Уильям Гибсон - Agency

“Lowbeer’s take is doing this demonstrates trust, and that we can cooperate.”

“How about Caitlin?”

“I’d ask her, but she’s video-conferencing the technical details of an aerial drone display above the building, an extension of the fabric work.”

“What if you do it and nothing happens?”

“A little pre-apocalyptic gathering? Why not enjoy it? Have to go now. I’ll see you there.”

“Is this what happens when Virgil’s not here to tell you shit’s crazy?”

“I don’t need Virgil to tell me that about this.” He grinned as his feed closed.

Netherton woke in their darkened bedroom, to sounds of Rainey feeding Thomas breakfast in the kitchen.

He remembered the bot, on the reeking cobbles, the laser on Fearing’s pistol pinpointing the singed whipcord waistcoat. He gestured for the bedside lamp, then again, to reduce its brightness, then frowned at the amount of clothing scattered on the floor. All from the night before, none of it Rainey’s, and none of it anything he’d worn to Cheapside.

These were the garments from which the assemblers had made his costume. Now retransformed, he supposed, as he and Rainey had slept. Evidently the swordstick as well, as there was no sign of it. She’d found the pin-striped flannel drawers as risqué as anticipated, but those seemed to be gone as well.

He sat up, unsure whether the myalgia he now noticed was due to his brief struggle with Bertie or the later interlude with Rainey. Getting up and putting on his robe, he set about picking up and tidying away his clothing, hanging some things in the closet and folding others into the bureau.

He hadn’t told Rainey anything about their visit with Fearing, other than that they’d had one, but really she’d only been interested in the flannel drawers. He’d said nothing whatever about Yunevich, of course, whoever that might be, though he kept repeating the name to himself, silently, else he forget it before he could speak with Lev in person. And nothing about inadvertently short-circuiting Bertie, though when he eventually did, he’d lack the stick, for an optimally dramatic demonstration of exactly what had happened.

He went blinking into the brightly lit kitchen, finding Thomas in his high chair, one pandaform third of the nanny seated beside him, on the edge of the table, its almost spherical legs somehow managing to be crossed.

“Lowbeer just rang,” Rainey said, feeding Thomas a spoonful of pablum, most of which he immediately ejected, letting it run down his chin while smacking his lips. “Didn’t want to wake you. Reminding you to make that call as soon as possible. Didn’t say which one. Breakfast?”

“I’d best make the call first,” Netherton said, tooth-tapping for Lev’s sigil.

“Wilf,” Lev greeted him, voice only, the avatar’s two thylacines brightening.

“We need to meet again,” Netherton said. “Your troupe, as well.”

“Same place,” said Lev. “I’m on my way.”

“See you there,” said Netherton, the thylacines dimming as he ended the connection. “Denisovan Embassy again,” he said to Rainey, who was wiping Thomas’s mouth.

“You’re anxious to hear more about his relatives cramping his style in Cheyne Walk, I know,” she said.

“Sorry about breakfast. It’s business of hers,” meaning Lowbeer’s. “I’ll shower first.”

“I should hope so,” she said primly, picking up Thomas. “Verity’s learned about the jackpot, by the way.”

“When?”

“While you were in Cheapside,” she said, “but I was in no mood to tell you last night. My fault, I’m afraid, that she put it together this soon.”

“How is she?”

“Seems to be digesting it reasonably well, though you’ve much more experience of judging that.”

“Sometimes,” Netherton said, “I’ve thought they were fine, only to have them suddenly start screaming, a day or so later.”

“Ash thinks she’s doing well. But don’t be late for Lev.”

Netherton returned to the bedroom, hung up his robe, and entered the shower. “Not too warm,” he told it, “brief burst of cold at the end of the rinse.” As his shower began, Ash’s sigil pulsed. “Yes?” he answered.

“Rainey broke it to her accidentally,” Ash said. “Virgil was privy to the exchange, though Conner seemed to have already told him most of it. Sevrin, the driver and financial manager, also overheard, though he either had a sense of it already or is extremely nonreactive. They’re all taking it reasonably well, though they don’t yet know of the extinctions.”

Netherton winced, as the exfoliant sprays cut in. Extinctions, for Ash, were exclusively a nonhuman matter, and a far more emotional one than the 80-percent loss in human population. Hence her having lived, for over two decades, with the mourning tattoos that now roamed the walls of her hideous yurt. “What are they doing now?” As the exfoliation ended, the shower began soaping him.

“Sevrin is following the instructions of his dispatcher, so we’ve no idea where they’re ultimately headed.”

The cold rinse kicked in. Netherton waited for it to be followed by warm drying air, before responding. “I’m on my way to the Denisovan Embassy,” he said.

“You should be accessing the drone.”

“I’m on Lowbeer’s business,” he said, as drying ceased, enjoying, as ever, the opportunity to not do something Ash wanted him to.

Her sigil dimmed, no goodbye.

Back in the bedroom, having cleaned his teeth, he dressed, putting on his best casual jacket. The meeting was business, after all, and of a very serious if impenetrable sort.

Yunevich, he reminded himself again.

After Rainey’s revelations, which had rung like predictions but were history to her, and the bizarre preview of whatever Stets was doing, Sevrin had announced they were heading for Monterey.

Not that this meant that they were going to Monterey, Verity understood, but that that was where the Moldovan speaker on Sevrin’s headset had directed him to go. Before they got there, she assumed, he’d be directed elsewhere, to eventually be suddenly informed that they were already where they’d actually been going all along, that being how Eunice had insisted it be done.

She’d been mainly dozing since her conversation with Stets, periodically registering their slog through the Silicon Valley side of the South Bay, ignoring both Sevrin’s cover-story destinations and any actual highways they traveled on. She had no idea where they currently were. With her head cushioned on the folded black sweatshirt, against darkly tinted glass, she’d lost the majority of their journey to a strange sleep, Rainey’s grim précis of future history compounding whatever existing exhaustion and confusion. Riddled not with dreams, exactly, but slow-moving trains of thought, at once rickety and ponderous, the most recent having been about how much the network Eunice had left behind could be considered to be a living part of Eunice. An unseen opponent (Verity herself, it had sometimes seemed, in the logic of dream) had argued that the network was literally Eunice, while Verity had contended that it wasn’t Eunice at all, less so than a last will and testament is literally the deceased.

“You okay?” asked Virgil, from across the headless span of the drone’s cam-riddled shoulders, it being seated once again between them, connected to the charger beneath the seat, Virgil having plugged that into the van’s electrical system. “You were talking in your sleep.”

“What did I say?”

“Nothing I could understand.”

“Where are we?” Peering through the tint at an expanse of sere autumn pastureland, the odd grazing cow, scattered stunted oaks standing leafless and bleakly hieroglyphic. Another planet. Earth.