The Peripheral

88

Ash’s tepee smelled of dust, though nothing there seemed actually to be dusty. Perhaps there was a candle for that, he thought, taking a seat. The peripheral regarded him levelly, from around the ostentatious intricacy of Ash’s faux-antique display, then lowered its eyes, as if tracing the patterns carved in the tabletop. Ash was to his left, nearer the peripheral. She’d unpinned her threatening little hat, which resembled a black leather toad, and placed it before her on the table. “You’re being given a ticket for the parliament of birds,” she’d said to him, and when he’d started to ask what that might mean, she’d touched a finger to her black lips, silencing him.

Now he saw the jet-and-sterling spider from her chatelaine, untethered, crawl down from her left jacket cuff, to pick its rapid, needle-footed way across the carving, toward him, rhinestone eyes glinting.

It climbed onto the back of his left hand. Entirely painlessly. Indeed, he couldn’t feel it there. He thought of the Medici, dropping tendrils imperceptibly between the cells of his skin.

Ash spoke at length then, in birdsong, and he understood.

“Don’t do that,” he said, horrified, when she’d stopped, but what he actually produced was birdsong, shrill and urgent. But then he realized that what she’d told him was that the “ticket,” which they could only use here, and the one time, admitted him to their morphing encryption, hers and Ossian’s, which was as impenetrable as anything in the world, so that even Lowbeer and her omnipotent aunties were unlikely to learn what was said. And then she began to tell him more.

That Lowbeer (and he did his best to ignore birdsong gradually becoming something characterized by harsh glottal clicks) had become very interested in continua and their enthusiasts. There were, for instance, Ash said, continua enthusiasts who’d been at it for several years longer than Lev, some of whom had conducted deliberate experiments on multiple continua, testing them sometimes to destruction, insofar as their human populations were concerned. One of these early enthusiasts, in Berlin, known to the community only as “Vespasian,” was a weapons fetishist, famously sadistic in his treatment of the inhabitants of his continua, whom he set against one another in grinding, interminable, essentially pointless combat, harvesting the weaponry evolved, though some too specialized to be of use outside whatever baroque scenario had produced it.

Netherton glanced at the peripheral, which could have understood none of this in any language, but was watching Ash as she said that Lowbeer had obtained from this Vespasian plans and specifications for something that Conner Penske was being trained to operate.

“What?” Netherton asked, hearing the query emerge instead as two mewling, long-voweled syllables.

She’d no idea, Ash said, her own vowels lengthening, but given Vespasian’s fetishism and Conner’s evident delight in his first lesson, it was most certainly a weapon of some kind. Lowbeer, she pointed out, would have resources for having things rapidly and secretly fabricated.

But why, Netherton asked, their shared tongue growing more Germanic, was Ash telling him this now? He didn’t tell her that he found it increased his anxiety, or that this costume jewelry perched on the back of his hand made him want to scream, but he wished that those feelings could somehow be inadvertently conveyed through whatever mutant Low Dutch he might momentarily be mouthing.

Because, Ash said (swinging off into something that reminded him of no language whatever, nor birdsong), Lowbeer had herself, virtually overnight, become a continua enthusiast. And because she, Ash, had come to see, while facilitating Lowbeer’s strategies in Lev’s stub, that Lowbeer was playing a longer game there than made sense for her to play. And because, and here her eyes narrowed to a single pupil per, having delivered the plans for whatever system or device to Lowbeer, Vespasian had gone uncharacteristically off to Rotterdam and died there, on Friday, suddenly and unexpectedly, but of apparently natural causes, a circumstance in which Lowbeer, in Ash’s opinion, had seemed remarkably uninterested.

And this had all occurred since they’d met Lowbeer, she continued, so really rather a busy week. But now, she said, the period of Netherton’s ticket, necessarily quite brief, was nearing its end. Once it ended, she expected Netherton not to mention these things at all. She had been motivated in sharing, she said, out of a degree of self-concern, but also by concern for him, and for Lev, and for Flynne and her family as well, whom she viewed as relative innocents, inadvertently abroad.

But what, Netherton asked, only now managing to ignore the constant unfamiliarity of his own verbal production, had she hoped thereby to accomplish?

She didn’t know, he understood her to say, but had felt she had to do something. And Lowbeer’s means of knowing who said what, via the aunties of the klept, were inestimable. And here it ended, with the spider springing from his hand and scrambling back to her.

Then the three of them sat there for a long moment, Netherton taking the peripheral’s hand beneath the table, and wondering how a sadistic continua enthusiast might die unexpectedly but seemingly naturally, in Rotterdam, and how he himself might best remember not to ask Lowbeer that, as he wasn’t supposed to know. But then, he thought, what if she’d heard them conversing in birdsong and gibberish? What wouldn’t she make of that?