“I beg your pardon?”
“Be quiet, darling. Let pattern recognition have its way.”
“Wilf?” asked Daedra.
“Thank you,” he said. “I’ve never liked Kafka.”
“Who’s that?”
“Never mind.”
“What do you want?”
“Unfinished business,” he said, with a small and entirely unforced sigh that he took as an omen that he was on his game.
“Is it about Aelita?”
“Why would it be?” he asked, as if puzzled.
“You haven’t heard?”
“Heard what?”
“She’s vanished.”
He silently counted to three. “Vanished?”
“She’d hosted a function for me, after the business on the Patch, at Edenmere Mansions. When her security came back on, afterward, she was gone.”
“Gone where?”
“She’s not tracking, Wilf. At all.”
“Why was her security off?”
“Protocol,” she said, “for the function. Did you sabotage my costume?”
“I did not.”
“You were upset about the tattoos,” she said.
“Never to the extent that I’d interfere with your artistic process.”
“Someone did,” she said. “You made me agree. In those boring meetings.”
“It’s good that I’ve called, then.”
“Why?” she asked, after slightly too long a pause.
“I wouldn’t want to leave it this way.”
“I wouldn’t want you to imagine you haven’t left it,” she said, “if that’s what you’re suggesting.”
He sighed again. His body did it for him. It was a quick sigh, propulsive. The regret of a man who knew both what he had lost and that he had well and truly lost it. “You misunderstand me,” he said. “But this isn’t the time. I’m sorry. Your sister. .”
“How can you expect me to believe you didn’t know?”
“I’ve been on a media fast. Only recently learned that I’ve been fired, for that matter. Busy processing.”
“Processing what?”
“My feelings. With a therapist. In Putney.”
“Feelings?”
“Some horribly novel sort of regret,” he said. “May I see you?”
“See me?”
“Your face. Now.”
Silence, but then she did open a feed, showing him her face.
“Thank you,” he said. “You’re easily the most remarkable artist I’ve ever met, Daedra.”
Her eyebrows moved fractionally. Not so much approval as a temporary recognition that he might have the capacity to be correct about something.
“Annie Courrèges,” he said. “Her sense of your work. Do you remember me telling you about that, on the moby?”
“Someone jammed the zip on that jumpsuit,” she said. “They had to cut me out of it.”
“I know nothing about that. I want to arrange for you to have something.”
“What?” she asked, with no effort to disguise a routine suspicion.
“Annie’s vision of your work. Happenstance, really, that she confided in me, and of course she had no idea about us. Having had that glimpse of her vision, and knowing you as I do, I find I must at least attempt to bring it to you.”
“What did she say?”
“I couldn’t begin to paraphrase. When you’ve heard it, you’ll understand.”
“You’re getting this from therapy?”
“It’s been a huge help,” he said.
“What are you asking me for, Wilf?”
“That you allow me to introduce you to her. Again. That I might contribute, in however small a way, to something whose importance I may never fully comprehend.”
She might, he thought, have been looking at a piece of equipment. A parafoil, say, wondering whether to keep or replace it. “They say you did something to her,” she said.
“To who?”
“Aelita.”
“Who does?” If he gestured now, with the empty glass, there was a chance a Michikoid would bring him another, but Daedra would see him do it.
“Rumors,” she said, “media.”
“What are they saying about you and the boss patcher? That can’t be pretty.”
“Sensationalism,” she said.
“We’re both victims, then.”
“You aren’t a celebrity,” she said. “There’s nothing sensational about you being suspected of something.”
“I’m your former publicist. She’s your sister.” He shrugged.
“What is that you’re sitting in?” she asked, appearing fully in front of him now, between two plinthed miniatures, no mere headshot. Her legs and feet were bare. She was wrapped in a familiar long cardigan, teal.
“A cloaked table, in the bar of a place in Kensington, Impostor Syndrome.”
“Why,” she asked, a single comma of suspicion appearing between her brows, “are you in a peri club?”
“Because Annie’s away. On a moby bound for Brazil. If you’re willing to meet her again, she’d need a peripheral.”
“I’m busy.” The comma deepened. “Perhaps next month.”
“She’s going into fieldwork. Embedding with neoprims. Technophobics. She’s had to have her phone extracted. If it goes well, she might be with them for a year or more. We’d have to do it soon, before she arrives.”
“I’ve told you I’m busy.”
“I’m concerned about her, there. Were we to lose her, her vision goes with her. She’s years from publishing. You’re her life’s work, really.”
She took a step toward the table. “It’s that special?”
“It’s extraordinary. She’s in such awe of you, though, that I don’t know how we could arrange it even if you weren’t so busy. A one-on-one meeting would be too much for her. If we could meet you, seemingly at random, perhaps at a function. Surprise her. She’s ordinarily very confident socially, but she could scarcely speak to you, at the Connaught. She’s been desolate about that. I suspect this embedding is an attempt at distraction.”
“I do have something coming up. . I don’t know how much time I’d have for her.”
“That would depend on how interesting you find her,” he said. “Perhaps I’m mistaken.”
“You can be,” she said. “I’ll think about it.”
And she and her teal cardi and her bare legs were gone, and with them the chill stone light of her voice mail.
He was looking out at the peripherals in Impostor Syndrome again. Their fretful animatronic diorama, viewed in utter silence. He signaled a passing Michikoid. Time for another drink.
57
Her mother said rich people looked kind of like dolls. Seeing Corbell Pickett in her mother’s living room, she remembered that. Every square inch of him was probably the same perfectly even tan, his full head of preacher hair as evenly silver.
She’d worn an old fishtail parka of Leon’s up from the trailer. He’d used that evil hydrophobic nanopaint on it, because it hadn’t been waterproof at all, in the Korean War Leon said it was from. Not the one he and Burton had been two years too young for, but the one before that, ancient history. She’d found it on Burton’s clothes rod, after she’d used his shaving mirror to put on some lip gloss, the rain still smacking on the Airstream’s cocoon. Tried not to touch the outside when she put it on. They’d shown PSAs about that paint, not touching it, in high school, when the government was first getting the stuff off store shelves. Fit her like a tent, stiff with paint.
“Damn,” she’d said, looking down at the white controller on Burton’s army blanket, “it’s cabled to my phone. Don’t like leaving my phone, but I don’t know how you disconnect that.”
“Leave ’em. Anybody you aren’t already on a first-name basis with tries to walk in here, tonight,” Tommy had said, zipping up his jacket, “they aren’t walking out.”
“Okay,” she’d said, from beneath the cavelike hood, as he’d opened the door into the rain, wondering if she was getting that “meaty” thing Ash had told her about, from being back in her own body. Like the supersaturated color in an old movie, maybe, and everything with a little more texture?
So she’d followed him out, feet slipping in the mud when she stepped down. Not hydrophobic, her shoes, and not even that comfortable. She’d wished she had her other ones, but then she’d remembered they were in a future that this world didn’t even lead to. And maybe weren’t even her size. She’d thought of the peripheral on its bunk, then, in the back room of that giant RV. Made her feel some emotion there might not be a name for, but was that just being back in her body too? Her shoes and socks already soaking through, she’d followed Tommy up the trail, thinking the rain made a little sizzling sound, as it tried its fastest to get off the coated cotton.