Hinterlands (short story)

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"Hinterlands" is a William Gibson short story written in 1981 and featured in his collection Burning Chrome in 1986. It is a fable about the 'cargo cult' mentality. "Hinterlands" explains what happens to cultures and civilisations when confronted with inexplicable evidence from an unknown but likely superior source that is dangerous but is nonetheless of value. The word Hinterland is German and means upstate or outback (literally country or land behind).

[edit] Plot

The narrative of the story is presented below in chronological order which is not necessarily the way it is presented in the story:

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The story begins with Soviet cosmonaut Olga Tovyevsky. She is on a routine flight to Mars when she disappears off the radar shortly after a routine exercise involving flares. She returns into the same space-time two years later and her spacecraft is towed back to Earth orbit. She is alive but insane. In her hands she has a seashell the like of which is unknown in Earth's biosphere. The only two possible conclusions are: She has either travelled to another star or come in contact with a civilisation that is capable of making the journey. Olga never gets her sanity back and the scientists do not get any sense out of her to understand what has happened to her.

The Russians send out another probe to the same coordinates in space. The solo astronaut, Major Grosz disappears at precisely the same point and he returns 234 days later. He has committed suicide before anyone can reach him. Many more astronauts are lost in the same way. The place when these events occur is called the Highway. It is not until a dead Frenchman brings back a code in a ring of steel, which turns out to be the Rosetta Stone for cancer, that these trips truly become important. Already the astonishing frequencies of these events create a cargo cult mentality around the Highway. Here, for the small price of a dead or insane astronaut one could get the future without waiting for it to happen on Earth.

Corporate interests want to know what else they can find out there. The powers-that-be use the CIA for their beautiful spoken Russian to advise the Reds that the West would come to their party at the Toyvesky Anomaly Coordinates. They would provide the best minds in psychiatry to cure the ones who came back alive but insane. As a result, they built a spacestation to sort out this messy albeit profitable situation. They build Heaven, the craft for dealing with returned "cargo". The narrator, Toby Halpert, is a failed spaceman. That is, he is someone who had volunteered to go to the Highway but to his own shame and disappointment did not hitch a lift from whatever is out there. The same fate befell his girlfriend Charmian and this is what bonds them.

His job now is to retrieve astronauts who were taken but are known to be alive on return. While with them, he also passes on the instructions given to him by various authorities through the use of an implant. Once the handler-surrogate Gestalt is in place, he is ready to enter the capsule of the latest returned astronaut. She is Leni Hofmannstahl and to the trade she is a confirmed meatshot. A meatshot is a fresh returnee who is also possibly alive.

As Toby waits in the biosphere of Heaven with fake birdsongs (real birds cannot handle the its centrifugal forces due to the lack of true gravity) Charmian is there to share a drug tea-break before the operation.

Their small talk is interrupted by his handler Hiro. Hiro has an intuition: He doesn't like this one. Toby has the same intuition; something he calls The Fear. It amounts to a paralyzing sense that something intensely powerful is close by. To overcome this, Hiro remotly cattle-prods Toby into action. Toby then rushes into the capsule. After a frantic search of the craft he finds her in the medical bay and he is too late. Leni had fooled her robot surgical manipulator (which she calls "Beautiful Machine") into dissecting her arm and allowing her to bleed to death.

The mission is over and Toby returns to his abode where he talks about his day with Charmian.