Later, alone in his room, listening to the landlady’s firm tread in the room below, Coretti realized that there was no need to remain where he was. The summons had come. But the landlady demanded three weeks’ notice if anyone wanted to leave. That meant that Coretti owed her money. Instinct told him to leave it for her. A Christian workingman in the next room coughed in his sleep as Coretti got up and went down the hall to the telephone. Coretti told the evening-shift foreman that he was quitting his job. He hung up and went back to his room, locked the door behind him, and slowly removed his clothing until he stood naked before the garish framed lithograph of Jesus above the brown steel bureau. And then he counted out nine tens. He placed them carefully beside the praying-hands plaque decorating the bureau top. It was nice-looking money. It was perfectly good money. He made it himself.
This time, he didn’t feel like making small talk. She’d been drinking a margarita, and he ordered the same. She paid, producing the money with a deft movement of her hand between the breasts bobbling in her low-cut dress. He glimpsed the gill closing there. An excitement rose in him but somehow, this time, it didn’t center in an erection. After the third margarita their hips were touching, and something was spreading through him in slow orgasmic waves. It was sticky where they were touching; an area the size of the heel of his thumb where the cloth had parted. He was two men: the one inside fusing with her in total cellular communion, and the shell who sat casually on a stool at the bar, elbows on either side of his drink, fingers toying with a swizzle stick. Smiling benignly into space. Calm in the cool dimness. And once, but only once, some distant worrisome part of him made Coretti glance down to where soft- ruby tubes pulsed, tendrils tipped with sharp lips worked in the shadows between them. Like the joining tentacles of two strange anemones. They were mating, and no one knew. And the bartender, when he brought the next drink, offered his tired smile and said, “Rainin’ out now, innit? Just won’t let up.” “Been like that all goddamn week,” Coretti answered. “Rainin’ to beat the band.” And he said it right. Like a real human being.
Hinterlands
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 im- plant, 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 wak- ing 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, citi- zen 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 pro- file 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 kilo- meters 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 Tovyevski Anomaly Coor- dinates if you don’t mind bringing Olga into it. Olga Tovyevski, Our Lady of Singularities, Patron Saint of the Highway. Hiro didn’t trust me to get up on my own. Just before the Russian orderlies came in, he turned the lights on in my cubicle, by remote control, and let them strobe and stutter for a few seconds before they fell as a steady glare across the pictures of Saint Olga that Char- mian had taped up on the bulkhead. Dozens of them, her face repeated in newsprint, in magazine glossy. Our Lady of the Highway.