A Fall in Autumn

by Michael G. Williams

  She stared me right in the eye as the doors shut, then she tugged the emergency cable twice to signal the all clear. The steerless operator didn’t speak, didn’t question her. He hit the button in his little booth at the front, and the steerless took off again, throwing everyone back into their seats.

  Bars in the City of Autumn never have to close. It’s an old legal loophole. They have to dismiss all patrons for a period every day in order to clean, but they don’t have to shut the door and lock up, and they can let the customers right back in as soon as they’re done with the daily sweeping and mopping of the floor. There are bars down in the Flank, where the party kids and the bravest of tourists and the worst of the drunks and the junkies hang out, that don’t even have doors. Why bother when you’re never closed? That’s part of the gimmick for them, in fact. Right there on the screen ads, they’ll say OUR DOOR IS ALWAYS OPEN TO YOU – BECAUSE WE DON’T HAVE ONE!

  That is not the case at Misconceptions. It has more than one door, and they’re both closed all the time, despite it likewise being a 24/7 bar. You never know when a Rat is on the hunt for a Tom, and why turn away revenue?

  It was still early afternoon when I got there, and the sun would be out for hours yet, but the alley I walked down to get to the first set of doors was practically a closed tunnel, as dark as night at the birth of the moon. It felt right somehow to step from the golden light of an afternoon in the spring season of somewhere, wherever we’d flown now, and into the chill of a place the sun never touched. It whispered in my ear about all the times I’d been down it before, on the clock and off, and of all the times to come. I shook it off, pushed open the outer door, and stepped into the darkened anteroom. Illuminated only by one dim red light, the walls were covered in matching red soundproofing. I could still hear the thump of the music on the other side of the inner doorway, but the pads meant I could also hear myself think.

  The Bull behind the counter gestured with a thumb as thick as my forearm. “Go on in, Val,” he rumbled. “Always good to see a regular in the middle of a slow day.”

  I touched the brim of my hat at him. Bruce was a sweet guy for a bouncer. I’d seen him rough people up when they asked for it and, on a couple of occasions, I helped. As professionals in the lowlife-related service industry, we had a healthy professional regard for one another. I stepped up to the second door. In front was the grate for the sniffer, and a puff of cool air shot up my pants legs. There was a moment’s consideration as it checked me for weapons or other contraband and then the door buzzed to let me in. I stepped through and looked around: not a lot of people, which is always good when I’m in a bar to work rather than to drink. The sort of drunk who’s at a nightclub in the middle of the afternoon is probably desperate enough for something like a human connection to answer a few questions if it means someone might sit with them a spell. Especially if that someone will buy the drinks.

  That’s only one of the ways a bar is sad in the middle of the day: the down on their luck types drowning a sack of thoughts in a river of cheap hooch. Another is that you can see everything, even if it’s actually sealed to the outside, even if they are consciously trying to make it feel like nighttime, even if it’s darker than it would be at night. There’s something in the human consciousness that finds itself picking out details it would never try to spot after sunset. Every cobweb, every mote of dust, every stained seat cushion, every place on the carpet where someone puked at some point in the past: they practically glow in the gaze of daylight eyes.

  Misconceptions is no different. Even though it was almost night dark inside, I still knew the place was grungy. It smelled bad. The carpet was worn and scarred, scarred as an Artisanal Human who’s lived a life worth living. It smelled like a cigar, but an old one: maybe one smoked a long time ago, maybe smoked a long time ago by a dead guy who’d started to get ripe. Misconceptions is a business on the edge in every way, and that doesn’t leave a lot of margin for floor wax and smoke-eaters.

  The barkeep is an old Tom named Blackie with golden eyes and a clipped ear to indicate he’s been fixed. One time, when I was real drunk, I asked him about it and he said, “It paid for college. A thing they did in Balmer. If I took the clip, I got a scholarship in return for being out of the repro game forever. Seemed like a good idea. I never liked kids anyway.”

  I asked him what he studied, and it seemed for a solid half-minute like he was pretending he hadn’t heard me. Eventually, he answered. “I studied art history,” he said. I blinked. I couldn’t help it. A Mannie with the soul of a scholar? The people back in Balmer must have figured the world was either very right or very wrong if that was happening. “But I dropped out. Never finished.” His clipped ear twitched, at the memory maybe, maybe at something else, and he looked up at me. “Want a refill?”

  That was the kind of place Autumn was, and Misconceptions, and I figured out of all those people haunted by their pasts, surely someone could tell me a little something about Splendor.

  It turned out I was right.

  4

  Blackie looked up and nodded at me when I walked up to the bar. “Early night, eh?” He wasn’t really chiding me. He was merely making conversation. He would never object to selling a drink. In fact, I found he’d already managed to mix me a cocktail in the seconds it took me to cross the room.

  I shook my head. “I wish. This is a working call.” I waved off Blackie’s meaningful glance and half-smirking mouth. One of the things I like best about Toms is the way their body language is so similar to human. You can read their expression as easily as anybody else’s, though they do the whole inscrutability thing way better than we do. “Not that kind of work, smartass. But I do need to buy a drink. Two, in fact.”

