The Peripheral

by William Gibson

  “Don’t,” he said.

  “Know what you look like?” Leaning over her knees.

  “No,” he said, though the emulation software’s sigil depicted something spherical, two-wheeled, with a topmost rectangle upright on a thin projection. She reached past him, arm growing huge, and the feed filled with a promotional image of the thing on the sigil, rectangular screen tightly framing an eager child’s face.

  “No hot synthetic bods, back here in Frontierland,” she said, “but we got Wheelie Boy. Where are you?”

  “In the Gobiwagen.”

  “The RV?”

  “At my desk,” he said.

  “That really your desk?”

  “No.”

  “Ugly-ass desk. Never was really any Coldiron?”

  “There are companies, registered in that name, in your Colombia, your Panama,” he said. “And now in your United States of America. You’re an executive of that one.”

  “But not there.”

  “No.”

  “Just Lev’s hobby? With your fuck-up and Lowbeer’s murder investigation on top of it?”

  “To my knowledge.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “Lowbeer suggested it,” he said. “And I wanted to see. Is it day? Is there a window? Where are we?”

  “Night,” she said. “My room. Bright moon.” She reached to the side, turning off a light source. Instantly, she was differently beautiful. Dark eyes larger. Daguerreotype, he remembered. “Turn around,” she said, doing it for him. “I have to put my jeans on.”

  Her room, rotating the cam as far as he could, was like the interior of some nomadic yurt. Nondescript furniture, tumuli of clothing, printed matter. This actual moment in the past, decades before his birth. A world he’d imagined, but now, somehow, in its reality, unimaginable. “Have you always lived here?”

  She bent, plucked him up, carrying him toward the window, into moonlight. “Sure.”

  And then the moon. “I know this is real,” he said, “it must be, but I can’t believe it.”

  “I can believe in yours, Wilf. Have to. You should try stretching a little.”

  “Before the jackpot,” he said, instantly regretting it.

  She turned him around then, away from the moon. Stood staring, moonlit, grave, into his eyes. “What’s that, Wilf, the jackpot?”

  Something stilled the part of him that knitted narrative, that grew the underbrush of lies in which he lived.

  79.

  THE JACKPOT

  She sat with him on her lap, in the old wooden chair under the oak in the front yard.

  Ben Carter, the youngest of Burton’s soldiers, who looked like he should still be in high school, sat on the front porch steps, bullpup across his lap, Viz in his eye, drinking coffee from a Thermos. She wanted some, but knew she’d never sleep at all if she had it, and Wilf Netherton was explaining the end of the world, or anyway of hers, this one, which seemed to have been the beginning of his.

  Wilf’s face, on the Wheelie’s tablet, had lit her way downstairs. She’d found Ben on the porch steps, guarding the house, and he’d been all embarrassed, getting up with his rifle and trying to remember where not to point it, and she’d seen he had a cap like Reece had had, with the pixilated camo that moved around. He hadn’t known whether to say hello to Wilf or not. She told him they were going to sit out under the tree and talk. He told her he’d let the others know where she was, but please not to go anywhere else, and not to mind any drones. So she’d gone out to the chair and sat in it with Wilf in the Wheelie Boy, and he’d started to explain what he called the jackpot.

  And first of all that it was no one thing. That it was multicausal, with no particular beginning and no end. More a climate than an event, so not the way apocalypse stories liked to have a big event, after which everybody ran around with guns, looking like Burton and his posse, or else were eaten alive by something caused by the big event. Not like that.

  It was androgenic, he said, and she knew from Ciencia Loca and National Geographic that that meant because of people. Not that they’d known what they were doing, had meant to make problems, but they’d caused it anyway. And in fact the actual climate, the weather, caused by there being too much carbon, had been the driver for a lot of other things. How that got worse and never better, and was just expected to, ongoing. Because people in the past, clueless as to how that worked, had fucked it all up, then not been able to get it together to do anything about it, even after they knew, and now it was too late.

