The Peripheral

by William Gibson

  “Where’d you hear that?” Burton asked.

  “Clovis gave me the antidote,” she said.

  “Party time around here?” Burton was looking at Griff, hard.

  “Let’s discuss it after we eat,” Griff said.

  “What is it, Burton?”

  “On a war crimes dial stops at ten? About a twelve.” Burton put a slice of roll in his mouth, chewed, looking at Griff.

  88.

  PARLIAMENT OF BIRDS

  Ash’s tepee smelled of dust, though nothing there seemed actually to be dusty. Perhaps there was a candle for that, he thought, taking a seat. The peripheral regarded him levelly, from around the ostentatious intricacy of Ash’s faux-antique display, then lowered its eyes, as if tracing the patterns carved in the tabletop. Ash was to his left, nearer the peripheral. She’d unpinned her threatening little hat, which resembled a black leather toad, and placed it before her on the table. “You’re being given a ticket for the parliament of birds,” she’d said to him, and when he’d started to ask what that might mean, she’d touched a finger to her black lips, silencing him.

  Now he saw the jet-and-sterling spider from her chatelaine, untethered, crawl down from her left jacket cuff, to pick its rapid, needle-footed way across the carving, toward him, rhinestone eyes glinting.

  It climbed onto the back of his left hand. Entirely painlessly. Indeed, he couldn’t feel it there. He thought of the Medici, dropping tendrils imperceptibly between the cells of his skin.

  Ash spoke at length then, in birdsong, and he understood.

  “Don’t do that,” he said, horrified, when she’d stopped, but what he actually produced was birdsong, shrill and urgent. But then he realized that what she’d told him was that the “ticket,” which they could only use here, and the one time, admitted him to their morphing encryption, hers and Ossian’s, which was as impenetrable as anything in the world, so that even Lowbeer and her omnipotent aunties were unlikely to learn what was said. And then she began to tell him more.

  That Lowbeer (and he did his best to ignore birdsong gradually becoming something characterized by harsh glottal clicks) had become very interested in continua and their enthusiasts. There were, for instance, Ash said, continua enthusiasts who’d been at it for several years longer than Lev, some of whom had conducted deliberate experiments on multiple continua, testing them sometimes to destruction, insofar as their human populations were concerned. One of these early enthusiasts, in Berlin, known to the community only as “Vespasian,” was a weapons fetishist, famously sadistic in his treatment of the inhabitants of his continua, whom he set against one another in grinding, interminable, essentially pointless combat, harvesting the weaponry evolved, though some too specialized to be of use outside whatever baroque scenario had produced it.

  Netherton glanced at the peripheral, which could have understood none of this in any language, but was watching Ash as she said that Lowbeer had obtained from this Vespasian plans and specifications for something that Conner Penske was being trained to operate.

  “What?” Netherton asked, hearing the query emerge instead as two mewling, long-voweled syllables.

  She’d no idea, Ash said, her own vowels lengthening, but given Vespasian’s fetishism and Conner’s evident delight in his first lesson, it was most certainly a weapon of some kind. Lowbeer, she pointed out, would have resources for having things rapidly and secretly fabricated.

  But why, Netherton asked, their shared tongue growing more Germanic, was Ash telling him this now? He didn’t tell her that he found it increased his anxiety, or that this costume jewelry perched on the back of his hand made him want to scream, but he wished that those feelings could somehow be inadvertently conveyed through whatever mutant Low Dutch he might momentarily be mouthing.

  Because, Ash said (swinging off into something that reminded him of no language whatever, nor birdsong), Lowbeer had herself, virtually overnight, become a continua enthusiast. And because she, Ash, had come to see, while facilitating Lowbeer’s strategies in Lev’s stub, that Lowbeer was playing a longer game there than made sense for her to play. And because, and here her eyes narrowed to a single pupil per, having delivered the plans for whatever system or device to Lowbeer, Vespasian had gone uncharacteristically off to Rotterdam and died there, on Friday, suddenly and unexpectedly, but of apparently natural causes, a circumstance in which Lowbeer, in Ash’s opinion, had seemed remarkably uninterested.

