The Peripheral

by William Gibson

  Lev closed the door behind them as they left the room.

  “Sampled our fucking DNA,” said Ossian, examining the palm of the hand that had shaken Lowbeer’s.

  “Of course she did,” said Ash, to Netherton, else she encrypt. “How could she be positive we’re who we claim to be?”

  “We could bloody sample hers,” said Ossian, frowning down at the teacup Lowbeer had used.

  “And be renditioned,” said Ash, again to Netherton.

  “Gets right up me,” said Ossian.

  “Murphy?” asked Netherton.

  “Don’t push it,” said Ossian, briefly but powerfully wringing the white cloth in his large hands. Then he flung the strangled tea towel onto the sideboard, picked up two of the small sandwiches, put both into his mouth, and began to chew, forcefully, his features regaining their usual impassivity.

  Ash’s sigil appeared. Netherton met her eyes, caught her very slight nod. She opened a feed.

  He saw, as from a bird’s point of view, one able to hover in complete stillness, Lowbeer. She was getting into the rear door of a car, a very ugly one, bulbous and heavy looking, the color of graphite. Lev said something, stepped back, and the car cloaked itself, jigsaw pixels of reflected streetscape scrawling swiftly up the subdued gloss of its bodywork.

  Cloaked, it pulled away, seeming to bend the street around it as it went, and then was gone. Lev turned back, toward the house. The feed closed.

  Ossian was still chewing, but now he swallowed, poured tea into a crystal tumbler, drank it off. “So,” he said, but not particularly to Ash, else it encrypt, “we’re using student quants at the London School of Economics?”

  “Lev’s agreed,” said Ash, to Netherton.

  “County’s economy is entirely about manufacturing drugs,” said Ossian, to Netherton. “We might well have all we need there.”

  Lev opened the door, smiling.

  “How was that?” Ash asked. Netherton saw a flight of birds cross the backs of her hands. She didn’t notice them.

  “What an extraordinary person,” Lev said. “Hadn’t met a senior police officer before. Or, for that matter, any police officer.”

  “They aren’t all like that,” said Ossian, “thank Christ.”

  “I don’t imagine they are,” said Lev.

  You, thought Netherton, have just now been sold something. Very thoroughly and a good quick job of it. He saw no reason to doubt that Inspector Ainsley Lowbeer was capable of that.

  27.

  DEAD OLD BOYS

  She woke in the dark, to the sound of men’s voices, close by, one of them Burton’s.

  She’d gone to Pharma Jon, picked up her mother’s meds, ridden back, helped her make dinner. She and Leon and her mother ate in the kitchen, then she and Leon did the dishes and watched some news with her mother. Then she’d gone up to bed.

  Now she looked out the window and saw the rectangular bulk of the white Sheriff’s Department car by the gate. “Four?” she heard her brother ask, just below her window, on the walk to the front porch.

  “Plenty for this jurisdiction, Burton, believe me,” said Deputy Tommy Constantine. “Hoping you won’t mind coming along with me and having a look, just in case you might know them.”

  “Because they wound up dead on Porter, and I live out on the end of Porter?”

  “It’s a long shot,” said Tommy, “but I’d appreciate it. My week’s just gone seriously sideways, with these dead old boys.”

  “What do they look like?”

  “Two pistols, a brand-new set of steak knives, zip ties. No ID at all. Car was stolen yesterday.”

  Flynne was getting dressed as fast and as quietly as she could.

  “How were they killed?” Burton asked, like he’d ask about an inning in a baseball game.

  “Shot in the head, with what I’d take to be a .22, from the size of the holes. Plus there’s no exit wound, so anyway we’ll get bullets.”

  “Made to sit still for it?”

  Flynne was pulling a clean t-shirt over her head.

  “Where it gets complicated,” Tommy said. “Chinese four-seater, they were shot from outside. Driver got it through the windshield, one beside him got his through the door window on his side, one behind him through the rear door window, one behind the driver through the rear window, back of the head. Like somebody walked around the car, popped ’em one at a time. But it looks like two of them were holding pistols when they were shot, so why weren’t they shooting back?”