  Blackie winked at me. “Who’s the lucky guy?”

  “You tell me.” I glanced around the small room, the clusters of tables and the niches of booths, the small dance floor between two sets of speakers in one corner, all bathed in the dim red LEDs of the ceiling fixtures. There were a few people around: one of the priests, one of the interamorists hoping for Creature Right to wander through the door, a couple of others I didn’t particularly recognize. “Any of these guys a history professor?” I was drawling a little, emphasizing my Artie accent. People who feel like they’re out on the edge open up more readily to others in the same boat.

  Blackie shook his whiskers no at me. “Closest bet is Solim over there.” He flicked his eyes at the priest. “The good father is a liturgist with a taste for wine.”

  I glanced that direction, then back. “Never seen him before.”

  Blackie nodded once, a dip of his elegant head. “Been coming in a few weeks now. Always takes his wine by his lonesome.”

  “Old-fashioned drink means old knowledge?” I met Blackie’s returned gaze. “Then set him up with a glass of his favorite while I go introduce myself.”

  Blackie nodded. “Coming right up.”

  I started to turn but then didn’t. “What brings him here?”

  Blackie’s lips curled up, and one snaggletooth fang popped out to wink at me. “I have no idea,” he said. “As far as I can tell, he has never once gone home with anybody from this place. Maybe he likes the wine.”

  “Not likely,” I snorted. “It’s pretty lousy wine.” I gave this Solim another glance. “Looks like he’s waiting for someone.”

  Blackie lifted one shoulder very faintly. “Perhaps he’s waiting for you.”

  I made my way over to the table at which the padre was reading what looked like a damaged book, with Blackie and a glass of something red and sour-smelling following right behind.

  Solim was an old Man Plus, Afrique Edition: he was tall and lithe, and his skin was the deep obsidian we tend to associate favorably with wisdom and quiet strength and a good sense of perspective on things. Over time, our culture has come to attach a surplus of moral worth to those places most fertile or most prosperous, and Afrique is the best of both. If there was anything particularly ironic about his being at
Misconceptions, I figured in some way it must be that: this was a man who could go anywhere and have anything, and he was here, reading a book in bad lighting amongst the thinnest of the ass hairs of Autumn.

  It suddenly occurred to me he might be one of the real Sinceres, valuing everyone regardless of origin the way their texts told them to do. And here I thought those had gone extinct.

  He didn’t look up as I approached, even as I put my hand on the back of the chair across from him and cleared my throat. He didn’t react at all until Blackie glided up with the glass of wine and set it down. “Compliments of the gentleman,” he purred, and then he disappeared in perfect silence.

  Solim looked at the wine, reached to grasp the stem of the glass between thumb and index finger, and slid it closer to himself. Without looking at me, he spoke. “I’m sorry, son, but I’m not into Artisanal Humans.” He kept a finger of the other hand on the page to mark his spot and looked back at it to keep reading once his wine was in place. He had known from the moment we walked up he would not be away from his book for long.

  “Then we already have something in common,” I replied, making conversation, not letting him shut me out so soon. I didn’t ask if I could sit: I simply did, pulling out the chair and sliding into it. “Cheers.” I held up my glass and tapped it against the side of his, a tiny little tink. I threw my head back and downed my drink, set the glass in front of me, and leaned my temple on my fist, my elbow on the edge of the table. “I’m not going anywhere, padre.”

  He ignored me for a few seconds, then a few more, then finally sighed very softly and closed his book. This time, he used a bookmark instead of his finger.

  I didn’t let myself grin in victory, but I wanted to.

  “How can I help you, my child?” He glanced over me in a flash, looking me in the eye. “I can tell it is not for a spiritual reason.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “You are not wearing the symbols of the Church.” He said it with a slight air of annoyance, like a medic at a dinner party being asked to look at another guest’s bum knee. His voice was deep and resonant but also soft. I could imagine him being gentle with some sheltered soul come to the Church in search of forgiveness for imagined sin. I could also see him telling someone to go straight to hell. “If you were a nonbeliever looking to convert, you could go to any of a number of sanctuaries. Autumn does not lack for houses of worship in which to be baptized. So, what is it you want?”

  “I’m looking for someone who can tell me about a Church legend.” Padre Solim was sitting leaned forward on his elbows, so I adjusted and mimicked him, slowly, over the course of the sentence. I didn’t want to shift into mirroring him all at once. It’s the sort of thing one does slowly. “I need to know about the history of avenging angels.”

  “You mean the legend,” the father said. He didn’t call me an idiot to my face, but his tone was dismissive. “Avenging angels are a myth.”

  “I’ve got a client who says otherwise.” I shrugged a little, using only my right shoulder and an eyebrow, a waggle of the head: casual as could be. “He may be crazy, I don’t know, I’m nobody’s analyst, but my gut tells me he saw something. So, here I am.”