  And this had all occurred since they’d met Lowbeer, she continued, so really rather a busy week. But now, she said, the period of Netherton’s ticket, necessarily quite brief, was nearing its end. Once it ended, she expected Netherton not to mention these things at all. She had been motivated in sharing, she said, out of a degree of self-concern, but also by concern for him, and for Lev, and for Flynne and her family as well, whom she viewed as relative innocents, inadvertently abroad.

  But what, Netherton asked, only now managing to ignore the constant unfamiliarity of his own verbal production, had she hoped thereby to accomplish?

  She didn’t know, he understood her to say, but had felt she had to do something. And Lowbeer’s means of knowing who said what, via the aunties of the klept, were inestimable. And here it ended, with the spider springing from his hand and scrambling back to her.

  Then the three of them sat there for a long moment, Netherton taking the peripheral’s hand beneath the table, and wondering how a sadistic continua enthusiast might die unexpectedly but seemingly naturally, in Rotterdam, and how he himself might best remember not to ask Lowbeer that, as he wasn’t supposed to know. But then, he thought, what if she’d heard them conversing in birdsong and gibberish? What wouldn’t she make of that?

  89.

  STROBE

  Griff had made her put on armor for the ride, a black-magic cotton candy jacket. Burton wore one too, and in a way that was what nearly killed him, how the lining flash-hardened with the energy of the bullet. Fired into the concrete between Burton’s feet, by a man who was probably already dead when his finger pulled the trigger, the bullet had ricocheted up, hit the jacket’s sleeve around Burton’s left wrist. The bullet had disintegrated then, something about the physics of the cotton candy tending to cause that, and one fragment headed back down, into Burton’s right thigh, nicking the femoral artery.

  It all seemed to happen at once, making no more sense than Tommy said any gunfight ever did, when you were in it. She’d been walking a little behind Burton, to his left, Clovis on her right, and afterward she remembered having sensed Clovis go up a notch, when they’d stepped out into the alley. They were going to get into Tommy’s car, to go and see her mother and try to talk her into letting them move her. Griff hadn’t mentioned the party time yet, whatever it might be, but if he didn’t, she was going to bring it up on the ride out. Mainly he’d talked about her mother, who refused to hear of moving. He wanted to move her to northern Virginia, where he said he had a safe house. Lithonia had agreed to go with her. Sweet as her mother was on Lithonia, she still wasn’t having any. Then Tommy had arrived to drive them, so she’d been looking forward to seeing her mother, even though she didn’t have much hope for her buying the idea of any safe house, and to sitting beside Tommy, if the way things were didn’t mean Carlos had to be sitting there instead, with his bullpup between his knees.

  It had been so quiet outside, in spite of the forty-seven protesters the drones had been able to count, over on the far side of the building, across the street in front of the parking lot. But Burton must’ve had his tomahawk head in his right hand, arm down at his side, the handle straight up, against the inside of his arm, and when he’d seen whatever gave the man in the squidsuit away, he’d popped the Kydex sheath off and dropped the tomahawk’s head, because she’d distinctly heard the sheath hit the concrete, just by where she’d locked her bike so many times. He’d caught the handle by its very end, how he did, before the head could hit the concrete, and wrist-snapped it, somehow, smack up into the man’s still-invis
ible head, making a sound like whacking an unripe pumpkin, and that had been the last thing she heard for a while, because then the guns were too loud to understand as sound at all.

  It seemed like separate gifs to her now. The front of Clovis’s paramedic crotch pack open like a clamshell. The fat plastic pistol clipped in it, same color as the pack. Clovis, who’d shoved her to the side so hard that it really hurt, the pistol in both her hands, arms out shoulder-high, leaning into recoil, the muzzle flash continual, until the magazine was empty, and no more expression on her face than if she’d just been driving, paying serious attention to the road. Another was ejected brass, from Carlos’s rifle, weightless cartridges, floating, like they were frozen by a strobe, but one bounced off the back of her hand, burning her. Another was the thing the squidsuits did as bullets hit them, how whatever stolen color and texture flared, whited out, died, as whoever wore it fell. And Burton on the ground, eyes open, blank, nothing moving but the blood pumping from his thigh with every heartbeat.

