The Peripheral

12

He’d wanted to impress her, and what better way than to offer her something money couldn’t buy? Something that had felt to him like a ghost story, when Lev had first explained it.

He’d told her about it in bed. “And they’re dead?” she’d asked.

“Probably.”

“A long time ago?”

“Before the jackpot.”

“But alive, in the past?”

“Not the past. When the initial connection’s made, that didn’t happen, in our past. It all forks, there. They’re no longer headed for this, so nothing changes, here.”

“My bed?” She spread her arms and legs, smiled.

“Our world. History. Everything.”

“And he hires them?”

“Yes.”

“What does he pay them with?”

“Money. Coin of their realm.”

“How does he get it? Does he go there?”

“You can’t go there. Nobody can. But information can be exchanged, so money can be made there.”

“Who did you say this is?”

“Lev Zubov. We were at school together.”

“Russian.”

“Family’s old klept. Lev’s the youngest. Man-child of leisure. Has hobbies, Lev. This is his latest.”

“Why haven’t I heard of it before?”

“It’s new. It’s quiet. Lev looks for new things, things his family might invest in. He thinks this one may be out of Shanghai. Something to do with quantum tunneling.”

“How far back can they go?”

“Twenty twenty-three, earliest. He thinks something changed, then; reached a certain level of complexity. Something nobody there had any reason to notice.”

“Remind me of it later.” She reached for him.

On the walls, the framed flayed hides of three of her most recent selves. Her newest skin beneath him, unwritten.

Ten at night now, in the kitchen of Lev’s father’s Notting Hill house, his house of art.

Netherton knew there was a house of love as well, in Kensington Gore, several houses of business, plus the family home in Richmond Hill. The Notting Hill house had been Lev’s grandfather’s first London real estate, acquired midcentury, just as the jackpot really got going. It reeked of the connections allowing it to quietly decay. There were no cleaners here, no assemblers, no cams, nothing controlled from outside. You couldn’t buy permission for that. Lev’s father simply had it, and likely Lev would too, though his two brothers, whom Netherton avoided if at all possible, seemed better suited to exercise the muscular connectedness needed to retain it.

He was watching one of Lev’s two thylacine analogs through the kitchen window, as it did its stiff-tailed business beside an illuminated bed of hostas. He wondered what its droppings might be worth. There were competing schools of thylacinery, warring genomes, another of Lev’s hobbies. Now it turned, in its uncanine fashion, its vertically striped flank quite heraldic, and seemed to stare at him. The regard of a mammalian predator neither canid nor felid was a peculiar thing, Lev had said. Or perhaps Dominika had a feed from its eyes. She didn’t like him. Had disappeared when he’d arrived, upstairs, or perhaps down into the traditionally deep iceberg of oligarchic subbasements.

“It’s not that simple,” Lev said now, placing a bright red mug of coffee on the scarred pine table in front of Netherton, beside a yellow bit of his son’s Lego. “Sugar?” He was tall, brownly bearded, archaically bespectacled, ostentatiously unkempt.

“It is,” Netherton said. “Tell her it stopped working.” He looked up at Lev. “You told me it might.”

“I told you that none of us have any idea when or why it started, whose server it might be, let alone how long it might continue to be available.”

“Then tell her it stopped. Is there any brandy?”

“No,” said Lev. “You need coffee. Have you met her sister, Aelita?” He took a seat opposite Netherton.

“No. I was going to. Before. They didn’t seem to be that close.”

“Close enough. Daedra didn’t want it. Neither would I, frankly. We don’t do that sort of thing, if we’re serious about continua.”

“Didn’t want it?”

“Had me give it to Aelita.”

“To her sister?”

“He’s part of Aelita’s security now. A very minor part, but she knows he’s there.”

“Fire him. End it.”

“Sorry, Wilf. She finds it interesting. We’re having lunch on Thursday, and I hope to explain that polts aren’t really what continua are about. I think she may get it. Seems bright.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I thought you had your hands full. And frankly you weren’t making a great deal of sense, at that point. Daedra rang, told me you were sweet, that she didn’t want to hurt your feelings, but why didn’t I give it to her sister, who likes odd things. It didn’t feel to me as if you were slated to be a very permanent part of her life, so I didn’t think it would matter. And then Aelita rang, and she seemed genuinely curious, so I gave it to her.”

Netherton raised the coffee with both hands, drank, considered. Decided that what Lev had just told him actually solved the problem. He no longer had a connection with Daedra. He’d indirectly introduced a friend to the sister of someone he’d been involved with. He didn’t know that much about Aelita, other than that she was named after a Soviet silent film. There hadn’t been much mention of her in Rainey’s briefing material, and he’d been distracted. “What does she do? Some sort of honorary diplomatic position?”

“Their father was ambassador-at-large for crisis resolution. I think she inherited a sliver of that, though some might say Daedra’s more the contemporary version.”

“Thumbnails and all?”

Lev wrinkled his nose. “Are you sacked?”

“Apparently. Not formally, yet.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Fail forward. Now that you’ve explained things, I see no reason for Daedra’s sister not to keep her polt.” He drank more coffee. “Why do you call them that?”

“Ghosts that move things, I suppose. Hello, Gordon. Pretty boy.”

Following Lev’s gaze, Netherton found the thylacine, upright on its hind legs on the small patio, gazing in at them. He really badly wanted a drink, and now he remembered where he thought he might likely find one. Just the one, though. “I need to think,” he said, standing. “Mind if I go and stroll the collection?”

“You don’t like cars.”

“I like history,” Netherton said. “I don’t fancy walking the streets of Notting Hill.”

“Would you like company?”

“No,” Netherton said, “I need to ponder.”

“You know where the elevator is,” said Lev, getting up to let the thylacine in.