The Peripheral

18

Netherton was fully as annoyed with the bohemian nonsense of Ash’s workspace as he would have expected to be. It wasn’t that it was pointlessly tiny, Ash having used scaffolding and tarps to wall off the furthest, smallest possible triangular corner of Lev’s grandfather’s garage, or that she’d decorated it to resemble some more eccentric version of the Maenads’ Crush, but that her display went to such pains not to resemble any other display, though whatever she was about to show them could as easily have been viewed as a feed.

Polished spheres of variously occluded crystal, agate perhaps, were supported in corroded chemistry apparatus she boasted of having bought from the mudlarks who’d pulled it from the Thames. And she’d prepared exceptionally horrible tea, in eggshell-thin china cups, without handles, cups that had cruelly suggested the possible offer of some wormwood-based liqueur, but no. It was like meeting in an antique phone box in which a psychic had set up shop, crammed in beside Lev at the ridiculously ornate little table.

Now she was selecting rings from a black suede pouch: interface devices, the sort of thing a less precious person would have permanently and invisibly buried in her fingertips. But here were Ash’s, gotten up like the rusty magic iron of imaginary kings, set with dull pebbles that lit and died as her white fingers brushed them.

The tea tasted burnt. Not as if anything in particular had burned, but like the ghost of the taste of something burnt. The walls, such as they were, were heavy curtains, like the ones in the Maenads’ Crush, but stained with tallow drippings, distressed to reveal bald fabric. The floor was covered with a faded, barely legible carpet, its traditional pattern of tanks and helicopters worn to colorless patterns of weft.

A drawing of a gecko whirled excitedly on the back of Ash’s left hand, as she seated an angular brown lump around the index finger of her right. Her animals weren’t to scale, or rather they appeared as if rendered at various distances. He didn’t think you’d see a gecko and an elephant at the same time, for reasons of scale. She had, evidently, no direct control over them.

Having donned four rings and two tarnished silver thimbles, she interlaced her fingers, causing the gecko to flee. “They put up a want ad, as soon as they came in,” she said.

“Who did?” Netherton asked, not bothering to suppress his irritation.

“I’ve no idea.” She made a steeple of her index fingers. “The server is the platonic black box. In the visualization, they appear to emerge directly beside us, but that’s oversimplification.”

Netherton was relieved that she hadn’t yet called the display a shewstone.

“Wanting what?” asked Lev, beside Netherton.

“To hire someone willing to undertake an unspecified task, likely involving violence. The board where they chose to place their ad is on a darknet, hence a market for criminal services. We have access to everything, in all of their nets, given the slower processing speeds. They offered eight million, so murder’s assumed.”

“Is that a reasonable amount?” Lev asked.

“Ossian thinks it is,” Ash said. “Not too much to be unusual in terms of the economy of this particular board, or to attract the attention of informers, or of their various governments’ agents, who no doubt are present. Not too little, either, to avoid attracting amateurs. They had an applicant almost immediately. Then the ad was taken down.”

“Someone answered an ad, to murder a stranger?” He saw Lev and Ash exchange a look. “If it’s all so transparent to you,” he asked, “why don’t we know more?”

“Some very traditional modes of encryption remain highly effective,” Lev said. “My family’s security could probably manage it, but they know nothing of any of this. We’ll keep it that way.”

Ash unlaced her fingers, flicked her rings and thimbles among the spheres, exactly the sort of pantomime Netherton had expected. The spheres glowed, expanded, grew transparent. Two hair-thin arcs of lightning shot down, through miniature nebulae of darker stuff, froze. “Here, you see. We’re blue, they’re red.” A fine jagged line of blue had emerged, as from a cloud of ink, a scarlet jag beside it, following one another down into a jumble of less dynamic-looking clouds, faintly luminous.

“Perhaps it’s all just the Chinese having a bit of fun at your expense, with superior processing,” Netherton said, which had in fact been Daedra’s immediate supposition.

“Not unfeasible,” said Lev, “but that sort of humor doesn’t suit them.”

“You’ve heard,” Netherton asked, “of this happening before? Stubs being infiltrated?”

“Rumors,” said Lev. “Since we don’t know where the server is, or what it is, let alone whose it might be, that’s been a minor mystery by comparison.”

“All word of mouth,” said Ash. “Gossip among enthusiasts.”

“How did you get involved in this?” Netherton asked.

“A relative,” said Lev. “In Los Angeles. It’s by invitation, to the extent that you need someone to tell you about it, explain how it works.”

“Why don’t more people know about it?”

“Once you’re in,” Lev said, “you don’t want just anyone involved.”

“Why?” asked Netherton.

“The God club,” Ash said, meeting Netherton’s eye with her figure-eight pupils.

Lev frowned, but said nothing.

“In each instance in which we interact with the stub,” Ash said, “we ultimately change all of it, the long outcomes.” A still image swam into focus, within one of the spheres of her display, steadied. A dark-haired young man, against what Netherton took to be a metric grid. “Burton Fisher.”

“Who is he?” Netherton asked.

“Your polt,” said Lev.

“Our visitors have hired someone to find him,” Ash said. “To kill him, Ossian assumes.”

Lev scratched his nose. “He was on duty, during that reception of Aelita’s.”

“No,” she said. “After. Your module estimates the event, whatever it may have been, to have occurred the evening after the reception. He would have gone on duty afterward.”

“They want to kill a dead man in a past that effectively doesn’t exist?” Netherton asked. “Why? You’ve always said that nothing that happens there can affect us.”

“Information,” Lev said, “flows both ways. Someone must believe he knows something. Which, were it available here, would pose a danger to them.”

Netherton looked at Lev, in that moment seeing the klept in him, the klept within the dilettante youngest son, within the loving father, the keeper of thylacine analogs. Something hard and clear as glass. As simple. Though in truth, he sensed, there wasn’t much of it.

“A witness, perhaps,” Ash said. “I’ve tried phoning him, but he isn’t picking up.”

“You’ve tried phoning him?” Netherton asked.

“Messaging as well,” Ash said, looking at her rings and thimbles. “He hasn’t responded.”