“There weren’t balloons with wings, were there?” Maintaining concentration on his thumb work.
“No, but people did imagine them. And this thing can only stay up for a while. Batteries.”
“It doesn’t look like a helicopter. It looks like a coffee table for dolls.”
“Eight props, that’s serious lift. And they’re protected. It can bump into something and not be instant rubbish. Give ray a rest and look at this.”
“How do I stop?” asked Milgrim, suddenly anxious.
“Just stop. The app will right it.”
Milgrim held his breath, took his thumbs from the screen. Looked up. The ray rolled up, executed an odd little wing-tip flutter, then hung suspended, rocking slightly, its dorsal surface to the ceiling.
Milgrim got up and went to the table. Nothing had ever been quite as pleasant as this afternoon with Fiona, in Bigend’s Vegas cube, though he kept surprising himself with the recognition of just how pleasant it was. There was nothing to do but play with Bigend’s expensive German toys, and talk, while the toys, and learning how they worked, provided a perfect topic for conversation. Fiona was working, technically, because she had to assemble the new drone from the parts in the two cartons, but she seemed to enjoy that. It involved a set of small screwdrivers mainly, color-coded hex wrenches, and videos on a website on his Air, via the red dongle. A company in Michigan, two brothers, twins, with matching eyeglasses and chambray shirts.
It didn’t look like a helicopter, though it did have those eight rotors. It was built of black foam, with a bumper of some other black material around its edge, and two rows of four holes, in which the rotors were installed. It stood on four slanted wire legs now, about six inches above the table. Its four batteries, currently charging at a wall socket, slotted into each of the corners, equalizing weight. It had a slender, streamlined black plastic fuselage underneath, housing the camera and electronics.
“No testing this indoors,” she said, putting down the screwdriver. “It’s together, though. I’m exhausted. Up all night. Feel like a nap?”
“A nap?”
“On your foam. It’s wide enough. You sleep last night?”
“Not really.”
“Let’s have a nap.”
Milgrim looked from one blank white wall to the next, then up at the black ray and the silver penguin. “Okay,” he said.
“Turn off your laptop.” She stood up while Milgrim shut the Air down. She walked over to the umbrella light and dialed it down low. “I can’t sleep with these pants on,” she said. “There’s Kevlar.”
“Right,” said Milgrim.
There was a ripping of Velcro, and then the sound of a zip. A big one, by the sound of it. Something, maybe Kevlar, rustled to the floor. She stepped out of the armored pants, already barefoot, and went to the white foam, which seemed to glow faintly. “Come on,” she said, “I can barely keep my eyes open.”
“Okay,” said Milgrim.
“You can’t sleep in Tanky amp; Tojo,” she said.
“Right,” Milgrim said, and began to remove his shirt, which had far too many buttons on each sleeve. When he’d gotten it off, he hung it on the back of the chair, over his new jacket, and took off his pants.
He could see her, dimly, pulling the MontBell out of its bag. He felt like screaming, or singing, something. He walked toward the foam, then realized he was wearing his black socks from Galeries Lafayette. That seemed wrong. He stopped and removed them, almost falling over.
“Get under,” Fiona said, having spread the open bag as wide as it would go. “Good thing I never use a pillow.”
“Me neither,” lied Milgrim, sitting down, tucking his socks quickly under the edge of the foam. He swung his legs under the Mont-Bell and lay down, very straight, beside her.
“You and that Heidi,” said Fiona, “you’re not a number, are you?”
“Me?” he said. “No!” Then lay there, eyes wide, awaiting her response, until he heard her softly snoring.
61. FACIAL RECOGNITION
They’d had a shower with H. G. Wells and Frank, Garreth’s bandaged leg, tucked through something that looked like an inhumanly capacious and open-ended condom. Toweling him off, she’d seen a bit more of Frank, “Frankenstein.” Much evidence of heroic surgery, so-called. As many stitches as a patchwork quilt, and indeed she suspected literally patchwork, the back of his other calf tidily scarred where they’d taken skin to graft. And within Frank, if Garreth wasn’t simply taking the piss, a good bit of newfangled rattan bone. Frank’s musculature was considerably reduced, though Garreth had hopes for that. Hopes generally, she’d been glad to see, and hard sensitive hands sliding all over her.
Now he lay on the Piblokto Madness bed, in Cabinet’s not-velour robe, Frank encased in a slippery-looking, black, Velcro-fastened wrapper through which a machine the size and nostalgic shape of a portable typewriter case pumped extremely cold water, very quickly. Heidi had used something similar, on their final tour, to help with the wrist and hand pain drumming had started to cause her. Garreth’s had arrived an hour before, by courier, a gift from the old man.
He was talking with the old man now; very much, she thought, as to a wife in a long marriage. They could convey a great deal in a very few words, and had their own slang, in-group jokes of seemingly infinite depth, a species of twin-talk. He wore a headset, cabled to his no-name black laptop, on the embroidered velour beside him, their conversation being conducted, she assumed, through one or another of the darknets they frequented. These were, she gathered, private internets, unlicensed and unpoliced, and Garreth had once remarked that, as with dark matter and the universe, the darknets were probably the bulk of the thing, were there any way to accurately measure them.
She didn’t listen. Stayed in the warm, steamy bathroom, drying her hair.
When she came out, he was staring up at the round bottom of the birdcage.
“Are you still talking?”
“No.” He removed the headset.
“Are you all right?”
“He’s done. Folded.”
“What do you mean?” She went to him.
“He had something he’d never told me about. Grailware. He’s giving it to me. For this. Means it’s over. Done.”
“What’s over?”
“The business. His mad career. If it weren’t, he’d not have given me this.”
“Can you tell me what it is?”
“Invisibility. A sigil.”
“A sigil?”
“The sigil of forgetting.”
“That thing’s chilling the blood in your brain.”
He smiled, though she could see the loss in him, the pain of it. “It’s a very great gift. Your man will be bricking it, if he knows we have it and he doesn’t.”
Which meant Bigend, she knew, and shit-scared. “Then he’ll want it for himself, whatever it is.”
“Exactly,” he said, “why he mustn’t know. I’ll convince him that Pep’s stayed off the cameras with tradecraft.”
“Pep?”
“Mad little Catalan. Perfect master car thief.” He looked at his watch, its black dial austere. The men who guard the Queen, he’d once told her, were not allowed to wear shoes with rubber soles, or watches with black faces. Why? she’d asked. Juju, he’d said. “He’ll be in from Frankfurt in twenty minutes.”
“How are you assembling all this so quickly, yet finding the time to soap my back and whatnot? Not to complain.”
“The old boy,” he said. “Can’t keep him from it. He’s doing it. It’s modular. We got that good at it. We have our bits of business, our set pieces, our people. We got really fast. Had to, as the best ones present themselves abruptly. Or did.”
“Can you really be invisible? Or is it more bullshit, like your rattan bones?”
“You’ll hurt Frank’s feelings. Think of it as a spell of forgetting. Or not remembering in the first place. The system sees you, but immediately forgets.”