  Her ears ringing, so bad she never expected them to stop. Tommy holding her back, as Clovis, the reloaded pistol in its open clamshell now, pulled things from pockets behind it. Homes blue latex gloves. A flat white ceramic hook. Crouched beside Burton, she used the hook to slit his cammies back in blood-soaked flaps, exposing his right thigh. Pushed the full length of her bright blue index finger straight into the spurting hole, frowned, moved it a little. The spurting stopped. She looked up. “Walter fucking Reed,” she demanded, “stat.”

  90.

  METRIC OF CAUTION

  He was in the shower, off the Gobiwagen’s master bedroom, when Rainey’s sigil appeared. “Hello,” he said, eyes closed against shampoo.

  “Is it still true,” she asked, “that you don’t know who you actually work for?”

  “I’m unemployed.”

  “I do,” she said. “More or less.”

  “Do what?”

  “Know who you work for.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Our last date, so to speak.”

  “Yes?”

  “Your friend.”

  “Lev?”

  “The one I met.”

  “I don’t work for her.”

  “But you do what she tells you to.”

  “I suppose I do,” he said. “For obvious reasons.”

  “So would I, if I were in your situation.”

  “Which is?”

  “I don’t want to know. I made a few discreet inquiries. Now anyone I asked about her, however privately, no longer knows me. Retroactively. Never have. Some have gone to the trouble of scrubbing me from group images. As metrics of caution go, that one’s telling.”

  “It isn’t something I can discuss now. Not this way.”

  “No need. I’m calling to tell you that I’ve tendered my resignation.”

  “From whatever new version of the project?”

  “From the Ministry. I’ll be looking at the private sector.”

  “Really?”

  “Whatever it is you’re doing, Wilf, it isn’t good to know about. But I don’t, so I’ll keep it that way.”

  “Then why call me?”

  “Because in spite of myself I still give a shit about you. I have to go now. Whatever it is, consider getting out of it. Goodbye.” Her sigil vanished.

  He waved his hand, stopping the shower, stepped out, groped for one of Lev’s grandfather’s thin black linen towels, dried his eyes and face.

  He looked into the bedroom, where Penske had left the dancing master lying perfectly straight on the huge bed, like the carved lid of a knight’s sarcophagus, hands crossed upon its chest.

  “‘Whatever it is,’” he said, quoting Rainey. Surprised to discover that he missed her, and that now he supposed he would have cause to continue to.

  91.

  ISOPOD

  With Burton on the middle bed, blood on the sheets, under a drone surgical unit like the carapace of a giant pill bug, made of that same color plastic as Clovis’s pistol, the back room of Coldiron looked like a field hospital. The drone, controlled by a team at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, was sucked down tight around him, navel to just above his knees, and making a surprising amount of noise, as it did whatever they were making it do. Clunks and clicks as it worked on him. Extracting the shapeless bullet fragment, which it extruded on a little tray, patching the artery, closing up the hole in his leg. That was the plan, anyway. Hydrostatic shock hadn’t been that bad, Griff had told her, the ricochet off concrete having spilled a lot of energy. Otherwise, at that range, the impact itself might have killed him, in spite of the armor stopping the bullet.

  The drone was somewhere else peripherals might come from, she thought, reminding her she had the Wheelie Boy on her lap, on the edge of the bed furthest from Conner. When she couldn’t look at Burton anymore, because he was unconscious, with a clear tube up his nose, sticky monitor-dots on his forehead and bare chest, and a couple of different tubes in his arm, she’d look over at Conner, face smooth and quiet, running something seventy years in the future, or at Griff, phone to his ear, nodding, talking but too low for her to hear. Then, when she could again, she’d look back at Burton.

  The drone kept clunking. A pill bug was an isopod, not an insect. The biggest ones lived in the ocean. Was that high school or National Geographic? She couldn’t remember.