  So now, in her day, he said, they were headed into androgenic, systemic, multiplex, seriously bad shit, like she sort of already knew, figured everybody did, except for people who still said it wasn’t happening, and those people were mostly expecting the Second Coming anyway. She’d looked across the silver lawn, that Leon had cut with the push-mower whose cast-iron frame was held together with actual baling wire, to where moon shadows lay, past stunted boxwoods and the stump of a concrete birdbath they’d pretended was a dragon’s castle, while Wilf told her it killed 80 percent of every last person alive, over about forty years.

  And hearing that, she just wondered if it could mean anything, really, when somebody told you something like that. When it was his past and your future.

  What had they done, she’d asked him, her first question since he’d started, with all the bodies?

  The usual things, he’d said, because it was never all at once. Then, later, for a while, nothing, and then the assemblers. The assemblers, nanobots, had come later. The assemblers had also done things like excavating and cleaning the buried rivers of London, after they’d finished tidying the die-off. Had done everything she’d seen on her way to Cheapside. Had built the tower where she’d seen the woman prepare for her party and then be killed, built all the others in the grid of what he called shards, and cared for it all, constantly, in his time after the jackpot.

  It hurt him to talk about it, she felt, but she guessed he didn’t know how much, or how. She could tell he didn’t unpack this, much, or maybe ever. He said that people like Ash made their whole lives about it. Dressed in black and marked themselves, but for them it was more about other species, the other great dying, than the 80 percent.

  No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves. And all of it around people: how people were, how many of them there were, how they’d changed things just by being there.

  The shadows on the lawn were black holes, bottomless, or like velvet had been spread, perfectly flat.

  But science, he said, had been the wild card, the twist. With everything stumbling deeper into a ditch of shit, history itself become a slaughterhouse, science had started popping. Not all at once, no one big heroic thing, but there were cleaner, cheaper energy sources, more effective ways to get carbon out of the air, new drugs that did what antibiotics had done before, nanotechnology that was more than just car paint that healed itself or camo crawling on a ball cap. Ways to print food that required much less in the way of actual food to begin with. So everything, however deeply fucked in general, was lit increasingly by the new, by things that made people blink and sit up, but then the rest of it would just go on, deeper into the ditch. A progress accompanied by constant violence, he said, by sufferings unimaginable. She felt him stretch past that, to the future where he lived, then pull himself there, quick, unwilling to describe the worst of what had happened, would happen.

  She looked at the moon. It would look the same, she guessed, through the decades he’d sketched for her.

  None of that, he said, had necessarily been as bad for very rich people. The richest had gotten richer, there being fewer to own whatever there was. Constant
crisis had provided constant opportunity. That was where his world had come from, he said. At the deepest point of everything going to shit, population radically reduced, the survivors saw less carbon being dumped into the system, with what was still being produced eaten by these towers they’d built, which was the other thing the one she’d patrolled was there for, not just housing rich folks. And seeing that, for them, the survivors, was like seeing the bullet dodged.

  “The bullet was the eighty percent, who died?”

  And he just nodded, on the Wheelie’s screen, and went on, about how London, long since the natural home of everyone who owned the world but didn’t live in China, rose first, never entirely having fallen.

  “What about China?”

  The Wheelie Boy’s tablet creaked faintly, raising the angle of its camera. “They’d had a head start,” he said.

  “At what?”

  “At how the world would work, after the jackpot. This,” and the tablet creaked again, surveying her mother’s lawn, “is still ostensibly a democracy. A majority of empowered survivors, considering the jackpot, and no doubt their own positions, wanted none of that. Blamed it, in fact.”

  “Who runs it, then?”

  “Oligarchs, corporations, neomonarchists. Hereditary monarchies provided conveniently familiar armatures. Essentially feudal, according to its critics. Such as they are.”

  “The King of England?”

  “The City of London,” he said. “The Guilds of the City. In alliance with people like Lev’s father. Enabled by people like Lowbeer.”

  “The whole world’s funny?” She remembered Lowbeer saying that.

  “The klept,” he said, misunderstanding her, “isn’t funny at all.”

