The Peripheral (36 page)

BICENTENNIAL

B
y daylight her house was different. He reminded himself that none of this was about assemblers. Natural processes only. He associated untidiness with klept privilege. Lev’s house, for instance: its absence of cleaners, as opposed to the corridor beneath Impostor Syndrome, its spotless sameness uniform through every uninhabited room in London.

The vehicle in front of them had continued on, beyond the house, then halted. In front of it, a smaller version had already stopped. Flynne had said that the smaller one was a bomb sniffer, operated by her cousin, who must be among the six who now emerged from the larger vehicle, all in identical black jackets. Four held stubby rifles. The fifth, who didn’t, might be Flynne’s cousin, who also wore some odd headpiece. Tacoma, the driver, had parked near the largest tree, the one he and Flynne had sat under in the moonlight. He recognized their bench, which he now saw was made of sawn lengths of graying wood, their once-white protective coating worn with use.

Out of the car now, tucked under her arm, he couldn’t adjust the Wheelie Boy’s camera quickly enough to compensate for her movement. He glimpsed the vehicle that had been following them, identical to the one in front, and four more black-coated men, each with a black rifle.

Then Flynne was striding toward the house, Tacoma evidently beside her. “Get them out of sight,” Flynne said to Tacoma, whom he couldn’t see. “Bullpups and jackets’ll worry my mother.”

“Got it,” he heard Tacoma say, and wondered what bull pups were. “Says your cousin’s coming in.”

“You stay here,” Flynne said, stepping up onto the planked veranda. “Keep Leon here. Don’t let him inside while I’m with my mother. No such thing as a serious conversation, him around.”

“Got it,” Tacoma said, stepping into the frame of the Wheelie’s camera. “We’ll be right here.” She indicated a sort of settee, in the same style as the bench under the tree, but with frayed fabric cushions.

Still carrying him, Flynne opened a curiously skeletal door, its thin frame tautly stretched with some sort of fine dark mesh, and stepped into the shade of the house. “I have to talk with my mother,” she said, and set him down on something, a table or sideboard, level with her waist.

“Not here,” he said. “On the floor.”

“Okay,” she said, “but stick around.” She put the Wheelie down on the floor, then turned and was gone.

He activated the thing’s tires, in opposite directions, slowly, the camera rotating with the spherical chassis. The room looked very tall, but wasn’t. The camera was quite close to the wooden floor.

There was the mantelpiece, the one with the commemorative plastic tray whose duplicate he’d seen in Clovis Fearing’s shop in Portobello Road, a pale oblong propped against the wall. He rolled forward, the camera bobbing annoyingly, until he could make out “Clanton Bicentennial,” and the dates. And seventy-some years on from the year of celebration, he sat at Lev’s grandfather’s desk in the Gobiwagen, the band of the Wheelie-emulator across his forehead, looking back through this clumsy toy at this strange world, in which worn things weren’t meticulously distressed, but actually worn, abraded by their passage through time. A fly buzzed heavily past, above the Wheelie Boy. Anxiously, he tried to track it, then remembered that here it was more likely a fly than a drone, and that the mesh on the weirdly fragile auxiliary door was meant to keep it out.
He turned the camera, studying the shabby, shadowy tableau of lost domestic calm. At the end of its arc, he discovered a cat glaring at him, on its haunches. As he saw it, it rushed the Wheelie, hissing, batting it fiercely back, the rear of the tablet striking the wooden floor. As the gyro whined, righting the Wheelie, he heard the cat push the mesh door far enough open to escape, and then the sound of it closing.

The fly, if it was the same one, could be heard buzzing, somewhere deeper in the house.

AMERICAN ANTIQUITIES

I
’m not going anywhere,” her mother said, propped on pillows against the chipped varnish of the bedstead, the prongs of the oxygen tube in her nose.

“Where’s Janice?”

“Picking peas. I’m not going.”

“Dark in here.” The roller blind was down, drapes drawn together over it.

