The Peripheral

by William Gibson

  “Clanton. Mom took us all over for the bicentennial, when we were kids.”

  “Lowbeer found one like it, recently, in London. Her modules had recorded this one the night I was here. Her friend searched for it. She deals in American antiquities. She’s American herself. Clovis Fearing.”

  “Clovis?”

  “Fearing,” he said.

  “Not Raeburn?” It didn’t make any sense. “How old is she?”

  “No older than Lowbeer, I suppose, though she chooses to be more obvious about it. Ah. Looked it up. Raeburn. Mrs. Clovis Fearing’s maiden name.”

  “She’s an old lady? In London?”

  “They knew one another, when they were younger. Lowbeer said she was visiting her to have her own memory refreshed. Mrs. Fearing said something about Lowbeer having been a British spy, and Lowbeer said that that had made Fearing one herself.”

  “But she was Raeburn then,” said Flynne. “Now.” She was looking at the white tray but not seeing it. Seeing Lowbeer’s hand instead, holding her hat against their quadcopter’s downdraft in the Cheapside street, and Griff’s hands, arranging the Sushi Barn food. “Shit,” she said, then said it again, more softly.

  100.

  BACK HERE

  Something about the mention of Clovis Fearing had caused Flynne to abruptly change the subject. She’d taken him out on the veranda, placed him on the love seat between Tacoma Raeburn and the man Flynne had introduced as her cousin Leon, and gone out to stand beneath the largest tree, having a conversation on her phone. Netherton had panned from Tacoma, whom he found attractive in an obliquely threatening way, to Leon, who wore a strange elasticated headscarf, its fabric abstractly patterned in shades Netherton associated with the droppings of birds, before cleaners tidied them away. He had pale, bushy eyebrows and the start of an equally pale beard.

  “Mr. Netherton’s in the future,” Tacoma said to Leon, whose mouth was slightly open.

  “Wilf,” said Netherton.

  Leon tilted his head to one side. “You in the future, Wilf?”

  “In a sense.”

  “How’s the weather?”

  “Less sunny, last I looked.”

  “You should be a weatherman,” Leon said, “you’re in the future and you know the weather.”

  “You’re someone who only pretends to be unintelligent,” Netherton said. “It serves you simultaneously as protective coloration and a medium for passive aggression. It won’t work with me.”

  “Future’s fucking snippy,” said Leon, to Tacoma. “I didn’t come out here to be abused by vintage product from the Hefty toy department.”

  “I think you might be stuck with that,” said Tacoma. “Wilf’s paying your salary, or close enough.”

  “Well shit,” said Leon, “I guess I should remove my hat.”

  “I don’t think he cares about that, but you could always take it off just because it’s butt-ugly,” Tacoma said.

  Leon sighed, and pulled off the scarf. His hair, what there was of it, was only a slight improvement. “Do I have you to thank for winning the lottery, Wilf?”

  “Not really,” Netherton said.

  “Future’s going to be a huge pain in the ass,” Leon said, but then Flynne was there, picking up the Wheelie.

  “Time for your visit with Mom, Leon,” she said. “You’re here to cheer her up, relax her. Way you do that, you start by telling her I got them to promise me she can stay here.”

  “They’re scared of somebody getting ahold of her,” Leon said, “having that over you.”

  “So now they get to throw money at it,” Flynne said. “They’re good at that. Go on, get in there with your aunt Ella. Make her feel good. You make her any more worried, I’ll tear you a new one.”

  “I’m going,” said Leon, “I’m going,” but Netherton saw that he was neither frightened nor angry. Leon got to his feet, making the love seat creak.

  “I’m taking Wilf down to the trailer,” Flynne said to Tacoma.

  “That on the property?” Tacoma asked.

  “Bottom of the hill behind the house. Near the creek. Burton lives there.”

  “I’ll just walk along with you,” Tacoma said, getting up, the love seat not creaking at all.

  “Wilf and I need to have a talk. It’s a small trailer.”

