The Peripheral

98

By daylight her house was different. He reminded himself that none of this was about assemblers. Natural processes only. He associated untidiness with klept privilege. Lev’s house, for instance: its absence of cleaners, as opposed to the corridor beneath Impostor Syndrome, its spotless sameness uniform through every uninhabited room in London.

The vehicle in front of them had continued on, beyond the house, then halted. In front of it, a smaller version had already stopped. Flynne had said that the smaller one was a bomb sniffer, operated by her cousin, who must be among the six who now emerged from the larger vehicle, all in identical black jackets. Four held stubby rifles. The fifth, who didn’t, might be Flynne’s cousin, who also wore some odd headpiece. Tacoma, the driver, had parked near the largest tree, the one he and Flynne had sat under in the moonlight. He recognized their bench, which he now saw was made of sawn lengths of graying wood, their once-white protective coating worn with use.

Out of the car now, tucked under her arm, he couldn’t adjust the Wheelie Boy’s camera quickly enough to compensate for her movement. He glimpsed the vehicle that had been following them, identical to the one in front, and four more black-coated men, each with a black rifle.

Then Flynne was striding toward the house, Tacoma evidently beside her. “Get them out of sight,” Flynne said to Tacoma, whom he couldn’t see. “Bullpups and jackets’ll worry my mother.”

“Got it,” he heard Tacoma say, and wondered what bull pups were. “Says your cousin’s coming in.”

“You stay here,” Flynne said, stepping up onto the planked veranda. “Keep Leon here. Don’t let him inside while I’m with my mother. No such thing as a serious conversation, him around.”

“Got it,” Tacoma said, stepping into the frame of the Wheelie’s camera. “We’ll be right here.” She indicated a sort of settee, in the same style as the bench under the tree, but with frayed fabric cushions.

Still carrying him, Flynne opened a curiously skeletal door, its thin frame tautly stretched with some sort of fine dark mesh, and stepped into the shade of the house. “I have to talk with my mother,” she said, and set him down on something, a table or sideboard, level with her waist.

“Not here,” he said. “On the floor.”

“Okay,” she said, “but stick around.” She put the Wheelie down on the floor, then turned and was gone.

He activated the thing’s tires, in opposite directions, slowly, the camera rotating with the spherical chassis. The room looked very tall, but wasn’t. The camera was quite close to the wooden floor.

There was the mantelpiece, the one with the commemorative plastic tray whose duplicate he’d seen in Clovis Fearing’s shop in Portobello Road, a pale oblong propped against the wall. He rolled forward, the camera bobbing annoyingly, until he could make out “Clanton Bicentennial,” and the dates. And seventy-some years on from the year of celebration, he sat at Lev’s grandfather’s desk in the Gobiwagen, the band of the Wheelie-emulator across his forehead, looking back through this clumsy toy at this strange world, in which worn things weren’t meticulously distressed, but actually worn, abraded by their passage through time. A fly buzzed heavily past, above the Wheelie Boy. Anxiously, he tried to track it, then remembered that here it was more likely a fly than a drone, and that the mesh on the weirdly fragile auxiliary door was meant to keep it out. He turned the camera, studying the shabby, shadowy tableau of lost domestic calm. At the end of its arc, he discovered a cat glaring at him, on its haunches. As he saw it, it rushed the Wheelie, hissing, batting it fiercely back, the rear of the tablet striking the wooden floor. As the gyro whined, righting the Wheelie, he heard the cat push the mesh door far enough open to escape, and then the sound of it closing.

The fly, if it was the same one, could be heard buzzing, somewhere deeper in the house.