William Gibson: The Peripheral

Part of a window slid aside. Lorenzo stepped out. “I have Wilf Netherton,” Netherton heard him say. Then Lorenzo’s sigil vanished, Daedra’s replacing it.

Her hands came up, clutched the lapels of her open jacket. “Wilf. How are you?”

“Glad to see you,” he said.

She smiled, displaying teeth whose form and placement might well have been decided by committee. She tugged the jacket closer, fists sternum-high. “You’re angry, about the tattoos,” she said.

“We did agree, that you wouldn’t do that.”

“I have to do what I love, Wilf. I wasn’t loving not doing it.”

“I’d be the last to question your process,” he said, channeling intense annoyance into what he hoped would pass for sincerity, if not understanding. It was a peculiar alchemy of his, the ability to do that, though now the hangover was in the way. “Do you remember Annie, the brightest of our neoprimitivist curators?”

Her eyes narrowed. “The cute one?”

“Yes,” he said, though he hadn’t particularly thought so. “We’d a drink together, Annie and I, after that final session at the Connaught, when you’d had to go.”

“What about her?”

“She’d been dumbstruck with admiration, I realized. It all came out, once you were gone. Her devastation at having been too overawed to speak with you, about your art.”

“She’s an artist?”

“Academic. Mad for everything you’ve done, since her early teens. Subscriber to the full set of miniatures, which she literally can’t afford. Listening to her, I understood your career as if for the first time.”

Her head tilted, hair swung. The jacket must have opened as she raised one hand to remove the sunglasses, but Lorenzo wasn’t having any.

Netherton’s eyes widened, preparing to pitch something he hadn’t yet invented, none of what he’d said so far having been true. Then he remembered that she couldn’t see him. That she was looking at someone called Lorenzo, on the upper deck of a moby, halfway around the world. “She’d particularly wanted to convey an idea she’d had, as the result of meeting you in person. About a new sense of timing in your work. She sees timing as the key to your maturation as an artist.”

Lorenzo refocused. Suddenly it was as if Netherton were centimeters from her lips. He recalled their peculiarly brisk nonanimal tang.

“Timing?” she asked, flatly.

“I wish I’d recorded her. Impossible to paraphrase.” What had he said previously? “That you’re more secure, now? That you’ve always been brave, fearless really, but that this new confidence is something else again. Something, she put it, so deeply earned. I’d planned on discussing her ideas with you over dinner, that last time, but it didn’t turn out to be that sort of evening.”

Her head was perfectly still, eyes unblinking. He imagined her ego swimming up behind them, to peer at him suspiciously, something eel-like, larval, transparently boned. He had its full attention. “If things had gone differently,” he heard himself say, “I don’t think we’d be having this conversation.”

“Why not?”

“Because Annie would tell you that the entrance you’re considering is the result of a retrograde impulse, something dating from the start of your career. Not informed by that new sense of timing.”

She was staring at him, or rather at whoever Lorenzo was. And then she smiled. Reflexive pleasure of the thing behind her eyes.

Rainey’s sigil privacy-dimmed. “I’d want to have your baby now,” she said, from Toronto, “except I know it would always lie.”

She’d forgotten to pee. Had to leave the copter autopiloting a perimeter, fifteen feet out from the client building, and run out to Burton’s new composting toilet. Now she tugged up the zip on her cutoffs, fastened the button, tossed a scoopful of cedar sawdust down the hole, and bashed out through the door, making the big tube of government hand sanitizer he’d slung on the outside thump and slosh. Smacked its white plastic, catching some, rubbed it across her palms and wondered if he’d lifted the tube from the VA hospital.

Back inside, she opened the fridge, grabbed a piece of Leon’s homemade jerky and a Red Bull. Stuck the lopsided strip of dried beef in her mouth as she sat down, reaching for her phone.

Paparazzi were back. Looked like double-decker dragonflies, wings or rotors transparent with speed, little clear bulb on the front end. She’d tried counting them, but they were fast, moved constantly. Maybe six, maybe ten. They were interested in the building. Like AI emulating bugs, but she knew how to do that herself. They didn’t seem to be trying to do anything, other than dart and hover, heads toward the building. She edged a couple, saw them dart away, gone. They’d be back. It felt like they were waiting for something, evidently on the fifty-sixth floor.

Building was black from some angles, but really a very dark bronzy brown. If it had windows, the floors she was working didn’t, or else they were shuttered. There were big flat rectangles on the face, some vertical, some horizontal, no order to them.

The fairies had gone quiet as she’d passed twenty, according to the display’s floor indicator. Some level of stricter protocol? She wouldn’t have minded having them back. It wasn’t that interesting up here, swatting at dragonflies. On her own time, she’d have been checking out views of the city, but she wasn’t being paid to enjoy the scenery.

Seemed to be at least one street that was transparent, down there, lit from below, like it was paved with glass. Hardly any traffic. Maybe they hadn’t designed that yet. She thought she’d seen something walking, two-legged, at the edge of woods, or a park, too big to be human. Some of the vehicles hadn’t had any lights. And something huge had sailed slowly past, out beyond the receding towers, like a whale, or a whale-sized shark. Lights on it, like a plane.

Tested the jerky for chewability. Not yet.

Went hard at a dragonfly, front camera. Didn’t matter how fast she went, they were just gone. Then a horizontal rectangle folded out and down, becoming a ledge, showing her a wall of frosted glass, glowing.

Took the jerky out of her mouth, put it on the table. The bugs were back, jockeying for position in front of the window, if that was what it was. Her free hand found the Red Bull, popped it. She sipped.

Then the shadow of a woman’s slim butt appeared, against the frosted glass. Then shoulder blades, above. Just shadows. Then hands, a man’s by their size, on either side, above the shadows of the woman’s shoulder blades, his fingers spread wide.

Swallowed, the drink like thin cold cough syrup. “Scoot,” she said, and swept through the bugs, scattering them.

One of the man’s hands left the glass, its shadow vanishing. Then the woman stepped away, the man’s other hand staying where it was. Flynne imagined him leaning there, against the glass, and that there hadn’t been the kiss he’d expected, or if there had been, not the hoped-for result.

Moody, for a game. You could open a serious relationship show with that. Then his remaining hand was gone. She imagined an impatient gesture.

Her phone rang. Put it on speaker.

“You good?” It was Burton.

“I’m in,” she said. “You in Davisville?”

“Just got here.”

“Luke show?”

“They’re here,” he said.

“Don’t mess with them, Burton.”

“Not a chance.”

Sure. “Anything ever happen, in this game?”

“Those cams,” he said. “You edging them back?”

“Yeah. And sort of a balcony’s folded out. Long frosted glass window, lights on inside. Saw shadows of people.”