  “I won’t come in,” Tacoma said. “Sorry, but you go outside the house, or this front yard, I have to move boys around, and drones.”

  “That’s okay,” Flynne said. “I appreciate it.”

  And then they were off the porch, Flynne striding across the lawn he’d seen as moonlit silver. It looked nothing like that now. Thinly, unevenly green, starting to brown in places. She rounded the corner of the house. Tacoma was murmuring to her earbud, he supposed telling boys and drones what she needed done.

  “Tomorrow night’s the party,” Flynne said to him. “I need you to tell me about Daedra, explain who this woman is I’m supposed to be, what she does.”

  “I can’t see,” he said. The camera side of the tablet was trapped under her upper arm. When she freed it, and turned him around, he saw trees, smaller ones, and a trampled earthen trail, descending. “Where are we going?”

  “Burton’s trailer. Down by the creek. He’s lived there since he got out of the Marines.”

  “Is he there?”

  “He’s back at Coldiron. Or in town somewhere. He won’t mind.”

  “Where’s Tacoma?”

  She swung the Wheelie around. He saw Tacoma on the trail behind them. Swung it back, started down. “Daedra,” she said. “How’d you meet her, anyway?”

  “I was hired to be a publicist on a project she was central to. Its resident celebrity. Rainey brought me on. She’s a publicist as well. Or was. She’s just resigned.” Trees on either side, the trail crooked.

  “Envy her that,” Flynne said, “having the option.”

  “But you do. You used it when you thought Lowbeer’s agent would use the party time on those religionists.”

  “That was bullshit. Well, not bullshit, ’cause I’d have done what I said. But then, pretty soon, we’d all be dead. Us back here, anyway.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Burton’s trailer. It’s an Airstream. Nineteen seventy-seven.”

  The year, from the century previous even to this one she carried him through, struck him as incredible. “Did they all look like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “An assembler malfunction.”

  “That’s the foam. Uncle who hauled it down here put that on to stop it leaking, and for insulation. Shiny streamline thing, under that.”

  “I’ll be out here if you need me,” said Tacoma, behind them.

  “Thanks,” said Flynne, reaching for the handle on a battered metal door, set back in the weathered larval bulge of whatever the thing had been covered with. She opened it, stepped up, into a space he recognized from first having interviewed her. Tiny lights came on, in strings, embedded in some slightly yellowish transparent material. A small space, as small as the rear cabin of the Gobiwagen, lower. A narrow metal-framed bed, table, a chair. The chair moved.

  “The chair moved,” he said.

  “Wants me to sit in it. Man, I forget how hot this sucker gets . . .”

  “‘Sucker’?”

  “Trailer. Here.” She put him down on the table. “Got to crack a window.” The window creaked, opening. Then she opened a squat white cabinet that stood on the floor, took out a blue-and-silver metallic-looking container, closing the cabinet. “My turn to not be able to offer you a drink.” She pulled a ring atop the container. Drank from the resulting opening. The chair was moving again. She sat in it, facing him. It hummed, creaked, was silent, unmoving. “Okay,” she said, “she your girlfriend?”

  “Who?”

  “Daedra.”

  “No,” he said.

  “But was she?”

  “No.”

  She looked at him. “You two were doing it?”

  �
�Yes.”

  “Girlfriend. Unless you’re an asshole.”

  He considered this. “I was quite taken with her,” he said, then paused.

  “Taken?”

  “She’s very striking. Physically. But . . .”

  “But?”

  “I’m almost certainly an asshole.”

  She looked at him. Or rather, he remembered, at part of his face on the Wheelie Boy’s tablet. “Well,” she said, “if you really know that, you’re ahead of most of the dating stock around here.”

  “Dating stock?”

  “Men,” she said. “Ella, my mother, she says the odds are good around here, but the goods are odd. ’Cept they aren’t odd, usually. More like too ordinary.”

  “I might be odd,” he said. “I like to imagine I am. Here. I mean there. In London.”

  “But you weren’t supposed to get involved with her that way, because it was business?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “About . . . ?”