  Flynne was scrubbing her face with a wet wipe. She used yesterday’s t-shirt as a towel. Then she dug her lip gloss out of her jeans and put some on.

  “Got a locked-room mystery on your hands, Tommy,” Burton said.

  “What I got on my hands is State Police,” she heard Tommy say, as she went out into the hall, touching the National Geographics for luck, and down the stairs.

  She didn’t see her mother as she went through the house, but this time of night the medication tended to keep her asleep.

  “Tommy,” she said, through the screen door, “how are you?”

  “Flynne,” Tommy said, smiling, taking off his deputy hat in a way she knew was only half a joke.

  “You two woke me up.” She opened the screen door, came out. “Don’t wake Mom. There’s dead people?”

  “Sorry,” said Tommy, lowering his voice. “Multiple homicide, assassination-style, about midway between here and town.”

  “That’s builders settling scores?”

  “Probably is. But these boys stole themselves a car outside of Memphis, so they’d come a ways.”

  Memphis brought her up short.

  “I’ll go look at them for you, Tommy,” said Burton, watching her.

  “Thanks,” said Tommy, putting his hat back on. “Nice to see you, Flynne. Sorry we woke you.”

  “I’ll go with you,” she said.

  He looked at her. “Dead people with holes in their heads?”

  “State Police and stuff. Come on, Tommy. It’s not like much ever happens around here.”

  “If it was up to me,” he said, “I’d get a backhoe, dig a hole big enough, shove the car in, them in it, and cover it up. Weren’t nice people. At all. But then I’d be left wondering if whoever did it might not be worse. But we got a new coffeemaker for the car. Coffee Jones. Choice of French or Colombian.” He stepped down off the porch.

  They followed him to the big white car and got in.

  She was finishing her little paper shot of Coffee Jones French espresso as the lights and the tent and the State Police car and the ambulance came into view, Tommy slowing. She was up front with him, passenger side, the Coffee Jones unit squatting on the transmission hump between them. There were two of those stumpy bullpup guns racked below the dashboard, above her feet.

  The tent was white and modular. They’d sized it to fit the vehicle, which wasn’t very large. Bigger than the rental car Burton and Leon had taken to Davisville, but not by much. The State Police car was a standard black Prius Interceptor with that origami-looking bodywork that Leon called go-faster folds. The ambulance was the same one she’d ridden in when they’d had to take her mother to the hospital in Clanton. They had big lights up on tall skinny orange poles, their feet weighted with sandbags.

  “Okay,” Tommy said, pulling over, to someone who wasn’t there. “Got a resident to try for an ID, but I doubt he’ll know ’em. Still dead, are they?”

  “What are they doing there?” she asked, pointing. Two biggish white quadcopters were hovering about nine feet above the road, beside the white tent, making those small plotting movements, mostly still but with the odd precise twitch in one direction or another. They were probably about the size of the one she’d flown in the game, which she never had seen. They were making a lot of noise between them, and she was glad it hadn’t happened any closer to the house.

  “The big ones are mapping data off the little ones,” Tommy said, and then she saw the little ones, pale gray and swarmy, a lot of
them, flitting a few inches above the surface. “Sniffing for tire molecules.”

  “Plenty on that road, I guess,” she said.

  “Map enough, something recent might show.”

  “Who called you?” Burton asked, seated behind Tommy, in the Faraday cage where they put prisoners.

  “State AI. Satellite noticed the vehicle hadn’t moved for two hours. Also flagged your property for unusual drone activity, but I told ’em that was you and your friends playing games.”

  “Appreciate it.”

  “How long you intend to be playing?”

  “Hard to say,” said Burton.

  “Kind of a special tournament?”

  “Kind of,” said Burton.

  “Ready to have a look, then?” Tommy asked.

  “Sure,” said Burton.

  “You can stay in the car, Flynne. Want another coffee?”

  “No,” she said, “and no thank you. I’m going with you.” She got out, noticing how clean the car was. Department’s pride and joy, she knew, only a year old.

  Tommy and Burton got out, Tommy putting his hat on and checking the screen of his phone.

