The Peripheral (43 page)

COMPOUND

B
ack from her Wednesday afternoon walk with Ainsley, along the Embankment, she put on Tommy’s oldest Sheriff’s Department shirt, one that still had a Deputy Sheriff’s patch on it. It was the most comfortable thing to wear over her bump, and it felt like him. Maybe they were getting like Janice and Madison, that way, but he basically wore the same thing every day, in uniform or out, and she had Coldiron’s stylists for anything public. She just had to keep them from making her wear some new designer thing, which could feel like a job in itself.

She went into the kitchen, to get a glass of juice from the fridge, and stood there drinking it, wondering, the way she still did, how they could’ve built something like this without assemblers. They’d built it about a hundred yards from the old house, in what had been disused pasture before, and there was no way to tell it hadn’t been built in the nineteen-eighties, then kept up, and gradually remodelled a little, by someone who could afford that but not much else. And they’d done it all without ever making a sound, and really fast. Tommy said they’d used a lot of different adhesives, none of them toxic. So that if you saw a nail head, that wasn’t really a nail, but just there to look like one. But having so much money for a project that it just didn’t matter, she’d learned, was a lot like having assemblers.

They’d built the barn that way too, but to look as old as the old house, or anyway on the outside. Macon and Edward lived there, and did all their really special printing there, stuff Coldiron needed to make sure didn’t get out too soon. Industrial espionage had been identified as a major concern from the get-go, because Coldiron was really
about knowing how to do things that nobody else knew how to do, back here. And they were just at the beginning, really, of mining that jackpot tech-surge. Too much at once, Ainsley said, and everything would go batshit on them, so a big part of the program was trying to pace that. Sometimes, particularly since she’d been pregnant, she wished she knew where it was all going. Ainsley said they couldn’t know, but at least they knew one place where it wasn’t going if they could help it, so hold on to that.

It kept her centered, living here. She thought it kept them all centered. They had an unspoken agreement never to call it a compound, probably because they didn’t want anybody to think of it as one, but it was, really. Conner and Clovis had their own house another hundred or so yards away. Burton and Shaylene lived in town, in the residential wing of the Coldiron USA building. That stood, the whole block of it, where the strip mall with Fab and Sushi Barn had been. Hong had a new flagship Sushi Barn, just across the street, on the corner, looking kind of like the original but shinier, and there was a branch of Hefty Fab beside it. Flynne hadn’t wanted them to call it that, but Shaylene said Forever Fab wasn’t a name with good global legs, plus she’d just absorbed Fabbit in the merger, so she also needed something to call all the former Fabbit outlets. And now there was a Sushi Barn in every Hefty Mart, even if it was just the opposite end of the nubbins counter.

She didn’t really like the business part of it. She guessed she disliked it about as much as Shaylene liked it. Coldiron actually had less money now, way less, because as soon as Matryoshka had stumbled, then collapsed, cut off from Sir Henry’s financial modules, Coldiron had started to divest, to get the economy back to something more normal, whatever that meant now. But they still had more money than anyone could understand, or really keep track of. And Griff said that that was good, because they had plenty that needed to be done with it, more than they could know.

She took the empty juice glass over to the sink, washed it out, put it in the drying rack, and looked out the window, up the hill to where
they’d built the pad that Marine One landed on, when Felicia came to see her. You couldn’t see that there was anything there at all, even when you were standing on it. Satellites couldn’t even tell it was there, because it was built with Coldiron science, emulating tech from up the line.

They’d talk in the kitchen, usually, when Felicia came, while Tommy sat out in the living room and shot the shit with the Secret Service, or anyway the ones he liked. Sometimes Brent came out from town, usually with Griff, when Felicia was there, and then it was more structured, about stockpiling vaccines against diseases they wouldn’t even have known were out there, or what countries to best put the phage factories in, or climate stuff. She’d met Felicia a little after Vice President Ambrose had had his embolism, and that had been awkward, both because Felicia only ever spoke of Wally, as she called him, with what seemed like a real and painful fondness, and because Flynne knew that he’d died after Griff had shown her footage of her own state funeral, and explained to her exactly what had led up to that.

