“You do?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“I can’t open it. But you might be able to. There. Touch the oval with your thumb.”
She crossed to the bar, did as suggested. The door slid up, into the ceiling. “A gin and tonic, please,” she said. He watched as her drink rose, startling in its seemingly Socratic perfection, up out of the marble counter. “And you?” she asked.
He tried to speak. Couldn’t. Coughed. Lowbeer picked up her drink. He caught the scent of juniper. “Perrier,” he said, in what seemed a stranger’s voice, as alien an utterance as any in Ash’s parliament of birds.
“I’m sorry, sir,” said the bar, young, male, German, “but we have no Perrier. May I suggest Apollinaris water?”
“Fine,” said Netherton, his voice his own now.
“Ice?” the bar asked.
“Please.” His water emerged. “I don’t understand why you’d test her,” he said. “If it was her you were testing.”
“It was,” she said, gesturing toward the armchairs. He picked up his scentless water and followed her. “I’ve a further role in mind, for her,” she continued, when they were both seated, “should we be successful at Daedra’s soiree. And perhaps one for you as well. I imagine you’re actually rather good at what you do, in spite of certain disadvantages. Disadvantage and peculiar competence can go hand in hand, I find.”
Netherton sipped the German mineral water, tasting faintly of what he supposed might be limestone. “What exactly are you proposing, if I may ask?”
“I can’t tell you, I’m afraid. In sending you to Daedra, I send you beyond the reach of my protection, and of Lev’s. It’s best that you know no more than you do now.”
“Do you,” Netherton asked, “know literally everything, about everyone?”
“I most certainly don’t. I feel hindered by a surfeit of information, oceanic to the point of meaninglessness. The shortcomings of the system are best understood as the result of taking this ocean of data, and the decision points produced by our algorithms, as a near enough substitute for perfect certainty. My own best results are often due to pretending I know relatively little, and acting accordingly, though it’s easier said than done. Far easier.”
“Do you know who that was, the man Flynne saw, when Aelita was killed?”
“I imagine I do,” she said, “but that isn’t good enough. The state requires proof, paradoxically, however much it may be built on secrets and lies. Were there no burden of proof, this all would be boneless, mere protoplasm.” She sipped her gin. “As it can all too often seem to be. Waking, I find I must remind myself how the world is now, how it became that way, the role I played in what it became and the role I play today. That I’ve lived on, absurdly long, in the ever-increasing recognition of my mistakes.”
“Mistakes?”
“I suppose I shouldn’t call them that, realistically. Tactically, strategically, in terms of available outcomes, I did the best I could. Rather better, sometimes, it can feel, even today. Civilization was dying, of its own discontents. We live today in the result of what I and so many others did to prevent that. You yourself have known nothing else.”
“Well hey,” said Lev’s brother’s peripheral, the dancing master, from the entrance to the master bedroom, “didn’t expect you.”
“Mr. Penske,” said Lowbeer, “delighted. How goes it with the cube?”
“Who thought that thing up?” asked the peripheral, now very clearly Flynne’s brother’s friend, Conner, lounging against the jamb in a way Pavel would never have done.
“A tortured nation,” said Lowbeer, “in the sole service of a pervert.”
“Sounds about right,” said Conner.
“And how is Mr. Fisher?” asked Lowbeer.
“You’d think he got his ass blown off,” said Conner, an oblique little smile misplaced amid the dancing master’s facial bone, “the way everybody goes on about it.”
You work for Klein Cruz Vermette?” she asked the red-haired girl, who was making up a bed for her in a smaller tarped-off section behind the one they’d eaten in. There was a bare slab of beige foam on the floor, nothing else. The girl had just popped a new sleeping bag out of a stuff sack, was unzipping it.
“I do.” She unrolled the bag and spread it on the foam. “Pillows haven’t come, sorry.”
“How long?”
The girl looked at her. “The pillows?”
“When’d you start, at KCV?”
“Four days ago.”
“Got a gun in that pouch?”
The girl looked at her.
“You work for Griff? Like Clovis?”
“I’m at KCV.”
“Keeping track of them?”
Same look, no answer.
“So what do you ordinarily do?”
“I’m not just trying to be some kind of hard-ass,” the girl said, “but I can’t tell you. I’m under constraint, and that’s aside from just basic opsec. Ask Griff.” She smiled, to take the edge off.
“Okay,” said Flynne.
“Want a fast-acting sedative with a really short half-life?”
“No, thanks.”
