A Fall in Autumn

by Michael G. Williams

  The fact Alejandro was drop-dead gorgeous—as walking, talking kewpie dolls go—didn’t help me get over my prejudices. If anything, it made me wary. The most dangerous thing in the world is a good marketing campaign, and he looked like a doozy.

  “I hope you don’t mind I’m here.” He murmured it with a small smile that seemed genuinely apologetic rather than the cocky sort of ironic I would have expected from some biological Casanova. “I was concerned about you.”

  I arched an eyebrow. Neither of us moved. I stood between the cabinets and my desk, Alejandro right inside the door, maybe five meters away. A little sunlight slid down the slats in the still-closed blinds in my window, and I still stood barefoot in dingy denim trousers and no shirt. “You figured out who I am.” I pointed a thumb at the handset on my desk. “You could have called.” I picked the cup back up. Perverse or no, I was going to fill it with whiskey.

  Alejandro paused, something I assumed was an intentional effect since his brain probably ran ten thousand times faster than mine. “Once I knew who you were,” he replied carefully, “I found out what you do and, it turns out, I need your services.”

  I set the cup down on the desk again, this time with a thud. “A golem needs a detective? I thought you guys knew everything.” I tried to smile a little at the end because I sounded like an asshole when I hadn’t meant to—well, not entirely. “Each the wise elder at the top of a mountain of secrets even their prodigious memories outlive?” I spoke it as a question, but it was a direct quote from the Spiralist texts, where it appears as a statement of self-evident fact. I am not a Spiralist, and I don’t have much use for their religion, but at least they’re forward-looking. I might occasionally have worn one of their St. Haraway medals solely to see scandal on the face of a Sincere, sure, but provoking offense is the extent of any dogma I might possess.

  Alejandro didn’t blush—maybe he couldn’t—but his eyebrows sagged, and his eyes dimmed a little. “I’m sorry,” he near-whispered, and his hand was on the knob again. “I shouldn’t have bothered you. I’m glad you’re well, M. Bakhoum.” He twisted the knob in perfect silence, opened it impossibly smoothly, and turned.

  “Wait.” My voice surprised me with its urgency. All I did was crack a joke in the presence of a golem. I know that is—to Two-Truth Spiralists anyway—like farting in front of the Hexagonal Pope, but people had undoubtedly done worse, right? Still, I felt like a heel. “I was simply…” I struggled, caught between the desire to be true to my offense-provoking reflexes and the need to sell exactly enough of myself to pay rent a little longer. I looked at that empty coffee cup and I thought of the landlady and I knew I couldn’t pay bills with pride. “I’m kidding. Come in.” I nodded at the client chair—only one because no one comes to a detective’s office in any state other than alone—and walked around to my side of the desk. I still didn’t have a shirt, and I didn’t care. Rent didn’t matter that much. “I happen to have some room on my dance card, Alejandro. Please, call me Valerius.”

  Alejandro turned, not quite looking at me, as though considering something far away. I’d seen plenty of visitors to my office do the same. Lots of people have second thoughts right before they spill their guts to me. He nodded to himself, closed the door again, strode over in near-silent and perfectly paced steps, and sat down. “I need you to solve a murder.” His eyes met mine, and he had that look of grim determination one gets when they know they want revenge more than justice.

  “Who’s the victim?” I leaned forward, putting my forearms on the edge of the desk to show I was taking him seriously. “This might be a job for the police.”

  “I am the victim,” Alejandro softly replied. “And no, I do not mean someone is going to try to kill me, M. Bakh— Valerius. I mean that this is not my first body. My last one was—” In my imagination, his voice clicked mechanically when it caught for a moment. He skipped whatever the finish to that sentence might be. “And I need to know why and by whom.”

