The Peripheral

by William Gibson

  “He hadn’t actually been there, before?”

  “Present at the start, certainly, for their initial flotilla and whatnot. Perhaps for the cannibalism as well. He isn’t at all nice, Hamed. Good at pretending, though.”

  “What did he pretend to be?” he asked.

  “A prophet. A shaman. Motivated extraordinarily, thus extraordinarily motivating. Taking the same drugs they took, which he himself provided. Though of course he didn’t actually take them. If you fancy resenting the tedious, I recommend intentional communities, particularly those led by charismatics.”

  “You believe he was here, while he was doing that?”

  “No, not here. Geneva.”

  “Geneva?”

  “As a place to await an opportunity to optimally monetize the island, as good as any. And, of course, his mother is Swiss.”

  “With two penises and the head of a frog?”

  “All easily reversible,” said Lowbeer, pinching out the candle’s flame. “He’s made a mistake, though, in not staying there. London’s his mistake. Premature.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s come to my attention again,” she said, her expression just then making Netherton wish for another change of topic.

  “What is it,” Netherton asked, “since you’re encouraging my curiosity, that you’ve offered Lev?”

  “Assistance with his hobby.”

  “Would you lie to me?”

  “If the need were sufficiently pressing,” she said, “yes.”

  “You’re telling me you’re helping him manage his stub?”

  “I’ve an overview of its history, after all. I’ve information which isn’t generally available, here. Nor there either, or I should say, then. Where certain bodies are buried, you see. The nature of actual as opposed to ostensible policy, for any number of state and nonstate players. Fed the right bits of that, on a need-to-know basis, Ash and Ossian become considerably empowered. I’m surprised at just how engrossing I’ve started to find it.”

  “Who else is in there, trying to kill Flynne and her brother? Do you know that?”

  “I don’t,” she said, “yet, though I’ve suspicions.” Taking a crisp white handkerchief from an inside breast pocket, she wiped her thumb and forefinger. “This business with al-Habib is fully as dull as its pretentious exoticism, Mr. Netherton. We’re on the same page, there. Real estate, recycled plastic, money. Whoever’s gained entrance to Lev’s stub is likely involved with that. A more interesting question, of course, being how they came to be admitted.”

  “Is it?”

  “It is, since the very mysterious server enabling all of this remains a mystery,” she said.

  “May I ask you what it is that you actually do?”

  “You pride yourself on not knowing who employs you. Rather behind the curve, in that. I might pride myself, were I so inclined, on not knowing what it is I do.”

  “Literally?”

  “If one has a sufficiently open mind about it, certainly. I was an intelligence officer, early in my career. In a sense I suppose I still am, but today I find myself enabled to undertake investigations, as I see fit. Into, should I so deem them, matters of state security. Simultaneously, I’m a law enforcement officer, or whatever that means in as frank a kleptocracy as ours. I sometimes feel like an antibody, Mr. Netherton. One protecting a disease.”

  She offered him an uncharacteristically wan smile then, and he remembered her saying she’d had memories suppressed, as he and Rainey’s rented Wu had sat with her in her car. She must have more, unsuppressed, he thought, because just then he was certain that he felt their weight.

  69.

  HOW IT SOUNDS

  When Reece tased her in the neck with what she’d thought was a flashlight, she’d just noticed how nothing on Burton’s table was squared up straight. It hurt. Then she wasn’t thinking, wasn’t there.

  After her talk with Macon, she’d ridden home, taking her time, trying not to notice where the dead men’s car went into the ditch. Not looking out for drones. Pretending things were normal.

  Her mother was asleep when she got there, Janice replaced by Lithonia, who said Leon had driven her out from Fab. Upstairs, she stretched out on her own bed, not meaning to sleep, and dreamed of London. From the air, every street was crowded as that Cheapside, but cars and trucks and buses instead of horses and carts. Full of people, except it wasn’t London but her town, gotten huge, rich, with a river the size of the Thames because of that. Waking, she went downstairs. Her mother still sleeping, Lithonia watching something on her Viz. Then down to the trailer, wondering if Burton was there but too lazy to check on Badger.

  “Fuck, Reece,” she protested now, tugging at the zip ties around each of her wrists.

  Reece, driving, didn’t say anything, just looked over, and that made the fear come. Not because he’d tased her and fastened her to this car seat with zip ties, but because, when he looked over, she saw that he was scared shitless.

  She had a zip tie around each wrist, one fastening those together, all looped through with a longer one that went down under the front of the seat. She could raise her hands high enough to rest them on her thighs, but that was it.

  Didn’t know what he was driving, but it wasn’t cardboard, wasn’t electric.

  “Made me,” he said. “No fucking choice.”

  “Who did?”

  “Pickett.”

  “Slow down.”

  “He’ll be after us,” he said.

  “Pickett?”

  “Burton.”

  “Jesus . . .” Was this Gravely? She thought it was but then she didn’t. Looked out at roadside bushes, whipping past.

  “Said they’d kill my family,” he said. “Would, too, ’cept I don’t have any. Just be me. Dead.”

  “Why? What did you do?”

