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

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 clipboard. 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. Fourteen 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 acoustically, 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 contact. 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 homecoming of a stranger named Leni
Hofmannstahl. A short trip, but it seems to take forever.

***

Olga, who was our first hitchhiker, the first one to stick out her thumb on the wavelength of
hydrogen, made it home in two years. At Tyuratam, in Kazakhstan, one gray winter morning, they
recorded her return on eighteen centimeters of magnetic tape.

If a religious man one with a background in film technology had been watching the point in space
where her Alyut had vanished two years before, it might have seemed to him that God had butt-
spliced footage of empty space with footage of Olga's ship. She blipped back into our space-time
like some amateur's atrocious special effect. A week later and they might never have reached her
in time; Earth would have spun on its way and left her drifting toward the sun. Fifty-three hours
after her return, a nervous volunteer named Kurtz, wearing an armored work suit, climbed through
the Alyut's hatch. He was an East German specialist in space medicine, and American cigarettes
were his secret vice; he wanted one very badly as he negotiated the air lock, wedged his way past
a rectangular mass of airscrubber core, and chinned his helmet lights. The Alyut, even after two
years, seemed to be full of breathable air. In the twin beams from the massive helmet, he saw tiny
globules of blood and vomit swinging slowly past, swirling in his wake, as he edged the bulky suit
out of the crawlway and entered the command module. Then he found her.

She was drifting above the navigational display, naked, cramped in a rigid fetal knot. Her eyes
were open, but fixed on something Kurtz would never see. Her fists were bloody, clenched like
stone, and her brown hair, loose now, drifted around her face like seaweed. Very slowly, very
carefully, he swung himself across the white keyboards of the command console and secured his suit
to the navigational display. She'd gone after the ship's communications-gear with her bare hands,
he decided. He deactivated the work suit's right claw; it unfolded automatically, like two pairs