The Peripheral (31 page)

FUTURE PEOPLE

H
e said they built all this with what he called assemblers, which she guessed were what she’d seen kill his ex’s sister.

What he called a feed was a window in her vision, not so big that she couldn’t see to walk, but watching it and looking where she was going could be tricky. Like a Viz would be, she guessed, but without having to wear it.

Architects had told the assemblers to cut a cross-section, down the length of the original street, in the shape of a big circle, a long central tubular emptiness. The buildings had been ruins to begin with, only partly standing, so the profile the assemblers cut away had mostly been less than the bottom half of that circle. Where the cut had gone through, regardless of the material encountered, the surface it left was slick as glass. What you’d expect with marble, or metal, but weird with old red brick, or wood. Assembler-cut brick looked like fresh-cut liver, assembler-cut wood slick as the paneling in Lev’s RV. Not that you saw much of that now, because the next step had been to overgrow the length of the cut with these fairy-tale trees, trunks too wide to be real, roots running everywhere, down into the ruins behind the edge of the cut, with their canopy so far above that you couldn’t see the highest branches at all.

Hybrid, Wilf said. Something Amazonian, something Indian, and the assemblers to push it all. The bark was like the skin of elephants, finer-textured on the twisted roots.

He used his hands when he talked. He’d had to let go of hers to explain the feed of how they built this, but she’d found holding hands
comforting, just to touch something alive here, even if it wasn’t her own hand she was doing it with. She had a different feeling about him, since he’d told her about the jackpot. She thought that that was about how she’d seen he was fucked up by the story, how he didn’t know he was. He put a lot of energy into convincing people, and that was his job, or why he had that job, but really he was always convincing himself, maybe just that he was there, whatever he was trying to convince you. “The one whose party we’re going to, she’s your ex?” she asked. The feed had ended, the window had closed, his badge had blinked out.

“I don’t think of her that way,” he said. “It was quite brief, extremely ill-advised.”

“Who advised you?”

“No one.”

“She some kind of artist?”

“Yes.”

“What kind?”

“She has herself tattooed,” he said. “But it’s more complicated than that.”

“Like with rings and things?”

“No. The tattoos aren’t the product. She herself is the product. Her life.”

“What they used to call reality shows?”

“I don’t know. Why did they stop calling them that?”

“Because it got to be all there is, except
Ciencia Loca
and anime, and those Brazilian serials. Old-fashioned, to call it that.”

He stopped, reading something she couldn’t see. “Yes. She’s descended from that, in a sense. Reality television. It merged with politics. Then with performance art.”

They walked on. “I think that already happened, back home,” she said. It smelled amazing, in here. The wet trees, she guessed. “Doesn’t she run out of skin?”

“Each of her pieces is a complete epidermis, toes to the base of the
neck. Reflecting her life experience during the period of the work. She has that removed, preserved, and manufactures facsimiles, miniatures, which people subscribe to. Annie Courrèges, who you’ll be pretending to be, has a complete set, though she can’t afford them on her salary.”

“Why does she?”

“She doesn’t,” he said. “I made that up, to tell Daedra.”

“Why?”

“To get her to put her clothes back on.”

She side-eyed him. “She has herself skinned?”

“While having a fresh epidermis grown. Removal and replacement are conterminous, virtually a single operation.”

“She sore, after?”

“I’ve not been around her when she’s done that. She’d done it recently, though, before I was hired. Clean epidermal slate. She’d agreed, after meeting with you, or rather with Annie Courrèges and two other neoprimitivist curators, not to be tattooed till completion of our project.”

“What are they?”

“Who?”

“Neoprimitivists.”

“Neoprimitivist curators. Neoprimitives either survived the jackpot on their own or have opted out of the global system. The ones our project hinged on were volunteers. An ecology cult. Curators study neoprimitives, experience and collect their culture.”

Three cyclists were approaching from the opposite direction, brightly dressed. Children, she supposed, as they sped past, in what she took to be superhero costumes. “You don’t seem to like it up here,” she said.

“The greenway?”

“The future. Neither does Ash.”

“Ash makes an avocation of not liking it,” he said.

“Know her before she got that done to her eyes?”

“I’ve known Lev since before he hired the two of them. She came that way. You take what you can get, in good technicals.”

