William Gibson - Hinterlands

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William GIBSON

Hinterlands

[from LIB.RU]

When Hiro hit the switch, I was dreaming of Paris, dreaming of wet, dark streets in winter. The

pain came oscillating up from the floor of my skull, exploding behind my eyes in a wall of blue

neon; I jackknifed up out of the mesh hammock, screaming. I always scream; I make a point of it.

Feedback raged in my skull. The pain switch is an auxiliary circuit in the bonephone implant,

patched directly into the pain centers, just the thing for cutting through a surrogate's

barbiturate fog. It took a few seconds for my life to fall together, icebergs of biography looming

through the fog: who I was, where I was, what I was doing there, who was waking me.

Hiro's voice came crackling into my head through the bone-conduction implant.- "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, citizen 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 status as yet unconfirmed. I shut my

eyes and swung there in the dark.

"Looks like you're her surrogate, Toby. Her profile 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 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

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/William%20Gibson%20-%20Hinterlands.txt (1 of 10) [10/18/2004 5:34:46 PM]

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William Gibson - Hinterlands

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