  “I see,” I lied. I blinked my lids in rapid succession, something I could do with my face for a few seconds while that sunk in. There were a lot of potential ramifications to those few words he’d said and, like viewing a sculpture that relied on some trick of the light, I was worried focusing on any one detail in particular might make the others fall out of view somehow: like maybe if I let myself get all the way through thinking golems have more than one body, I would forget also to file away the memetic tendril on which was written a golem did something bad enough to get killed for it. “I see,” I lied again.

  “I doubt that,” he replied, but he had a small smile that spoke to me with a gentle sort of sadness. Ancient and awed, sometimes fearsome, occasionally worshipped, always seeking to avoid being understood too well, as though allergic to the notion of becoming familiar: golems are something else all right. No wonder we have so many plays and stories and legends about them. They’re like cats who can talk.

  “Well,” I went on as my usual cynicism crept back in and tried to shove aside the moment of pure fascination, “here’s the thing.” I nodded toward the door. “It says ‘questions answered,’ which is a polite way of saying ‘detective,’ which is itself a polite way of saying ‘a lady thinks her boyfriend is stepping out,’ or vice versa, and they’d like me to do the dirty work. I learn things, Alejandro, and sometimes those things are about a subject as heavy as murder, sure, but the victim has never before been the client, so we’re in uncharted waters. Further, if you don’t give me some significant details to start from, then I’m afraid I must confess I will quite happily take your retainer with a guarantee I will never in a million years find anything out.” I smiled at him, hands open, shrugging. When it came to honesty, I had an office so clean you could eat off of the floor. I would have been a rich man many times over if I were a little bit dirty, but I was sure I would also have been dead.

  Alejandro smiled again and the simskin around his eyes crinkled with precisely the right amount of genuine-seeming amusement to warm the cockles of my heart. Whoever built this guy put a lot of love into it. I won’t lie, some animal part of me wanted to get all that love back out, maybe in a single go. “Okay,” he murmured after a moment’s consideration. I didn’t let myself wonder how many operations his brain could perform in the time it took him to emote something on a human scale like that. I probably couldn’t afford to count that high. “I’ll tell you this: I died in Splendor.” He looked off to one side, remembering, the way you do. His gaze shifted back to look me dead on. “I died when Splendor fell.”

  I didn’t suck in a breath, didn’t whimper, didn’t cry out, didn’t order him out of my office, but I did stare back at him in stupefied silence for a very long time. “The Fallen Ghost,” I breathed. It wasn’t a question.

  He nodded at me. “I died when she fell, and a part of me—it’s hard to explain why, but it feels very distant—a part of me remembers what it felt like when she fell. A part of me can still feel the end of gravity in Splendor and how it felt when I realized we were falling, all the way down, all the way to the end.”

  The Fallen Ghost.

  I shuddered all over.

  Ghost Drives are how we have the Cities at all. They tell us in history classes there used to be a bunch of them. Now, there’s only this last one, the City of Autumn, flying high over the Global and United Empire of the Vrashabh, which everyone politely does not mention is neither global nor united. In this late and deprecated age, there are plenty of Ghost Drives in other things, too, but the engines of this City are the greatest things humankind has ever built. Tucked behind Down Preserves, Autumn’s engines are the apex of engineering in the whole history of Earth. The ancients supposedly had technology, of course, but look what they did with it: they blew it. They got everything wrong. They failed to prepare for the changing world in which they lived. They were ignorant and primitive, and they didn’t make good use of what they had. Overpopulation and filth are the two best controls on human populations, and the ancients manufa
ctured both like they were going out of style.

  Autumn’s Ghost Drives are more than the engines of the City—more than mere locomotion or steering. They are also the brain of this vast, highly automated place. The people who built and launched the Great Cities understood human nature well enough to know we would fuck up whatever was left to our care. If everything about the maintenance of this place, its day-to-day operation, et cetera, were left to humans, it wouldn’t have stayed in the air a week. Instead, it’s been afloat for—well, gods, I don’t even remember how long. Centuries, at least. It’s been so long, it’s one of those numbers we gloss over in school as kids. Anyway, the Ghost Drive manages a lot of things. It runs a lot of the City’s automated systems, maybe all of them. There are smaller Ghost Drive devices here and there in the City—gyros and hovers and a handful of mag cars and some corporations own a few Ghost Drive delivery trucks as a show of power and wealth. They’re specks compared to the intelligence contained in a Ghost Drive like the one running Autumn. Every city worth the use of that word feels like a living thing and, in fact, by many measures is exactly that.

