“We could all have had two heads,” Macon said, “and they wouldn’t have mentioned it.” He had his Viz in, and she guessed he was literally keeping an eye on news and the market.
“They were nice, though.”
“You wouldn’t want to be on their bad side.”
“You’re Chief Technical Officer, huh?” she asked him.
“Yep.”
“Shaylene’s not on the board? That Burton’s idea?”
“I don’t think it was his call. My guess is they’re looking at who’s essential to whatever makes this worthwhile to them. You’re essential, Burton is, evidently I am, and Conner.”
“Conner?”
“Not on the board either, but it looks like he’s essential.”
“Why does it?”
“He’s already swallowed one of these.” He took a small plastic box from the front pocket of his new blue shirt and put it on the table between them. Clear, flat, square. Inside, white foam with a single cutout, fitting a glossy black pill. “You’ll want some water.”
“What is it?” She looked at him.
“Tracker. That’s not it. Gel cap around it, makes it less easy to lose, easier to swallow. Barely big enough to see, on its own. Ash ordered them from Belgium. Bonds to your stomach lining, good for six months, then it disassembles itself and nature takes its course. Company makes it has its own string of low-altitude satellites. Have to keep putting ’em up, but they make that a feature, not a bug, ’cause they get to keep changing their hardwired encryption.”
“To keep track of where I’m at?”
“Pretty well anywhere, unless somebody sticks you in a Faraday cage, or way down in a mine. A little more robust than Badger”-he smiled-“and you could lose your phone. Want some water?”
She opened the box, shook the thing out. Didn’t feel any different than any other pill. Tiny little reflections of the snack bar lights in the deep glossy black. “Don’t bother,” she said, putting it on her tongue and washing it down with half a short cup of black coffee Burton had left on the table. “Wish it meant somebody in Belgium could tell me where the fuck I am,” she said. “In terms of all the rest of it, I mean.”
“Know what ‘collateral damage’ means?”
“People get hurt because they happen to be near something that somebody needs to happen?”
“Think that’s us,” he said. “None of this is happening because any of us are who we are, what we are. Accident, or it started with one, and now we’ve got people who might as well be able to suspend basic laws of physics, or anyway finance, doing whatever it is they’re doing, whatever reason they’re doing it for. So we could get rich, or killed, and it would all still just be collateral.”
“Sounds about right. What do you say we do, with that?”
“Try not to get damaged. Let it go where it’s going, otherwise, because we can’t stop it anyway. And because it’s interesting. And I’m glad you swallowed that. You get lost, it’ll tell us where to find you.”
“But what if I wanted to get lost?”
“They aren’t the ones trying to kill you, are they?” He took his Viz off, looked her in the eye. “You’ve met them. Think they’d be trying to kill you, if you stood to get them in some kind of very deep shit, or lose them a bunch of money?”
“No. Couldn’t tell you exactly why. But they could still completely screw up the world, just by dicking around with it. Couldn’t they?”
His fingers closed around the tangled, rigid, silvery filaments. She looked down and saw the lights of the projectors, moving in there. She looked up at him.
He nodded.
68
Netherton, eyes screwed shut, viscerally dreading the gray light of the patchers’ island, became aware of a honeyed scent, warm yet faintly metallic.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Netherton,” Lowbeer said, from nearby. “I suppose that was very unpleasant for you. Not to mention unnecessary.”
“I’m not opening my eyes,” he said, “until I’m sure we’re no longer there.” He opened his right, fractionally. She was seated opposite where he lay.
“We’re in the cupola of the land-yacht,” she said. “Not peripherally.”
Opening both eyes, he saw that she’d lit her candle. “Were you here, before?”
“I was in Ash’s tent,” she said. “Had I come in earlier, you’d have asked where we were going. And refused, possibly.”
“Revolting place,” he said, meaning the island, though equally true of Ash’s tent. He sat up, the cushion that had supported his head lowering itself as he did.
“Ash,” said Lowbeer, fingers extended around the candle as if for warmth, “imagines you a conservative.”
“Does she?”
“Or a romantic, perhaps. She sees your distaste for the present rooted in the sense of a fall from grace. That some prior order, or perhaps the lack of one, afforded a more authentic existence.”
The autonomic cutout slid down Netherton’s forehead, over his eyes. He plucked it off, resisted the urge to snap it in half, put it aside. “She’s the one mourning mass extinctions. I simply imagine things were less tedious generally.”
“I personally recall that world, which you can only imagine was preferable to this one,” she said. “Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them. We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp. Bolt labels on the result. Handles. Then speak of the handles as though they were things in themselves.”
“I’ve no idea how anything could be otherwise,” he said. “I simply don’t like the way things are. Neither does Ash, apparently.”
“I know,” she said. “It’s in your dossier.”
“What is?”
“That you’re a chronic malcontent, albeit quite a purposeless one. Otherwise we might have met earlier.” Periwinkles quite sharp, just then.
“And why, exactly, do you think al-Habib is here?” Netherton asked, a change of topic seeming suddenly welcome.
“That was a peripheral, that you saw her stick her thumb into,” she said. “He’d been peripherally there for years, though not with the peri you and Rainey saw. Very expensively bespoke, the one you saw die. It had only been there for a few days. Complete genome, full complement of organs, fingerprints. The formal forensic signatures of a legal death, waiting to be ticked off. The island’s history assigned to an imaginary figure. His previous peripheral, most likely, was weighted and dropped into the water column, to be consumed by their assemblers. None of his immediate cohort would have been privy to that, nor to his real identity, and now, conveniently, courtesy of the Americans, they’re all dead. But we saw the survivors, didn’t we? Mortaring him into the fabric of the place. Memorializing what he’d pretended to be.”
“He hadn’t actually been there, before?”
“Present at the start, certainly, for their initial flotilla and whatnot. Perhaps for the cannibalism as well. He isn’t at all nice, Hamed. Good at pretending, though.”
“What did he pretend to be?” he asked.
“A prophet. A shaman. Motivated extraordinarily, thus extraordinarily motivating. Taking the same drugs they took, which he himself provided. Though of course he didn’t actually take them. If you fancy resenting the tedious, I recommend intentional communities, particularly those led by charismatics.”
“You believe he was here, while he was doing that?”
“No, not here. Geneva.”
“Geneva?”
“As a place to await an opportunity to optimally monetize the island, as good as any. And, of course, his mother is Swiss.”
“With two penises and the head of a frog?”
“All easily reversible,” said Lowbeer, pinching out the candle’s flame. “He’s made a mistake, though, in not staying there. London’s his mistake. Premature.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s come to my attention again,” she said, her expression just then making Netherton wish for another change of topic.
“What is it,” Netherton asked, “since you’re encouraging my curiosity, that you’ve offered Lev?”