Agency

84 Looking Quite Chipper

As Netherton surfaced in Hanway Street, a plain white Michikoid trotted past, pulling an equally white carbon-fiber rickshaw. In it sat two heavily modded neoprimitives, their faces as masklike as those of the Michikoids. Patchers, he knew, inhabitants of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which he’d visited himself, telepresently, on the job that had resulted in Lev introducing him to Lowbeer. These two would be envoys, neither tourism nor private business being a possibility. What skin of theirs was visible was a rough gray, bioengineered to protect them from excessive sunlight. Under the winter morning, it reminded him of frost.

Then they were gone, having reached and turned the corner. Lowbeer’s sigil, the coronet, began to pulse. “Yes?” he responded.

“The car’s in Tottenham Court Road,” said Lowbeer. “You’ll see it.”

He walked on, thinking that Lowbeer’s real work consisted of learning things, often things this fundamentally dull, through processes largely automated for her by the aunties and other systems. Eventually, having made her decisions, some action might be implemented, usually covertly, resulting in something dramatic happening. This, he supposed, was the nature of security work, where by definition one attempts to preserve aspects of the status quo. What she did with the stubs might be seen as that as well, he decided, if you thought of it in terms of a much longer status quo.

On Tottenham Court Road now, he spotted movement in a wide shop window. Drawing closer, he saw a miniaturized scale model of this part of London, tiny vehicles and pedestrians driving and strolling. A crisp yellow circular cursor surrounded a single magnified figure, its back to him, in front of a shop window. He raised his arm, the figure’s arm following suit. Thomas would love this.

He walked on, eventually coming to Lowbeer’s car, or what could be seen of it, as its step descended from nowhere. It was parked, for once appropriately, in curbside space reserved for Metropolitan Police and emergency vehicles.

Up and into it, then, to find Lowbeer seated in the chair pit, fingers steepled, elbows on the tray-sized mahogany table, on which were two white china mugs, cream, sugar, and a cylindrical black carafe. The car’s windows, or rather the cam systems that emulated them, showed vehicular traffic to one side, pedestrian to the other. “Good morning,” she said, as he heard the door close behind him. “Coffee?”

“Yes, thanks,” he said, the Denisovan Embassy’s café au lait having produced no noticeable effect.

“Have a seat,” she said. She wore a gray tweed suit, gray broadcloth shirt, and a pointillist camouflage necktie, olive and buff shot through with martial red. Looking quite chipper. “Lev’s dancing girls are extremely effective. We made a serious effort to listen in on your conversation, no success whatever. Aunties assume the encryption’s Chinese, nothing old-boy klept at all. We’ll look into that later, as it’s unexpected, though not unprecedented. Well?”

Netherton was settling himself in the built-in green armchair opposite hers. “He says it’s Yunevich. He also says, and I quote, that Yunevich isn’t his sort of klept. Seems to be a deep-burrowing, low-profile Square Miler with pretensions to Soviet bureaucratic DNA.”

Lowbeer was pouring from the carafe. “An old boy,” she said. “Endlessly predictable. Tedious, really.”

Her expression, as she said this, though superficially mild, made Netherton grateful not to be this Yunevich, whoever he was.