"Vernor Vinge - A Fire Upon the Deep" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vinge Vernor)

more than five percent of Org capacity.

Friends, we of Windsong are in the long-haul
communication business. We know how difficult it is to
maintain transceiver elements that mass as much as a
planet. We know that hard contract commitments simply
cannot be made by suppliers in our line of work. But at
the same time, the behavior of Vrinimi Org is
unacceptable. It's true that in the last three hours the
Org has returned R01 through R04 to general service, and
promised to pass on the Power's surpayment to all those
who were "inconvenienced". But only Vrinimi knows how
large these surpayments really are. And no one (not even
Vrinimi!) knows whether this is the end of the outages.

What is to Vrinimi a sudden, incredible cash glut, is to
the rest of you an unaccountable disaster.

Therefore Windsong at Debley Down is considering a
major--and permanent--expansion of our service: the
construction of five additional backbone transceivers.
Obviously this will be immensely expensive. Transceivers
are never cheap, and Debley Down does not have quite the
geometry enjoyed by Relay. We expect the cost must be
amortized over many decades of good business. We can't
undertake it without clear customer commitment. In order
to determine this demand, and to ensure that we build
what is really needed, we are creating a temporary
newsgroup, Windsong Expansion Interest Group, moderated
and archived at Windsong. Send/Receive charges to
transceiver-layer customers on this group will be only
ten percent our usual. We urge you, our
transceiver-layer customers, to use this service to talk
to each other, to decide what you can safely expect from
Vrinimi Org in the future and how you feel about our
proposals.

We are waiting to hear from you.

________________________________________________________________


Chapter 9

Afterwards, Ravna slept well. It was halfway through the morning when she drifted back toward wakefulness. The ring of her phone was monotonously insistent, loud enough to reach through the most pleasant dreams. She opened her eyes, disoriented and happy. She was lying with her arms wrapped tightly around ... a large pillow. Damn. He'd already left. She lay back for a second, remembering. These last two years she had been lonely; till last night she hadn't realized how lonely. Happiness so unexpected, so intense ... what a strange thing.
The phone just kept ringing. Finally she rolled out of bed and walked unsteadily across the room; there should be limits to this Techno Primitive nonsense. "Yes?"
It was a Skroderider. Greenstalk? "I'm sorry to bother you, Ravna, but--are you all right?" The Rider interrupted herself.
Ravna suddenly realized that she might be looking a little strange: sappy smile spread from ear to ear, hair sticking out in all directions. She rubbed her hand across her mouth, cutting back laughter. "Yes, I'm fine." Fine! "What's up?"
"We want to thank you for your help. We had never dreamed that you were so highly placed. We'd been trying for hundreds of hours to persuade the Org to listen for the refugees. But less than an hour after talking to you, we were told the survey is being undertaken immediately."
"Um." Say what? "That's wonderful, but I'm not sure I--who's paying for it, anyway?"