“What’s he do, Lev?” She wasn’t sure that rich people necessarily did anything.

“Family’s powerful. Old klept. Russian. His two older brothers seem likely to sustain that. He’s a sort of scout for the family. Looks for things they might invest in. Not about profit so much as keeping fresh. Sources of novelty.”

She looked up into the branches, which seemed to be dripping less now. Something with red wings went flopping there, the size of a large bird but the wings were a butterfly’s. “This isn’t novelty to you, is it?”

“No,” he said, “it isn’t. That’s why there are neoprimitivist curators. To scoop up any random bits of novelty the neoprimitives might produce, vile as they are. That was why we were working with Daedra. Technological novelty in that case, more easily commodified than usual. Three million tons of recycled polymer, in the form of a single piece of floating real estate. That’s Hyde Park there, ahead.”

And she saw they were nearing the end of the greenway, the trees less tall, more thinly planted, opening out. She could hear a squawking, like a loudspeaker. “What’s that?”

“Speaker’s Corner,” he said. “They’re all mad. It’s allowed.”

“What’s that white thing, like part of a building?”

“Marble Arch.”

“Has a couple of arches. Like they took it off something else and sort of left it there.”

“They did,” he said. “But then it probably made more sense, visually, with traffic going through it.”

They were out of the greenway now, descending widening stairs to the level of the park.

“The one who’s talking,” she said, “he’s got to be on stilts, but it doesn’t look like it.” The spidery figure, she guessed, would be close to ten feet tall.

“A peripheral,” he said. The tall thing’s round pink head was fronted
with a sort of squared-off trumpet, that same pink, through which it blared down, incomprehensibly, at the small crowd of figures surrounding it, at least one of which seemed to be a penguin, though as tall as she was. The tall speaker wore a tight black suit, its arms and legs very narrow. She couldn’t understand what it was saying, but thought she made out the word “nomenclature.” “They’re all mad,” he said. “They might all be peripherals. Harmless, though. This way.”

“Where are we going?”

“I thought we could walk to the Serpentine. See the ships. Small replicas. They sometime enact historic battles. The
Graf Spee
is particularly good.”

“Is that speaker making any sense at all?”

“It’s a tradition,” he said, and led her along a smooth gravel path, beige. And there were people here, walking in the park, sitting on benches, pushing buggies. They didn’t look particularly like future people to her. She guessed Ash did, more than anyone else she’d seen here, if you didn’t count the ten-foot trumpet-head Wilf said was a peripheral. She could still hear him ranting, behind them.

“What will it be like, when we go to your ex’s party?”

“I wish you wouldn’t call her that. Daedra West. I don’t know, exactly. Powerful people will be there, according to Lev and Lowbeer. The Remembrancer himself, possibly.”

“Who’s that?”

“An official of the City. I don’t think I could explain to you what his traditional function was. Originally, I think, to remind royalty of an ancient debt. Later, entirely symbolic. Since the jackpot, best not spoken of.”

“Does he know Daedra?”

“I’ve no idea. I’ve not been to that sort of occasion, and glad of it.”

“You scared?”

He stopped on the path, looked at her. “I suppose I’m anxious, yes. This whole business is entirely outside my experience.”

“Mine too,” she said. She took his hand. Squeezed it.

“I’m sorry we’ve invaded your life,” he said. “It was lovely, where you were.”

“It was? I mean, is?”

“Your mother’s garden, in the moonlight . . .”

“Compared to this?”

“Yes. I’ve always dreamed about it, in a way, the past. I didn’t fully realize that, somehow. Now I can’t believe I’ve actually seen it.”

“You can see it more,” she said. “I’ve got the Wheelie Boy, at Fab.”

“At what?”

“Forever Fab. I work there. Did. Before this all started.”

“That’s what I mean,” he said, his hand tensing. “We’re changing it all.”

“We’re all poor, except Pickett, who’s maybe dead now, and one or two others. Not like here. Not a lot to do. I would’ve joined the Army when Burton went in the Marines, but our mom needed taking care of. Still does.” She looked around at the wide flat park, the lawns, paths like something in a geometry class. “This is the biggest park I’ve ever seen. Bigger than the one by the river in Clanton, with the Civil War fort. And that greenway’s probably the craziest thing I’ve really ever seen, that people built. That the only one?”