  “What happened. And when you get to a part that I can’t understand, or I don’t know what you’re talking about, I’ll stop you and ask you questions until I understand it.”

  She looked very serious, but not unfriendly.

  “I will, then,” said Netherton.

  101.

  ORDINARY SAD-ASS HUMANNESS

  Her time in the trailer with Wilf had kept her mind off what she couldn’t quite believe she’d decided about Lowbeer and Griff. The ordinary sad-ass humanness of his story with Daedra, in spite of big lumps of future-stuff, had been weirdly comforting.

  She still wasn’t sure how Daedra made her living, or what her relationship with the United States government was. Seemed like a cross between a slightly porny media star and what sophomore year Art History called a performance artist, plus maybe a kind of diplomat. But she still didn’t get what the United States did either, in Wilf’s world. He made it sound like the nation-state equivalent of Conner, minus the sense of humor, but she supposed that might not be so far off, even today.

  After the trailer, the three of them had gone up to the house and had the peas Janice had stir-fried with some bacon and onions, sitting around the kitchen table with Leon and her mother. Her mother had asked Tacoma about her name, and her job, and Tacoma had been good at not seeming like she wasn’t explaining what she did, and Flynne had seen her mother seeing that, but not minding. Her mother was in a better mood, and Flynne took that to mean she’d accepted that she wouldn’t be sent off to northern Virginia with Lithonia.

  Driving back, it was the same convoy, and no other traffic on the road at all. “Should be more people driving out here, this time of day,” she said to Tacoma.

  “That’s because it’s shorter to list what Coldiron doesn’t own in this county. You own both sides of this road. In the rest of the county, Hefty still owns the bulk of what you don’t. What’s left either belongs to individuals, or Matryoshka.”

  “The dolls?”

  “The competition. It’s what we call them in KCV. Out of Nassau, so that’s probably where they first came through from the future, the way Coldiron did in Colombia.”

  They were at the edge of town now, and Tacoma started talking to her earbud, making the convoy take unexpected turns, or as unexpected as you could manage anywhere this size. Flynne figured they were angling to get into the back without attracting the attention of Luke 4:5, on the other side of Tommy’s yellow Sheriff’s Department tape. They knew how to obey police tape, because that could help them in court, when they eventually sued the municipality, like they always did, most of them having gone to law school for that express purpose. They always protested in silence, and that was deliberate too, some legal strategy she’d never understood. They’d hold their signs up and stinkeye everybody, never say a word. You could see the mean glee they took in it, and she just thought it was sorry, that people could be like that.

  At least there was some traffic in town, mostly KCV employees trying to look local. Not a single German car. Anyone who made a living selling secondhand Jeeps should be hosting a big fiesta about now, for the workers at the factory in Mexico.

  “Always been a redhead?” Flynne asked Tacoma, to get her mind off Luke 4:5.

  “A day longer than I’ve been with KCV,” Tacoma said. “They have to bleach it almost white, before they dye it.”

  “I like it.”

  “I don’t think my hair does.”

  “You get contacts at the same time?”

  “I did.”

  “Otherwise, you’d look enough like your sister that people would put it together.”

  “We drew straws,” Tacoma said. “She would’ve gone blond, but I lost. She was blond when she was younger. Brings out her risk-taking tendencies, so this is probably better.”

  Flynne looked over at the blank screen of the Wheelie’s tablet, wondered where he was now. “Are you really a notary?”

  “Hell yes. And a CPA. And I’ve got paper for you to sign when we get back, taking your brother’s little militia from cult of personality to state-registered private security firm.”

  “I have to talk with Griff, first thing. Has to be private. You help me with that?”

  “Sure. Your best bet’s Hong’s. That one table, off in an alcove? I’ll have him hold that for you. Otherwise, you can’t know who’s on the other side of the nearest tarp.”

  “Thanks.”

  And then the truck was in the alley behind Fab, sandwiched between the two SUVs as they disgorged black-jacketed Burton boys, everybody with a bullpup except Leon.

  “Ready?” Tacoma asked, killing the engine.