There was a jelly jar beside the drying rack, full of some of Conner’s old toes, fingers, a thumb. He’d given them to Flora, Lithonia’s daughter. They were some early iterations that Macon had printed back at the old Fab, with machines he’d had printed somewhere else, before they’d built the barn. Flora had forgotten them, that morning, when she’d been up to visit. She’d painted their nails sloppily pink, and Flynne saw that the thumb was moving a little, which had been the problem with the first few batches they’d printed. Watching Conner play squash, sometimes, she’d remember how fast Macon and Ash and Ossian had been able to get him up to speed. Now he never took the composite prosthesis off, the various parts of it, just wore them constantly, but up the line he still had his version of Pavel. She couldn’t imagine using a different peripheral herself. “Hell no,” Leon had said, at dinner once, when she’d said that, “that would be like
having a whole other body.” And then he’d made Flora scream, by telling her that if Flynne had a boy, she’d name him Fauna.

Now it was time to go down and have lunch with them. Her mother, Lithonia, Flora, and Leon, who was living in her old room now. Lithonia, it had turned out, was an amazing cook, so now Madison was sandblasting the inside of the old Farmer’s Bank, for a restaurant Lithonia and her cousin would start there, nothing too fancy but a break from Sushi Barn and Jimmy’s. Jimmy’s wasn’t likely to become a chain, and if it did, Leon said, it would be a sign that the jackpot was coming anyway, in spite of everything they were doing.

Her mother, now that all her medications were being made by Coldiron, and custom-made at that, no longer needed the oxygen. In the meantime, if anyone else needed anything, they’d bought Pharma Jon, whose profit margin, on Flynne’s suggestion, they’d slashed by half, instantly making it the single most beloved chain in the country, if not the world.

Picking up the jelly jar, she went out, without bothering to lock the door, and down along to the path they’d been wearing between the two houses, which was starting to look as though it had always been there.

She’d told Ainsley, earlier, walking on the Embankment, how she sometimes worried that they weren’t really doing more than just building their own version of the klept. Which Ainsley had said was not just a good thing but an essential thing, for all of them to keep in mind. Because people who couldn’t imagine themselves capable of evil were at a major disadvantage in dealing with people who didn’t need to imagine, because they already were. She’d said it was always a mistake, to believe those people were different, special, infected with something that was inhuman, subhuman, fundamentally other. Which had reminded her of what her mother had said about Corbell Picket. That evil wasn’t glamorous, but just the result of ordinary half-assed badness, high school badness, given enough room, however that might happen, to become its bigger self. Bigger, with more
horrible results, but never more than the cumulative weight of ordinary human baseness. And this was true, Ainsley had said, of the very worst monsters, among whom she herself had so long moved. Her job in London, she’d said, might seem to Flynne to be a patient caretaker amid large and specially venomous animals, but that wasn’t the case.

“All too human, dear,” Ainsley had said, her blue old eyes looking at the Thames, “and the moment we forget it, we’re lost.”

PUTNEY

L
iving with Rainey was a little like having a cognitive implant, he thought, getting out of bed and looking down at her, but nicer in so many ways. He’d scarcely been aware that she had freckles, for instance, or that they were so widely distributed, or, indeed, that he liked freckles. Now he covered some of his favorites with the corner of the duvet and went to clean his teeth.

Her sigil appeared, before he could start. “Yes?”

“Coffee,” she said, and he could hear her from the bedroom as well as on his phone.

“I’ll use the machine as soon as I’ve brushed my teeth.”

“No,” she said, “that’s a real Italian downstairs, in that fake news agent’s. I want his espresso.” She made it sound pornographic. “His crema.”

“Phone him.”

“You ruined my career, put me in a position that forced me to resign from an enviable government position, and ultimately resulted in my being threatened by assassins in the pay of New Zealand’s secret state, and you won’t bring me a decent human-made coffee? And a croissant, from that place across the street.”

“All right,” said Netherton. “Let me brush my teeth. I did rescue you from those darknet kiwis, who were hardly state assassins, and bring you here, under the protection of the British secret state. So to speak.”

