The Peripheral

56

It just seemed to happen, as he most liked it to. Lubricated by the excellent whiskey, his tongue found the laminate on his palate of its own accord. An unfamiliar sigil appeared, a sort of impacted spiral, tribal blackwork. Referencing the Gyre, he assumed, which meant the patchers were now being incorporated into whatever the narrative of her current skin would become.

On the third ring, the sigil swallowed everything. He was in a wide, deep, vanishingly high-ceilinged terminal hall, granite and gray.

“Who’s calling, please?” asked a young Englishwoman, unseen.

“Wilf Netherton,” he said, “for Daedra.”

He looked down at his table in the bar, his empty glass. Glancing to the right, he saw the circle of bar floor, scoured aluminum, that surrounded the round table, set now, with a jeweler’s precision, into Daedra’s granite floor, the demarcation a function of the club’s cloaking mechanism. Unable to see the bar, or the Michikoids, he realized that he was also unable to signal for another drink.

Receding down the length of the dully grandiose hall, like an illustration of perspective, were chest-high plinths of granite, square in cross-section, supporting the familiar miniatures of her surgically flayed hides, sandwiched between sheets of glass. Typical self-exaggeration, as she’d so far only produced sixteen, meaning that the majority were duplicates. A wintery light found its way down, as from unseen windows. The ambient sound was glum as the light, as calculated to unsettle. An anteroom, reserved for cold calls. A point was being made. “Fine,” he said, and heard the echoes of the word deflect across granite.

“Netherton?” asked the voice, as if suspecting the name of being an unfamiliar euphemism.

“Wilf Netherton.”

“What would this be concerning, exactly?”

“I was her publicist, until recently. A private matter.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Netherton, but we have no record of you.”

“Associate Curator Annie Courrèges, of the Tate Postmodern.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Be quiet, darling. Let pattern recognition have its way.”

“Wilf?” asked Daedra.

“Thank you,” he said. “I’ve never liked Kafka.”

“Who’s that?”

“Never mind.”

“What do you want?”

“Unfinished business,” he said, with a small and entirely unforced sigh that he took as an omen that he was on his game.

“Is it about Aelita?”

“Why would it be?” he asked, as if puzzled.

“You haven’t heard?”

“Heard what?”

“She’s vanished.”

He silently counted to three. “Vanished?”

“She’d hosted a function for me, after the business on the Patch, at Edenmere Mansions. When her security came back on, afterward, she was gone.”

“Gone where?”

“She’s not tracking, Wilf. At all.”

“Why was her security off?”

“Protocol,” she said, “for the function. Did you sabotage my costume?”

“I did not.”

“You were upset about the tattoos,” she said.

“Never to the extent that I’d interfere with your artistic process.”

“Someone did,” she said. “You made me agree. In those boring meetings.”

“It’s good that I’ve called, then.”

“Why?” she asked, after slightly too long a pause.

“I wouldn’t want to leave it this way.”

“I wouldn’t want you to imagine you haven’t left it,” she said, “if that’s what you’re suggesting.”

He sighed again. His body did it for him. It was a quick sigh, propulsive. The regret of a man who knew both what he had lost and that he had well and truly lost it. “You misunderstand me,” he said. “But this isn’t the time. I’m sorry. Your sister. .”

“How can you expect me to believe you didn’t know?”

“I’ve been on a media fast. Only recently learned that I’ve been fired, for that matter. Busy processing.”

“Processing what?”

“My feelings. With a therapist. In Putney.”

“Feelings?”

“Some horribly novel sort of regret,” he said. “May I see you?”

“See me?”

“Your face. Now.”

Silence, but then she did open a feed, showing him her face.

“Thank you,” he said. “You’re easily the most remarkable artist I’ve ever met, Daedra.”

Her eyebrows moved fractionally. Not so much approval as a temporary recognition that he might have the capacity to be correct about something.

“Annie Courrèges,” he said. “Her sense of your work. Do you remember me telling you about that, on the moby?”

“Someone jammed the zip on that jumpsuit,” she said. “They had to cut me out of it.”

“I know nothing about that. I want to arrange for you to have something.”

“What?” she asked, with no effort to disguise a routine suspicion.

“Annie’s vision of your work. Happenstance, really, that she confided in me, and of course she had no idea about us. Having had that glimpse of her vision, and knowing you as I do, I find I must at least attempt to bring it to you.”

“What did she say?”

“I couldn’t begin to paraphrase. When you’ve heard it, you’ll understand.”

“You’re getting this from therapy?”

“It’s been a huge help,” he said.

“What are you asking me for, Wilf?”

“That you allow me to introduce you to her. Again. That I might contribute, in however small a way, to something whose importance I may never fully comprehend.”

She might, he thought, have been looking at a piece of equipment. A parafoil, say, wondering whether to keep or replace it. “They say you did something to her,” she said.

“To who?”

“Aelita.”

“Who does?” If he gestured now, with the empty glass, there was a chance a Michikoid would bring him another, but Daedra would see him do it.

“Rumors,” she said, “media.”

“What are they saying about you and the boss patcher? That can’t be pretty.”

“Sensationalism,” she said.

“We’re both victims, then.”

“You aren’t a celebrity,” she said. “There’s nothing sensational about you being suspected of something.”

“I’m your former publicist. She’s your sister.” He shrugged.

“What is that you’re sitting in?” she asked, appearing fully in front of him now, between two plinthed miniatures, no mere headshot. Her legs and feet were bare. She was wrapped in a familiar long cardigan, teal.

“A cloaked table, in the bar of a place in Kensington, Impostor Syndrome.”

“Why,” she asked, a single comma of suspicion appearing between her brows, “are you in a peri club?”

“Because Annie’s away. On a moby bound for Brazil. If you’re willing to meet her again, she’d need a peripheral.”

“I’m busy.” The comma deepened. “Perhaps next month.”

“She’s going into fieldwork. Embedding with neoprims. Technophobics. She’s had to have her phone extracted. If it goes well, she might be with them for a year or more. We’d have to do it soon, before she arrives.”

“I’ve told you I’m busy.”

“I’m concerned about her, there. Were we to lose her, her vision goes with her. She’s years from publishing. You’re her life’s work, really.”

She took a step toward the table. “It’s that special?”

“It’s extraordinary. She’s in such awe of you, though, that I don’t know how we could arrange it even if you weren’t so busy. A one-on-one meeting would be too much for her. If we could meet you, seemingly at random, perhaps at a function. Surprise her. She’s ordinarily very confident socially, but she could scarcely speak to you, at the Connaught. She’s been desolate about that. I suspect this embedding is an attempt at distraction.”

“I do have something coming up. . I don’t know how much time I’d have for her.”

“That would depend on how interesting you find her,” he said. “Perhaps I’m mistaken.”

“You can be,” she said. “I’ll think about it.”

And she and her teal cardi and her bare legs were gone, and with them the chill stone light of her voice mail.

He was looking out at the peripherals in Impostor Syndrome again. Their fretful animatronic diorama, viewed in utter silence. He signaled a passing Michikoid. Time for another drink.