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 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 1420 mega- hertz, 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. When the afterimage faded from Earth’s monitor screens, the Alyut was gone. In the Urals a middle-aged Georgian technician bit through the stem of his favorite meerschaum. In New South Wales a young physicist began to slam the side of his monitor, like an enraged pinball finalist protesting TILT.
The elevator that waited to take me up to Heaven looked like Hollywood’s best shot at a Bauhaus mummy case a narrow, upright sarcophagus with a clear acrylic lid. Behind it, rows of identical consoles receded like a textbook illustration of vanishing perspective. The usual crowd of technicians in yellow paper clown suits were milling purposefully around. I spotted Hiro in blue denim, his pearl-buttoned cowboy shirt open over a faded UCLA sweat shirt. Engrossed in the figures cas- cading down the face of a monitor screen, he didn’t notice me. Neither did anyone else. So I just stood there and stared up at the ceiling, at the bottom of the floor of Heaven. It didn’t look like much. Our fat cylinder is actually two cylinders, one in- side the other. Down here in the outer one we make our own “down” with axial rotation are all the more mundane aspects of our operation: dormitories, cafe- terias, the air-lock deck, where we haul in returning – boats, Communications and Wards, where I’m care- ful never to go. Heaven, the inner cylinder, the unlikely green heart of this place, is the ripe Disney dream of homecoming, the ravenous ear of an information-hungry global economy. A constant stream of raw data goes pulsing home to Earth, a flood of rumors, whispers, hints of transgalactic traffic. I used to lie rigid in my hammock and feel the pressure of all those data, feel them snaking through the lines I imagined behind the bulkhead, lines like sinews, strapped and bulging, ready to spasm, ready to crush me. Then Charmian moved in with me, and after I told her about the fear, she made magic against it and put up her icons of Saint Olga. And the pressure receded, fell away. “Patching you in with a translator, Toby. You may need German this morning.” His voice was sand in my skull, a dry modulation of static. “Hillary ” “On line, Dr. Nagashima,” said a BBC voice, clear as ice crystal. “You do have French, do you, Toby? Hofmannstahl has French and English.” “You stay the hell out of my hair, Hillary. Speak when you’re bloody spoken to, got it?” Her silence became another layer in the complex, continual sizzle of static. Hiro shot me a dirty look across two dozen con- soles. I grinned. It was starting to happen: the elation, the adrenaline rush. I could feel it through the last wisps of barbiturate. A kid with a surfer’s smooth, blond face was helping me into a jump suit. It smelled; it was new- old, carefully battered, soaked with synthetic sweat and customized pheromones. Both sleeves were plastered from wrist to shoulder with embroidered patches, mostly corporate logos, subsidiary backers of an im- aginary Highway expedition, with the main backer’s much larger trademark stitched across my shoulders the firm that was supposed to have sent HALPERT, TOBY out to his rendezvous with the stars. At least my name was real, embroidered in scarlet nylon capitals just above my heart. The surfer boy had the kind of standard-issue good looks I associate with junior partners in the CIA, but his name tape said NEVSKY and repeated itself in Cyrillic. KGB, then. He was no tsiolnik; he didn’t have that loose-jointed style conferred by twenty years in the L-5 habitat. The kid was pure Moscow, a polite clipboard ticker who probably knew eight ways to kill with a rolled newspaper. Now we began the ritual of drugs and pockets; he tucked a microsyringe; loaded with one of the new euphorohallucinogens, into the pocket on my left wrist, took a step back, then ticked it off on his clip- board. The printed outline of a jump-suited surrogate on his special pad looked like a handgun target. He took a five-gram vial of opium from the case he wore chained to his waist and found the pocket for that. Tick. Four- teen pockets. The cocaine was last. Hiro came over just as the Russian was finishing. “Maybe she has some hard data, Toby; she’s a physical chemist, remember.” It was strange to hear him acous- tically, not as bone vibration from the implant. “Everything’s hard up there, Hiro.” “Don’t I know it?” He was feeling it, too, that special buzz. We couldn’t quite seem to make eye con- tact. Before the awkwardness could deepen, he turned and gave one of the yellow clowns the thumbs up. Two of them helped me into the Bauhaus coffin and stepped back as the lid hissed down like a giant’s faceplate. I began my ascent to Heaven and the home- coming of a stranger named Leni Hofmannstahl. A short trip, but it seems to take forever. * * *