The Peripheral

100

Something 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.