“Nothing. They sent him, from D.C. Reece grabbed you, Lowbeer took over from Ash. Felt like she already had him in place, in case of whatever. If you hadn’t had that pill in you, I’d guess Griff would have called down all manner of government funniness to find you. He got Clovis in to mind Conner, when he’s under the crown.” He looked back, where Carlos had stayed put by the door. “Carlos thinks she’s a ninja.”
“Clovis is a boy’s name,” Flynne said. “Some king, back in France.”
“From Austin. Says she’s named after the town in New Mexico.”
“What’s she like?”
“Easier to introduce you.” He pulled a tarp aside. There were the three hospital beds, in a row, with Conner in one of them, in his Polartec but under a white sheet, eyes closed, wearing a Snow White crown.
“Clovis,” Macon said, “Flynne Fisher. Flynne, Clovis Raeburn.”
The woman beside the bed was a little older than Flynne, taller, and looked like she’d be good on a skateboard. Lanky, black-eyed, black hair cut short on the sides and up in a little fin on top. “Wheelie Boy,” Clovis said. “Had one in high school. You into collectibles?”
“Macon gave it to me. You born in Clovis?”
“Conceived. Mom figured it was really Portales, but she didn’t want Dad naming me that.”
“Getting along with Conner?”
“Hasn’t opened his eyes since I got here.” Clovis wore narrow stretch cammies and one of those shirts they’d worn under the old rigid plate armor, sleeves like a combat jacket but the torso like a clingy jersey top. She had a big first-aid pouch slung in front of her crotch, the red cross suppressed, two shades of coyote brown. She came over and shook hands.
“My friend Janice,” Flynne said, and watched them shake.
“Vermette’s got about three hundred documents he needs signed and notarized,” Macon said. “We’ll set a table up in here and you can talk while you do that.”
“Ladies,” Conner said, from the bed, “which one of you wants to help me with this catheter?”
Clovis looked at Flynne. “Who’s the douche-canoe?”
“No idea,” said Flynne.
“Me neither,” said Janice.
Flynne went over to the bed. “What were you in, up there? Macon says you’re training.”
“Kind of like a washing machine, inertial propulsion. Big-ass flywheels inside.”
“Washing machine?”
“About three hundred pounds. Big red cube. I’d just learned to balance it on one corner, then rotate, when they made me come back.”
“What’s it for?”
“Fuck if I know. Wouldn’t want to meet one in a dark alley.” He lowered his voice. “Macon’s high on a government stimulant. Like builders’ best, but minus the jitters. None of that dys-fucking-functional kind of paranoia.”
“Not like your own super-functional kind?”
He looked from her to Macon. “Won’t give me any,” he said.
“Doctor’s orders,” Macon said. “And anyway they engineered every last thing out of it that people do drugs for. Except staying awake.”
“You quit being so whiny-assed special,” Clovis advised Conner, having stepped closer to his bed, “like every other butt-hurt Haptic Recon pussy it’s been my misfortune to meet, and maybe I’ll get you a nice cup of coffee.”
Conner looked up at her like he’d discovered a kindred spirit.
82
The lawn in Flynne’s garden stretched to the edges of the world. The moon was a floodlight, too bright. Carbon-black seas, flat as paper. He couldn’t find her. He rolled forward, on ridiculous wheels, head bobbing. Lowbeer was monitoring this dream, he knew, and wondered how he knew. The craters of the moon becoming the coronet-
Her sigil. “Yes?” Expecting the Gobiwagen’s dome as he opened his eyes, but a different dome, moving, rain, streaks of sunlight through cloud, wet gray masonry, black-painted mullions, the branches of plane trees. He was slumped back in a chair, something cradling his neck and head, but now that withdrew.
“Sorry to wake you,” Lowbeer said. “Or not to wake you, actually. That would be the Medici’s dosing, scheduled to rouse you now.”
He was in her car again, seated at the table, opposite Flynne’s peripheral, which, though it smiled at him now in AI reflex, wasn’t Flynne. The upper part of the vehicle, previously windowless, was now completely transparent, raindrops seeming to roll across some invisible bubble of force. “Can anyone see in?” he asked.
“Of course not. You were asleep. It seemed an unnecessarily boring journey for the peripheral. Difficult not to anthropomorphize something that looks so entirely human.”
Netherton rubbed his neck, where some temporary extrusion from the chairback had propped his head at what the car had deemed a comfortable angle. “Who put me in here?” he asked.
“Ossian and Ash, after you’d had a good long sleep in the Mercedes. Ash operated the exoskeleton, via a homunculus, in order not to leave Mr. Murphy with all of the heavy lifting.”
Netherton peered out through the rain, trying to recognize the street. “Where am I going?”
“Soho Square. Flynne will join you there. Before she meets Daedra, I want you to explain the role she’ll be playing, your neoprimitive curator. Her theory about Daedra’s artistic evolution.”
“I haven’t made it up yet, entirely.”
“You need to do that, and to share it with Flynne. She must be able to make conversation about that, convincingly. Coffee.”
A circular opening expanded on the tabletop, a steaming cup emerging, as on a tiny stage elevator. He saw the peripheral looking at the cup, restrained an urge to offer her one. It. Her. “I never fail to be impressed with Ash’s medicine,” he said.
“That in itself is probably not a good sign,” said Lowbeer, “though otherwise I’m pleased to hear it.”
“Where are you?”
“With Clovis,” she said, “virtually. She’s refreshing my memory. Her own as well, of course. That really was quite a vile period, Flynne’s day. We tend to forget, all that came after having so overshadowed it. I scarcely grasped its nastiness, then, even with my resources at the time.”
The car turned a corner. He still had no idea where they were. Lifting the steaming cup, he admired the steadiness of his hand. The peripheral was watching. He winked. It smiled. He smiled back, feeling obscurely guilty, and sipped his coffee.
83
Macon had been kidding, about the three hundred signatures, but she’d quit counting after about thirty. She was almost through the stack now, the red-haired girl notarizing each one, with a stamp and a signature of her own and a spring-loaded seal, after Flynne had signed.
They’d set up a card table for her in the space with the beds. Janice and Clovis were propped on the edge of the bed nearest Conner’s, facing him, legs out straight, and Macon was seated beside Flynne on a folding chair.
“I should be reading these,” Flynne said, “but I wouldn’t understand them anyway.”
“The way things are going,” Macon said, “you don’t have a lot of choice.”
“How are they going?”
“Well,” leaning back to briefly consult something in his Viz, “there haven’t been any catastrophic market imbalances yet, but it’s early days. It’s a race to the top, and the way we’re doing it, the way our competitor’s doing it, is seriously stressing the system.”
“What’s the top?”
“Won’t know until we get there, and if we aren’t on it, we’ll likely be dead.”
“Who’s the competitor?”
“They don’t have a name. More the numbered account school of funny. Shells within shells. That’s us too, mainly, but if you get through all of our shells, there’s Milagros Coldiron. Just a name, and nobody knows what it means, but at least we got one. With Pickett gone, we lost our governor for a while, but then Griff went back to D.C. and fixed that up from there, so in a way we’re already up to federal.”