"William Gibson - Hinterlands" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gibson William)

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 cascading 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 inside 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, cafeterias, the air-lock deck, where we haul in returning - boats,
Communications and Wards, where I'm careful 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."


file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/William%20Gibson%20-%20Hinterlands.txt (2 of 10) [10/18/2004 5:34:46 PM]
 file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/William%20Gibson%20-%20Hinterlands.txt


"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 consoles. 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 newold, 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 imaginary 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