Agency

60 Regard of the Adjustor

Turning into Alfred Mews, Netherton glanced down its length to the windows of their flat. He walked toward them, waiting for Lowbeer’s car to partially decloak. When it did, he stepped past and turned, to face what he hoped was where he’d last seen its door. “May I come in?”

“Certainly,” said Lowbeer, the door appearing just to the left of where he’d expected it, along with a surrounding hand’s-width of glossy black bodywork, the decloaked segment unevenly pixelated along its edges. The door opened, its step folding down. He stepped forward, up, and into the glow of a single stout white candle, centered on the table in the carpeted pit. Behind him, the door quietly closed.

“White iris and vetiver,” Lowbeer said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“Very nice,” said Netherton, having learned to take a degree of comfort in her candles, not for their scents but for the touch of dotty old lady they lent her, however deceptively. “I’ve a question.”

She was in shirtsleeves, a rare circumstance but not unheard of, her necktie undone. “Yes?”

“How private is this?”

“Security was the central goal, in the design of every aspect of this vehicle,” she said, “but you’ve no reason to be concerned when you’re with me in any case, wherever we are.”

“This concerns your deeper state function.”

“Which we’ve certainly touched on before. Would you like a seat?”

“I’ll stand,” Netherton said, glancing at the candlelit conversation pit, which suggested a séance. “Lev Zubov’s father’s uncle says that unnamed figures in the klept are questioning the continued need for your office.”

She glanced to one side, appearing to watch something. “He told you this in the Denisovan Embassy?”

“Were you listening?” Netherton asked, one of his core fears being that Lowbeer eavesdropped on literally everything, constantly, though she denied that ability.

“I wasn’t, no,” she said. “I was able to hear him greet you, and ask you to take a seat. Then nothing, until you asked him about not liking Cheyne Walk. The zero-connectivity bots would explain the sizable ellipsis, as well as guarantee his father’s involvement.”

“It’s to do with the stubs,” Netherton said, “exactly as I’ve feared. That you steer them away from the klept becoming as powerful in them as it is here.”

“He expects you to tell me this?”

“He insisted. But only you.”

“Once again, then,” she said, “the divide between the ambitions of conspirators and the desire, among those bringing us word of those ambitions, to preserve whatever aspect of the status quo they themselves hold dear.” The blank buff walls had become windows now, the car itself, Netherton assumed from experience, remaining cloaked. “That’s often how this sort of thing comes to my attention.”

“He warned that I might be in danger as well.”

“It’s possible, certainly,” she said, “but these conspiracies have so far always been successfully neutralized. The only novel thing about this one is my tinkering with stubs offering a fresh rationale for my removal.”

“I’ve worried about them reacting this way.”

“This is a routine if infrequent aspect of my work,” she said. “They should only react to me with terror, but need occasionally to be reminded. Who knows of this so far, that you’re aware of?”

“Lev, his father, the unnamed uncle who supposedly informed his father, myself, and you.”

“Keep it that way, please,” she said, making intensely blue eye-contact. “Don’t mention it to Rainey until it’s been resolved.”

“My mother told me about you,” Netherton said, surprising himself, “when I was a small child. Not you specifically, but a figure in a story, benevolent but frightening. She called that figure the Adjustor. Adjustor of destinies, she said, for those who threatened the stability of the klept. When I was older, I came to understand that you, or rather someone in your role, actually existed.”

She looked toward the white candle. “It was never envisioned as a solo position. There were a number of us, originally. I’m simply the last. Should the klept ever truly decide to be done with me, they need only deny me access to the technology that keeps me alive and functional.”

“Rainey guesses they can’t afford to do that, since they can’t be certain you haven’t hidden the most damaging information about them where it will pop up if they remove you.”

“You’ve married a woman of great acuity, Mr. Netherton,” Lowbeer said, turning her blue gaze back to him, from the candle.

“My mother’s story,” Netherton said, “held that everything would invariably collapse, if the klept were left to their own resources. Do you believe that?”

“But for the occasional pruning,” she said, “under the auspices of an impartial eye, yes. Their tedious ambition and contempt for rule of law would bring everything down, around their ears and ours. They managed to do that with the previous world order, after all, though then it was effectively their goal. They welcomed the jackpot, the chaos it brought. The results of our species’ insults to nature did much of their work for them. No brakes magically appeared then, and I don’t see them appearing now, absent someone free to act, with sufficient agency, against their worst impulses. The biosphere only survives, today, by virtue of what prosthetic assistance we can afford it. The assemblers might keep that going, were the klept to founder. But I don’t trust that some last convulsive urge to short-term profit, some terminal shortsightedness, mightn’t bring an end to everything.”

Netherton blinked, swallowed. “China, too?”

“We do still share the biosphere with China,” she said. “And trade with them, to what extent they allow.”

“You killed Vespasian, didn’t you?”

Her eyes met his. Hers, if original, were over a hundred years old. “I used to regret not having come across him sooner,” she said, “thus having had the opportunity to kill him earlier, but now I have to consider the opportunity he’s provided us, however inadvertently, in Eunice’s stub.”

Netherton heard the door open behind him, signaling the end of the meeting.

“Verity’s asleep in the hotel in San Francisco,” Lowbeer said. “When she wakes, speak with her. I’m here, should you need me.”

“You knew Lev phoned me,” Netherton said. “Did you know it was about this?”

“That it might be along these lines. The conversation tripped something the aunties had in place, that I hadn’t been aware of.”