“You didn’t,” said Netherton. “Not here. Please.”
“I did,” Lowbeer said. “You’re not nauseous?”
“I’m too annoyed to be sick,” Netherton said, realizing as he said it that it was true.
“Follow me.” And the thing crawled quickly away from him, toward some source of light, head low to avoid the ceiling, if it were a ceiling. Terrified of being left behind, Netherton crawled after it, gagging slightly at glimpses of his forepaws, which had opposed thumbs.
Clearing the overhang, whatever it was, Lowbeer’s peripheral rose on short hind legs. “On your feet.”
Netherton found himself standing, without being certain how that had been accomplished. He glanced back, seeing that they’d apparently crawled from beneath a bench in an alcove. Everything was that milky translucent gray. The glow ahead, he guessed, was moonlight, filtering down through however many membranes of revolting architecture.
“These units,” Lowbeer said, “are already being consumed by the island’s assemblers, which devour anything not of their own making, from flecks of drifting polymer to more complex foreign objects. As we’re currently being eaten, our time here is short.”
“I don’t want to be here at all.”
“No,” said Lowbeer, “but remember, please, that you were very recently employed in a scheme to monetize this place. You may dislike it intensely, but it’s as real as you are. More so, perhaps, as there are presently no schemes to monetize you. Now follow me.” And the koala-like form was suddenly bounding, partially on all fours, in the direction of further light. Netherton followed, immediately discovering an unexpected agility. Lowbeer led the way, across a blank, repulsive landscape, or perhaps floorscape, as they seemed to be within some enclosed structure larger than Daedra’s hall of voice mail. Vast irregular columns lined either side, much nearer on their right. The surface over which they ran was uneven, slightly rippled.
“I hope you’ve some compelling reason for this,” Netherton said, catching up with her, though he knew that people like Lowbeer didn’t need reasons, whether to put Annie Courrèges on a moby for Brazil or to bring him here.
“Whim, quite likely,” she said, confirming his thought. The bears’ exertions didn’t seem to affect her speech, or his. “Thought perhaps it will help you remember what I tell you here. For instance, that my investigation currently seems to hinge on a point of protocol.”
“Protocol?”
“The corpse of al-Habib,” she said, “if it wasn’t touched in the attack, but rather lay where it fell, makes no sense whatever in terms of protocol. The protocols of a low-orbit American attack system most particularly.”
“Why?” asked Netherton, clinging to the mere fact of conversation as to a life preserver.
“A system prioritizing her security would have immediately neutralized any possibility of his posing a posthumous threat.”
“Who?” asked Netherton.
“Al-Habib,” she said. “He might, for instance, have been implanted with a bomb. Considering his bulk, quite a powerful one. Or a swarm weapon, for that matter. The system saw to the others.” Netherton remembered the silhouette of the flying hand. “Protocol required him to be dealt with in the same fashion. He wasn’t. There must have been a strategic reason for that. Slow a bit, now.” Her hard gray forepaw tapped his chest. Distinctly, claws. “They’re nearby.”
Music. Aside from the scuffing of his and Lowbeer’s feet, the first local sound he’d heard since arriving here. Like the tones of the wind-walkers, but lower, more organized, ponderously rhythmic. “What’s that?” Netherton asked, halting entirely.
“A dirge for al-Habib, perhaps.” She’d stopped as well. Her ears rotated, searching. “This way.” She steered him to the right, toward the long base of the nearest column, then forward again, alongside it. As they neared its corner, she dropped on all fours and crept forward, to peer around it, like something from a children’s book, but gone appallingly wrong. “And here they are.”
Netherton braced his right paw on the column and leaned over Lowbeer’s bear, until he could see around the corner. A sizable throng of small, gray, predictably horrid figures squatted, around the upright corpse of the boss patcher. He was hollow now, Netherton saw, membrane thin, like the island’s architecture. Eyeless, the cavern of his mouth agape, he appeared to be propped up with slender lengths of silvered driftwood.
“Incorporating him into the fabric of the place,” Lowbeer said. “But not about myth so much as plastic. Each cell in his body replaced with a minim of recovered polymer. He’s made his escape, you see.”
“His escape?”
“To London,” Lowbeer said. “Americans enabled that, by not destroying his apparent remains. Though he’s always been a bit of an escape artist, our Hamed. Minor Gulf klept. Dubai. But a fifth son. Quickly the black sheep. Very black indeed. Had to flee in his late teens, under a death warrant. The Saudis particularly wanted him. The aunties knew where he was, of course, though I’d quite forgotten about him myself. And we wouldn’t tell the Saudis, of course, unless it became worth our while. His mother’s Swiss, by the way, a cultural anthropologist. Neoprimitives. That would be what he based his patchers on, I imagine.”
“He faked his death?” The music, if it could be called that, was a largely subsonic auger, boring into Netherton’s brain. He straightened, stepping back from Lowbeer and the column. “I can’t do this,” he said.
“Faked it most complexly. The peripheral’s DNA is that of an imaginary individual, albeit with a now highly documented past. I imagine Hamed’s own DNA is fairly imaginary by now, for that matter, by way of keeping a step ahead of the Saudis. But I’m taking mercy on you, Mr. Netherton. I can see how difficult this is for you. Close your eyes.”
And Netherton did.
67
Their lawyers were from Klein Cruz Vermette, in Miami. One of the three who’d met them in the snack bar at Hefty was a Vermette, Brent, but not the one in the name. Son of the one in the name, not yet a full partner.
It had been Macon’s idea to sign the papers there. Otherwise they’d have been doing it in Fab, or the space next door, or in Tommy’s police car, Tommy having driven them over from the football field, where the helicopter they’d chartered in Clanton had landed. They’d flown in their own jet, from Miami to Clanton, and they were nice. So nice, she figured, that Coldiron must be paying them fuckloads of money not to show how weird they must think this all was, that she and Burton and Macon were being set up as a corporation that was buying a strip mall. But it did make it easier, the niceness. Brent, who had an even more expensive-looking tan than Pickett’s, had put away a plate of pork nubbins, while the other two had Hefty lattes.
She’d only seen Tommy when he’d walked them in from the parking lot, hadn’t had a chance to speak with him. She guessed driving and being security was part of his job now, or part of the part about Jackman’s deal with Pickett. He’d given her a nod, when he went back to the car. She’d smiled at him.
She’d have thought having Tommy drive the lawyers to a meeting in Hefty Mart was too obvious, but now she figured his relationship with the town had always been funny. Plenty of people must know about Jackman and Pickett, and more than she wanted to imagine must be making money off building, though maybe not that directly. So if you saw Tommy drive some people in business clothes to Hefty, then sit there in the parking lot while they had a meeting inside, maybe you’d ignore it. Or maybe you’d go over and say hello, and Tommy would give you something from the Coffee Jones machine, but you wouldn’t ask him what he was doing.
Now it was just her and Macon there, Burton having gone with Tommy to take them back to their helicopter. She’d gotten herself a half-order of chicken nubbins, which she sometimes liked more than she’d admit.