Alejandro smiled a little and nodded. “Feel free,” he said. “You needn’t be shy around me. I have no sense of shame about human nakedness.”
I blushed at him. “Uh, thanks for the assurance,” I muttered. “But I’m going to step down the hall.”
Twenty minutes later, I was in a tie and a shirt that probably buttoned at the collar, and I had on the same mud-caked shoes I was wearing three days before when he found me at the edge of the snowline back in Down Preserves. My hair was combed back and parted on the right so it would eventually fall across my face if I moved right, the way I like it—the way I’ve liked it ever since an old lover told me it made me look like a star from the prehistoric age. He said I had an ancient’s name and an ancient’s look and they fit one another. I’ve always held that compliment close to my heart. It was the only thing he gave me worth keeping.
I sat back down at my desk. Alejandro sat politely, perfectly still as I moved around the room after I returned. When I eased into the chair across from him, he seemed to come back to life like a handset powering back up from sleep mode. I wondered how he powered himself, and I wondered how he recharged, and I wondered if I would ever know him well enough or long enough to feel comfortable asking.
“So, it sounds to me,” I rubbed my hands together as I spoke, “like you aren’t looking for someone who killed you. You’re looking for whoever brought down Splendor. Is that correct? Because that’s a much more interesting question, and you don’t seem like the kind of guy to dick around with the small stuff.”
Alejandro nodded his head, but he also waggled it back and forth on his neck. He sometimes used odd body language, nothing I’d ever seen a person do, and this seemed to communicate some sort of ambivalence in his response to the question. His hand also swiveled back and forth at the wrist, like a raft bucking from one side to the other on choppy water. I wondered if that was how they indicated things wherever he was built—whenever he was built. “Yes and no. I think whoever brought down Splendor did it to destroy all the artificial intelligences managing, working in, or resident upon that City.”
Splendor’s destruction had always been officially classified as a catastrophic failure of her Ghost Drive, but nobody really believed that. It felt like taking the ancient myths and saying Osiris had a heart attack or L’Oswalt had really been a magician. Everyone knew deep in their gut there was more to it than that.
We all saw the video of Splendor’s demise: the line of thin smoke from the middle of the aft engines followed by the eruption and jettisoning of one and then two and then five of her tremendous exhaust jets. Splendor tilted to one side like a mag car with a faulty charge, began sinking, and finally crashed in the center of the Gulf Desert in the middle of one of that region’s torrential seasonal rains. She came down both too far from people to hurt much of anyone and too far from people to get much help from anyone. In the videos, she seems to fall slowly, more like she’s trying to land, but, of course, it’s deceptive. If the moon smashed into the Earth, it would probably look comfortably slow if you stood back far enough, but it would be a catastrophe all the same.
Everyone knew the fall of Splendor was no accident. She flew too long, saw too much history, to fail as a fluke. There was nearly a war with the Eastern Expanse over it. A Legion threatened to go rogue and launch an assault on an Expanse perimeter base because so many people were sure the Expanse was behind it. The Vrashabh Emperor held his forces in check, barely, and the rogue general was hanged on video to emphasize the virtue of obedience, but people still said he was right to rebel.
“So you subscribe to theories of terrorism or war or some other sort of sabotage?” I clasped my hands together over my stomach, my thumbs up, the way life coaches do on videos. It’s a way to look comfortable and confident without using their other favorite trick: mimicking the body language of the client. That’s usually my gambit, but I figured a golem could probably pick up on it better than a human.
“Of course I do.” Alejandro sounded certain. “Don’t you?”
“I’m a detective. I always assume both that things are never as simple as they sound and that things are way simpler than people tell me.” I shrugged. “I don’t try to make too many assumptions without some facts to push around the plate. The facts are that Splendor fell and many people, perhaps most, assume it was more conspiracy than accident. Beyond that, there isn’t a lot in the way of agreement to go around.”