“Janice wanted me to sleep.”

“Didn’t you sleep last night?”

“I won’t go.”

“Who wants you to go?”

“Leon. Lithonia. Janice too, but she won’t admit to it.”

“Go where?”

“Northern fucking Virginia,” her mother said, “as you know perfectly well.”

“I just recently heard about that idea myself,” Flynne said, sitting down on the white candlewick bedspread.

“Is Corbell dead?”

“Missing.”

“You kill him?”

“No.”

“Try to?”

“No.”

“Not like I’d blame you. All I know is what I see on the news, and lately what little I can pry out of Janice and Lithonia. Is all of this
happening because of whatever it is you and Burton are doing, that landed Corbell Pickett in my living room?”

“I guess so, Mom.”

“Then what the hell is it?”

“I’m not even sure. Burton thought he was moonlighting for some company in Colombia. Turns out they’re in London. Sort of. They’ve got a lot of money. To invest. One thing and another, they set up a branch office here and hired Burton and me to run it, or at least act like we do.” She looked at her mother. “I know it doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

“Kind of sense the world makes,” her mother said, drawing the candlewick up under her chin, “there’s death and taxes and foreign wars. There’s men like Corbell Pickett doing evil shit for a dollar, only real money anybody local and civilian makes here now, and there’s decent-enough people having to work for their own little bit of that. Whatever you and Burton are doing, you aren’t going to be changing any of that. Just more of the same. I’ve been here all my life. So have you. Your father was born where Porter meets Main, when they still had a hospital. I’m not going anywhere. Particularly not anywhere Leon tells me I’m going to like.”

“Man in our company suggested that. He’s from London.”

“I don’t give two shits, where he’s from.”

“Remember how hard you tried to get me not to talk like that?”

“Nobody was trying to make you move to northern Virginia. And I wouldn’t have let them, either.”

“You’re not going anywhere. You’re staying right here. I thought Virginia was a nonstarter the minute I heard it.”

Her mother peered at her over the clenched bedspread. “You and Burton aren’t making the economy about to crash, are you?”

“Who said that?”

“Lithonia. Smart girl. Gets it off one of those things they wear over one eye.”

“Lithonia said we were making the economy crash?”

“Not you. Just that it might. Or anyway that the stock market’s weirder than anybody’s ever seen it.”

“I hope not.” She stood up, went and kissed her mother. “I’ve got to call them now,” she said. “Tell ’em you’re not going anywhere. They’ll need to get you more help around the place. Friends of Burton’s.”

“Playing soldier?”

“They were all in the service, before.”

“Think they’d’ve got their fill of it,” her mother said.

Flynne went out and found Janice in the living room, in plaid flannel pajama bottoms and a black Magpul t-shirt, her hair in four stumpy pigtails. She was holding an old ceramic bowl with most of the edge chipped off, full of fresh-picked peas. “Ella’s not going anywhere,” Flynne said. “They’re just going to have to make her safer out here.”

“I figured,” said Janice. “Why I didn’t try to push it.”

“Where’s Netherton?”

“Guy on the Wheelie Boy?”

“Here,” said Netherton, wheeling out of the kitchen.

“In the kitchen if you need me,” said Janice, stepping past the Wheelie.

“Did you speak with your mother?” Netherton asked.

“She’s definitely not going anywhere. I have to call and sort that with Griff and Burton and Tommy. They’ll have to protect her out here, whatever happens.”

The Wheelie had kept going. Was across the room now, in front of the fireplace. She watched the tablet tilt back. “This tray,” he said, voice tiny at that distance, on the little speakers.

“What?”

“On the mantelpiece. Where did you get it?”

“Clanton. Mom took us all over for the bicentennial, when we were kids.”

“Lowbeer found one like it, recently, in London. Her modules had recorded this one the night I was here. Her friend searched for
it. She deals in American antiquities. She’s American herself. Clovis Fearing.”

