The Peripheral

2

Netherton woke to Rainey’s sigil, pulsing behind his lids at the rate of a resting heartbeat. He opened his eyes. Knowing better than to move his head, he confirmed that he was in bed, alone. Both positive, under current circumstances. Slowly, he lifted his head from the pillow, until he could see that his clothes weren’t where he assumed he would have dropped them. Cleaners, he knew, would have come from their nest beneath the bed, to drag them away, flense them of whatever invisible quanta of sebum, skin-flakes, atmospheric particulates, food residue, other.

“Soiled,” he pronounced, thickly, having briefly imagined such cleaners for the psyche, and let his head fall back.

Rainey’s sigil began to strobe, demandingly.

He sat up cautiously. Standing would be the real test. “Yes?”

Strobing ceased. “Un petit problème,” Rainey said.

He closed his eyes, but then there was only her sigil. He opened them.

“She’s your fucking problem, Wilf.”

He winced, the amount of pain this caused startling him. “Have you always had this puritanical streak? I hadn’t noticed.”

“You’re a publicist,” she said. “She’s a celebrity. That’s interspecies.”

His eyes, a size too large for their sockets, felt gritty. “She must be nearing the patch,” he said, reflexively attempting to suggest that he was alert, in control, as opposed to disastrously and quite expectedly hungover.

“They’re almost above it now,” she said. “With your problem.”

“What’s she done?”

“One of her stylists,” she said, “is also, evidently, a tattooist.”

Again, the sigil dominated his private pain-filled dark. “She didn’t,” he said, opening his eyes. “She did?”

“She did.”

“We had an extremely specific verbal on that.”

“Fix it,” she said. “Now. The world’s watching, Wilf. As much of it as we’ve been able to scrape together, anyway. Will Daedra West make peace with the patchers, they wonder? Should they decide to back our project, they ask? We want yes, and yes.”

“They ate the last two envoys,” he said. “Hallucinating in synch with a forest of code, convinced their visitors were shamanic spirit beasts. I spent three entire days, last month, having her briefed at the Connaught. Two anthropologists, three neoprimitivist curators. No tattoos. A brand-new, perfectly blank epidermis. Now this.”

“Talk her out of it, Wilf.”

He stood, experimentally. Hobbled, naked, into the bathroom. Urinated as loudly as possible. “Out of what, exactly?”

“Parafoiling in-”

“That’s been the plan-”

“In nothing but her new tattoos.”

“Seriously? No.”

“Seriously,” she said.

“Their aesthetic, if you haven’t noticed, is about benign skin cancers, supernumerary nipples. Conventional tattoos belong firmly among the iconics of the hegemon. It’s like wearing your cock ring to meet the pope, and making sure he sees it. Actually, it’s worse than that. What are they like?”

“Posthuman filth, according to you.”

“The tattoos!”

“Something to do with the Gyre,” she said. “Abstract.”

“Cultural appropriation. Lovely. Couldn’t be worse. On her face? Neck?”

“No, fortunately. If you can talk her into the jumpsuit we’re printing on the moby, we may still have a project.”

He looked at the ceiling. Imagined it opening. Himself ascending. Into he knew not what.

“Then there’s the matter of our Saudi backing,” she said, “which is considerable. Visible tattoos would be a stretch, there. Nudity’s nonnegotiable.”

“They might take it as a signal of sexual availability,” he said, having done so himself.

“The Saudis?”

“The patchers.”

“They might take it as her offer to be lunch,” she said. “Their last, either way. She’s a death cookie, Wilf, for the next week or so. Anyone so much as steals a kiss goes into anaphylactic shock. Something with her thumbnails, too, but we’re less clear about that.”

He wrapped his waist in a thick white towel. Considered the carafe of water on the marble countertop. His stomach spasmed.

“Lorenzo,” she said, as an unfamiliar sigil appeared, “Wilf Netherton has your feed, in London.”

He almost vomited, then, at the sudden input: bright saline light above the Garbage Patch, the sense of forward motion.