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"Damn, Toby. Know what it does to my ears, you scream like that?"
"Know how much I care about your ears, Dr.
Nagashima? I care about them as much as "
"No time for the litany of love, boy. We've got business. But what is it with
these fifty-millivolt spike waves off your temporals, hey? Mixing something
with the downers to give it a little color?"
"Your EEG's screwed, Hiro. You're crazy. I just want my sleep. . . ." I
collapsed into the hammock and tried to pull the darkness over me, but his
voice was still there.
"Sorry, my man, but you're working today. We got a ship back, an hour ago.
Air-lock gang are out there right now, sawing the reaction engine off so
she'll just about fit through the door."
"Who is it?"
"Leni Hofmannstahl, Toby, physical chemist, citi-
zen of the Federal Republic of Germany." He waited until I quit groaning.
"It's a confirmed meatshot."
Lovely workaday terminology we've developed out here. He meant a returning
ship with active medical telemetry, contents one (1) body, warm, psychological
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file:///F|/rah/New%20Folder/Burning%20Chrome.txt status as yet unconfirmed. I
shut my eyes and swung there in the dark.
"Looks like you're her surrogate, Toby. Her pro-
file syncs with Taylor's, but he's on leave."
I knew all about Taylor's "leave." He was out in the agricultural canisters,
ripped on amitriptyline, doing aerobic exercises to counter his latest bout
with clinical depression. One of the occupational hazards of being a
surrogate. Taylor and I don't get along. Funny how you usually don't, if the
guy's psychosexual profile is too much like your own.
"Hey, Toby, where are you getting all that dope?"
The question was ritual. "From Charmian?"
"From your mom, Hiro." He knows it's Charmian as well as I do.
"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 kilo-
meters 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
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ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
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 Tovyevski
Anomaly Coor-
dinates 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 Char-
mian 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
hydro-
gen-band radio-flare experiments, the tail end of a low-
priority Soviet-Australian scientific exchange. Olga knew that her role in the
experiments could have been file:///F|/rah/New%20Folder/Burning%20Chrome.txt
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file:///F|/rah/New%20Folder/Burning%20Chrome.txt 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 photo-
genic 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
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