  There was Queen Anne’s lace grown up flat and level, a carpet of flowers, from the bottom of the roadside ditch, hiding the fact that there was a ditch at all. She must have walked past this spot hundreds of times, going to school, then coming back, but it hadn’t been a place. Now, she thought, looking at the lights, the square white tent, it looked like they were making a commercial, but really it was a murder scene.

  A policewoman, State, in a white paper hazmat suit, half unzipped, was standing in the middle of Porter, eating a pulled-pork sandwich. Flynne liked her haircut. Wondered if Tommy did. Then she wondered where you got a pulled-pork sandwich, this time of night.

  Two figures in hazmat suits emerged from the tent, one of them dangling, in either hand, a pistol in a large zip-top freezer bag. One pistol was black, the other a multicolored fab job, ghetto-style, yellow and bright blue.

  “Hey, Tommy,” said the one with the guns, muffled by the suit.

  “Hey, Jeffers,” said Tommy. “This is Burton Fisher. Family’s lived up the road since about World War One. He’s kindly agreed to see if he’s ever laid eyes on our customers before, much as I assume he hasn’t.”

  “Mr. Fisher,” said the hazmat suit, and then its goggles looked at her.

  “His sister, Flynne,” Tommy said. “She doesn’t need to see the customers.”

  The hazmat suit passed the freezer bags to the other one, then undid zips on the goggled hood. A pink, closely shaved head, blinking. “Prints came back on all four customers, Tommy. Nashville, not Memphis. Lots of prior. About what you’d expect. Muscle for builders: grievous bodily harm, plenty of suspicion of homicide but nothing that’s stuck.”

  “Burton can have a look anyway,” said Tommy.

  “We appreciate your time, Mr. Fisher,” said Jeffers.

  “I need to suit up?” Burton asked.

  “No,” said Jeffers, “these were for before we did the yucky parts. So we wouldn’t contaminate them.”

  Burton and Tommy ducked into the white tent, leaving her with Jeffers, as the other cop was carrying the pistols away.

  “What do you think happened?” she asked Jeffers.

  “They were driving along the road,” said Jeffers, “headed in the direction you came from. Tooled up to kill somebody. No ID on any of ’em, so they left that somewhere, to pick up later. Then, we don’t know. Front wheel’s in the ditch, hit it pretty fast, and they’re all dead, shot in the head from outside the vehicle.”

  She watched the little molecule-hunters darting close to the road. Under the lights, they cast shadows like bugs.

  “So if he ran off the road, say somebody blocked it,” Jeffers said, “ambush, shot the driver first, he went into the ditch, then maybe a couple of ambushers ran over and shot the other three before they could respond.” He looked at her, glumly pop-eyed. “Or,” he said, “anybody around here drive a trike?”

  “A trike?”

  He shrugged in the hazmat suit, in the direction of the drones. “We’re getting some tire tracks out of particulate collection. Looks like three wheels, but it’s just borderline so far, too faint.”

  “Can they do that?” Flynne asked.

  “When it works,” Jeffers said, unenthusiastically.

  Burton emerged from the tent, Tommy behind him. “Anonymous-ass strangers,” Burton said, to her. “Ugly ones. Wanna see?”

  “Take your word for it.”

  Tommy removed his hat, fanned his face with it, put it back on. “I’ll drive you back now.”

  28.

  THE HOUSE OF LOVE

  Lev’s father’s house of love, a corner property but otherwise undistinguished, was in Kensington Gore.

  The car that had driven them was piloted by a small peripheral, a homunculus seated in a cockpit rather like an elaborate ashtray, embedded in the top of the dash. Netherton assumed it was controlled by some aspect of Lev’s family’s security. It irritated him, as pointless in its way as Ash’s theatricalities. Or, he supposed, it was intended to amuse Lev’s children, in which case he doubted it did.

  Neither he nor Lev had spoken, on the way from Notting Hill. It felt good to be out of Lev’s house. He’d wished his shirt could have been pressed, though at least it had been laundered, the best such bot-free premises could offer. An antique unit called a Valetor needed repair, Ossian said.

  “You don’t, I suppose,” Netherton asked, looking up at the polarized windows of the house of love, “use this yourself?”