That’s when Alejandro slipped. Maybe I bugged him with my resolute skepticism and my refusal to take gossip for argument. Maybe a golem is capable of petty resentment, like a child yelling nuh-uh over its shoulder as it runs from an argument. Maybe it was calculated.
I’ve spent a long time ever since pondering that last one.
“I was there, I know what I saw: an an—,” Alejandro started, but he shocked himself—or seemed to—and paused in the middle of the last word. His eyes didn’t leave mine for a moment, a mere fraction of a second, and then they looked at the window and the flat blinds covering them and the honey light of morning trying to seep through.
I sat up a little straighter in my chair and ran a hand through my hair to push a lock out of my eyes. “Okay. Sounds like there’s plenty for you to tell me.” I reached out and fiddled with my handset. It lit up red as it started to record. Alejandro looked at it and opened his mouth to object, but I cut him off. “This is Autumn, Alejandro, not Splendor. You know the rules. ‘All activities may be documented.’ It’s written right into our charter. Don’t play dumb on me.”
“There was a time,” Alejandro said, “when humankind valued freedom to speak over the freedom to record.” He sounded a little sad and a little wry when he said it.
“Sure, and we used to fly to the moon in tubes of silver and gold.” I smiled a little. “Tell all the Sincerity fairy tales you want, mister, but they probably wouldn’t let you in their church, and they sure as hell won’t solve your murder. That means we stick to the facts.”
Alejandro regarded me with eyes I knew, had they been human, would have played for pity: maybe squinting, maybe tearing up a bit. He searched my face for something he wasn’t finding, looked disappointed at its absence, regarded his own beautiful hands folded in his lap, and then nodded. “I, of course, require client confidentiality.” His voice was pitched low, a hint of resignation mixed in.
I nodded. “I offer it for free.”
“I’m willing to pay the standard confidentiality fee in order to be sure,” he replied, mouth twisted a little sourly. “I’m a wealthy being.”
I arched an eyebrow. Another item to tuck away in the woefully slim file on golems: not so much that they might or might not be wealthy, but that they had a sense of pride, and it could be wounded. “Like I said,” I countered, “I don’t charge a confidentiality fee.”
“That must make you pretty unpopular around the guild.”
I shrugged again, but this time with only my thumbs. “I need customers, not colleagues.”
Alejandro smiled for a flicker of a second and then paused in exactly the way a human would have done were they clearing their throat. “In the City of Splendor, I had a job.”
My other eyebrow went up this time. A golem with a job—a clock to punch, a bill to pay, a role like the rest of us—was unheard of. That’s one of the things “everyone” knew about them for some value of “everyone.”
Alejandro went on. “Splendor didn’t have cabs.” He lifted a hand to gesture at something he saw only in his memory. “No rats to drive them. There were rats for other things, but not to drive. The City’s transportation network was entirely automated. Recall that Splendor was the City of a Million Souls, though the exact mathematics were debatable, and yet nobody owned a mag car. Instead, we had a vast armada of linked mags running on a neural network. Each car operated as part of an autonomous cluster controlled by one Ghost Drive. It worked like cells in a body. The Ghost Drive coordinated the routes of the nodes in appointed areas and the delivery of car
s for maintenance.” Alejandro shrugged a little. “I worked in maintenance.” He smiled again, this time at me. “Machines caring for machines so they can in turn care for people,” he said. “That’s how I thought of it, and it felt good and right. There are things I don’t remember because the trauma of my own death and the circumstances in which I worked prevent me from recalling any number of details, but that’s the rough shape of things: I was caring for transport.