  Flynne hadn’t been ready for any of it, she thought, not since that night she went to the trailer to sub for him. It wasn’t stuff you could be ready for. Like life, maybe, that way.

  102.

  TRANSPLANT

  Netherton found Ossian waiting, a narrow rosewood case tucked beneath one arm, beside Ash’s tent, the unpleasant profile of the six-wheeled Bentley nowhere to be seen.

  “Is Ash inside?” Netherton asked, Flynne’s peripheral beside him, watching him speak. He’d awakened it, if that was the term, after Ash had phoned, asking him to bring it along to the tent, for a meeting.

  “She’s been delayed,” Ossian said. “She’ll be along shortly.”

  “What’s that?” Netherton asked, eyeing the rectangular wooden box.

  “Case for a pair of Regency dueling pistols, originally. Come in.” The tent smelled, familiarly now, of the dust that wasn’t there. Ash’s displays, the agate spheres, were the sole source of light. Netherton held a chair for the peripheral, which then sat, looking up at Ossian. Ossian put the rosewood box down on the table. Like a shopman, employing a certain constrained drama, he undid two small brass latches, paused briefly for effect, then opened the hinged lid.

  “Temporarily deactivated,” he said, “and for the first time since they left the pram factory.” The case was lined with green felt. In identical fitted recesses nested a pair of what Netherton assumed to be guns. Like toys, really, given the glossy candy-cane cream-and-scarlet twisted around their short barrels.

  “How is it that they fit the box so perfectly?”

  “Rejigged the interior. Wanted something to carry them in. Wouldn’t want one tucked in my pocket, however positive I am that they’re disabled. Took some serious doing, to turn them off, but we managed to only release assemblers the one time, when you were there. Zubov has the Bentley with a specialist now, having five meters of leather cloned, to repair the upholstery.”

  “Lowbeer values these things because they’re difficult to trace?”

  “Because they’re terror weapons, more likely,” said Ossian. “They aren’t guns in any ballistic sense. Not about the force of a projectile. They’re directed swarm weapons. Flesh-eaters, in the trade.”

  “What trade would that be?”

  “They project self-limiting, single-purpose assemblers.
Range a little under ten meters. Do nothing whatever but disintegrate soft animal tissue, including, apparently, your finer Italian leathers. But more or less instantly, and then they disassemble themselves. That way, they’re of no danger to the user, or rather to the infant, as their only user was intended to be the pram.”

  “But they have handles,” Netherton observed. The handles were shaped something like the profile of a parrot’s head. They were the same cream shade as the barrels, minus the scarlet, but matte, bonelike.

  “Grips and manual triggers are your Edward’s, to Lowbeer’s specifications. He isn’t bad at all.”

  “I don’t understand why a pram would have been equipped with these in the first place.”

  “Aren’t Russian then, are you? Effect of one of these on a human body will absolutely get your attention, foremost. Quite the spectacular exit. See a fellow kidnapper go that way, the thinking runs, you’ll flee. Or try to. Self-targeting. Once the system acquires a target, it sends the assemblers where they’re needed.”

  “But you’ve entirely disabled them?”

  “Not permanently. Lowbeer has the key to that.”

  “Why does she want them?”

  “Discuss it with her,” said Ash, ducking in, something fleeing cumbrously, on four legs from her cheek, across her neck, as she entered.

  “When are we expecting Flynne?” Netherton asked, glancing at the peripheral.

  “I’d assumed she’d be here by now,” Ash said, “but we’ve just been told she’s unavailable. And that we’ll wait.” Briefly, she cawed to Ossian, in some coarser birdsong. He lowered the lid over the peppermint pistols. “In the meantime,” Ash said, “we think we’ve solved the problem of Flynne’s lacking the gift of neoprimitivist curatorial gab.”

  “How is that?” Netherton asked.

  “I suppose you could call it fecal transplant therapy.”

  “Really?” Netherton looked at her.

  “A synthetic bullshit implant,” Ash said, and smiled. “A procedure I don’t imagine you’ll ever be in need of.”

  103.