“Clovis?”

“Fearing,” he said.

“Not Raeburn?” It didn’t make any sense. “How old is she?”

“No older than Lowbeer, I suppose, though she chooses to be more obvious about it. Ah. Looked it up. Raeburn. Mrs. Clovis Fearing’s maiden name.”

“She’s an old lady? In London?”

“They knew one another, when they were younger. Lowbeer said she was visiting her to have her own memory refreshed. Mrs. Fearing said something about Lowbeer having been a British spy, and Lowbeer said that that had made Fearing one herself.”

“But she was Raeburn then,” said Flynne. “Now.” She was looking at the white tray but not seeing it. Seeing Lowbeer’s hand instead, holding her hat against their quadcopter’s downdraft in the Cheapside street, and Griff’s hands, arranging the Sushi Barn food. “Shit,” she said, then said it again, more softly.

BACK HERE

S
omething about the mention of Clovis Fearing had caused Flynne to abruptly change the subject. She’d taken him out on the veranda, placed him on the love seat between Tacoma Raeburn and the man Flynne had introduced as her cousin Leon, and gone out to stand beneath the largest tree, having a conversation on her phone. Netherton had panned from Tacoma, whom he found attractive in an obliquely threatening way, to Leon, who wore a strange elasticated headscarf, its fabric abstractly patterned in shades Netherton associated with the droppings of birds, before cleaners tidied them away. He had pale, bushy eyebrows and the start of an equally pale beard.

“Mr. Netherton’s in the future,” Tacoma said to Leon, whose mouth was slightly open.

“Wilf,” said Netherton.

Leon tilted his head to one side. “You in the future, Wilf?”

“In a sense.”

“How’s the weather?”

“Less sunny, last I looked.”

“You should be a weatherman,” Leon said, “you’re in the future and you know the weather.”

“You’re someone who only pretends to be unintelligent,” Netherton said. “It serves you simultaneously as protective coloration and a medium for passive aggression. It won’t work with me.”

“Future’s fucking snippy,” said Leon, to Tacoma. “I didn’t come out here to be abused by vintage product from the Hefty toy department.”

“I think you might be stuck with that,” said Tacoma. “Wilf’s paying your salary, or close enough.”

“Well shit,” said Leon, “I guess I should remove my hat.”

“I don’t think he cares about that, but you could always take it off just because it’s butt-ugly,” Tacoma said.

Leon sighed, and pulled off the scarf. His hair, what there was of it, was only a slight improvement. “Do I have you to thank for winning the lottery, Wilf?”

“Not really,” Netherton said.

“Future’s going to be a huge pain in the ass,” Leon said, but then Flynne was there, picking up the Wheelie.

“Time for your visit with Mom, Leon,” she said. “You’re here to cheer her up, relax her. Way you do that, you start by telling her I got them to promise me she can stay here.”

“They’re scared of somebody getting ahold of her,” Leon said, “having that over you.”

“So now they get to throw money at it,” Flynne said. “They’re good at that. Go on, get in there with your aunt Ella. Make her feel good. You make her any more worried, I’ll tear you a new one.”

“I’m going,” said Leon, “I’m going,” but Netherton saw that he was neither frightened nor angry. Leon got to his feet, making the love seat creak.

“I’m taking Wilf down to the trailer,” Flynne said to Tacoma.

“That on the property?” Tacoma asked.

“Bottom of the hill behind the house. Near the creek. Burton lives there.”

“I’ll just walk along with you,” Tacoma said, getting up, the love seat not creaking at all.

“Wilf and I need to have a talk. It’s a small trailer.”

“I won’t come in,” Tacoma said. “Sorry, but you go outside the house, or this front yard, I have to move boys around, and drones.”

“That’s okay,” Flynne said. “I appreciate it.”

And then they were off the porch, Flynne striding across the lawn
he’d seen as moonlit silver. It looked nothing like that now. Thinly, unevenly green, starting to brown in places. She rounded the corner of the house. Tacoma was murmuring to her earbud, he supposed telling boys and drones what she needed done.