  A real city develops moods and tells itself jokes in the pantomime of traffic patterns and abandoned projects. A city like that becomes more than the sum of the people inhabiting it. They become networked in a way they can’t quite put their collective finger on, but that doesn’t make their finger any less collective. Those cities still have nothing on Autumn. Knowing there’s that much Newron™ power (I always hear that trademark symbol in my head when I say it) humming away somewhere underneath our feet makes the City feel alive in a way a regular city—a patch of convenient geography, any of the many mundane land-bound lower-case-c cities—can never match.

  The Great Cities were launched into the air long ago, when humankind was just starting to emerge from the Darkest Ages. Flight was being rediscovered. The Empire was young and ambitious. The Empire ran into the Eastern Expanse and their Ghosts Drives, and one thing led to another. There was what they call a confluence, though I suspect was more like plain old industrial espionage, and here we are: living on the back of the Great City herself like ants on the back of a turtle, like fleas on the back of a dog with nothing but charity in its heart.

  Ten years ago, though, there were two of the Great Cities: Autumn and Splendor.

  I surfaced again from my own thoughts and blinked at Alejandro. “Tell me what Splendor was like,” I challenged him. “Prove to me you were there.”

  And that’s exactly what he did.

  Splendor was a lot like Autumn, by all accounts: that same sense of the City being truly alive, a feeling of the people in it being watched over. There’s a feeling in Autumn, sometimes, that she’s looking out for us, guarding us like a mother hen sitting on three-quarters of a million tightly packed eggs. Some of that sense of maternal affection comes from her flight patterns. She tends to stick to places experiencing the eponymous season of the year. When the southern hemisphere begins to fade into winter, she often glides into the far north of the northern hemisphere, where spring is starting to take the edge off of winter and it feels a lot like fall.

  There’s a practical reason, of course: those are times of the year when it rains most. Autumn’s programming is a complete mystery—there’s absolutely no one alive who could even begin to map the unknown trillions of lines of instructions and connections she must have been given at launch—but she exhibits patterns and must satisfy specific needs. Otherwise, the City is a sealed box, one of the locked-room mysteries writ large on a chunk of airborne landscape. One of the patterns she follows is to seek out fresh water, so we never have to worry about that. It’s usually cool and often wet in Autumn. Even when it isn’t actively raining, it’s almost always foggy, and that fog is wet and dense because it’s actually clouds. It can be cold in the City, but the wind is kept in check by the presence of the Fore Barrier. That doesn’t mean we don’t get breezy, but it does mean we don’t all get peeled off every time she’s moving at full speed.

  When we glide into yet another rainy season somewhere so the water washes over us, and the trash and some of the people get dragged down the drains so the sidewalks gleam again in the moonlight, it’s hard not to think Autumn loves us—loves us enough to put on a show, to take care of us, to wash us off like a mother cat and her kittens. She also warns us in advance. A literal ticker tape emerges from a machine in City Hall, and the Lord Mayor’s meteorologist tells us the score for the next day or two or three. She’s rarely wrong, though once in a while, a storm catches her off-guard. Whoever built this place had a lot of things thought out ahead of time. I feel like maybe the sense of companionship we all need, hovering a mile above the Earth with nothing but an ancient set of mysterious devices no one would know how to repair if they broke, was one of the things Autumn’s makers considered before they cut her loose.

