The Peripheral (38 page)

THE RED MEDICI

N
etherton, just then looking at the peripheral, saw Flynne arrive. It was like seeing someone jarred out of a reverie, the peripheral suddenly informed, present. She took in the faces around the table. “Where’s Lowbeer?” she asked.

“You’ll be meeting with her,” Ash said, “but you’re here now for equipment, for tomorrow’s event.”

“What kind of equipment?”

“Two kinds,” Ash said.

Ossian opened the rosewood pistol case.

“These are weapons,” Ash said.

“Why do they look like that?” Flynne raised an eyebrow at Netherton.

“They were built into a high-security pram,” Netherton said, “as an antikidnapping measure.”

“Are they guns?”

“Best think of them as that,” Ash said. “Never point one at anyone you don’t want to kill. There’s a relationship between what happens when you depress this stud,” she indicated a point on the inner curve of the parrot-head handle, “and the position of the barrel. Though not exclusively, so not entirely like a gun in that regard. Once the system acquires a biological target, on being triggered, it dispatches assemblers, which seek and find the target regardless. Pick one up.”

The peripheral leaned forward, tapped the gun nearest her with the nail of her index finger. “Like an old derringer, but made of peppermint.” She used both hands to lift it from its recess, neatly managing,
Netherton noted, to not point it at any of them. It lay on her open palm.

“It’s deactivated, currently,” said Ossian, “after considerable effort. You can try the grip.”

She closed her hand around the parrot’s head, extended the thing, its festive barrel pointing at a palm-sized bald patch on Ash’s velour tent. “I’m taking these to Wilf’s ex’s party?”

“You certainly aren’t,” said Ash. “Weapons of any sort are proscribed, and you’ll be scanned thoroughly, prior to admission. In any case, these happen to be as blatantly illegal as anything in London today.”

“Then why are you showing them to me?” She returned the thing to its fitted recess, sat back.

“Under certain conditions,” Ash said, “as I understand it, one of these may be delivered to you. We’re showing them to you now so you’ll recognize them, if necessary, and know how to use them.”

“Point and click,” Ossian said. “Has absolutely no effect on inorganic material. Soft tissue only.” He lowered the lid.

“Second order of business,” said Ash, opening her hand, palm up, to reveal what Netherton assumed was a Medici, but red. “This will install a cognitive bundle that will enable you to sound something like a neoprimitivist curator. If not to another neoprimitivist curator, though I’d imagine that’s debatable.”

“It will?” Flynne asked, eyeing the thing. “How?”

“Think of it as a disguise. You no more need to operate it than you need to operate a mask. Certain specific sorts of query will trigger it.”

“And?”

“You’ll spout a reasonably high grade of facile nonsense.”

“Will I know what it means?”

“It won’t mean anything,” said Ash. “Were you to keep it up, you’d shortly repeat yourself.”

“Bullshit baffles brains?”

“One hopes. I’ll need to install it in your peripheral now.”

“Where did you get it?” Flynne asked.

“Lowbeer,” said Ossian.

“The back of your hand, please,” said Ash.

Flynne placed the peripheral’s hand palm down on the table, beside the corroded base of Ash’s display, spread its fingers. Ash pressed the red Medici gently against the back of the peripheral’s hand, where it remained, seeming to do nothing at all.

“Well?” Flynne asked, looking up at Ash.

“It’s loading,” Ash said.

Flynne looked at Netherton. “What have you been doing?” she asked.

“Waiting for you. Admiring your guns. Yourself?”

“Talking with Griff.” He couldn’t read her expression. “They’re talking about defenses for our house. Stuff that’s supposed to not bother my mother.”

“The mystery man,” said Ossian. “So you’ve actually met him.”

Flynne looked at him. “Sure.”

“Any idea how she recruited him?” Ossian asked.

“No,” Flynne said, “but wouldn’t it figure that she’d be good at that?”

“No doubt,” said Ossian. “But we seem to be increasingly following his orders, with next to no idea of who he might be.”

“No idea who she is, either,” Flynne said. “Maybe he’s like that.”

Ash leaned forward to remove the Medici, then tucked it into her reticule. “We’ll just test it,” she said to Flynne. “Tell us, please, why you think Daedra West’s art is important today.”

Flynne looked at her. “West’s oeuvre obliquely propels the viewer through an elaborately finite set of iterations, skeins of carnal memory manifesting an exquisite tenderness, but delimited by our mythologies of the real, of body. It isn’t about who we are now, but about who we would be, the other.” She blinked. “Fucking hell.” The peripheral’s eyes were wide.

