The Peripheral

  “If you’d got yourself that piddling wound in the service,” said Conner, his peripheral holstering its large hands in the pockets of its black suit trousers, “I guess it still might count as wounded fucking warrior.”

  The exoskeleton feinted at him, cat-quick, but Conner somehow wasn’t where the tan hands went, fast as they were.

  “Lowbeer says say hello,” she said to Burton. “She’s glad you can come with us. So am I.”

  “Cross between a trunk monkey and a fancy jack,” said his infomercial voice. “What I joined the Marines for.”

  111.

  ZIL

  Netherton walked around the black limousine, their transport to Farringdon and the reason Ash was dressed that way. Built in 2029, she’d informed him, the ZIL, the last off the assembly line, had never been a part of Lev’s father’s collection, but his grandfather’s personal vehicle, dating from when he’d lived in this house. Lowbeer, apparently, had opted to use it now.

  Its bodywork reminded him of Flynne’s new dress, at once dull and very faintly lustrous. What few bits weren’t that peculiar black were stainless steel, beadblasted to nonreflectivity: the oversized wheels, and the broad and utterly minimalist grille, looking as though it had been laser-sliced off a loaf of ZIL grille-stuff. The hood was only fractionally longer than the rear deck, both of which could easily be imagined as tennis courts for the use of rather large homunculi. It had no rear window whatever, which gave him the sense that it had turned up its collar. The gravitas of its imminently thuggish presentation was remarkable, he thought. Perhaps that was why Lowbeer had chosen it, though he couldn’t see the sense in that, particularly. Curious about the interior, he leaned forward.

  “Don’t touch it,” Ash said, behind him. “You’d be electrocuted.”

  He turned. Met her double stare from beneath the patent bill. “Seriously?”

  “It’s like the pram. They had trust issues. Still do.”

  He took a step back. “Why did she want this one? Hardly in character for me, and certainly not for Annie. If I were really attending, this evening, I’d arrive in a cab.”

  “You are attending, this evening. Otherwise I wouldn’t be gotten up this way.”

  “Without an agenda, I mean.”

  “When was it you were last without one?”

  Netherton sighed.

  “I imagine,” said Ash, “that she’s decided to make a point. This will be recognized, absolutely, as belonging to Lev’s grandfather. Daedra’s security, whatever that may consist of, will certainly know that it emerged from this address. Any pretext that you aren’t associated with the Zubovs will end, upon our arrival. Possibly she sees advantage in that. There’s usually some degree of advantage in underlining one’s association with klept. Disadvantages too, of course.” She considered him. “Suit’s not bad.”

  Netherton looked down at the black suit she’d had made for him. Looked back up. “Is it black because the occasion requires it, or because you ordered it?”

  “Both,” said Ash, a distant herd of something or other choosing that instant to transit her forehead, what was visible of it below the bill, making it appear as though a cloud of restless foreboding were lodged beneath her hat.

  “Will you wait for us, there?”

  “We aren’t allowed to park within two kilometers,” she said. “When you’re ready to go, they’ll call us. Though Lowbeer will already have done, I’m sure.”

  “When do we leave?” He glanced up at the Gobiwagen.

  “Ten minutes. Need to put Burton in the trunk.”

  “I’ll use the toilet,” he said, starting for the gangway. And check to see that the bar’s still locked, he thought, certain as he was that it would be.

  112.

  TO FARRINGDON

  It wasn’t far, Ash said.

  The interior of this car felt larger than the lounge in the Mercedes RV. It wasn’t, but it felt it. The way grown-up furniture felt when you were little. And everything in here was this black that made her like her dress less. It must be a thing, that black.

  And the light outside was rainy, silvery, pink, the way it was when she’d first come here, lifting out of that launch bay in the white van.

  Netherton, seated beside her, was almost too far away to reach, and if they’d been closer, it would’ve felt too much like a date. Conner was up front with Ash, room enough between them for two other people.

  She wished it had a coffee machine, but that made her think of Tommy and Carlos and everybody back there, with Homes convoying in from three different directions. “Can I still phone home?” she asked Ash, assuming she could hear her through the partition.

