Burton standing there, lit by the open door. Behind him, Macon and Edward, Leon, Carlos. Leon whistled, between two fingers.
“Never much going on around here,” she said, and stepped down.
“That could change,” Macon said. “Remember how I saw you there?”
“They’ve got more for you to do,” she said to him, hearing Janice step down behind her. “Janice, she’ll tell you.” She looked at the others. Realized she had no idea what anybody in particular thought was going on, herself included. “Burton and I,” she said, “we need to talk. Excuse us.” She started up the path, then stopped as he caught up with her.
“You ready now?” he asked, quietly.
“Couldn’t talk, before. Forget talking: Couldn’t think. It did something to my head.”
“Macon says you went somewhere. Says he saw you there on his phone. Where?”
“Not Colombia. They say it’s the future. London. What we saw in the game.”
“What do you think it is?”
“Don’t know.”
“If you were in the trailer, how’d Macon see you somewhere else?”
She looked at him, his face in the moonlight. “Kind of robot body. Macon saw it. But it feels human. Like a drone, but you don’t have to think about operating it. Thing on my head, in the trailer, they call a neural cutout. Keeps your own body from responding when you do something with the peripheral.”
“The what?”
“Peripheral. What they call them. The body things.”
“Who are they?”
“Ash, she’s the first one you talked to, she works for Lev. That’s his name. I think he’s Russian, but English Russian? Grew up there.”
“When do they say they are?”
She told him.
“Just over seventy years? How different does it look?”
“You saw it yourself,” she said. “Different but not that much. Or maybe a lot and it doesn’t all show?”
“You believe them?”
“It’s something.”
“They have a lot of money.” It wasn’t a question, but she could see he didn’t want her to tell him it wasn’t true.
“Metric fuck-tons, for all I know, but there’s no way any of that’s getting here. But they’re figuring out ways to game the markets, here.”
“Because they know what’s going to happen, before it does?”
“Say it doesn’t work that way. They can spend money on their side, pay people there to figure out how they can make money here, then have the Coldiron lawyers do things, here. Information from there affects things here. But they don’t know our future. They don’t need to know our future to kick ass in the market, though, because they can find out whatever they need to know about our present, any day. Their stuff’s all seventy years faster than ours.”
“Okay,” he said, and she wondered if what she was seeing in his eyes was the Corps’ speed, intensity, violence of action, or his right way of seeing. Because he just got it. Ignored the crazy, went tactically forward. And she saw how weird that was, and how much it was who he was, and for just that instant she wondered if she didn’t somehow have it too.
“Follow the money,” he said. “What’s in it for them?”
“That’s where it gets fucked up.”
“You don’t think it’s already fucked up?” His eyes crinkled, like he was about to laugh at her.
“It was like a game, for Lev. We aren’t their past. We go off in some different direction, because they’ve changed things here. Their world’s not affected by what happens here, now or going forward. But shit’s gone sideways on them, some other way. Because I saw that woman killed. Whatever that’s about. I saw the man who knew she was going to be killed. Who got her out on that balcony for that thing to eat her. And now somebody up there’s gotten in here too.”
“Here?”
“Now. Our time.”
“Who?”
“Whoever hired those men from Memphis, to kill us.”
“But why’s this Lev in it now? He’s the man, right? It’s still his show?”
“I don’t know. I’m going back there now, to find out.”
“Now?”
“Soon as I can use myself a flush toilet, I’m back in the Snow White hat. Janice brought me a sandwich and some water, so I won’t starve here, while I’m back up there. Then we’ll have more to work with. I don’t want you doing anything, okay? Things are complicated enough. Just lock everything down, really tight. Don’t let anybody on the property but our closest people. We don’t know enough now to make any kind of move at all.”
He looked at her. “Easy Ice,” he said, and she saw the shiver run through him in the moonlight, the haptic thing, but then it was gone.
“Where’s Conner?” she asked.
“At his place.”
“That’s good,” she said. “Keep him there.”
