Burning Chrome by William Gibson Page B

its bright, thin arms neatly folded,chromed limbs of a spider crab, tipped with hemostats, forceps, laser scalpel. Hillary was hysterical, half-lost on some faint channel, something about the anatomy of the human arm, the tendons, the arteries, basic taxonomy. Hillary was screaming.
    There was no blood at all. The manipulator is a clean machine, able to do a no-mess job in zero g, vacuuming the blood away. She’d died just before Hiro had blown the hatch, her right arm spread out across the white plastic work surface like a medieval drawing, flayed, muscles and other tissues tacked out in a neat symmetrical display, held with a dozen stainless-steel dissecting pins. She bled to death. A surgical manipulator is carefully programmed against suicides, but it can double as a robot dissector, preparing biologicals for storage.
    She’d found a way to fool it. You usually can, with machines, given time. She’d had eight years.
    She lay there in a collapsible framework, a thing like the fossil skeleton of a dentist’s chair, through it, I could see the faded embroidery across the back of her jump suit, the trademark of a West German electronics conglomerate. I tried to tell her. I said, ‘Please, you’re dead. Forgive us, we came to try to help, Hiro and I. Understand? He knows you, see, Hiro, he’s here in my head. He’s read your dossier, your sexual profile, your favorite colors; he knows your childhood fears, first lover, name of a teacher you liked. And I’ve got just the right pheromones, and I’m a walking arsenal of drugs, something here you’re bound to like. And we can lie, Hiro and I; we’re ace liars. Please. You’ve got to see. Perfect strangers, but Hiro and I, for you, we make up the perfect stranger, Leni.’
    She was a small woman, blond, her smooth, straight hair streaked with premature gray. I touched her hair,once, and went out into the clearing. As I stood there, the long grass shuddered, the wildflowers began to shake, and we began our descent, the boat centered on its landscaped round of elevator. The clearing slid down out of Heaven, and the sunlight was lost in the glare of huge vapor arcs that threw hard shadows across the broad deck of the air lock. Figures in red suits, running. A red Dinky Toy did a U-turn on fat rubber wheels, getting out of our way.
    Nevsky, the KGB surfer, was waiting at the foot of the gangway that they wheeled to the edge of the clearing. I didn’t see him until I reached the bottom.
    â€˜I must take the drugs now, Mr Halpert.’
    I stood there, swaying, blinking tears from my eyes. He reached out to steady me. I wondered whether he even knew why he was down here in the lock deck, a yellow suit in red territory. But he probably didn’t mind; he didn’t seem to mind anything very much; he had his clipboard ready.
    â€˜I must take them, Mr Halpert.’
    I stripped out of the suit, bundled it, and handed it to him. He stuffed it into a plastic Ziploc, put the Ziploc in a case manacled to his left wrist, and spun the combination.
    â€˜Don’t take them all at once, kid,’ I said. Then I fainted.
    Late that night Charmian brought a special kind of darkness down to my cubicle, individual doses sealed in heavy foil. It was nothing like the darkness of Big Night, that sentient, hunting dark that waits to drag the hitchhikers down to Wards, that dark that incubates the Fear. It was a darkness like the shadows moving in the back seat of your parents’ car, on a rainy night when you’refive years old, warm and secure. Charmian’s a lot slicker than I am when it comes to getting past the clipboard tickers, the ones like Nevsky.
    I didn’t ask her why she was back from Heaven, or what had happened to Jorge. She didn’t ask me anything about Leni.
    Hiro was gone, off the air entirely. I’d seen him at the debriefing that afternoon; as usual, our eyes didn’t meet. It didn’t matter.