“Sleep tight, then.” When she was gone, it struck Flynne that she’d changed from her cammies into really bad mom jeans and a man’s blue tank top with the mascot of the Clanton Wildcats on the front. On the way in here, they’d passed Brent Vermette, wearing a boonie hat that Leon wouldn’t have minded, and some kind of cheap black plastic watch.
She stood the Wheelie Boy on the open sleeping bag, took off the soft armor jacket, rolled it, put it against the wall of Tyvek-bagged shingles at the head of the foam. Sat down on the foam and undid her laces. Needed new shoes. Took them off, leaving her socks on, stood up, took off her jeans, sat back down, picked up the Wheelie, pulled the top of the open sleeping bag across her legs. It wasn’t dark in here, or light either. Just sort of blue. Like being in the middle of a clear block of Homes blue plastic. There was light up by the rafters, leaking from tarped-off sections where people were working. They might all be keeping it down, so she and Burton could sleep. Lowered voices. She was in here because Clovis needed the other bed, now they’d lifted the pill bug off Burton. Clovis had put on a helmet and examined the sutured hole in his thigh, doing what a surgeon in D.C. told her to, while seeing what she saw. Like Edward working long distance with a Viz in each eye, but the helmet was older, the way government stuff could be, sometimes way ahead, sometimes way behind. Burton had been conscious, but woozy, and Flynne had kissed his scratchy cheek and told him she’d see him in the morning.
“Hello?”
She looked at the Wheelie Boy. Netherton, big-eyed and big-nosed. “You got the cam too close again,” she told him. He adjusted it. Not that much better.
“Why are you whispering?”
“Quiet time, in here.”
“I spoke with Lowbeer,” he said. “In person. She isn’t going to do it.”
“I know,” she said. “Griff told me.”
He looked disappointed.
“I should’ve called you when I found out,” she said, “but they were doing things to Burton’s leg. She with you now?”
“She’s upstairs, with Conner.”
“Listening now?”
“Her modules,” he said, “but they always are. She says she never intended to use that weapon.”
“Macon was set to. Didn’t know what it was, but he was ready.”
“She would have been disappointed, she said, if you hadn’t objected. Then given them all stomach flu, having made you immune.”
“Maybe she should do that anyway. Why would she have been disappointed?”
“In you,” he said.
“Me?”
“It was a test.”
“Of what?”
“Evidently she wanted to determine whether, as you might put it, you are an asshole.”
“I’m just the only one who happened to see what happened. I could be an asshole and still ID the guy I saw. What would it matter?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “How is your brother?”
“Not bad, considering. They’re mainly worried about infection.”
“Why?”
“Because antibiotics don’t work for shit.”
He gave her a look.
“What?” she asked.
“You’re still relying on antibiotics.”
“Not that much. They only work about a third of the time.”
“Do you get cold?” he asked.
“When?”
“‘Colds.’ ‘Common cold’?”
She looked at him. “Don’t you?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Induced immunity. Only neoprimitives forgo it.”
“They don’t want to be immune from colds?”
“Ostentatiously perverse.”
“I don’t get that about you,” she said.
“About what?”
“How you don’t seem to like your own tech-level, but you don’t like people who opt out of it either.”
“They don’t opt out of it. They volunteer for another manifestation of it, but with heritage diseases. Which they then believe make them more authentic.”
“Nostalgic for catching colds?”
“If they could look as though they catch them, but avoid any discomfort, they would. But others, insisting on the real thing, would mock them for their inauthenticity.” The Wheelie’s tablet rotated, creaking slightly. “Everything’s blue.”
“They hung tarps, to break up the space. This blue’s Homes surplus. Cheapest stuff at Hefty is always Homes blue.”
“Homes?” he asked.
“Homeland Security. Question for you, different topic. Are the people brought in to work here trying to look local? I just saw a girl wearing jeans I’d figure she’d gnaw her legs off to get out of.”
“Ash brought in wardrobe stylists. And less demonstrative vehicles.”
“The parking lot out front looks like a BMW dealership.”
“It probably doesn’t, now.”
“Luke still across the street?”
“I think so, but Ossian’s exploring buying them out.”
“Buying a church?”
“You may already own several. Coldiron’s acquisition strategy is entirely situational. If buying a church facilitates the next takeover, they buy the church.”
“Why’s it called that? Coldiron?”