“Go use that flush toilet,” he said. “Nobody’s stopping you.”
46.
THE SIGHTS
Netherton watched as the peripheral opened its eyes. Ash had had it recline again on the bunk in the back cabin, had readjusted the lights.
“Okay,” Flynne said, tentatively. Then: “Not bad.”
“Welcome back,” said Lev, over Netherton’s shoulder.
“How’s the tetrachromia?” asked Ash.
“I can’t remember what it was like,” Flynne said, “except I didn’t like it.”
“Try sitting up,” suggested Ash.
Flynne sat up, shook her hair to the side, then touched it, froze. “My haircut. Saw it before, in the mirror here, but I couldn’t think. You did that?”
“The stylist was impressed,” said Ash. “I imagine he’ll be copying it.”
“That’s Carlota,” said Flynne. “She’s the best. She’s in the Marianas, has a bot chair in our Hefty Clips. Keeps up with the styles.”
“You’re used to telepresence, then,” Lev said.
“We call it getting a haircut,” Flynne said, giving him a look as she got to her feet, “back in frontier days.”
“We have something you might like to see,” said Lev. He turned, behind Netherton, and walked back along the corridor. Netherton smiled at her, self-consciously, and followed Lev, Ash behind him.
“Where’s your dogs?” Flynne asked, behind them, loud in the veneered narrowness.
“Upstairs,” Lev said, turning, as she emerged.
Netherton watched her touching things. Running a finger across the glassy veneer. Lightly tapping a knuckle on a steel handle. Testing the peripheral’s sensoria, he guessed.
“I liked them,” she said. “I could see how they weren’t dogs, but in a dog ballpark.” She touched her black trousers. “Why do these clothes all feel like yoga pants?”
“They have no seams,” said Ash. “The seams on the outside are decorative, traditional. They were made for you by assemblers. All of a piece.”
“Fabbed,” said Flynne. “Don’t mean to be rude, but if you aren’t wearing contacts, like you said, is that some kind of condition?”
“A modification,” said Ash. “A species of visual pun, on a likely mythical condition called pupula duplex. Which is usually depicted as dual irises, but I chose to make it literal.”
“How do things look?”
“I seldom use the lower pair. They register infrared, which can be interesting in the dark.”
“You don’t mind if I ask questions? I’m not sure what anything is, here. You could’ve been born that way. Or have a religion or something. How would I know? But tattoos that run around, I sort of get that.”
“Please,” Ash said, “ask questions.”
“Where’s the phone, in this?” Flynne asked, holding up her hands. “I was trying to tell my friend about it.”
“I could check with Hermès,” said Lev. “The components are very small, though, and distributed. Some are biological. I couldn’t tell you where my own are, without accessing medical history. Part of m
y cousin’s became inflamed, had to be replaced. Base of the skull. But they can put them anywhere.” He propped himself against the edge of the desk. “May we show you London now? We’ve a helicopter above the house, like the one you flew for us. You’ll want to take a seat.”
“Can I fly it?”
“Let us show you the sights,” said Lev. He smiled.
She looked from Lev to Ash, then to Netherton. “Okay,” she said, and sat.
Ash took the other chair. Netherton joined Lev on the edge of the desk, glad to not be behind it, so less associated with its psychological functions of hierarchy and intimidation. “It wasn’t such a shock for you, this time,” he said to Flynne.
“I couldn’t wait to get back here,” she said. “But I’m not necessarily going to believe you about any of this, okay?”
“Of course,” said Lev.
Netherton was suddenly aware of smiling in a particularly stupid fashion, while Ash smirked at him, her gray eyes doubly gimleted. But then she turned, and spoke to Flynne. “You’re seeing my sigil now,” she said, and Flynne nodded, Netherton seeing it too. Now Lev’s was there, and Flynne’s, which was featureless. “Now I’ll open a feed,” Ash said, “full binocular.”