“Crema,” she said, sleepily.

He brushed his teeth, remembering how Lowbeer had had to get her out of Canada, then into England, and how they’d wound up in
bed together, not for the first time but definitely the first time he hadn’t been drunk. And how he’d confessed, in possibly the single most awkward morning-after moment of what seemed a long career of them, his feelings for Flynne, or possibly her peripheral, or both, with Rainey pointing out that she, Flynne, had recently become his client. And hadn’t he, she asked, had ample proof of what could come of having it off with clients? But Flynne wasn’t Daedra, he’d protested. But what he was, most definitely, Rainey had said, was someone so immature as to believe that his own erotic projections should have actual weight in the world. And then she’d pulled him back into bed and argued it differently, though from the same position, and he’d begun, he supposed, to see it her way. And soon it had become apparent that Flynne and Sheriff Tommy were a couple, and here he was dressing, in their newly shared flat, to go down to the street, on a sunny Soho afternoon, grateful as ever that plans to implement a Cheapside-style cosplay zone here had never been implemented.

He was coming out of the baker’s when Macon’s sigil appeared. “Yes?”

“If we fly your boy to Frankfurt, will you be able to brief the German PR team, tomorrow morning, ten your time?”

“Where is it, now?”

“On the runaway in Cairo, cleared for takeoff. We’ve got Flynne’s peri, the one for this hemisphere, in Paris, so if she’s available then, you could brief them together.”

“Sounds good. Anything else?”

“Nope. You coming to the barbecue, Sunday?”

“Wheelie, yes.”

“You’re weird, Wilf. I heard you got your girlfriend one.”

“We’ll both be there.”

“You want to fetishize an extremely narrow-bandwidth experience,” Macon said, “that’s your business.”

“If you spent more time up here,” said Wilf, “you might start to appreciate that sort of thing. It’s relaxing.”

“Too rich for my blood,” said Macon, cheerfully, and his sigil was gone.

Putney tomorrow, Netherton reminded himself, after ordering a pair of double espressos to take away. Two in the afternoon. His second follow-up appointment. If it was sunny, they’d ride bicycles. He doubted the German PR business would take that long.

Always nice to see Flynne.

The idea of “third-worlding” the past of alternate continua owes everything to “Mozart in Mirrorshades” (1985) by Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner, though there the travel is physical, with extraction of natural resources the focus of exploitation. Filtered through simulation gaming, telepresence, and drones, that became something I mumbled about to James Gleick, on first meeting him, just when whatever became this book was getting started. (Later, he drew my attention to that Wells quote.)

The descriptions of Cheapside and Newgate owe much to Kate Colquhoun’s
Mr. Briggs’ Hat
(2011), a wonderfully vivid account of Britain’s first railway murder.

Several landscape features of Wilf’s London are from John Foxx’s interview, by Etienne Gilfillan, in the March 2011 issue of
Fortean Times
.

Nick Harkaway, in his Hampstead garden, told me spooky things about the inner workings of the guilds of the City of London, any merely literal truth of which I have scrupulously avoided prying into.

“Buttholeville” is the title of a song with lyrics (and, I assume, title) by Patterson Hood.

The longer I write novels, the more I appreciate first readers. This one had quite a few, aside of course from my wife Deborah and daughter Claire. Paul McAuley and Jack Womack weathered countless near-identical iterations of the first hundred pages or so. Ned Bauman and Chris Nakashima-Brown both waded through cold reads of the book at midpoint, always valuable but tricky work. James Gleick and Michael St. John Smith did the same, but toward the conclusion. Sean Crawford, Louis Lapprend, and the enigmatic V. Harnell ran a sort of tag team. Meredith Yayanos kept a careful eye on Inspector Lowbeer throughout, an acute and articulate tunnel canary amid some issues I know little about. Sophia Al-Maria read the first completed version, helping mightily with Hamed in terms of Gulf Futurism.

Martin Simmons suggested the use of bagged roofing shingles for impromptu fortification.

Mr. Robert Graham very generously provided essential writing hardware.

My editor and literary agent were wonderful, as ever.

Thank you all.

—Vancouver, 23 July 2014