The Peripheral by William Gibson Page A

seized his shoulders, lifting him to an approximate sitting position on what seemed to have become the edge of a low table. “Hold yourself upright, man,” the Irishman ordered. “Flop and you’ll crack your skull.”
    Netherton blinked, still not recognizing the place. Was he in Notting Hill? He hadn’t known Lev’s house to have a room this small, and particularly not in its basements. The walls were the color of the ceiling, blond veneer. Ash took something from her reticule, a triangular lozenge of plastic, pale green, translucent, frosted like driftglass. Like all of her things, it looked slightly grubby. She slapped its softness against the inside of his right wrist. He frowned as he felt it move, bloodlessly settling incomprehensibly thin tendrils between the cells of his skin. He watched her doubled pupils flick, reading data only she could see. “It’s giving you something,” she said. “But you mustn’t drink on top of that, not at all. You mustn’t take liquor from the vehicles again, either.”
    Netherton was watching the intricate texture of her bustier, whichresembled a microminiature model of some Victorian cast-iron station roof, its countless tiny panes filmed as by the coal smoke of fingerling locomotives, yet flexing as she breathed and spoke. Or rather was observing his vision sharpen, brighten, as the Medici had its increasingly welcome way with him.
    “Mr. Zubov,” said Ossian, meaning Lev’s father, and coughed once, into a fist, “may at any time require his father’s land-yacht.” Not inclined to let Netherton off, but really what was the problem? Lev wouldn’t be concerned with a single bottle, regardless of its age.
    Ash’s Medici released his wrist. She tucked it into her reticule, which he saw was worked with beads of mourning jet.
    Netherton stood, briskly, his surroundings now making perfect sense. A Mercedes land-yacht, something Lev’s grandfather had commissioned for a tour of Mongolian deserts. There was no place for it, at the house in Richmond Hill, so Lev’s father kept it here. The empty bottle, he now remembered, was in a toilet, somewhere to the right. But they obviously knew that. Perhaps he should look into getting one of these things, these hangover alleviators.
    “Don’t even think about it,” Ash said, gravely, as if reading his mind. “You’d be dead in a month, two at most.”
    “You’re awfully grim,” he said to her. Then smiled, because, really, she was. Elaborately so. Hair the nano-black of the lace at her throat, the bustier of perpetually rain-streaked iron and glass, as if viewed through the wrong end of a telescope, the layered skirts below it like a longer, darker version of the boss patcher’s tutu. And now the line drawing of a lone albatross, slowly and as if in distant flight, circling her white neck.
    He looked back at the table he’d slept on, when it had been retracted, flush, into a recess in the floor. Now it was ready to serve as breakfast nook or gaming table, or a place to spread one’s maps of Mongolia. He wondered if Lev’s grandfather had ever made the journey. He remembered laughing at the vulgarity of what Lev calledthe Gobiwagen, the one time he’d been shown through, but he’d noted the bar, with its very handsome stock of liquor.
    “Keeping it locked from now on,” said Ossian, demonstrating his own degree of telepathy.
    “Where were you two?” He looked from Ossian to Ash, as if implying some impropriety. “I came down to find you.”
    Ossian raised his eyebrows. “Did you expect to find us here?”
    “I was exhausted,” Netherton said, “in need of refreshment.”
    “Tired,” said Ossian, “emotional.”
    Lev’s sigil appeared. “I thought sixteen hours was long enough for you to be unconscious,” he said. “Come to the kitchen. Now.” The sigil disappeared.
    Ash and Ossian, who’d heard nothing Lev had said, were staring at him, unpleasantly.
    “Thanks for the pick-me-up,” he said to Ash,