  “Yes, but do it now. We’ll be there soon.”

  Ash had helped her set up the peripheral’s phone for dialing, while they waited for Burton to get into the trunk and fold up, transferring the numbers from her own phone. Now she brought the badges up, scrolled to Macon’s yellow one with the single red nubbin, and tapped the roof of her mouth.

  “Hey,” said Macon.

  “What’s happening?”

  “Guests still on the way,” he said.

  “Shit . . .”

  “Putting it mildly.”

  “Who’s with my mother?”

  “Janice. And Carlos and his friends, some of them.”

  Flynne saw herself in the white bed, under the white crown, Burton and Conner beside her in their own beds. What would happen here if she died there, she wondered for the first time? Nothing, except that her peripheral would go on automatic pilot, that cloud thing. Would it still bullshit, then, if you asked it about Daedra’s art? Would that be the only remaining evidence that she’d been here?

  “Better wrap it up,” Ash said. “We’re driving into their protocol now.”

  Faintly at first, she heard the whispers of those fairy police dispatchers, around the base of Aelita’s building.

  113.

  BOUNCY CASTLE

  A Michikoid with a luminous wand waved their ZIL to the curb, behind something more on the order of the six-wheeled silver Bentley steam iron, though the color of Lowbeer’s car when uncloaked. A couple with shaven heads and Maori facial tattoos were briefly visible, between the sleek graphite wedge of the vehicle and a solemn-looking bouncy castle affair that obviously wasn’t a routine architectural feature of Edenmere Mansions or any other shard. The various scanners would be in there, he assumed. The entrance seemed staffed entirely with Michikoids, in identical gray, vaguely quasi-military uniforms. He remembered the one on Daedra’s moby, just before it flung itself over the rail, bristling with weapons, and what Rainey had said about how she’d seen them move like spiders, down on the patchers’ island.

  Ash and Conner each opened a door, as if on cue. The ZIL’s doors were so massive that they must be servo-powered, though silently. Simultaneously, Ash on Netherton’s side and Conner on Flynne’s, they opened the passenger doors.

  Without thinking, Netherton leaned toward Flynne, squeezed her hand. “We’ll lie like champs,” he said, not knowing where that had come from. She gave him an odd, startled smile, and then they were out, on either side, the air damp, colder than he expected, but fresh. A Michikoid scanned Conner with a nonluminous wand, another doing the same to Ash, and then he and Flynne were waved into the bulging gray inflatable, as between the thighs of some oversized toy elephant.

  A field of some kind induced a moderately dissociative state, as they were scanned and prodded, by a variety of unpleasantly robotic portals, for perhaps the next fifteen minutes, and then they were being greeted by an artfully distressed Michikoid in an ancient kimono.

  “Thank you for honoring our celebration of the life of Aelita West. Your personal security attendant has been admitted separately. You will find him awaiting you. The elevator is third from the left.”

  “Thank you,” said Netherton, taking the peripheral’s hand. The tattooed couple was nowhere in sight. Nor was anyone else, the lobby as welcoming as Daedra’s voice mail,
though typical in that.

  “Celebration of life?” Flynne asked, as he led her toward the elevator.

  “So it said.”

  “Byron Burchardt’s parents had one of those.”

  “Who?”

  “Byron Burchardt. Manager at the Coffee Jones. Got run over by a robot eighteen-wheeler, Valentine’s Day. I felt guilty because I’d been pissed at him, for firing me. But I went anyway.”

  “They seem to have accepted that she’s gone.”

  “I don’t see how they could be sure she is. But I wish we’d known. Could’ve brought some flowers.”

  “Daedra never suggested this. It seems to be a surprise.”

  “A surprise funeral? You do that, here?”

  “A first, for me.”

  “Fifty-sixth floor,” she said, indicating the bank of buttons.

  The doors opened as he touched the button. They stepped in. The doors closed behind them. The ascent was perfectly silent, rapid, slightly dizzying. He was sure that drink would be served.

  114.