  The thing about the Fallen Ghost, Splendor, is that she was supposedly like that but more. People felt at home in Splendor, whereas in Autumn we always at best feel like we’ve made a home. Splendor wasn’t necessarily all streets of platinum and sterling silver trees, either. It had slums, it had rich assholes, it had cops you could buy and politicians who’d sold out. It had all the things you’d expect in a City that massive—seven hundred thousand according to official census results, and everyone guessed that was short by at least twenty percent—but it had more than that. There was something in the air in Splendor. The things written about Splendor have almost all been written in the decade since she fell, so they run toward aggrandizement, toward overstating her grandeur and flattering her the same way we flatter any dead asshole whose parents or kids might overhear what we say. Still, through all of them, there is a single thread of honest sentiment. If my so-called career as a detective has taught me anything, it’s that the theme that keeps coming up, the one consistently appearing somewhere in every Splendor story, is either a willful lie or honest to gods truth, and it’s nothing short of love. People loved living in Splendor. They loved visiting her. She was the last of the nice Great Cities, the ones people would seek out as a tourist knowing they would have a lovely time.

  Plenty of people visit Autumn, but it isn’t for the hospitality. People visit Autumn the same way they visit one of the Sincerity Church’s monastic Pax Americana reenactments: it’s one of those things they should do while they can. They visit Autumn like they’re visiting the surviving and somehow lesser half of a set of elderly twins.

  “So, you lived in Splendor,” I admitted, and I managed not to put air quotes around lived, but I suspected his golem hearing could detect it in the subharmonics of my voice or something like that.

  Alejandro hesitated. If he were a human, I would have said he was trying to find a way to answer the question without quite telling a lie. “Yes,” he finally replied. His eyes fell a little when he said it, too, and they got a little sad, and for the first time in my interactions with him, my gut read it as nothing more than a touch of honest emotion on an expressive face. It can twist me up sometimes to see a human suffer emotional pain or distress, sure, especially when things are so bad they’re showing it despite an upgrade that’s supposed to make it impossible—a Plus with an entertainer template, or a Happy Housespouse who’s been taking their microflora every day per the autopharm instructions.

  Seeing it on a golem was awful. Somewhere in my psyche, I, too, was carrying around all that cultural programming about golems always being friendly or gentle, the way you tell kids if they’re in trouble they should find a cop even though by the time they’re a teenager they’ll have learned better. Seeing those beautiful eyes—dangerous, artificial, falsely expressive, and inescapably, undeniably gorgeous—turn sad at the memory of a place he loved and by all accounts probably loved him was like a kick between the legs.

  “I’m sorry to bring up a bad memory.” I made an automatic apology, reflexive in my attempt to wipe the sadness from that face, even though he was the one who’d told me. I felt a need to make it up
to him anyway.

  Alejandro waved a few fingers, a delicate movement and at the same time the most human thing I’d seen him do so far. It was meant to sweep away an ugly moment, a throwaway gesture by someone whose every movement I imagined to be calculated and overt, like the way he’d opened and shut the door without letting the hinges squeal. “Having lived in Splendor is why I’m here. Please don’t apologize for my experiences,” he murmured after another of my heartbeats had passed. His eyes met mine. “Please don’t apologize for anyone’s experience. Surviving a tragedy beats the alternative.” The corners of his mouth twisted up, and I hated my heart for the way it melted a little bit.

  “But you didn’t survive.” My own smile was a little warier. My nose crinkled at the approach of a laugh that never arrived. “Technically, that is why you’re here.”

  Now he did smile, and it almost made it all the way up his face. “True.” He paused. “So what do you need to know?”

  I looked around for a moment, considering how to answer him. I needed to know all kinds of things: who built him, how many spare bodies did he have, where did he keep them, what was his purpose, and how long had he been here? Those would have been the tip of the iceberg, as the ancients used to say, whatever an iceberg is, and I wouldn’t even have been warming up. To buy myself some time to sort my thoughts, I looked down at my bare feet, at my bare chest. “Do you mind if I get dressed? If you’re here to hire me, I ought at least shower and put on a shirt.”