“Spell-correct. Ash chose ‘milagros’ because she likes them. Not miracles but small metal charms, offerings to the saints, representing various suffering body parts. Calderón is a partner in a Panama City law firm Lev nearly hired, but didn’t. Ash liked the sound of it, then liked the look of the accidental result.”
“You don’t hang out a lot with artists?”
“I don’t, no.”
“I would, if I could. What kind of music do you like?”
“Classical, I suppose,” he said. “What kind do you like?”
“Kissing Cranes.”
“Cranes?”
“Like storks.”
“Kissing?”
“It’s an old German trademark, knives and razors. You have Badger?”
“Music?”
“A site. Keeps track of your friends and stuff.”
“‘Social media’?”
“I guess so.”
“It was an artifact of relatively low connectivity. If I remember correctly, you already have less of it than there was previously.”
“Now there’s mostly just Badger. And darknet boards, if you’re into that. I’m not. Hefty owns Badger. My peripheral there?”
“Back cabin.”
“Can I see her?”
He reached up, giant fingers fumbling, and did something to his cam. She saw the room with the tacky marble desk, the little round leather armchairs. On the Wheelie screen it looked like a grifter bank, but for puppets. He got up, went into the back, along the skinny passage of slick wood, to where her peripheral, in a silky-looking black sweatshirt and black tights, lay on the ledgelike bunk, eyes closed.
“Totally looks like somebody,” she said. It really did. It was the opposite of something they’d build to meet some general idea of beauty. And if she understood correctly, nobody knew who it looked like. It was like the pictures in a box at a yard sale, nobody remembering who those people were, or even whose family, let alone how they came to be there. It gave her a sense of things falling, down some hole that had no bottom. Whole worlds falling, and maybe hers too, and it made her want to phone Janice, who was out at the house, and see how her mother was doing.
As he left the rear cabin, the Wheelie window vanished, taking the sigil of the emulation software with it. She’d gone to phone about her mother, and perhaps to sleep. He’d heard it in her voice, that she needed that. The attack, her brother’s wound, the business with the party time. But still she had that way of simply going forward.
He pictured the peripheral’s upturned face, eyes closed. It wasn’t sleeping, but where was it, within itself? But then it didn’t, as he understood it, possess a self to be within. Not sentient, yet as Lowbeer had pointed out, effortlessly anthropomorphized. An anthropomorph, really, to be disanthropomorphized. Though when she was present in it, or perhaps through it, was it not some version of her?
He saw the two glasses on the desk before he realized that the bar was still open. Enrobed in a sudden ponderous nonchalance, he moved to pick them up, returning as casually to the open bar, a glass in either hand. As he put them down, the bar’s door slid down. Lev’s sigil appeared. He fought the urge to block the door with his arms, palms flat on the gold-veined marble, fingers spread. Surely it wouldn’t crush his hands.
“What are you doing?” asked Lev, as Netherton heard the door’s lock click.
“I was with Flynne,” he said, “in that toy peripheral. But she had to phone her mother.” He pressed both hands against pale glassy veneer, feeling the German solidity, the complete lack of movement.
“I’m grilling sandwiches,” Lev said. “Sardines on Italian bread, pickled jalapeño. Looking tasty.”
“Is Lowbeer there?”
“She suggested the sardines.”
“I’ll be right up.”
As he was going out the door, he remembered that he was still wearing the headband, with its vaguely Egyptianate, milkily translucent giant sperm of a cam. He took it off and put it in his jacket pocket.
When he’d crossed the garage, taken the bronze elevator, and made his way to the kitchen, he saw through the mullioned doors that Conner was in the garden, on hands and knees, snarling at Gordon and Tyenna. The peripheral’s features lent themselves terrifyingly to this, seeming to expose more teeth than the two creatures possessed between them, in spite of their peculiarly long jaws. They were facing him, side by side, as if ready to spring, their musculature looking even less canine than usual, their stiff tails in particular. Carnivorous kangaroos, in wolf outfits with Cubist stripes. Netherton felt an oddly intense gratitude, just then, for their not having, as the drop bears had, hands.
The kitchen smelled smokily of grilled sardines. “What’s he doing out there?” Netherton asked.
“I don’t know,” said Lev, at the stove, “but they love it.”
Now the two creatures lunged at Conner simultaneously. He fell between them, flailing, wrestling with them. They were making a high-pitched, repetitious coughing sound.
“Dominika’s gone to Richmond Hill, with the children,” Lev said, checking flattened panini in a sandwich press.
“How is she?” Netherton asked, as unable as ever to read the domestic temperature of Chez Lev.