  CELEBRATION OF LIFE

  When they came out of the elevator, she saw, between two knots of people in black, the view from her first time here, that curve in the river. All the windows were unfrosted and the interior walls had been removed. Not so much removed but like they’d never been there. One big space now, like Lev’s dad’s gallery. Conner stood near the elevator, scoping everything. He looked completely on his game, and she guessed he was finally back to some version of what she imagined he’d been, before whatever it was had blown him up. He wasn’t quite smiling, because he was in full bodyguard mode, but he almost was.

  “No way up or down except this elevator,” he said, as they reached him. “Stairs to the floor above and below. Some seriously ugly mofos in here. They’d be like me, security. Mofo-ettes too. Like a bad-ass convention sprinkled on a small town’s worth of rich folks.”

  “More people than I’ve ever seen here in one place before,” she said, and then something howled, deep in every bone in the peripheral’s body. “Testing the entanglement,” the nastiest voice she’d ever heard said, a kind of modulated ache, but she knew it was Lowbeer. “Please acknowledge.”

  Twin taps of the tongue’s tiny magnet, left forward palate-quarter.

  “Good,” said the bones, horribly. “Circulate. Tell Wilf.”

  “Let’s circulate,” she said to Wilf, as a crowd of tattooed New Zealanders passed them. Tā moko, she remembered, from Ciencia Loca. Technically not tattoos. Carved in. Grooved. The skin lightly sculpted. The boss, she guessed, was the blonde with the profile like something on a war canoe. They definitely didn’t look like they were here to party, or for that matter to celebrate life. Something had happened, around the blonde’s face as she’d passed them, a stutter of image-capture, barely visible. She remembered what Lowbeer had said, about artifacts in her field of vision.

  “Keep a minimum of two meters distance,” Wilf said, to Conner. “When we engage in conversation, double that.”

  “I’m housebroken,” Conner said. “She had me taught that in a virtual coronation ball, king of fucking Spain. This is like poolside casual.”

  A Michikoid with a tray of glasses, pale yellow wine, offered her one. “No thanks,” she said. She saw Wilf reach for one, smiling, then freeze. Like seeing the haptics glitch Burton. Then his hand changed course, for one with fizzy water, near the edge of the tray. He winced, picking it up. “Follow me,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “This way, Annie.” He took her hand, led her toward the center, away from the windows, the glass of water held near his chest.

  She remembered how long it had taken her to fly a circuit around this space. Wondered if the bugs were out there now, and what they’d really been.

  There was an entirely black screen, square, floor-to-ceiling, near the middle of the space, people around it, talking, holding drinks. It looked like a giant version of one of those old flat displays that Wilf had on his desk, the first time she’d seen him. Wilf kept moving, looking as though he knew where he was going, but she assumed he didn’t. From a slightly different angle, now, she saw the black screen wasn’t entirely blank, but showed, very dimly, a woman’s face. “What’s that?” she asked Wilf, nodding in its direction.

  “Aelita,” he said.

  “Is that something you do, here?”

  “Nothing I’ve ever seen before. And I—” He broke off. “And here’s Daedra,” he said.

  Daedra was smaller than she’d expected, Tacoma’s size. She looked like somebody in a video, or an ad. At home that was something, even just to see someone like that. Pickett had had a little of it, sort of by osmosis, but not like he’d ever really tried. He was local. Brent Vermette had a lot of the guy version, via Miami and wherever else, and if he had a wife she’d have a lot of it too. But Daedra had it all, and tattoos on top of that, squared-off black spirals, up over her collarbones, out of the top of her black dress. Flynne realized she was waiting for the tattoos to move, and no reason to assume they wouldn’t, except she thought Wilf would have mentioned it, if they did.

  “Annie,” Wilf said, “you’ve met Daedra before, at the Connaught. I know you weren’t expecting this, but I’ve told her about your sense of her art, her career. She’s very interested.”

  Daedra was staring at her flatly. “Neoprimitives,” she said, as if she didn’t entirely like the word. “What do you do with them?”