“There was a typhoon.” Alejandro looked away again, into the world of memory. “Splendor operated in much the same way as Autumn in regard to water. They all did, in fact.” He looked back. “The Great Cities, I mean. They all would dip into fronts, localized rainy seasons, storms, whatever was needed to keep their water supply topped off. We were suffering an unusual dry spell, and Splendor’s gardens started to show it.” He paused and gestured with one finger. “Water reserves were only about a third of normal. I remember getting the notice we had to reuse water to wash the mag cars.” He laughed suddenly. “There was a sense of shame to that. Shame. We were so wasteful. I find myself embarrassed to think about it now. At any rate, we needed water, and Splendor detected a typhoon moving toward the Gulf Desert. The more accurate term was ‘hurricane,’ but no one uses that anymore.” He shrugged, again surprising me with the naturalness of his body language. “Normally, we would fly in front of it, wait for it to pass, drop into the back third, and fill up the reserves in a matter of hours. It could be dangerous for the people of the City, so Splendor issued a general quarters announcement. The living populations were ordered to shelter. The streets were cleared, the mag cars were all brought in, the steerless busses were all parked and immobilized, the gyros and hovers all strapped down, and we waited for the storm to pass.
“Everything went exactly as planned. The streets were emptied. I remember waiting with the equipment, strapped in place, feeling lucky the typhoon formed when it did. Then I had an idea: why not use the rain to wash the mag cars, too? I wanted…” He paused and smiled at me. “This is going to seem sentimental, perhaps, but I wanted the good feeling I got from this lucky storm to wash over everything and…bless it. So I opened the vast street-level doors at each end of my sunken garage, did some calculations, and figured I could effectively turn the garage bay—the size of at least four or five tournament fields put together—into a giant washing bin. I even opened up one of the soap dispensers, vented it right onto the floor. As water rushed across the garage in great pounding waves, it picked up the soap and created a scrub cycle.”
He smiled again, and I would have sworn there was something like joy in those beautiful, artificial eyes of his. I wondered whose hands had shaped them. I also laughed because the image of a garage the size of a palace turned into a massive washing machine full of soap and water was genuinely funny to me. I produced a little chuckle, nothing hysterical, but Alejandro picked it up and threw it back at me, and I was so shocked I laughed harder. A golem laughing! Now that was like hearing the Hexagonal Pope himself fart.
Alejandro’s smile lingered as he went back to speaking. “During the storm, when things were supposed be so pure and beautiful and cleansing, the men entered.” Alejandro stopped, and his voice caught for a second. This was the part I needed to hear. The client always hesitates to tell me the thing I need them to tell me more than anything else.
“The men were in a heavy hover, one of the ones that carries dozens of standard persons. Those hovers are huge and can withstand the winds in a typhoon.” Alejandro ran his dry, artificial tongue across his dry, artificial lips. “The hover had chromatic skin shifting to match the color of whatever was behind it—sky, cloud, ground, whatever was opposite any given observer. In a place as flat and gray and violent as the edge of a typhoon, that meant slate and white and black, swirling as the massive cloud system around us twisted up and wrung itself out. I think a human could not have seen them, or would have had to look very closely. I could detect them because…” He paused. “Because my eyes were different then.” He waved off any thought of explaining. “Gods below,” he said. “I’m saying way too much.”
I didn’t say anything to encourage or discourage him. I wanted him to feel like he was expected to keep speaking.
“Anyway,” Alejandro said, and he sounded more human the more he spoke, “the hover landed hard, with a massive splash, outside the garage. The doors opened on the side of the hover and out the men came. There were only a few of them: a squad of five and their escort. They carried weapons, wore suits of body armor, and each had a rucksack with something heavy in it. They had an escort who led them to the edge of the garage—right up to the door—before descending into the water. The men stepped in very gingerly, testing their footing. The water was up to their knees and getting higher, but that didn’t matter. The men waded in right up to their chests while that escort led the way at the front. The whole group marched through like nothing was happening.” Alejandro looked back at me, and anger glinted in his eyes. The way that anger flashed left no doubt in my mind as to his sincerity. This wasn’t a calculated conveying of false emotion: the way his hand twisted up on itself in his lap as he spoke looked to me an awful lot like someone who wished he could choke the life out of a hated enemy. “Like they owned the place, Valerius,” he said. “Like they owned the gods-damned place. My place. They paraded right in with those sacks and right through the doors into the maintenance levels, and they ended the damned world.” Alejandro fell silent then, his eyes working as he remembered what came next. I needed him to tell me, not look inward and clam up.