  “Not a fucking thing. Kill me if I didn’t get you for them. He’s got people inside Homes. Homes can find anybody. So they’d find me, then somebody’d come and kill me.”

  “Could’ve told us.”

  “Sure, then they’d come and kill me. Kill me anyway, I don’t get you over there right now.”

  She looked over and saw a muscle working, all on its own, at the hinge of his jaw. Like if you hooked it up to something, it could send his life story in code, all the parts of it he couldn’t tell, maybe didn’t know.

  “Didn’t want to,” he said. “Not like I had a choice, to believe them or not. They’re who they are, and that’s what they do.”

  She felt both front pockets of her jeans. Phone wasn’t there, wasn’t on her wrist, she wasn’t sitting on it. “Where’s my phone?”

  “Copper mesh they gave me.”

  She looked out the window. Then at the plastic chrome lettering on the glove compartment. “What’s this you’re driving?”

  “Jeep Vindicator.”

  “Like it?”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Helps to make conversation,” she said.

  “It’s not cardboard,” he said, “it’s American.”

  “Don’t they make most of it in Mexico?”

  “You just want to shit on my damn car now?”

  “That you’re fucking kidnapping me in?”

  “Don’t say that!”

  “Why not?”

  “How it sounds,” he said, between his teeth, and she knew he was just that far from crying.

  70.

  ASSET

  The kitchen was fragrant with the blini Lev was making. “She’s helping you with the stub,” Netherton said. “She told me.” Rain was falling in the garden, on the artificial-looking leaves of the hostas. Did thylacines dislike rain? Neither Gordon nor Tyenna was in sight.

  Lev looked up from the segmented iron pan. “I don’t expect you to understand.”

  “Understand what?”

  “The appeal of continua. Or of collaborating with her. She’s already gotten us into the White House.”

  “That would be what, then,
the first Gonzales administration?”

  “No direct contact. Yet. But we’re close. No one I know of has ever penetrated a stub this efficiently. She knows where the pivots are, the moving parts. How it works.”

  “Is that what she offered you, after that first meeting?”

  “It’s reciprocal,” Lev said, removing the pan from the element. “She assists me, we protect Burton and his sister, you help her with the Aelita business, Daedra, whatever that is.” Using a spatula, he began to transfer the blini to two waiting plates. “Salmon, or caviar?”

  “Is the caviar real?”

  “You’d want my grandfather, for caviar from a sturgeon.”

  “I wouldn’t, actually.”

  “I’ve had it,” Lev said. “I couldn’t tell the difference. This is entirely its equal.”

  “I will, thank you.”

  Lev tidily burdened each blintze with sour cream and caviar.

  “Ossian’s taken delivery of a Bentley,” Netherton said. “Drove itself in from Richmond Hill. Like a silver-gray steam iron, windowless, six wheels. Hideous. Parked by Ash’s tepee. What’s that about?”

  “Executive transport,” Lev said. “Early jackpot. They need to disassemble something, so they’ll do it inside. Assemblers might be released.”

  “The buggy?”

  Lev looked up from the blini. “Who told you about that?”

  “Ossian pointed it out to me, when we were waiting for your brother’s peripheral. He didn’t mention disassembling it. But later I saw him pushing it through the garage, and Lowbeer told me she wants its weapons.”

  “He didn’t know, when you first saw it. She only asked for it when you’d returned from that club. Immediately after. Well, not for it, exactly. She asked if I had any weapons. I don’t keep weapons. But then I remembered.”

  “Assemblers?”

  “Short-acting,” Lev said. “Decommission themselves. If there were an accident, the vehicle should be able to contain them.”

  “Dominika didn’t want it, Ossian said.”

  “Neither did I. Grandfather means well, but he’s of another generation. You haven’t visited the Federation, have you?”

  “No,” said Netherton.

  “I’ve somehow managed to avoid it myself.”

  “Dominika was born here?”

  “Literally, in Notting Hill,” said Lev.

  Lev was one of those people whom marriage seemed basically to suit in some fundamental way, a state Netherton found unimaginable. The world seemed to consist increasingly of such states. “Why does Lowbeer want the buggy’s weapons?” he asked, as Lev passed him a warm plate.

  “She hasn’t said. Given the quality of advice she’s providing Ash and Ossian, I’m disinclined to second-guess her.”

  “You’ve no idea who else is in your stub?”

  “No. But their quants are easily as good as Ash’s.” They were seated at the pine table now, Lev with his fork poised above his blini. He frowned. “Yes?” he said. “When? Do they know who?” He looked at Netherton, or rather through him. “Let me know, then.” He put down his fork.

  “What is it?”

  “The signatures of Flynne’s phone have vanished, about two miles from her home.”

  “You don’t know where she is?”

  “We do,” said Lev. “She has a tracker in her stomach. The service alerts us if she leaves our specified perimeter, as it now has. Both her tracker and her phone drove together to the nearest town, which she does frequently, then both turned north. As they did, her phone was lost. Either she turned it off, which she never does, or someone blocked its signal. Shortly after that, she left the perimeter. The vehicle has since been exceeding speed limits, on very rough roads.”

