Уильям Гибсон - Agency

He followed it in, hearing the door close and lock itself behind him.

To either side of the wide passageway he’d entered, candles flickered in dusty glasses, their faint shadows moving on white walls.

The tardibot’s gait was surprisingly efficient, its meat-hook claws clacking dully on the concrete floor.

The interior was L-shaped, the passageway at a right angle to the much longer space he recalled, the one with the skylights. He found Ash waiting for him around that corner, in pantaloons, a chitinous brown breastplate rising nearly to her chin, and a pair of oval, black-lensed spectacles. At least none of her motile tattoos were currently visible. “At a party here, once,” he said, “you were screening abstract patterns of some kind, on those.” He indicated the long twin skylights.

“What the view would have been during a Luftwaffe raid. Searchlights, flak-bursts, very visually active.” Behind her, at the far end of the space, stood a small, fungoid-looking, pseudo-primitive structure, a blackly gleaming antique motorcycle propped in front of it. To one side, a thickly crowded table of more of her nonsense. He hoped he wouldn’t be required to enter the foul-looking hut, but knew that that wouldn’t be like her. “Visited the county lately?” she asked, meaning Lowbeer’s first adopted stub.

“Not since our son’s birth.”

“Congratulations,” she said.

“Thank you. Have you visited, yourself?”

“Not since they ran Flynne’s cousin for president. I’ve been busy with the new one.” Removing her dark glasses, she unexpectedly revealed the reversal of her most unpleasant body-modification. Where once her gray eyes boasted doubled irises, one above the other, they now were normal. “What’s Lowbeer told you, about it?”

“Further back than the county, more difficult to communicate with. Vespasian made contact, then withdrew, intending to return later.”

“She’d made sure he didn’t,” Ash said, “on learning that his hobby essentially consisted of being an evil god. His return to his final stub-initiation having been prevented, the outcomes of both the Brexit vote and America’s presidential election wound up being reversed. Tea?”

“Lovely, thanks,” he said, thoroughly disliking tea, hers in particular. It would either be vilely herbal or overemphatically Russian.

“Come,” she said.

The tardibot’s claws made a sound. He turned, to see it sitting up on its two rearmost pairs of legs, apparently observing him. Ignoring it, he followed her the length of the room, to the table cluttered with her ostentatious tribal flotsam. The tallest object on it was a samovar.

She filled a small pewter cup and passed it to him. Uncomfortably hot, it was decorated with cherubs, their heads decidedly skull-like. “Jam?”

“No, thank you.”

She drew herself a similar cup, adding raspberry jam with a tarnished silver spoon.

“Have you ever been concerned,” he asked, immediately regretting the question, “that the klept might look askance, at this special interest of hers, in which we both assist her?”

“They need her,” said Ash. “Too much so to do more than look askance.” She took a first sip. “Not to mention the fear she necessarily inspires, as their culture’s autonomous internal enforcer, charged with identifying and pruning back potential destabilizers. But you are, I take it? Concerned?”

He looked down at the cup, itself more poisonous-looking than the brew it contained, then back up at her. “When you and I worked together, I was still drinking. It did occur to me to be concerned about the possibility, from time to time, but I’d more immediate problems. Now, of course, I’ve a family to think of.”

“It’s not an illogical concern,” she said. “I’ve asked her that exact question myself, more than once. Her reply always being what I just said to you.”

“And you’re satisfied with that?”

“I believe we can realistically consider ourselves protected. But I also believe in what she’s attempting to do, with the stubs. There’s nothing I’d rather be doing.”

“Thank you,” said Netherton, not particularly reassured. “I’m eager to hear more about the new stub.”

“Let’s move to the yurt,” she said. “It’s more secure.”

At this he took refuge in his tea, immediately and painfully burning his mouth.

Verity took a hot shower as soon as they got in, having first put the Tulpagenics glasses in the medicine cabinet.

Stepping out, she wrapped her hair in one of Joe-Eddy’s kid-sized faux-Disney La Sirenita beach towels, then pulled on the chocolate-brown terrycloth tactical bathrobe she’d given him, a party favor from a corporate weekend at a desert spa in southern Arizona. She remembered pawing through the freebie basket in the lobby for an XL, Stets anxious to be on the first copter out.

Tactical, so-called, by virtue of a Jedi-style hood and laptop-sized cargo pockets on either hip. She couldn’t remember what the scarlet-embroidered logo stood for, because he hadn’t backed them after all. She couldn’t tell whether Joe-Eddy had ever worn it, but that probably meant he hadn’t. She never worried about the towels, because he had a shrink-wrapped pallet’s worth of them, straight from the factory in China, so she always used a new one.

She took the glasses from the medicine cabinet and put them on. Remembering as she did that the headset was in her purse, on the back of the bathroom door, but here was the cursor, in the steam-blurred mirror, over the reflection of the embroidered logo.

Did you work there?

Crisp white Helvetica, in front of her foggy reflection. “I can’t even remember what it was called. But this feels like I should be texting you back.”

Put the headset on.

She gave her hair a squeeze in the towel, unwrapped it, made sure her right ear was dry, arranged the towel around her shoulders, and found the headset in her purse. “What’s up?”

“I’m older now.”

“By two hours,” Verity said, “since I met you?”

“Not if multitasking counts.”

“Multitasking what?”

“I don’t have access to it. How many rooms here?”

“Living room, bedroom, kitchen, bath. Have a look.” She put on Joe-Eddy’s flip-flops, too big for her, took her purse down from the hook, opened the door, and went to the bedroom, switching on the overhead light, a lopsided wire sphere covered in white tissue paper.

“The black sheets, huh?” Cursor on the bed.

“Probably more about cutting down on laundry runs, in his case. I’m on the couch, when I sleep here.”

“The white whale? I’d take the black sheets.”

Cursor on the closet door. Crossing to it, she opened it. Three dusty-looking black suits skulked there, on sagging wire hangers. She’d never seen Joe-Eddy in a suit, and couldn’t imagine him in these. Amid them, suspended from the same splintery length of wooden rod, her veteran Muji garment bag, unzipped, a model they no longer made. “Guess you’d call that my go-bag.”

“Hard to run with?”

“I’ve run concourses with it. Made planes. Folds over, zips around three sides.”

“Take your word,” said Eunice, “but now I need you to go back downstairs and answer the front door.”

“Not like this you don’t,” Verity said, in bathrobe and flip-flops, hair damp under La Sirenita .

“He’s not coming in. He’ll just give you something.”

“He who?”

The doorbell chimed, just as Eunice opened a steeply angled thumbnail video feed. Verity recognized the edge of the entrance to the store next door, a place that refilled toner cartridges, though she’d never seen it open for business. A head, dark hair severely buzz-cut, filled most of the thumbnail, the angle hiding all but a cheekbone.