“And then what? What happened next?” My voice was quiet.
“An hour later, we felt the first explosion. Like an earthquake.” Alejandro’s smile was bitter and tight. “An earthquake in a flying City,” he chuckled, but his voice was as grim as a grave. “I didn’t hear it, but I felt the shockwave pass through the subturf. A few minutes later, there was another, and then several at once. Then we knew we were in trouble because the Ghost Drive began to scream.” He closed his eyes now. “We could all hear her, of course. The living couldn’t, but we could. She cried out in pain and in anguish even as she gave orders for maintenance.” He blinked slowly. “Splendor was both mortally wounded and her own emergency doctor. The City began to tilt to one side, so the living also knew they were in trouble. I imagined all those people huddled in shelters, looking at one another and then away again, knowing their time was over.” He smiled, opening his eyes again. “Even as I wondered what I could do to help, here came the five soldiers and their escort. One of the men had been killed, so they carried him. He was not entirely all in one piece, and I mean that as a literal statement of fact. I suspect the first explosion was premature: that a bomb went off earlier than planned, and maybe that caused another to set their charge, thinking they missed a cue, but the remaining three were more disciplined. Their escort was leading the way again, and it wore a look of triumph. I knew those men did what was done. It was obvious to me. They were not trying to hide it. They did not try to blend in.
“They waded back through the water in my garage, back out the way they came, got in their hover, and left. Everything was that simple, that mundane. No cackling villain explaining their grand scheme. No obvious calling card or clue to identity.” Alejandro looked down at his own hands again.
“Well. That’s an interesting story.” He started to look offended, so I put up a hand. “I’m not saying it’s a fabrication. And assuming every part of it is true and accurate, it doesn’t leave a lot of room for charitable interpretations.” I was being insensitive about his trauma because a part of my job is not to be swayed by the emotions of a stressful situation, but this story was completely bogus. The whole thing was too tidy. A squad of paramilitary types fly in, blow up a couple of bombs, and the whole City falls? Utter bullshit. “But that isn’t the same as seeing them set the charges. It wouldn’t hold up in a criminal hearing.”
Alejandro nodded. “I know. But I also heard them speak. One o
f them said to their escort, ‘I want us off this rock before it hits,’ and their escort told him they would have plenty of time.” Alejandro quoted now from his own presumed-perfect artificial memory. “‘Lieutenant,’ their escort said to the man, ‘This would be a cause worth dying for, but be not afraid of imminent demise. We have time in abundance.’”
I blanched a little at something in the phrasing of that quote. “Tell me about this escort they had with them.” But I already knew the answer before Alejandro said it. This was the thing Alejandro had maybe surprised himself by blurting out to begin with.
“It was an avenging angel.” The golem’s voice steadied into a mechanical drone to bury the emotion behind it. “I saw an angel in Splendor the day the City fell. It led in a team of soldiers, and it destroyed the City, and it killed everyone who lived there—including me.”
I looked at Alejandro for a long moment of silence and then surprised myself. “Standard retainer is three days. I bill expenses separately. Anything over, say, a hundred, I’ll ask about before I spend it.” I held out my hand. “It’s good to have you as a client, Alejandro.”
The golem looked just as surprised as I felt, perhaps because I took his pronouncement so calmly. But why wouldn’t I? I could make a few easy bucks off a crazy golem, get a good story out of it for the next time I was respectable enough to invite to a dinner party, if that ever happened again, and in the meantime, I could have a nice couple of days off. It beat hiding from the landlady and drinking Old Indefatigable out of a dusty coffee mug.
A Fall in Autumn Page 4