  80.

  THE CLOVIS LIMIT

  Clovis Fearing, introduced by Lowbeer as a very old friend, most spectacularly and evidently was: as old or older than Lowbeer herself, and very deliberately looking it. With her head likely hairless under a black knit cloche, atop a display of Victorian mourning so fustily correct as to make Ash’s outfits seem racily burlesque, she resembled some crumbling relict saint, one with acute and highly mobile black eyes, their whites yellowed and bloodshot. The Clovis Limit, her shop in Portobello Road, dealt exclusively in Americana.

  He was here, Lowbeer had explained on their short ride over, because Daedra had now invited him to her party on Tuesday evening, though Lowbeer hadn’t yet permitted him to open the message. That, along with his RSVP, must be done from a location that didn’t involve Lev. One, he understood, that wouldn’t introduce the architecture of the Zubov family’s security to whatever architectures Daedra herself might be involved with, something Lowbeer regarded as messiness, and very much to be avoided.

  “This young man, Clovis, is Wilf Netherton,” she said now, looking mildly around at the barbaric clutter of the crowded shop. “He’s a publicist.”

  Mrs. Fearing, for such was her title on the shop front, eyed him, lizard-like, out of perhaps the densest matrix of wrinkles and mottle he’d ever encountered. Her skull was worryingly visible, seemingly mere microns behind what time had left of her face. “I don’t suppose we should blame him,” she said, her voice surprisingly firm, accent American but more pronounced than Flynne’s. “Wouldn’t think you’d need one.” Her hands, atop the counter’s glass, were like the claws of a bird, the back of one marked with an utterly illegible blot of subcutaneous ink, ancient and totally unmoving.

  “His friends are continua enthusiasts,” Lowbeer said. “Are you familiar with that?”

  “I’ve had a run of them, these past few years. They’ll buy anything from the twenty thirties, twenty forties. Seem to try to get as far back from the jackpot proper as they can. About twenty twenty-eight, latest. What can I do you for, then, hon?”

  “Wilf,” said Lowbeer, “if you wouldn’t mind, I need to catch up with Clovis. You could open your mail and make that call from the pavement, if you like. Do stay near the car. Should you stray, it will retrieve you.”

  “Of course,” said Netherton. “A pleasure, Mrs. Fearing.”

  Ignoring him, Clovis Fearing was peering sharply at Lowbeer.

  “I need my memory refreshed, dear,” he heard Lowbeer say, as he went out.

  Saturday’s crowd had considerably thinned, this late in the evening, the barrow sellers mostly packed up and gone, though shops like Fearing’s remained open. Lowbeer’s car was parked there, cloaked but steaming slightly, an odd effect, though passersby studiously ignored it. A pair of theatrically professorial Italians, deep in conversation, were passing as he emerged. They crossed to an horologer’s shop, diagonally opposite. The car was making random ticking sounds, as of metal cooling, contracting. He remembered Flynne’s face, luminous in the moonlight, stricken. He hadn’t liked having to tell her about the jackpot. He disliked the narrative aspects of history, particularly that part of it. People were so boringly deformed by it, like Ash, or else, like Lev, scarcely aware of it.

  He turned to face Mrs. Fearing’s display window, pretending to study a shallow glass-topped tray of stone arrow points, enigmatic symbols of a prior order. In Flynne’s moonlit garden, he felt, he’d glimpsed some other order. He tried to recall what Lowbeer had said Ash thought about him, in that regard, but couldn’t. He tapped the roof of his mouth, selected Daedra’s invitation, studied its particulars. The event was to be held in Farringdon, Edenmere Mansions, fifty-sixth floor, and that would be Aelita’s residence, the place Burton had been assigned to watch, where Flynne had apparently seen her murdered. He was invited, as was Dr. Annie Courrèges, though she was expected peripherally. The evening was described only as “a gathering,” no hint as to purpose or tone.