The room vanished, replaced by a foggy midmorning aerial vista of London, the angular uprights of the shards set regularly out across the city’s compacted intricacy, a density relieved by greenways he’d hiked as a child, by systematic erasures of alleged mediocrities, by new forests grown thick and deep. The glass roofing some of the cleansed and excavated rivers dully reflected what sun there was, and in the Thames he saw the floating islands, rearranged yet again, the revolving blades beneath them better positioned to gather the river’s strength.
“Damn,” said Flynne, evidently impressed.
Ash piloted them toward Hampstead, where Netherton’s parents had taken him to a schoolmate’s party, when he was ten, to spend the afternoon within a length of clay drainpipe, buried under a cast-iron bench, a space strung with tiny colored lanterns, where costumed mice had sung and danced and staged mock duels. The hands of his homunculus had been crude and translucent, not unlike those of the patchers. As he remembered this, Ash was telling Flynne of the waterwheels turned by the rescued rivers, but nothing of any preceding history, times prior, darkness.
He crossed the roof of his mouth with his tongue tip, blanking the feed, returning to the Gobiwagen, preferring to watch Flynne’s face.
“But where is everybody?” she asked. “There’s no people.”
“That’s complicated,” said Ash, evenly, “but at this altitude you wouldn’t notice anyone.”
“Hardly any traffic, either,” Flynne said. “Noticed that before.”
“We’re almost in the City now,” said Ash. “Cheapside. Here’s your crowd.”
But those aren’t people, thought Netherton, watching Flynne’s expression as she took it all in.
“Cosplay zone,” said Lev, “Eighteen sixty-seven. We’d be fined for the helicopter, if it didn’t have cloaking, or if it made a sound.”
Netherton tapped the requisite quadrant of palate, returning to Ash’s feed, to find them stationary over morning traffic, already so thick as to be almost unmoving. Cabs, carts, drays, all drawn by horses. Lev’s father and grandfather owned actual horses, apparently. Were said to sometimes ride them, though certainly never in Cheapside. His mother had shown him the shops here as a child. Silver-plated tableware, perfumes, fringed shawls, implements for ingesting tobacco, fat watches cased in silver or gold, men’s hats. He’d been amazed at how copiously the horses shat in the street, their droppings swept up by darting children, younger than he was, who he’d understood were no more real than the horses, but who seemed as real, entirely real, and terrifying in the desperation of their employment, cursing vividly as they dodged with crude short brooms between the legs of the animals, as men his mother said were bankers, solicitors, merchants, brokers, or rather their simulacra, hurried along beneath tall hats, past handpainted signs for boots, china, lace, insurance, plate glass. He’d loved those signs, had captured as many as he could while holding his mother’s hand, uncomfortable in his stiff and requisite clothing. He’d kept a lookout for fierce-eyed boys hurtling handcarts along, or running, shouting, back into dark courts stinking, he supposed, as realistically as the green dung of the horses. His mother had worn broad dark skirts for such visits, swelling from a narrow waist to brush the pavement, below a very fitted sort of matching jacket, some unlikely hat perched on the side of her head. She hadn’t cared for any of it. Had brought him here because she felt she should, and perhaps he’d elaborated on that, later, developing his own sharp distaste for anything of the sort.
“Look at it,” Flynne said.
“It isn’t real,” he said. “Worked up from period media. Scarcely anyone you see is human, and those who are, are tourists, or schoolchildren being taught history. Better at night, the illusion.” Less annoying, in any case.
“The horses aren’t real?” Flynne asked.
“No,” said Ash, “horses are rare now. We’ve generally done better, with domestic animals.”
Please, thought Netherton, don’t start. Lev might have thought the same thing, because now he said, “We’ve brought you here to meet someone. Just to say hello, this time.”
They began to descend.
Netherton saw Lowbeer then, looking up, in skirts and a jacket very like the ones his mother had worn.
47.
