Free The Peripheral by William Gibson Page A

asshole, huh?”
    “It’s a tiresome asshole town. Least you got an excuse. Go home. Burton’s on his way back from Davisville. He’ll come see you.” And it was like she could see herself there, on the gray gravel in front of Jimmy’s, and the tall old cottonwoods on either side of the lot, trees older than her mother, older than anybody, and she was talking to a boy who was half a machine, like a centaur made out of a motorcycle, and maybe he’d been just about to kill another boy, or a few of them, and maybe he still would. She looked back and saw Madison was on the porch, bracing the football player who’d thrown the bottles, titaniumglasses up against the boy’s eyeballs, boy backing to keep from being poked in the chest with the rows of pens and flashlights in Madison’s Teddy Roosevelt vest. She turned back to Conner. “Not worth it, Conner. You go home.”
    “Fuck-all ever is,” he said, and grinned, then punched something with his chin. The Tarantula revved, wheeled around, and took off, but he’d been careful not to spray her with gravel.
    A drunken cheer went up from Jimmy’s porch.
    She dropped her beer on the gravel and walked to where she’d locked her bike, not looking back.

18.
    THE GOD CLUB
     
    N etherton was fully as annoyed with the bohemian nonsense of Ash’s workspace as he would have expected to be. It wasn’t that it was pointlessly tiny, Ash having used scaffolding and tarps to wall off the furthest, smallest possible triangular corner of Lev’s grandfather’s garage, or that she’d decorated it to resemble some more eccentric version of the Maenads’ Crush, but that her display went to such pains not to resemble any other display, though whatever she was about to show them could as easily have been viewed as a feed.
    Polished spheres of variously occluded crystal, agate perhaps, were supported in corroded chemistry apparatus she boasted of having bought from the mudlarks who’d pulled it from the Thames. And she’d prepared exceptionally horrible tea, in eggshell-thin china cups, without handles, cups that had cruelly suggested the possible offer of some wormwood-based liqueur, but no. It was like meeting in an antique phone box in which a psychic had set up shop, crammed in beside Lev at the ridiculously ornate little table.
    Now she was selecting rings from a black suede pouch: interface devices, the sort of thing a less precious person would have permanently and invisibly buried in her fingertips. But here were Ash’s, gotten up like the rusty magic iron of imaginary kings, set with dull pebbles that lit and died as her white fingers brushed them.
    The tea tasted burnt. Not as if anything in particular had burned, but like the ghost of the taste of something burnt. The walls, such as they were, were heavy curtains, like the ones in the Maenads’ Crush, but stained with tallow drippings, distressed to reveal bald fabric. Thefloor was covered with a faded, barely legible carpet, its traditional pattern of tanks and helicopters worn to colorless patterns of weft.
    A drawing of a gecko whirled excitedly on the back of Ash’s left hand, as she seated an angular brown lump around the index finger of her right. Her animals weren’t to scale, or rather they appeared as if rendered at various distances. He didn’t think you’d see a gecko and an elephant at the same time, for reasons of scale. She had, evidently, no direct control over them.
    Having donned four rings and two tarnished silver thimbles, she interlaced her fingers, causing the gecko to flee. “They put up a want ad, as soon as they came in,” she said.
    “Who did?” Netherton asked, not bothering to suppress his irritation.
    “I’ve no idea.” She made a steeple of her index fingers. “The server is the platonic black box. In the visualization, they appear to emerge directly beside us, but that’s oversimplification.”
    Netherton was relieved that she hadn’t yet called the display a