора (Varley John)

screens hissed white noise through confetti clouds of snow. Ugene Springfield and the Polo sisters
floated around the central holo tank. Their faces were bathed in the red glow.
Gaby handed the plates to the computer, punched up an image-intensifying program, and indicated
the screen Cirocco should watch. The pictures were sharpened, combined, then rapidly alternated.
Two miniscule dots blinked, not far from each other.
"There it is," Gaby said proudly. "Small proper motion, but the plates are only twenty-three hours
apart."
Gene called to them. "Orbital elements are coming in," he said. Gaby and Cirocco joined him.
Cirocco glanced down and saw his arm go possessively around Gaby's waist, looked quickly away,
noting that the Polo sisters had seen it and were just as careful not to notice. They had all
learned to stay out of each other's affairs.
Saturn sat in the middle of the tank, fat and brassy. Eight blue circles were drawn around it,
each larger than the last, each in the equatorial plane of the rings. There was a sphere on each
circle, like a single pearl on a string, and beside the pearls were names and numbers: Mnemosyne,


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Janus, Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea, Titan, and Hyperion. Far beyond those orbits was a
tenth one, visibly tilted. That was Iapetus. Phoebe, the most distant, could not be shown on the
scale they were using.
Now another circle was drawn in. It was an eccentric ellipse, almost tangent to the orbits of Rhea
and Hyperion, cutting right across the circle that represented Titan. Cirocco studied it, then
straightened. Looking up, she saw deep lines etched on Gaby's forehead as her fingers flew over
the keyboard. With each pro- gram she called up, the numbers on her screen changed.
"It had a very close call with Rhea about three million years ago," she noted. "It's safely above
Titan's orbit, though perturbations must be a factor. It's far from stabilized."
"Meaning what?" Cirocco asked.
"Captured asteroid?" Gaby suggested, one eyebrow raised doubtfully.
"The proximity to the equatorial plane would make that un- likely," one of the Polo sisters said.
April or August? Cirocco wondered. After eighteen months together she still couldn't tell them
apart.
"I was afraid you'd see that." Gaby chewed a knuckle. "Yet if it was formed with the others, it
ought to be less eccentric."
The Polo shrugged. '"There are ways to explain it. A catastrophic event in the recent past. It
would be easy to move it."
Cirocco frowned. "Just how big is it, then?"
The Polo--August, she was almost sure it was August- looked at her with that calm, strangely
unsettling face. "I should say about two or three kilometers. Possibly less."
"Is that all?"
Gene grinned. "You give me the numbers, I'll land on it." "What do you mean, 'Is that all'?" Gaby
said. "It couldn't have
been very much bigger, not to have been sighted by the Lunar scopes. We would have known about it
thirty years ago."
"All right. But you interrupted my bath for a damn pebble. It hardly seems worth it."
Gaby looked smug. "Maybe not to you, but if it was a tenth that size, I'd still get to name it.
Discovering a comet or an asteroid is one thing but only a couple people each century get to name
a moon."
Cirocco released her toehold on the holo tank strut and twisted toward the corridor entrance. just