  “My brothers do,” said Lev. “I loathe the place. A source of pain for my mother.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Netherton, “I’d no idea.” He now remembered that he had, actually, Lev once having told him all too much about it, drinking. He looked back at their car, in time to see their driver, the homunculus, hands on its hips, apparently watching them from atop the dash. Then windows and windshield polarized.

  “I don’t think my father was ever that enthusiastic about this sort of thing,” said Lev. “There was something pro forma about it all, as if it were expected of him. I think my mother saw that too, and that made it worse.”

  “But they’re together now,” Netherton observed.

  Lev shrugged. He wore a battered black horsehide jacket with a Cossack collar. When he shrugged, it moved like a single piece of armor. “What did you think of her?”

  “Your mother?” Netherton had only seen her once, in Richmond Hill, at some particularly Russian function.

  “Lowbeer.”

  Netherton glanced both ways, up and down Kensington Gore. Not a pedestrian or vehicle in sight. London’s vast quiet seemed suddenly to press in. “Should we be talking, here?” he asked.

  “Better here than in the house,” said Lev. “More than one person’s been set up for extortion, there. What did you think of her?”

  “Intimidating,” said Netherton.

  “She offered me help with something,” Lev said. “That’s why we’re here.”

  “I was afraid of that.”

  “You were?”

  “When you came back from escorting her to her car, you seemed taken with her.”

  “I sometimes find my family oppressive,” Lev said. “It’s interesting, to meet someone with a countervailing degree of agency.”

  “Isn’t she basically doing the City’s will, though? And aren’t your family and the Guilds quite deeply in one another’s pockets?”

  “We all do the City’s will, Wilf. Don’t imagine otherwise.”

  “What was her suggestion, then?” Netherton asked.

  “You’re about to see,” said Lev. He mounted the steps to the entrance of the house of love. “I’m here,” he said to the door, “with my friend Netherton.”

  The door made a low whistling sound, seemed to ripple slightly, then swung smoothly and silently inward. Netherton followed Lev up the steps and through it, into
a foyer of variegated pinks and corals.

  “Labial,” said Lev. “So crushingly obvious.”

  “Majora,” agreed Netherton, craning his neck at a fretwork archway carved from some glossy and particularly juicy-looking rose stone. Or deposited, rather, piecemeal, by bots, the whole place having that look of never having been touched by human hands.

  “Mr. Lev. So good to see you, Mr. Lev.” Not young, the woman was otherwise of no particular age, possibly Malaysian, her cheekbones etched in graceful arcs of tiny triangular laser scars. “It’s been too long.”

  “Hello, Anna,” said Lev. Netherton wondered if she’d been calling him Mr. Lev since his childhood. It seemed possible. “This is Wilf Netherton.”

  “Mr. Netherton,” said the woman, ducking her head.

  “They’re here?” Lev asked.

  “Upstairs, first floor. The escort satisfied herself that we were legitimate prospective buyers, then left. Should you choose to purchase, the nutrient equipment and other service modules will be delivered to Notting Hill. If not, they’ll send someone to collect her.”

  “Who will?” Netherton asked.

  “A firm in Mayfair,” said Lev, starting up a curving coral stairway. “Estate sales, mainly. Pre-owned.”

  “Pre-owned what?” Netherton followed, the woman a few steps behind.

  “Peripherals. Quite high end. Some early collectibles. We haven’t time to have something printed up.”

  “Is this about Lowbeer helping you?”

  “It’s about my helping her. Reciprocally,” said Lev.

  “I was afraid of that.”

  “The blue salon,” said the woman, behind them. “Would you care for drinks?”

  “Gin tonic,” said Netherton, so quickly that he was afraid she mightn’t have been able to understand him.

  “No, thanks,” said Lev.

  Netherton turned on the stairs, catching the woman’s eye and nodding, as he held up two fingers.

  “This way,” Lev said, taking his arm, as the stairs ended. He led Netherton into a depthless, deeply blue room, its walls seemingly at some great but indeterminate distance. A fantastically cheesy twilight, a gloaming of second-rate nightclubs, seaside casinos, illusorily extended in a room that could scarcely have been the size of Lev’s drawing room.