“I’d hoped for something in a more colloquial register,” said Ash, “but I suppose that’s a contradiction in terms. Try not to let it run on. The thinness will show.”

“I can interpret, for Daedra,” Netherton suggested.

“Quite,” said Ash.

STATIC IN YOUR BONES

I
n the elevator, she tried thinking about what Wilf had told her about Daedra’s art, wondering if she might hear that bullshit voice in her head, but she didn’t. “What is that thing that talks?” she asked him.

“Cognitive bundle,” he said, as the doors opened. She smelled Lev’s cooking from the kitchen. “It constructs essentially meaningless statements out of a given jargon, around whatever chosen topic. I won’t walk you up. You’ve been there before.” He’d stopped at the foot of the stairs.

“I said it,” she said, “but I didn’t think it.”

“Exactly. But that isn’t evident to anyone else. And it wasn’t bad, for a collage from rote.”

“Creeps me out.”

“I think it’s actually a good idea, in our situation. Best you get upstairs.”

“Try the Wheelie, when I get back.”

“Where is it?”

“On a chair in the back of Coldiron. By the beds.”

“Good luck,” he said.

She turned and climbed the stairs, with their runner of patterned carpet, to turn at the landing, up again. At the top, furniture gleamed softly, glass sparkled. She wished she could’ve stopped to look at the things, but here was Lowbeer, at the double doors, only one of them partially open, her hand on the knob. “Hello,” she said. “Please come in.” Into that green again, gilt trim. A single lamp, incandescent element behind glass cut like diamonds. “Griff is sorting out protection for your mother, I understand.”

Flynne looked at the long table, its dark top perfectly smooth but not too glossy. It no longer felt to her like Santa’s Headquarters here. She wished it did. A very business-y room, almost an office. She looked at Lowbeer, who was wearing another one of her suits. Saw Griff there, more strongly than she’d expected. “He’s you,” she said. “He’s you when you were younger.”

Lowbeer’s head tilted. “Did you guess, or did he confide in you?”

“You have the same hands. Netherton saw the tray on our mantel. Said he’d seen one in Clovis’s store here. That she’s an old woman. I guess once I thought of her being there, and here, at the same time . . .” She stopped. “But it isn’t the same time. I guessed you might be there too.”

“Exactly,” said Lowbeer, closing the door.

“Am I here, that way?” Flynne asked.

“Not that we’ve been able to determine. Your birth record survives. No death record. But things became messy, as I understand Netherton’s explained to you. Records, during the deeper jackpot, are incomplete to nonexistent, and more so in the United States. There was a military government there, briefly, that erased huge swathes of data, seemingly at random, no one seems to know why. If you were alive today, you’d be about my age, and that would mean either that you were wealthy or very well connected, which tend to be the same thing, here. Which should mean that I’d be able to have found you.”

“You don’t mind, that I know?”

“Not at all. Why would you think I might?”

“Because it’s a secret?”

“Not from you. Come, sit here.” She went to the tall, mossy-green armchairs, at the head of the table. She waited until Flynne was settled in one, then sat in the other. “I understand that Netherton is pleased with the cognitive bundle.”

“Glad somebody is.”

“And you’ve been shown the guns.”

“Why do I need them?”

“Only one,” she said. “The other’s either for Conner or your brother, depending. I hope none of you need them, but there’s a crudeness of mind behind this business. Best we have our own options for crudeness.”

The tall windows were hidden behind green curtains. Flynne imagined a maze behind them, more green curtains, like the blue tarps in Coldiron. “What about President Gonzales? Griff says they killed her.”

“They did. It set the tone.”

“You’re going to change that?”

“That depends. It’s less like a conspiracy than a climate, at this point.”

“What does it depend on?”

“Daedra’s party, it seems.”

“How?”

“Coldiron and Matryoshka, as your people are calling it, are racing for ownership of your world. Competing tides of subsecond financial events. We are not winning. We are not losing, by that much, but we are not winning. Lev is employing a brilliant but makeshift apparatus on Coldiron’s behalf. Matryoshka, which exists in order to kill you, and for no other reason, appears to be employing some more powerful state financial apparatus, here. I need to stop that, in order to enable Coldiron’s dominance, which may then enable the prevention of Gonzales’s assassination. But the politics here are such that I’m unable to do that without first having proof, or some reasonable facsimile thereof, of who murdered Aelita. I can’t begin to explain how power works, here, but someone powerful must have an interest in Matryoshka. Invariably, they will have stepped on someone else’s toes, or stand to. I can leverage that, offer that other party a fulcrum with which to crush them. But in order for any of that to happen, you and Netherton must succeed at Daedra’s event.”