  “She’s in it now, this vehicle?”

  “Yes, but nearing the base of operations of the drug synthesist who controls her county.”

  “She’s been abducted?” asked Netherton.

  “Lowbeer’s cross, Ash says.”

  “What are you doing about it?”

  “Lowbeer has her own asset, or assets, in the stub,” Lev said. “Ash says they’re on this too. As are her brother and Macon, of course.”

  “Who are they, these assets?”

  “She isn’t saying. Ash and Ossian don’t like that. It would be whoever has access to the Gonzales White House, I imagine, not that she’s ever suggested as much.” He picked up his fork. “Eat these while they’re still warm. Then we’ll go down and see Ash.”

  71.

  MCMANSION

  Pickett’s place, as much as she’d ever see of it, wasn’t what she’d imagined at all.

  Reece had driven her past a white gatehouse with window slits, but hadn’t turned in. Further along, past a long stretch of white plastic fence, fabbed to look like somebody’s idea of Old Plantation, he’d turned in to a less-important-looking gate, already open, where two men in cammies and helmets were waiting, beside a golf cart. They both had rifles. Reece got out and talked to one of them, while the other one spoke to somebody else on his headset, none of them looking at her.

  She’d given up trying to talk to Reece a few miles back. She’d seen it made his driving worse, and there was no point getting killed, out on some back-ass county road in the dark, even in a situation like this. They’d kept passing old wrecks, left there because the state, let alone the county, couldn’t afford to do anything about them. She’d wondered if people in those had been talking to somebody like Reece when the crash happened. Then she’d remembered swallowing the black pill in the Hefty snack bar, and wondered if it was doing what it was supposed to do. Reece didn’t know about that, but he’d put her phone in a Faraday pouch.

  Then Reece came back to the Jeep, opened the door on her side, took a pair of wire clippers out of his side pocket, snipped through the zip tie that fastened her to the seat, and told her to get out.

  He put his hand on her head when she did, the way you saw cops do in shows, and it made her think how he’d never touched her before, that she could remember, not even shaken hands, and she’d known him to speak to for about three years.

  “You see Burton,” he said, “tell him wasn’t anything I could do.”

  “I know there wasn’t,” she said, and it hurt her that it was true. That a man like Pickett, just by being what he was, could give Reece a choice of doing this or waiting for them to come and kill him.

  He closed the Jeep’s door, handed the pouch with her phone in it to the man standing nearest, walked around the back, got in on the driver’s side, closed his door, pulled back out on the road, and drove away.

  The man with her phone in the Faraday pouch snapped what she guessed was a dog’s training leash onto the zip tie that held the ones around her wrists together. The other man was watching the gate close itself. Then they brought her over to the golf cart, which said CORBELL PICKETT TESLA on the side. The man who held the leash sat beside her, in the back, and the other man drove, and neither one of them said a word, as they drove her to Pickett’s house, some back way, on single-lane gravel that hadn’t been properly graded.

  The house had floodlights trained on it, bright as day and ugly as shit, though this was just the back of it. They’d painted everything white, she guessed to tie it together, but it didn’t. Looked like somebody had patched a factory, or maybe a car dealership, onto a McMansion, then stuck an Interstate chain restaurant and a couple of swimming pools on top of that. There were sheds scattered, beside the gravel and further back, and machinery too, under big tarps, and she wondered if he actually built drugs here. She’d figured he wouldn’t, but maybe he didn’t have to give a shit. But then maybe he didn’t actually live here.

  The cart rolled up to a corrugated white door in the factory-looking part, stopped, and the man beside her gave the leash a little tug, so she got off. He watched her, but didn’t make eye contact. The other man touched something on his belt and the door clanked up. They led her into a big, mostly dark space, and then between rows
of white plastic tanks taller than she was, like the ones for holding rainwater.

  Came to a wall she guessed was the foundation of the original house, rough-cast concrete, with a door in it. Regular door from Hefty, but with an old-fashioned hasp bolted on it, a big rusty bolt stuck down through the U-shaped part. More tree fort than builder baron, but then she guessed he didn’t have to give a shit about that either. She waited, like she saw you did if somebody had you on a leash, while the other one pulled out the bolt, opened the door, and turned on too many lights all at once, hanging low from a rough concrete ceiling that was already none too high. They led her over to a table in the middle, the only furniture in the room aside from two chairs, one on either long side of it, like the ones in the Hefty snack bar. The table, bolted to the floor with galvanized L-brackets, had a stainless-steel top that had seen a lot of wear, like in a cafeteria kitchen. Some dents and dings there that she didn’t want to imagine how they’d been made, and someone had drilled a hole exactly in the center, put in a big screw eye, the kind you’d use to hang a porch swing. The man with the leash walked her around to the chair behind the table facing the door, pointed at it, and she sat down. Then he tugged her wrists over to the eye bolt, fastened Reece’s white zip ties to it with a much more serious-looking zip tie, this one in that official Homes blue, unclipped the leash, and they both just turned and walked out, leaving the lights on and closing the door behind them. She heard them drop the bolt into place.