POWER RELATIONSHIPS
In the middle of a walking forest of black hats stood a white-haired woman with bright blue eyes. The men seemed no more to see her than they saw whatever Ash was flying, which Lev said they couldn’t, though they felt the turbulence, each one reaching up to hold his hat as he walked through it. They walked around the woman as she stood there, looking up at what they couldn’t see, one gray-gloved hand holding a little hat against the downdraft.
There was a new badge, beside Lev’s, Ash’s, Wilf’s. A sort of simple crown, in profile, gold on cream. The others dimmed now. “We’re in privacy mode,” the woman said. “The others can’t hear us. I am Detective Inspector Ainsley Lowbeer, of the Metropolitan Police.” Her voice in Flynne’s head, sounds of crowd and traffic muted.
“Flynne Fisher,” Flynne said. “Are you why I’m here?”
“You yourself are why you’re here. If you hadn’t chosen to stand in for your brother, you wouldn’t have witnessed the crime I’m investigating.”
“Sorry,” said Flynne.
“I’m not sorry at all,” the woman said. “Without you, I’d have nothing. An annoyingly seamless absence. Are you frightened?”
“Sometimes.”
“Normal under the circumstances, insofar as they can be said to be normal. Are you satisfied with your peri?”
“My what?”
“Your peripheral. I chose it myself, I’m afraid on very short notice. I felt it had a certain poetry.”
“Why do you want to talk to me?”
“You witnessed a peculiarly unpleasant homicide. Saw the face of someone who may be either the perpetrator or an accomplice.”
“I thought that might be why.”
“Some person or persons unknown have since attempted to have you murdered, in your native continuum, presumably because they know you to be a witness. Shockingly, in my view, I’m told that arranging your death would in no way constitute a crime here, as you are, according to current best legal opinion, not considered to be real.”
“I’m as real as you are.”
“You are indeed,” said the woman, “but persons of the sort pursuing you now would have no hesitation whatever in killing you, or anyone else, here, now, or elsewhere. Such persons are my concern, of course.” Bright blue, her eyes, and cold. “But you are my concern as well. My responsibility, in a different way.”
“Why?”
“For my sins, perhaps.” She smiled, but not in any way Flynne found comforting. “Zubov, you should u
nderstand, will pervert the economy of your world.”
“It’s pretty fucked anyway,” Flynne said, then wished she’d put it another way.
“I’m familiar with it, so yes, it is, though that isn’t what I mean. I don’t like what these people are doing, these continua hobbyists, Zubov included, though I do find it fascinating. Some might think you more real than I am myself.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’m very old, elaborately and artificially so. I don’t feel entirely real to myself, frankly. But if you agree to assist me, I shall assist you in return, insofar as I can.”
“Got a male version of this? Peripheral?”
The Detective Inspector raised penciled eyebrows. “You would prefer one?”
“No. I don’t want to be the only one who’s seen this, been here. I need someone who’ll back me up, when I go home and tell them what’s going on.”
“Zubov could arrange it, I’m sure.”
“You’re after whoever sent that gray knapsack thing to kill her, aren’t you? And that asshole who brought her out on the balcony?”
“I am, yes.”
“I’ll be a witness. When it comes to trial. I would anyway.”
“There shall be no trial. Only punishment. But thank you.”
“I want that peripheral, though. And fast. Deal?”
“Consider it done,” said Lowbeer. The other badges undimmed, the din of Cheapside flooding back, now with an added booming of big church bells. “We’ve had our chat,” Lowbeer called up. “Thank you so much for bringing her by. Goodbye!”
Cheapside was the size of one of the badges then, then smaller, gone. Flynne blinked across at Lev. He was seeing her, she saw, and so was Wilf Netherton, but Ash’s weird eyes were fixed on blank veneer.
“Actually, Inspector,” Ash said, “I believe we can borrow one. Yes. Of course. I’ll speak with Mr. Zubov. Thank you.” She turned to Lev, seeing him now. “Your brother’s sparring partner,” she said. “Your father keeps it in Richmond Hill, brings it out to remind Anton of his folly?”
“More or less,” Lev said, glancing at Flynne.