Flynne looked at the cut glass and silver on the sideboard. She looked at Lowbeer. “It all hangs on me identifying the asshole on that balcony?”

“Yes.”

“That’s fucked.”

“It is that, yes. But here we are. Should you recognize him, you’ll alert me, and things will be set in motion.”

“What if I don’t? Can’t?”

“Best not dwell on that. But if you do succeed, we face another level of difficulty, in that Daedra’s gathering operates under a protocol that strictly bans the use of personal communication devices. As peripherals, telepresent devices, you and Mr. Penske become exceptions of a sort, but you’ll be very tightly monitored. So it then becomes a question of how, should you identify our murderer, you will then communicate that to me.”

“So how do I?”

“Your peripheral’s newly installed cognitive bundle is, literally, a bundle. Within it is a communications platform the security bubble around Daedra’s event will be unable to detect. You will hear me, when you do, as, and I quote, ‘static in your bones.’ I understand it’s peculiarly unsettling, but it’s our safest option.”

“And if he’s there?”

“Far the more interesting fork to consider. And why I was pleased by your complete unwillingness to allow the use of that peculiarly vile chemical weapon.”

“Why did you do that?”

“Because I may need you, going forward, to be exactly the person who won’t do that.”

“You always want to know a lot,” she said, “but you won’t tell me much at all.”

“We need you focused on the moment.”

“‘We’ who?”

“You and I, my dear,” said Lowbeer, and reached across to pat her hand.

BUTTHOLEVILLE

H
ello?” he said, settled in the Gobiwagen’s cupola, as the Wheelie’s window opened. “Flynne?”

“She’s not back yet,” said a voice, a woman’s, the accent familiar. The window’s contents looked abstract, white verticals against that same blue.

“Tacoma?”

“Clovis,” she said. “You’re Netherton.” And she picked the Wheelie up, turned it.

Unflattering angle, from below, of what he nonetheless took to be a very attractive face. Short black hair. He tried to see the face of the proprietor of The Clovis Limit there, but only saw her ancient, waiting skull. Terrifying. God’s view of humanity, perhaps, were there one. “Wilf,” he said, “hello.”

“Here she is,” she said, turning, and he was looking down on Flynne, her head in a strange, awkward, glitteringly white construct of some kind, cushioned with white pillows. Her eyes were closed. It was like looking down at the peripheral in the back cabin, except that this was Flynne herself. Absent.

“Can she hear us?” he asked.

“No. The crown’s an autonomic cutout. So I’m told. I thought you had all this tech, up there.”

“We do,” he said. “I’m not technical, myself. But our version of this looks like a transparent plastic hairband.”

“They were made up to your specs, but we had to improvise.” She turned him again. Flynne’s brother was in the next bed, under an identical crown. In the third bed, a face he didn’t recognize. The two
of them under blue blankets. What he’d first seen were white bars at the foot of Burton’s bed, against blanket. The second man’s body mass seemed child like.

“Who’s that?” he asked.

“Conner.”

“Penske. I’ve only seen him in the dancing master.”

“The who?”

“Lev’s brother’s martial arts instructor. Peripheral. Excellent dancer, apparently.”

“I’d give my left nut to get up there, see all that,” she said, turning him to face her again. “What can I do for you, Wilf?”

“Is there a window?”

“Not really. On the other side of this stupid wall,” and she turned him, to view an improvised surface that seemed to be made of stacked white envelopes, perhaps containing paper files. “But they’ve sprayed it with polymer, so you can’t see out. Even if you could, you’d just be seeing the alley behind a strip mall in Buttholeville.”

“Is that the town’s name?”

“Nickname. Mine. My sister’s too, I guess. We’re awful.”

“I’ve met her,” he said. “She’s not awful.”

“Told me she met you.”

“Do you know when Flynne will be back?”

“No. Want to wait? Watch the news? I’ve got a tablet here.”

“The news?”

“Local’s interesting, today. We’ve got Luke 4:5 pulling out, nobody’s sure why. Griff actually doesn’t like it. He’s had two PR firms keeping them from getting media coverage, and that’s been working. Now that they’re leaving, for no apparent reason, there’s some national interest. Basically because it’s not what they usually do. You won’t be able to change the channel.”

“I’ll try it, then,” he said. “It fascinates me, here.”

“Takes all kinds.”