The Peripheral

64

The bar was locked. He pressed his thumb against the oval of brushed steel again. Nothing happened.

But this seemed inconsequential, he noted, as he lowered his hand. Perhaps how it would feel to have had the laminates installed, in Putney. Sufficiently uncharacteristic a thought that he glanced around, as if to be sure that no one had seen him entertain it. He was, he judged, in some complex bio-pharmacological state, the Medici having toyed with his dopamine levels, receptor sites, something. Enjoy it, he advised himself, though perhaps it wasn’t quite that simple.

From Ash, he’d understood that he’d fallen immediately and deeply asleep, on stretching out upstairs, before waking to Burton’s arrival. The Medici, she’d said, had emulated the effect of much more REM sleep than he’d actually gotten, and done other things as well. But after he’d helped her get Ossian into the chair, to have his shoulder repaired, she’d insisted that Netherton go back to sleep. Which he had, after a second application of the Medici. Having just seen it do something very unpleasant looking to Ossian, not to mention bloody, this had seemed less than fastidious, though he knew that at its nanoscale of operation it was constantly sterile.

He’d awakened again, and descended the cheese-grater stairs, alone except for the peripherals in their respective cabins. Flynne’s friend Conner had left his on Lev’s grandfather’s baronial bed, arms spread cruciform, ankles primly together.

Lowbeer’s sigil appeared now, with its coronet, pulsing. He happened to be looking in the direction of the desk, its thronelike chair behind it, so that the sigil momentarily suggested the crown of some ghost executive of Milagros Coldiron, itself a sort of ghost corporation.

“Yes?”

It stopped pulsing. “You’ve slept,” Lowbeer said.

“Flynne’s brother arrived,” he said, “unexpectedly.”

“He was rigorously selected by the military,” she said, “for an unusual integration of objective calculation and sheer impulsivity.”

Netherton moved his head slightly, placing the sigil over the window, but then it looked as if a coronet-headed figure were outside, looking in. “I suppose,” he said, “that he does seem more balanced than the other one.”

“He wasn’t, initially,” she said. “Their service records have survived here, from before Lev touched their world. Both were damaged, to various extents.”

Netherton moved to the window, thinking he’d seen a pulse of squidlight. “I didn’t like him using her peripheral.” Another arch pulsed and he saw Ossian, walking toward the Gobiwagen in a peculiar way, arms at his sides and slightly bent, hands held forward at the waist. “Ossian looks as though he’s pushing something that isn’t there,” he said.

“A Russian pram. I’m having a technical in Lev’s stub take it apart.”

“A pram?” Then he remembered the cloaked buggy, in the entranceway.

“We make it very difficult to secure prohibited weapons. The ones extracted from that pram will be entirely sterile.”

“Sterile?” Thinking of the Medici.

“Devoid of identification.”

“Why would you want them?”

“Have you eaten?” she asked, ignoring his question.

“No.” He realized that he was actually hungry.

“Best wait, then,” said Lowbeer.

“Wait?”

But her sigil was gone.