Agency

24 Porch

Madison wore wire-rimmed spectacles with colorless resin lenses. Not as historicist affectation, Netherton remembered, but ground to optically correct for some defect in his vision.

Solemnly amicable, his upper lip entirely concealed by a wide, brushlike mustache, Madison seemed, as Flynne had more than once said, to have had all of his glands removed. Seated in Janice’s workstation chair, he lifted the Wheelie Boy into view, a tablet atop an aluminum rod, rising from a spherical plastic chassis the size of a large grapefruit, with a lug-tired plastic wheel on either side. “Got your little guy here,” he said.

“Whenever you’re ready,” Netherton said.

Madison touched the base of the Wheelie’s chassis, causing an oddly angled view of the living room to fill Netherton’s field of vision, which straightened then, when Madison placed the Wheelie on the floor before him, upright on its two wheels.

“Envy you always having your phone with you,” Madison said. “Never cared for wearables myself, so I’m still carrying mine.”

Having had his implanted when he was too young to recall the procedure, Netherton regarded the residents of the county as essentially phoneless. They wore them variously or, like Madison, carried units resembling a small tablet, all lacking the most basic neuroconnectivity.

Now he tried his tongue tip on the roof of his mouth, the backs of his front teeth, reacquainting himself with the Wheelie’s steering. Responding, it rolled forward, the height and angle of its cam causing Madison’s beige plastic clogs and white socks to loom. He tilted the camera up and back.

“After you,” Madison said, raising his arm to point.

Netherton, already more at home with the controls, tongue-tapped the sequence required to make the wheels briefly rotate in opposite directions, the tablet turning to face the front door, open except for a frame supporting fine plastic mesh, intended to exclude flying insects. Through that, now, the morning sunlight of the county’s summer. Madison rose from his chair and went to hold the framed mesh open, as Netherton steered the Wheelie out, swiveling the tablet for a better view. “You and Janice never wanted to move out to the compound proper?”

“Flynne’s banned calling it the compound,” Madison said, “proper or otherwise. For the reason you just called it that. The world’s being run out of it. We’ve been happy to stay right here and still be able to help.”

Netherton rolled farther out onto the porch, Madison following. “Rainey says it saddens her, that things here are so heavily stage-managed. Do you and Janice feel that way?”

“No,” said Madison, “not given the immediate future you’re trying to keep us from.”

Netherton turned the Wheelie, tilting the cam up at him. “I wish I knew that the future of this stub will be an improvement over history as we know it, but we’re no more able to see your future than our own.”

“Not that we expect you to be all-seeing,” Madison said, looking down at the Wheelie. “We know you’ve just got cooler phones and better computers.”

“I understand you’ve had some luck with the list I gave Janice,” Netherton said.

“Finnish gentleman, on one of my boards, Russian militaria. Has lots of American material from back when you’re looking. Got positives on his first search. Your U-N-I-S-S, for instance, commenced April 2015, out of the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, but then was run from the Applied Physics Laboratory, University of Washington, plus Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. That they needed two APLs suggests a lot of processing, by the standard of the day.”

“Physics?”

“Not that it was about physics, this system. My Finn’s not seeing anything after 2023. Highly classified throughout, though. He was delighted at how highly. This was all information he already had, of course, but no idea he had it, and might never have found it, if I hadn’t asked him to look.”

“Excellent,” said Netherton, assuming that it probably was, insofar as Lowbeer seemed not to have known about it either.

“There’s more,” said Madison, “but we won’t be seeing that until I give him something in return.”

“Lowbeer will want anything he finds, money no object.”

“Money’s no object anyway,” said Madison, “because this is a peer-to-peer exchange. I could lose my membership if I offered him money. He’s given me a want list of his own, information he hasn’t been able to find. When I find it for him, he’ll give us the rest of what he’s got, plus anything related that he might turn up in the meantime.”

“What does he want?”

“Performance data on the Kamov Ka-50, a single-seat Russian attack helicopter, designed in the 1980s. The Black Shark, they called it. NATO reporting name Hokum-B.”

“Why does he want that?”

“Because he hasn’t been able to find it himself.”

Netherton tooth-tapped the Wheelie Boy around, to take in the view from their front porch. The gravel driveway ran down to a paved road, beyond which a rusted wire fence enclosed uneven land he supposed was pasture, dotted with a few trees. He was always struck by how unplanned this vista was, a genuinely nondesigner landscape.

Nothing like it in London, hence stranger to him than, for instance, Madison’s nonmonetary economy of fossilized military secrets.