The Peripheral

6

Lorenzo captured the moby’s approach to the city. His hands, on the railing, and Netherton’s, on the upholstered arms of the room’s most comfortable chair, seemed momentarily to merge, a sensation nameless as the patchers’ city.

Not a city, the curators had insisted, but an incremental sculpture. More properly a ritual object. Grayly translucent, slightly yellowed, its substance recovered as suspended particulates from the upper water column of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. With an estimated weight of three million tons and growing, it was perfectly buoyant, kept afloat by segmented bladders, each one the size of a major airport of the previous century.

It had less than a hundred known inhabitants, but as whatever continually assembled it seemed also to eat cams, relatively little was known about them.

The service cart edged fractionally closer to the arm of his chair, reminding him of the coffee.

“Get this now, Lorenzo,” Rainey ordered, and Lorenzo turned to focus on Daedra, amid a scrum of specialists. A white china Michikoid knelt, in a Victorian sailor outfit, lacing Daedra’s artfully scuffed leather high-tops. A variety of cams hovered, one of them equipped with a fan to flutter her bangs. He assumed the wind test indicated she was going in without a helmet.

“Not bad,” he said, admiring the cut of the new jumpsuit in spite of himself, “if we can keep her in it.” As if she’d heard him, Daedra reached up, tugged the zip slightly, then a bit more, exposing a greasy arc of abstracted Gyre-current.

“Went clever on the print file for the zip,” Rainey said. “Hope she doesn’t try it lower, not until she’s down there.”

“She won’t like that,” he said, “when she does.”

“She won’t like it that you lied to her about the curator.”

“The curator may have had remarkably similar thoughts. We won’t know until I speak with her.” He picked up the cup without looking at it, raised it to his lips. Very hot. Black. He might survive. The analgesics were starting to work. “If she earns her percentage, she won’t care about a stuck zip.”

“That’s assuming the powwow’s productive,” Rainey said.

“She has every reason to want this to be successful.”

“Lorenzo’s put a couple of larger cams over the side,” she said. “They’ll be there soon. Ringside.”

He was watching the costumers, makeup technicians, assorted fluffers and documentarians. “How many of these people are ours?”

“Six, including Lorenzo. He thinks that Michikoid is her real security.”

He nodded, forgetting she couldn’t see him, then spilled coffee on the white linen robe as feed from two speeding cams irised into his field, to either side of Daedra.

Feed from their island always made him itch.

“About a kilometer apart now, heading west northwest, converging,” Rainey said.

“You couldn’t pay me.”

“You don’t have to go there,” she said, “but we do both need to watch.”

The cams were descending through tall, sail-like structures. Everything simultaneously cyclopean and worryingly insubstantial. Vast empty squares and plazas, pointless avenues down which hundreds might have marched abreast.

Continuing to descend, over dried crusts of seaweed, bleached bones, drifts of salt. The patchers, their prime directive to cleanse the fouled water column, had assembled this place from recovered polymers. What shape it had taken was afterthought, offhand gesture, however remarkably unattractive. It made him want to shower. Coffee was starting to seep through the front of his robe.

Now Daedra was being helped to don her parafoil, which in its furled state resembled a bilobed scarlet backpack, bearing the white logo of its makers. “Is the ’foil her placement,” he asked, “or ours?”

“Her government’s.”

The cams halted abruptly, simultaneously finding one another over the chosen square. Descended, above diagonally opposite corners, each capturing the other’s identical image. They were skeletal oblongs, the size of a tea tray, matte gray, around a bulbous little fuselage.

Either Lorenzo or Rainey brought the audio up.

The square filled with a low moaning, the island’s hallmark soundscape. The patchers had wormed hollow tubes through every structure. Wind blew across their open tops, generating a shifting, composite tonality he’d hated from the moment he’d first heard it. “Do we need that?” he asked.

“It’s so much of the feel of the place. I want our audience to have that.”

Something was moving in the distance, to his left. “What’s that?”

“Wind-powered walker.”

Four meters tall, headless, with some indeterminate number of legs, it was that same hollow milky plastic. Like the discarded carapace of something else, moving as if animated by an awkward puppetry. It rocked from side to side as it advanced, a garden of tubes atop its length no doubt contributing to the song of the plastic island.

“Have they sent it here?”

“No,” she said. “They set them free, to wander with the wind.”

“I don’t want it in the frame.”

“Now you’re the director?”

“You don’t want it in the frame,” he said.

“The wind’s taking care of that.”

The thing went stiffly on, swaying, on its hollow translucent legs.

On the upper deck of the moby, he saw, her support staff had been withdrawn. The white china Michikoid remained, checking the parafoil, hands and fingers moving with inhuman speed and precision. The ribbon on its sailor cap fluttered in the breeze. A real one, the cam with the fan absent now.

“And here we are,” said Rainey, and he saw the first of the patchers, one cam shifting focus.

A child. Or something the size of one. Hunched over the handlebars of a ghostly little bike, the bike’s frame the same salt-crusted translucence as the city and the wind-walker. Unpowered, it seemed to lack pedals as well. The patcher progressed by repeatedly scuffing at the avenue’s surface.

The patchers repelled Netherton even more than their island. Their skin was overgrown with a tweaked variant on actinic keratosis, paradoxically protecting them from UV cancers. “There’s only the one?”

“Satellite shows them converging on the square. One dozen, counting this one. As agreed.”

He watched the patcher, gender indeterminate, advancing on its kick-bike, its eyes, or possibly goggles, a single lateral smudge.