William Gibson - The Peripheral

“Okay,” she said, “but stick around.” She put the Wheelie down on the floor, then turned and was gone.

He activated the thing’s tires, in opposite directions, slowly, the camera rotating with the spherical chassis. The room looked very tall, but wasn’t. The camera was quite close to the wooden floor.

There was the mantelpiece, the one with the commemorative plastic tray whose duplicate he’d seen in Clovis Fearing’s shop in Portobello Road, a pale oblong propped against the wall. He rolled forward, the camera bobbing annoyingly, until he could make out “Clanton Bicentennial,” and the dates. And seventy-some years on from the year of celebration, he sat at Lev’s grandfather’s desk in the Gobiwagen, the band of the Wheelie-emulator across his forehead, looking back through this clumsy toy at this strange world, in which worn things weren’t meticulously distressed, but actually worn, abraded by their passage through time. A fly buzzed heavily past, above the Wheelie Boy. Anxiously, he tried to track it, then remembered that here it was more likely a fly than a drone, and that the mesh on the weirdly fragile auxiliary door was meant to keep it out. He turned the camera, studying the shabby, shadowy tableau of lost domestic calm. At the end of its arc, he discovered a cat glaring at him, on its haunches. As he saw it, it rushed the Wheelie, hissing, batting it fiercely back, the rear of the tablet striking the wooden floor. As the gyro whined, righting the Wheelie, he heard the cat push the mesh door far enough open to escape, and then the sound of it closing.

The fly, if it was the same one, could be heard buzzing, somewhere deeper in the house.

I’m not going anywhere,” her mother said, propped on pillows against the chipped varnish of the bedstead, the prongs of the oxygen tube in her nose.

“Where’s Janice?”

“Picking peas. I’m not going.”

“Dark in here.” The roller blind was down, drapes drawn together over it.

“Janice wanted me to sleep.”

“Didn’t you sleep last night?”

“I won’t go.”

“Who wants you to go?”

“Leon. Lithonia. Janice too, but she won’t admit to it.”

“Go where?”

“Northern fucking Virginia,” her mother said, “as you know perfectly well.”

“I just recently heard about that idea myself,” Flynne said, sitting down on the white candlewick bedspread.

“Is Corbell dead?”

“Missing.”

“You kill him?”

“No.”

“Try to?”

“No.”

“Not like I’d blame you. All I know is what I see on the news, and lately what little I can pry out of Janice and Lithonia. Is all of this happening because of whatever it is you and Burton are doing, that landed Corbell Pickett in my living room?”

“I guess so, Mom.”

“Then what the hell is it?”

“I’m not even sure. Burton thought he was moonlighting for some company in Colombia. Turns out they’re in London. Sort of. They’ve got a lot of money. To invest. One thing and another, they set up a branch office here and hired Burton and me to run it, or at least act like we do.” She looked at her mother. “I know it doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

“Kind of sense the world makes,” her mother said, drawing the candlewick up under her chin, “there’s death and taxes and foreign wars. There’s men like Corbell Pickett doing evil shit for a dollar, only real money anybody local and civilian makes here now, and there’s decent-enough people having to work for their own little bit of that. Whatever you and Burton are doing, you aren’t going to be changing any of that. Just more of the same. I’ve been here all my life. So have you. Your father was born where Porter meets Main, when they still had a hospital. I’m not going anywhere. Particularly not anywhere Leon tells me I’m going to like.”

“Man in our company suggested that. He’s from London.”

“I don’t give two shits, where he’s from.”

“Remember how hard you tried to get me not to talk like that?”

“Nobody was trying to make you move to northern Virginia. And I wouldn’t have let them, either.”

“You’re not going anywhere. You’re staying right here. I thought Virginia was a nonstarter the minute I heard it.”

Her mother peered at her over the clenched bedspread. “You and Burton aren’t making the economy about to crash, are you?”

“Who said that?”

“Lithonia. Smart girl. Gets it off one of those things they wear over one eye.”

“Lithonia said we were making the economy crash?”

“Not you. Just that it might. Or anyway that the stock market’s weirder than anybody’s ever seen it.”

“I hope not.” She stood up, went and kissed her mother. “I’ve got to call them now,” she said. “Tell ’em you’re not going anywhere. They’ll need to get you more help around the place. Friends of Burton’s.”

“Playing soldier?”

“They were all in the service, before.”

“Think they’d’ve got their fill of it,” her mother said.

Flynne went out and found Janice in the living room, in plaid flannel pajama bottoms and a black Magpul t-shirt, her hair in four stumpy pigtails. She was holding an old ceramic bowl with most of the edge chipped off, full of fresh-picked peas. “Ella’s not going anywhere,” Flynne said. “They’re just going to have to make her safer out here.”

“I figured,” said Janice. “Why I didn’t try to push it.”

“Where’s Netherton?”

“Guy on the Wheelie Boy?”

“Here,” said Netherton, wheeling out of the kitchen.

“In the kitchen if you need me,” said Janice, stepping past the Wheelie.

“Did you speak with your mother?” Netherton asked.

“She’s definitely not going anywhere. I have to call and sort that with Griff and Burton and Tommy. They’ll have to protect her out here, whatever happens.”

The Wheelie had kept going. Was across the room now, in front of the fireplace. She watched the tablet tilt back. “This tray,” he said, voice tiny at that distance, on the little speakers.

“What?”

“On the mantelpiece. Where did you get it?”

“Clanton. Mom took us all over for the bicentennial, when we were kids.”

“Lowbeer found one like it, recently, in London. Her modules had recorded this one the night I was here. Her friend searched for it. She deals in American antiquities. She’s American herself. Clovis Fearing.”

“Clovis?”

“Fearing,” he said.

“Not Raeburn?” It didn’t make any sense. “How old is she?”

“No older than Lowbeer, I suppose, though she chooses to be more obvious about it. Ah. Looked it up. Raeburn. Mrs. Clovis Fearing’s maiden name.”

“She’s an old lady? In London?”

“They knew one another, when they were younger. Lowbeer said she was visiting her to have her own memory refreshed. Mrs. Fearing said something about Lowbeer having been a British spy, and Lowbeer said that that had made Fearing one herself.”

“But she was Raeburn then,” said Flynne. “Now.” She was looking at the white tray but not seeing it. Seeing Lowbeer’s hand instead, holding her hat against their quadcopter’s downdraft in the Cheapside street, and Griff’s hands, arranging the Sushi Barn food. “Shit,” she said, then said it again, more softly.

Something about the mention of Clovis Fearing had caused Flynne to abruptly change the subject. She’d taken him out on the veranda, placed him on the love seat between Tacoma Raeburn and the man Flynne had introduced as her cousin Leon, and gone out to stand beneath the largest tree, having a conversation on her phone. Netherton had panned from Tacoma, whom he found attractive in an obliquely threatening way, to Leon, who wore a strange elasticated headscarf, its fabric abstractly patterned in shades Netherton associated with the droppings of birds, before cleaners tidied them away. He had pale, bushy eyebrows and the start of an equally pale beard.