The Peripheral

82

The lawn in Flynne’s garden stretched to the edges of the world. The moon was a floodlight, too bright. Carbon-black seas, flat as paper. He couldn’t find her. He rolled forward, on ridiculous wheels, head bobbing. Lowbeer was monitoring this dream, he knew, and wondered how he knew. The craters of the moon becoming the coronet-

Her sigil. “Yes?” Expecting the Gobiwagen’s dome as he opened his eyes, but a different dome, moving, rain, streaks of sunlight through cloud, wet gray masonry, black-painted mullions, the branches of plane trees. He was slumped back in a chair, something cradling his neck and head, but now that withdrew.

“Sorry to wake you,” Lowbeer said. “Or not to wake you, actually. That would be the Medici’s dosing, scheduled to rouse you now.”

He was in her car again, seated at the table, opposite Flynne’s peripheral, which, though it smiled at him now in AI reflex, wasn’t Flynne. The upper part of the vehicle, previously windowless, was now completely transparent, raindrops seeming to roll across some invisible bubble of force. “Can anyone see in?” he asked.

“Of course not. You were asleep. It seemed an unnecessarily boring journey for the peripheral. Difficult not to anthropomorphize something that looks so entirely human.”

Netherton rubbed his neck, where some temporary extrusion from the chairback had propped his head at what the car had deemed a comfortable angle. “Who put me in here?” he asked.

“Ossian and Ash, after you’d had a good long sleep in the Mercedes. Ash operated the exoskeleton, via a homunculus, in order not to leave Mr. Murphy with all of the heavy lifting.”

Netherton peered out through the rain, trying to recognize the street. “Where am I going?”

“Soho Square. Flynne will join you there. Before she meets Daedra, I want you to explain the role she’ll be playing, your neoprimitive curator. Her theory about Daedra’s artistic evolution.”

“I haven’t made it up yet, entirely.”

“You need to do that, and to share it with Flynne. She must be able to make conversation about that, convincingly. Coffee.”

A circular opening expanded on the tabletop, a steaming cup emerging, as on a tiny stage elevator. He saw the peripheral looking at the cup, restrained an urge to offer her one. It. Her. “I never fail to be impressed with Ash’s medicine,” he said.

“That in itself is probably not a good sign,” said Lowbeer, “though otherwise I’m pleased to hear it.”

“Where are you?”

“With Clovis,” she said, “virtually. She’s refreshing my memory. Her own as well, of course. That really was quite a vile period, Flynne’s day. We tend to forget, all that came after having so overshadowed it. I scarcely grasped its nastiness, then, even with my resources at the time.”

The car turned a corner. He still had no idea where they were. Lifting the steaming cup, he admired the steadiness of his hand. The peripheral was watching. He winked. It smiled. He smiled back, feeling obscurely guilty, and sipped his coffee.