The Peripheral

46

Netherton watched as the peripheral opened its eyes. Ash had had it recline again on the bunk in the back cabin, had readjusted the lights.

“Okay,” Flynne said, tentatively. Then: “Not bad.”

“Welcome back,” said Lev, over Netherton’s shoulder.

“How’s the tetrachromia?” asked Ash.

“I can’t remember what it was like,” Flynne said, “except I didn’t like it.”

“Try sitting up,” suggested Ash.

Flynne sat up, shook her hair to the side, then touched it, froze. “My haircut. Saw it before, in the mirror here, but I couldn’t think. You did that?”

“The stylist was impressed,” said Ash. “I imagine he’ll be copying it.”

“That’s Carlota,” said Flynne. “She’s the best. She’s in the Marianas, has a bot chair in our Hefty Clips. Keeps up with the styles.”

“You’re used to telepresence, then,” Lev said.

“We call it getting a haircut,” Flynne said, giving him a look as she got to her feet, “back in frontier days.”

“We have something you might like to see,” said Lev. He turned, behind Netherton, and walked back along the corridor. Netherton smiled at her, self-consciously, and followed Lev, Ash behind him.

“Where’s your dogs?” Flynne asked, behind them, loud in the veneered narrowness.

“Upstairs,” Lev said, turning, as she emerged.

Netherton watched her touching things. Running a finger across the glassy veneer. Lightly tapping a knuckle on a steel handle. Testing the peripheral’s sensoria, he guessed.

“I liked them,” she said. “I could see how they weren’t dogs, but in a dog ballpark.” She touched her black trousers. “Why do these clothes all feel like yoga pants?”

“They have no seams,” said Ash. “The seams on the outside are decorative, traditional. They were made for you by assemblers. All of a piece.”

“Fabbed,” said Flynne. “Don’t mean to be rude, but if you aren’t wearing contacts, like you said, is that some kind of condition?”

“A modification,” said Ash. “A species of visual pun, on a likely mythical condition called pupula duplex. Which is usually depicted as dual irises, but I chose to make it literal.”

“How do things look?”

“I seldom use the lower pair. They register infrared, which can be interesting in the dark.”

“You don’t mind if I ask questions? I’m not sure what anything is, here. You could’ve been born that way. Or have a religion or something. How would I know? But tattoos that run around, I sort of get that.”

“Please,” Ash said, “ask questions.”

“Where’s the phone, in this?” Flynne asked, holding up her hands. “I was trying to tell my friend about it.”

“I could check with Hermès,” said Lev. “The components are very small, though, and distributed. Some are biological. I couldn’t tell you where my own are, without accessing medical history. Part of my cousin’s became inflamed, had to be replaced. Base of the skull. But they can put them anywhere.” He propped himself against the edge of the desk. “May we show you London now? We’ve a helicopter above the house, like the one you flew for us. You’ll want to take a seat.”

“Can I fly it?”

“Let us show you the sights,” said Lev. He smiled.

She looked from Lev to Ash, then to Netherton. “Okay,” she said, and sat.

Ash took the other chair. Netherton joined Lev on the edge of the desk, glad to not be behind it, so less associated with its psychological functions of hierarchy and intimidation. “It wasn’t such a shock for you, this time,” he said to Flynne.

“I couldn’t wait to get back here,” she said. “But I’m not necessarily going to believe you about any of this, okay?”

“Of course,” said Lev.

Netherton was suddenly aware of smiling in a particularly stupid fashion, while Ash smirked at him, her gray eyes doubly gimleted. But then she turned, and spoke to Flynne. “You’re seeing my sigil now,” she said, and Flynne nodded, Netherton seeing it too. Now Lev’s was there, and Flynne’s, which was featureless. “Now I’ll open a feed,” Ash said, “full binocular.”

The room vanished, replaced by a foggy midmorning aerial vista of London, the angular uprights of the shards set regularly out across the city’s compacted intricacy, a density relieved by greenways he’d hiked as a child, by systematic erasures of alleged mediocrities, by new forests grown thick and deep. The glass roofing some of the cleansed and excavated rivers dully reflected what sun there was, and in the Thames he saw the floating islands, rearranged yet again, the revolving blades beneath them better positioned to gather the river’s strength.

“Damn,” said Flynne, evidently impressed.

Ash piloted them toward Hampstead, where Netherton’s parents had taken him to a schoolmate’s party, when he was ten, to spend the afternoon within a length of clay drainpipe, buried under a cast-iron bench, a space strung with tiny colored lanterns, where costumed mice had sung and danced and staged mock duels. The hands of his homunculus had been crude and translucent, not unlike those of the patchers. As he remembered this, Ash was telling Flynne of the waterwheels turned by the rescued rivers, but nothing of any preceding history, times prior, darkness.

He crossed the roof of his mouth with his tongue tip, blanking the feed, returning to the Gobiwagen, preferring to watch Flynne’s face.

“But where is everybody?” she asked. “There’s no people.”

“That’s complicated,” said Ash, evenly, “but at this altitude you wouldn’t notice anyone.”

“Hardly any traffic, either,” Flynne said. “Noticed that before.”

“We’re almost in the City now,” said Ash. “Cheapside. Here’s your crowd.”

But those aren’t people, thought Netherton, watching Flynne’s expression as she took it all in.

“Cosplay zone,” said Lev, “Eighteen sixty-seven. We’d be fined for the helicopter, if it didn’t have cloaking, or if it made a sound.”

Netherton tapped the requisite quadrant of palate, returning to Ash’s feed, to find them stationary over morning traffic, already so thick as to be almost unmoving. Cabs, carts, drays, all drawn by horses. Lev’s father and grandfather owned actual horses, apparently. Were said to sometimes ride them, though certainly never in Cheapside. His mother had shown him the shops here as a child. Silver-plated tableware, perfumes, fringed shawls, implements for ingesting tobacco, fat watches cased in silver or gold, men’s hats. He’d been amazed at how copiously the horses shat in the street, their droppings swept up by darting children, younger than he was, who he’d understood were no more real than the horses, but who seemed as real, entirely real, and terrifying in the desperation of their employment, cursing vividly as they dodged with crude short brooms between the legs of the animals, as men his mother said were bankers, solicitors, merchants, brokers, or rather their simulacra, hurried along beneath tall hats, past handpainted signs for boots, china, lace, insurance, plate glass. He’d loved those signs, had captured as many as he could while holding his mother’s hand, uncomfortable in his stiff and requisite clothing. He’d kept a lookout for fierce-eyed boys hurtling handcarts along, or running, shouting, back into dark courts stinking, he supposed, as realistically as the green dung of the horses. His mother had worn broad dark skirts for such visits, swelling from a narrow waist to brush the pavement, below a very fitted sort of matching jacket, some unlikely hat perched on the side of her head. She hadn’t cared for any of it. Had brought him here because she felt she should, and perhaps he’d elaborated on that, later, developing his own sharp distaste for anything of the sort.

“Look at it,” Flynne said.

“It isn’t real,” he said. “Worked up from period media. Scarcely anyone you see is human, and those who are, are tourists, or schoolchildren being taught history. Better at night, the illusion.” Less annoying, in any case.

“The horses aren’t real?” Flynne asked.

“No,” said Ash, “horses are rare now. We’ve generally done better, with domestic animals.”

Please, thought Netherton, don’t start. Lev might have thought the same thing, because now he said, “We’ve brought you here to meet someone. Just to say hello, this time.”

They began to descend.

Netherton saw Lowbeer then, looking up, in skirts and a jacket very like the ones his mother had worn.