“Tomorrow night’s the party,” Flynne said to him. “I need you to tell me about Daedra, explain who this woman is I’m supposed to be, what she does.”

“I can’t see,” he said. The camera side of the tablet was trapped under her upper arm. When she freed it, and turned him around, he saw trees, smaller ones, and a trampled earthen trail, descending. “Where are we going?”

“Burton’s trailer. Down by the creek. He’s lived there since he got out of the Marines.”

“Is he there?”

“He’s back at Coldiron. Or in town somewhere. He won’t mind.”

“Where’s Tacoma?”

She swung the Wheelie around. He saw Tacoma on the trail behind them. Swung it back, started down. “Daedra,” she said. “How’d you meet her, anyway?”

“I was hired to be a publicist on a project she was central to. Its resident celebrity. Rainey brought me on. She’s a publicist as well. Or was. She’s just resigned.” Trees on either side, the trail crooked.

“Envy her that,” Flynne said, “having the option.”

“But you do. You used it when you thought Lowbeer’s agent would use the party time on those religionists.”

“That was bullshit. Well, not bullshit, ’cause I’d have done what I said. But then, pretty soon, we’d all be dead. Us back here, anyway.”

“What’s that?”

“Burton’s trailer. It’s an Airstream. Nineteen seventy-seven.”

The year, from the century previous even to this one she carried him through, struck him as incredible. “Did they all look like that?”

“Like what?”

“An assembler malfunction.”

“That’s the foam. Uncle who hauled it down here put that on to stop it leaking, and for insulation. Shiny streamline thing, under that.”

“I’ll be out here if you need me,” said Tacoma, behind them.

“Thanks,” said Flynne, reaching for the handle on a battered metal door, set back in the weathered larval bulge of whatever the thing had been covered with. She opened it, stepped up, into a space he recognized from first having interviewed her. Tiny lights came on, in strings, embedded in some slightly yellowish transparent material. A small space, as small as the rear cabin of the Gobiwagen, lower. A narrow metal-framed bed, table, a chair. The chair moved.

“The chair moved,” he said.

“Wants me to sit in it. Man, I forget how hot this sucker gets . . .”

“‘Sucker’?”

“Trailer. Here.” She put him down on the table. “Got to crack a window.” The window creaked, opening. Then she opened a squat white cabinet that stood on the floor, took out a blue-and-silver metallic-looking container, closing the cabinet. “My turn to not be able to offer you a drink.” She pulled a ring atop the container. Drank from the resulting opening. The chair was moving again. She sat in it, facing him. It hummed, creaked, was silent, unmoving. “Okay,” she said, “she your girlfriend?”

“Who?”

“Daedra.”

“No,” he said.

“But was she?”

“No.”

She looked at him. “You two were doing it?”

“Yes.”

“Girlfriend. Unless you’re an asshole.”

He considered this. “I was quite taken with her,” he said, then paused.

“Taken?”

“She’s very striking. Physically. But . . .”

“But?”

“I’m almost certainly an asshole.”

She looked at him. Or rather, he remembered, at part of his face on the Wheelie Boy’s tablet. “Well,” she said, “if you really know that, you’re ahead of most of the dating stock around here.”

“Dating stock?”

“Men,” she said. “Ella, my mother, she says the odds are good around here, but the goods are odd. ’Cept they aren’t odd, usually. More like too ordinary.”

“I might be odd,” he said. “I like to imagine I am. Here. I mean there. In London.”

“But you weren’t supposed to get involved with her that way, because it was business?”

“That’s correct.”

“Tell me about it.”

“About . . . ?”

“What happened. And when you get to a part that I can’t understand, or I don’t know what you’re talking about, I’ll stop you and ask you questions until I understand it.”

She looked very serious, but not unfriendly.

“I will, then,” said Netherton.