  Did she have to be asked directly about Daedra’s art for the bullshit implant to kick in? She guessed she did. “I study them,” she said, some part of her reaching back to the ragged yellow-spined wall of National Geographic, to Ciencia Loca, anything. “Study the things they make.”

  “What do they make?”

  The only thing she could think of was Carlos and the others making things out of Kydex. “Sheaths, holsters. Jewelry.” Jewelry wasn’t true, but it didn’t matter.

  “What does that have to do with my art?”

  “Attempts to encompass the real, outside of hegemony,” said the implant. “The other. Heroically. A boundless curiosity, informed by your essential humanity. Your warmth.” Flynne felt like her eyes were bugging. She forced herself to smile.

  Daedra looked at Wilf. “My warmth?”

  “Exactly,” said Wilf. “Annie sees your essential humanity as the least appreciated aspect of your work. Her analysis seeks to remedy that. I’ve found her arguments to be extraordinarily revelatory.”

  “Really,” said Daedra, staring at him.

  “Annie’s quite shy, in your presence,” he said. “Your work means everything to her.”

  “Really?”

  “I’m so grateful to meet you,” Flynne said. “Again.”

  “That peripheral looks nothing like you,” Daedra said. “You’re on a moby, headed for Brazil?”

  “She’s supposed to be meditating,” Wilf said, “but she’s cheating now, in order to be here. The group she’ll be embedding with insists on visitors having all of their implants removed. Remarkable dedication, on her part.”

  “Who’s it supposed to be?” Still staring at Flynne.

  “I don’t know,” said Flynne.

  “A rental,” said Wilf. “I found it through Impostor Syndrome.”

  “I’m sorry about your sister,” Flynne said. “I didn’t know that this was about her, until we got here. Must be so sad.”

  “My father was on the fence about it until yesterday afternoon,” Daedra said, not sounding sad at all.

  “Is he here?” Flynne asked.

  “Baltimore,” Daedra said. “He doesn’t travel.” And behind her, through the crowd, came the man from the balcony, not in a dark brown robe now but a black suit, his dark beard grown in a little, trimmed. Smiling.

  “Fuck,” Flynne said, under her breath.

  Daedra’s eyes narrowed. “What?”

  Tongue to palate. That shiver of frames, around him.

  “Sorry,” said Flynne. “I’m so a
wkward. You’re my favorite artist in the whole world. I keep feeling like hyperventilating or something. And asking you about your dad when you’ve just lost your sister . . .”

  Daedra stared at her. “I thought she was English,” she said to Wilf.

  “The neoprims she’s embedding with in Brazil are American,” said Wilf. “Working on fitting in.”

  The man from the balcony walked right past, didn’t glance at them, but Flynne wondered who wouldn’t take a second look at Daedra?

  “But we’ve come at the wrong time,” said Wilf, who as far as Flynne knew would have no idea that she’d just tagged their man. They should have worked out a signal. He was bluffing now. She could tell. “At least the two of you have been reintroduced—”

  “Downstairs,” Daedra said. “Easier to talk there.”

  “Go with her,” said the bone-voice. It made dragging your fingernails across a chalkboard seem like stroking a kitten.

  “This way,” said Daedra, and led them toward the windows facing the river, around a low wall and down a wide flight of white stone stairs. Flynne looked back, saw Conner following them, flanked by two of the china-white robot girls, with their identical featureless faces, in loose black tunics and pants that zipped tight at their ankles, their feet white and toeless. They’d been standing at the head of the stairs, she guessed guarding it. Wilf walked beside her, still carrying his glass of water, which he didn’t seem to be drinking.

  The floor below was more like what she’d seen from the quadcopter. Like a more modern version of the ground floor at Lev’s, rooms in every direction. Daedra led them into one with windows on the river, but Flynne saw them frost over as they walked in. Another Daedra, in the same dress, was standing there. She seemed to see them but didn’t react. A brunette in exercise clothes was sitting in an armchair that looked uncomfortable but probably wasn’t, a few white papers in her hand. She looked up. “You’re on in ten,” Daedra said to her, Flynne getting it that this woman wasn’t a guest at the party.