  Tongue back to palate. Gyre on her sigil. No towering granite hall, this time. An indeterminate space, crepuscular, intimate, slightly boudoirlike in affect. “Mr. Netherton!” Her posh-girl module, startled but delighted.

  “Responding to Daedra’s very kind invitation, thank you,” he said. “Dr. Courrèges will accompany me peripherally.”

  “Daedra will be so sorry to have missed you, Mr. Netherton. Shall I have her try to phone you?”

  “That won’t be necessary, thank you. Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye, Mr. Netherton! Have a lovely evening!”

  “Thank you. Goodbye.”

  Daedra’s sigil vanished, Lowbeer’s replacing it. “You appear to be in quite good odor,” she said.

  “You were listening.”

  “As the pope remains Catholic, I trust. Please come back in for a moment.”

  He reentered the shop, avoiding a stuffed, top-hatted alligator, or perhaps crocodile, upright and waist-high, which wore a matched and holstered set of what he took to be a child’s toy pistols, their cast-metal handles decorated with steer heads. Lowbeer and Fearing were still at the counter. Between them now, a rectangular tray of off-white plastic.

  “Recognize this?” asked Lowbeer, indicating the tray.

  “No,” he said. He saw the words CLANTON BICENTENNIAL in a clumsy font, a pair of years two centuries apart, small drawings or vignettes, the printing faded, worn.

  “Your peripheral happened to record one of these in her house,” Lowbeer said. “We compared the various objects there to the catalogs of Clovis’s cooperative of dealers. This one was under Ladbroke Grove. Assemblers brought it up.”

  “Just now?”

  “While you were out.”

  “I don’t recognize it.” He vaguely knew that former tube tunnels in the vicinity were packed with artifacts, the combined stock of many dealers, minutely cataloged and instantly accessible to assemblers. It struck him as sad, somehow, that this thing had been down there, just moments before. He hoped it wasn’t literally the one from Flynne’s house.

  “Hers was on a mantelpiece,” Lowbeer said, “pride of place.”

  “Been to Clanton,” said Mrs. Fearing. “Shot a man there. Lounge of the Ramada Inn. In the ankle. I was always a decent shot, at the range, but it’s how you do
when you aren’t that counts.”

  “Why?” asked Netherton.

  “He was trying to leave,” said Mrs. Fearing.

  “You were a piece of work, Clovis,” said Lowbeer.

  “You were a British spy,” said Mrs. Fearing.

  “So were you,” said Lowbeer, “though on a freelance basis.”

  Mrs. Fearing’s extraordinary topography of wrinkles readjusted slightly. A smile, possibly.

  “Why did you say she’d been a British spy?” he asked Lowbeer, a few minutes later, in her car. Two small children, tended by a Michikoid nanny, had been passing as the door decloaked, and had applauded, delighted. Lowbeer had wiggled the fingers of one hand at them as she’d climbed in, after Netherton.

  “She was,” said Lowbeer, “at the time.” She gazed at the flame of her candle, on the table between them. “I ran her, out of the embassy in Washington. It led to her marrying Clement Fearing, as it happened, one of the last Tory MPs.” She frowned. “I never shared her enthusiasm for Clement, at all, but there was no denying the convenience of an influential husband. Not that she wasn’t inexplicably fond of him. Terrible days.”

  “I told Flynne, about the jackpot.”

  “I listened, I’m afraid,” said Lowbeer, obviously neither afraid nor in the least regretful. “You made a good job of it, considering.”

  “She demanded I tell her. Now I worry that I’ve made her sad, frightened her.” And he actually did, he realized.

  “It is,” said Lowbeer, “as people used to say, to my unending annoyance, what it is. I’m going to have Ash sedate you, when we get back.”

  “You are?”

  “It’s like alcoholic oblivion, but without the bother of the run-up or the subsequent mess. I need you rested. I must have you and Flynne ready for Daedra’s party, Tuesday evening.”

  “You had so little time with her, back there,” Netherton said. “I thought you needed information.”

  “I do,” she said, “but she’ll need time to retrieve and decrypt it. It’s nothing she literally remembers.”