  Clovis had gone to take a shower. Cold to start, she’d said, and fully dressed, because that would probably get most of Burton’s blood out of her clothes. Flynne hadn’t even known there was a shower. Clovis said it was on a hose, in a janitorial closet, with a drain in the floor, and right then it didn’t seem particularly strange, Clovis explaining that, standing there with Burton’s blood all over her. He’d needed a transfusion, but they’d had plenty of blood, his type. Which meant they had Flynne’s type too, because they were the same. And they’d had this drone, that Clovis said was what the Secret Service kept handy in case the president got shot, and was maybe even being run by the same surgeons.

  If Conner hadn’t been under the crown, she’d have had to explain it all to him. Not that she knew anything about it, other than what she’d seen. Tommy had phoned for some deputies to clean things up in the alley, after, get whoever had been waiting in those squidsuits out of there, and there hadn’t been one single siren. Shooters hadn’t been local, or the deputies would’ve let Tommy know who they were by now. And it was like nobody in town had heard the shooting.

  There was something wrong with her now, she decided, looking over at her brother’s face while the drone clicked and whirred, all those little pill-bug legs doing whatever they were doing. She’d seen them glittering, as Carlos and Griff lifted it and put it down over him, Clovis kneeling by the bed with her bloody bright blue finger still stuck in his thigh, pressing on the artery, and then she’d pulled her finger out as the drone came to life, making its noises.

  The thing that was wrong was that she’d gone to where she’d been that time in Operation Northwind, but now she couldn’t scream on the couch, or walk out on Janice’s porch to puke on the grass. Just sit here, on the edge of the bed she guessed would be hers, with the ringing in her ears, and beyond it the edges of Griff’s accent, talking softly on his phone. She felt like Burton would be okay, but it worried her that she couldn’t feel more about it.

  “You don’t look so good,” Tommy said, sitting down beside her and taking her hand, just like that was natural.

  And she remembered Wilf’s hand, in that Oxford Street greenway, and the thing with floppy red wings, high up in the wet gray branches. “My ears are ringing,” she said.

  “Be lucky if you don’t get any permanent loss,” he said. “Part of what you’re feeling now’s just decibel level. Affects your nervous system.”

  “They were like the first four in that car,” she said. “Then those two down below the trailer. Dozen people dead, because of us.”

  “You aren’t making them come after you.”
>
  “I can’t tell anymore.”

  “Not a good time to try to figure it out. But I’ve got something I have to run by you, while our man here’s on the phone. Not a good time for that either, but I have to do it.” He was looking at Griff.

  “What?”

  “I don’t want them using that shit on Luke 4:5. Not on anybody.”

  “Party time?”

  “You wouldn’t call it that, if you had any better idea what it does.”

  “Burton said it’s a war crime.”

  “It is,” he said, “and good reason. It’s an aerosol. They’d have a single little bird go down the line, painted black, tonight, spray ’em all.”

  “What’s it do?”

  “Stimulant, aphrodisiac, and, I have trouble pronouncing this, psychotomimetic.”

  “What’s it mean?”

  “It duplicates the condition of being totally serial-killer sadist bugfuck.”

  “Fuck . . .”

  “You wouldn’t want it on your conscience. Don’t want it on mine.” He looked over at Burton. “Now I feel like shit for riding his ass, for what they did at Pickett’s.”

  “He told me you were unhappy. Didn’t seem to hold it against you.”

  “They didn’t know they’d set off those tanks of precursor. What they put on Conner’s gobot might’ve been fine just for Pickett and a few of his posse, which is frankly something I couldn’t hold against anybody. But they did blow up some poor assholes with no better way to make a living, on my watch, some of whom I knew to say hello to.” He gave her hand a squeeze, then let go of it.

  She wondered who it was, up the line, had given Ash those crazy eyes, and whether they could do the same to somebody here, with the isopodal drone? Or if they might know how to fix whatever it was about Burton’s haptics that glitched him? Crazy things to wonder, but she felt a little better now. She reached over for Tommy’s hand again, because holding it and hearing his voice was making that Operation Northwind thing go away.