The Peripheral

94

The bar was still locked, just as it had been some minutes before. He looked at his thumb on the oval of brushed steel, inset into the glassine veneer. He was, minus a drink, as ready as he ever expected to be to confront Lowbeer with the news of Flynne’s unwillingness to attend Daedra’s event. It wasn’t, after all, his decision, or his idea. Though he had, somehow, it seemed, become party to it.

He’d indicated to Flynne that he’d contact Lowbeer immediately, and shortly he would, certainly, but he wasn’t happy about it. He supposed he understood Flynne’s reason for taking this course, but it wasn’t his. Though perhaps it sprang from that strata of archaic self-determination he found so exciting in her. Exciting and problematic. Why did the two seem so often to be inextricably linked, he wondered? And wondered, remembering Ash’s parliament of birds, whether Lowbeer might have in any case been privy to his conversation with Flynne? He paced nervously to the window, peered out into the dark garage.

Saw squidlight pulse, as Lowbeer stepped beneath an arch, headed his way. He backed away from the window. Definitely her broad shoulders, white hair, the ladylike take on a City suit. He sighed. Found the panel that brought the armchairs up, selected two and raised them. Looked at the closed bar. Sighed again. Went to the door, opened it, stepped out. She was at the bottom of the gangway, smiling pinkly. “I was nearby,” she said, “for a chat with Clovis. You don’t mind my dropping in?”

“Do you know?” he asked her.

“About what?”

“Flynne’s decision.”

“I do,” she said. “After all these years, I still find it vaguely embarrassing. Though it wasn’t that I specifically asked to hear it. The aunties fetched it.”

He wondered if that was true, that she could still be embarrassed by her own acts of surveillance? Perhaps it was akin to his own unease at knowing she’d listened, when of course one did assume that the klept was entirely able to do that. Just as one assumed, to whatever extent, that that was always being done. “Then you heard me agree to convey Flynne’s terms.”

“I did,” she said, starting up, “and your bafflement at doing so.”

“Then you know that she won’t go, unless this so-called party time is removed from the equation.”

She paused, midway. “And how do you feel about that yourself, Wilf?”

“It’s awkward. I’m prepared to attend, as you know. But you’ve proposed to do something, in the stub, that she finds very offensive.”

“She doesn’t find it offensive,” she said, starting up again. “She finds it evil. As it would have been, had I followed through.”

“Did you intend to?”

She’d reached the top. Netherton stepped back. “I field-test operatives,” she said. “A part of my basic skill set.”

“You wouldn’t have done it?”

“I would have infected them with a mild strain of Norwalk virus, had she not protested, having made her and the others immune. And been disappointed, I suppose. Though I never felt there was much chance of that, really.” She entered the cabin.

“It was a trick?”

“A test. You’ve passed it yourself. You made the right decision, though without quite knowing why. I assume you did it because you like her, though, and that counts for something. I think I might like a drink.”

“You do?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“I can’t open it. But you might be able to. There. Touch the oval with your thumb.”

She crossed to the bar, did as suggested. The door slid up, into the ceiling. “A gin and tonic, please,” she said. He watched as her drink rose, startling in its seemingly Socratic perfection, up out of the marble counter. “And you?” she asked.

He tried to speak. Couldn’t. Coughed. Lowbeer picked up her drink. He caught the scent of juniper. “Perrier,” he said, in what seemed a stranger’s voice, as alien an utterance as any in Ash’s parliament of birds.

“I’m sorry, sir,” said the bar, young, male, German, “but we have no Perrier. May I suggest Apollinaris water?”

“Fine,” said Netherton, his voice his own now.

“Ice?” the bar asked.

“Please.” His water emerged. “I don’t understand why you’d test her,” he said. “If it was her you were testing.”

“It was,” she said, gesturing toward the armchairs. He picked up his scentless water and followed her. “I’ve a further role in mind, for her,” she continued, when they were both seated, “should we be successful at Daedra’s soiree. And perhaps one for you as well. I imagine you’re actually rather good at what you do, in spite of certain disadvantages. Disadvantage and peculiar competence can go hand in hand, I find.”

Netherton sipped the German mineral water, tasting faintly of what he supposed might be limestone. “What exactly are you proposing, if I may ask?”

“I can’t tell you, I’m afraid. In sending you to Daedra, I send you beyond the reach of my protection, and of Lev’s. It’s best that you know no more than you do now.”

“Do you,” Netherton asked, “know literally everything, about everyone?”

“I most certainly don’t. I feel hindered by a surfeit of information, oceanic to the point of meaninglessness. The shortcomings of the system are best understood as the result of taking this ocean of data, and the decision points produced by our algorithms, as a near enough substitute for perfect certainty. My own best results are often due to pretending I know relatively little, and acting accordingly, though it’s easier said than done. Far easier.”

“Do you know who that was, the man Flynne saw, when Aelita was killed?”

“I imagine I do,” she said, “but that isn’t good enough. The state requires proof, paradoxically, however much it may be built on secrets and lies. Were there no burden of proof, this all would be boneless, mere protoplasm.” She sipped her gin. “As it can all too often seem to be. Waking, I find I must remind myself how the world is now, how it became that way, the role I played in what it became and the role I play today. That I’ve lived on, absurdly long, in the ever-increasing recognition of my mistakes.”

“Mistakes?”

“I suppose I shouldn’t call them that, realistically. Tactically, strategically, in terms of available outcomes, I did the best I could. Rather better, sometimes, it can feel, even today. Civilization was dying, of its own discontents. We live today in the result of what I and so many others did to prevent that. You yourself have known nothing else.”

“Well hey,” said Lev’s brother’s peripheral, the dancing master, from the entrance to the master bedroom, “didn’t expect you.”

“Mr. Penske,” said Lowbeer, “delighted. How goes it with the cube?”

“Who thought that thing up?” asked the peripheral, now very clearly Flynne’s brother’s friend, Conner, lounging against the jamb in a way Pavel would never have done.

“A tortured nation,” said Lowbeer, “in the sole service of a pervert.”

“Sounds about right,” said Conner.

“And how is Mr. Fisher?” asked Lowbeer.

“You’d think he got his ass blown off,” said Conner, an oblique little smile misplaced amid the dancing master’s facial bone, “the way everybody goes on about it.”