“From here, we could walk greenways to Richmond Park, Hampstead Heath, and on, from either. Fourteen in all. And the hundred rivers, all recovered . . .”

“Glassed over, lit up?”

“Some of the largest, yes.” He smiled, but stopped when it seemed to surprise him. She hadn’t seen him smile much, not that way. He let go of her hand, but not all at once.

He started walking again. She walked beside him.

Macon’s red nubbin badge appeared. “I’m seeing Macon’s badge,” she said.

“Say hello,” he said.

“Hello? Macon?”

“Hey,” said Macon, “got this situation getting going. Clovis wants you back.”

“What?”

“Luke 4:5’s outside with the signs and shit, here. You and your brother and your mother, you’re on the signs. Cousin Leon too.”

“The fuck?”

“Looks like Coldiron is their new thing they’ve decided God hates.”

“Where’s Burton?”

“On his way back from Pickett’s. Just started.”

“Shit,” Flynne said.

CHATELAINE

L
ooking up from the battle taking place on the Serpentine, he saw Ash approaching, in various tones of black and darkest sepia, along the pathway’s beige gravel, as if on hidden casters.

He’d been regretting Flynne missing the miniatures, though he himself preferred steam to sail, and the drama of long-range guns to these sparkings of tiny cannon. But the water in the region of the battle had scaled waves, and miniature cloud, and something about that always delighted him. The peripheral, seated on the bench beside him, seemed to be following it as well, though he knew attention to moving objects was just a way of emulating sentience.

“Lowbeer wants you back at Lev’s,” said Ash, coming to a halt in front of their bench. Her skirts and narrow jacket were a baroquely complicated patchwork of raw-edged fragments, some of which, though no doubt flexible, resembled darkened tin. She wore a more ornate reticule than usual, covered in mourning beads and hung with a sterling affair he knew to be a chatelaine, the organizer for a set of Victorian ladies’ household accessories. Or not so Victorian, he saw, as a sterling spider with a faceted jet abdomen, on one of the chatelaine’s fine chain retainers, picked its agile way up from the jacket’s waist, its multiple eyes tiny rhinestones.

“Flynne seemed worried, to be called back,” he said, looking up at her. “The timing was unfortunate. I was about to explain the framing narrative for Annie.”

“I’ve explained to her that you’re a publicist,” she said. “She seemed
to understand it in terms of some already very degraded paradigm of celebrity, so it was relatively easy.”

“Public relations isn’t one of your areas of expertise,” he said. “I hope you haven’t left her with misconceptions.”

Ash reached out, brushed the peripheral’s bangs aside. It looked up at her, eyes calm and bright. “She does bring something to it, doesn’t she?” she said to him. “I’ve seen you noticing.”

“Is she in more danger now, there?”

“I suppose so, though it’s difficult to quantify. Some apparently powerful entity, based here, wants her dead, there, and brings increasingly massive resources to the task, there. We’re there to counter that, but in our competition with them, we’ve stressed her world’s economy. That stress is problematic, as it can and probably soon will produce more chaotic change.”

A sudden sharp crack from the battle in the Serpentine. Children cheered, nearby. He saw that one of the ships had lost its central mast to a cannonball, as had happened long ago, he’d no idea where, according to whatever account was being reenacted. He stood, extended his hand to the peripheral, which took it. He helped it to rise, which it did gracefully.

“I don’t like it, that she’s sending you to Daedra’s,” said Ash, fixing him with her vertically bifurcated gaze. It occurred to him that he’d now been around her so much that he scarcely noticed her eyes. “It’s almost certain that Daedra, or one of her associates, is our competitor in the stub. They may be unable to do more to Flynne, here, than destroy her peripheral, in which case she finds herself back in the stub, however painful the experience may have been. The same for Conner, in brother Anton’s dancing master. But you’ll attend in person. Physically present, entirely vulnerable.”

“Tactically,” he said, “I don’t see what other choice she has.” He looked at her, struck with the idea that she might be genuinely concerned for him.

“You haven’t considered the danger you’ll be placing yourself in?”

“I suppose I’ve tried not to consider it too closely. But then what would happen to Flynne, if I were to refuse? To her brother, mother? Her whole world?”

Her four pupils bored into his, her white face perfectly immobile. “Altruism? What’s happening to you?”

“I don’t know,” he said.