Burning Chrome by William Gibson Page A

when the gestalt clicks, Hiro and I meld into something else, something we can never admit to each other, not when it isn’t happening. Our relationship would give a classical Freudian nightmares. But I knew that he was right: something felt terribly wrong this time.
    The clearing was roughly circular. It had to be; it was actually a fifteen-meter round cut through the floor ofHeaven, a circular elevator disguised as an Alpine mini-meadow. They’d sawed Leni’s engine off, hauled her boat into the outer cylinder, lowered the clearing to the airlock deck, then lifted her to Heaven on a giant pie plate landscaped with grass and wildflowers. They’d blanked her sensors with broadcast overrides and sealed her ports and hatch; Heaven is supposed to be a surprise to the newly arrived.
    I found myself wondering whether Charmian was back with Jorge yet. Maybe she’d be cooking something for him, one of the fish we ‘catch’ as they’re released into our hands from cages on the pool bottoms. I imagined the smell of frying fish, closed my eyes, and imagined Charmian wading in the shallow water, bright drops beading on her thighs, long-legged girl in a fishpond in Heaven.
    â€˜Move, Toby! In now!’
    My skull rang with the volume; training and the gestalt reflex already had me halfway across the clearing. ‘Goddamn, goddamn, goddamn…’ Hiro’s mantra, and I knew it had managed to go all wrong, then. Hillary the translator was a shrill undertone, BBC ice cracking as she rattled something out at top speed, something about anatomical charts. Hiro must have used the remotes to unseal the hatch, but he didn’t wait for it to unscrew itself. He triggered six explosive bolts built into the hull and blew the whole hatch mechanism out intact. It barely missed me. I had instinctively swerved out of its way. Then I was scrambling up the boat’s smooth side, grabbing for the honeycomb struts just inside the entranceway; the hatch mechanism had taken the alloy ladder with it.
    And I froze there, crouching in the smell of plastique from the bolts, because that was when the Fear found me, really found me, for the first time.
    I’d felt it before, the Fear, but only the fringes, theleast edge. Now it was vast, the very hollow of night, an emptiness cold and implacable. It was last words, deep space, every long goodbye in the history of our species. It made me cringe, whining. I was shaking, groveling, crying. They lecture us on it, warn us, try to explain it away as a kind of temporary agrophobia endemic to our work. But we know what it is; surrogates know and handlers can’t. No explanation has ever even come close.
    It’s the Fear. It’s the long finger of Big Night, the darkness that feeds the muttering damned to the gentle white maw of Wards. Olga knew it first, Saint Olga. She tried to hide us from it, clawing at her radio gear, bloodying her hands to destroy her ship’s broadcast capacity, praying Earth would lose her, let her die…
    Hiro was frantic, but he must have understood, and he knew what to do.
    He hit me with the pain switch. Hard. Over and over, like a cattle prod. He drove me into the boat. He drove me through the Fear.
    Beyond the Fear, there was a room. Silence, and a stranger’s smell, a woman’s.
    The cramped module was worn, almost homelike, the tired plastic of the acceleration couch patched with peeling strips of silver tape. But it all seemed to mold itself around an absence. She wasn’t there. Then I saw the insane frieze of ballpoint scratchings, crabbed symbols, thousands of tiny, crooked oblongs locking and overlapping. Thumb-smudged, pathetic, it covered most of the rear bulkhead.
    Hiro was static, whispering, pleading. Find her, Toby, now, please, Toby, find her, find her, find –
    I found her in the surgical bay, a narrow alcove off the crawlway. Above her, the Schöne Maschine, the surgical manipulator, glittering,