  Padre Solim smiled a little. He had the sort of smile that managed to patronize and feel sorry for itself at the same time: the smile of a man who is absolutely aware he knows more than you do and is tired of your shit. It was a smile born of living in the gray twilight between the Imperials and the servitor classes. It would be wrong for him to assert too much privilege when addressing me, and it would be wrong for him to assert too little. He was between that rock and that hard place familiar to untold generations of experts in something other than being born rich.

  “Your client says he saw an avenging angel? Then he’s lying. Even if they were real, the myths tell us they kill witnesses without mercy or remorse. There are very few claimed sightings in history and only one supposed instance of an angel being defeated—and that tale simply served a political purpose at a pivotal point in history; in other words, he probably lied.” Solim paused and looked me in the eye. “Avenging angels are the dragons of our modern age.” He gestured a little, a reflex indicating a screen presentation that didn’t exist. He was warming up to the lectern of the mind. It occurred to me he may have given this speech before, maybe many times, perhaps for an hour or two at a go. I signaled Blackie for another round of drinks. “If the angels of legend were real, and your client saw one, he would be dead.”

  “Funny you should say that,” I replied. “That’s exactly why he hired me: he’s already died once, and he says an angel killed him.”

  The father smirked. “Is your client a disheveled but earnest woman named Henrietta?”

  I knit my brow and shook my head once to the left, standard Autumnese for a no. “Why?”

  “Just a thought. I’m sorry, but your client sounds as though he or she is quite insane.”

  “He may be, as I’ve said, but his money spends.” I shrugged a little. “Do you believe in avenging angels? You sure sound like you do. You talk about them as though they are real things.” He started to object, but I cut him off. “There are differences in how people speak of things they believe and things they know. There are intonations meant to suggest a subject is closed and locked, and the key has been painted blue and thrown in the ocean. You talk about angels that way.”

  “Because they are false. It’s like being asked if I know how to flap my arms and fly.” He sounded like he was trying very hard to be patient with a frustratingly dim child.

  “The problem with that is, people only lock something up and warn people off if it’s valuable: if it’s real to them and they’re worried people will steal the thing or do something bad with it. If you really believed angels to be a myth, you might laugh, you might call me names, you might get up and walk away, but you wouldn’t work so hard to keep me from asking again.” I smirked a little. “Trust me, padre, you and I aren’t in such different kinds of business.”

  “They are an article of faith,” Padre Solim said, and I’d swear I caught a whiff of irony when he said it, like maybe that was a pat answer he simply got really good at delivering. “Of course I believe in them.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “Genetic randomization is an article of your faith. The elevated social value of Arties like me, that’s an article of your faith. The divine right by which the Vrashabh Emperor rules, that’s an article of your faith. That the Hexagonal Pope speaks for the Ancestors, that’s an article of your faith. You believe in a lot of things, pops, but they’re mostly reflections of the political status quo or a way to keep your indoctrinated base in line. You don’t believe in much that’s impossible: the continuation of our civilization and something to piss off your biggest rivals, and that’s it. If the church really believed in avenging angels, you’d have machine gun nests on top of your steeples. I haven’t noticed any in this town. Have you? And yet, you shifted tactics on me when you realized you couldn’t throw me off with Plan A. You had a Plan B ready to go.”

  Solim looked at me long and hard. “What do you want to know?” He was ready to get my cheap shoes out of his two glasses of free wine.

  “I want to know the history of avenging angels. I want to know if Leonidas Minos and Baelor Unconquered were real people. I want to know if they actually fought side by side to defeat an avenging angel. I want to know why you, personally, believe in the bogeyman. I want to know if it’s possible my client is telling the truth. I want to know why you don’t want to answer the question.” I paused. “That’s for starters.”

  Solim listened and formed a small, soft smile. It was jarring because, so far, he’d done such a bang-up job of failing to live up to the Wise Old Padre thing he had going with his look and now suddenly, he was oozing empathy behind his harsh response. “Read a book,” he said. The smile grew. “It’s all there. I suggest a third-year primer on the social history of the Empire. It will have a great deal to say on the heroism of t
he first Emperor and on his friend Baelor.”

  “No.” I leaned forward by a hair. I was tired of all the mixed signals. I stood up, pissed off at this guy and not even really sure why. He’d done nothing but give me the standard answers. Maybe that was why I was pissed off. Still, to know there was more back there behind his eyes—to know there was more to this story and the only thing between it and me was an old man saying no—I couldn’t accept that. “Fine. I’ll find somebody else who can tell me why an avenging angel would have been behind the death of the City of Splendor.”

  I turned to walk away from the table, and a vice clamped down on my arm from behind. I stopped dead and looked down at the ebony hand around my wrist. I followed it back up the arm to the shoulder and then to the eyes of the priest. They were narrow and bright, and he was every bit as suspicious as he was intrigued. “What did you say?”

  I shook his hand off, or tried to, but the glue had apparently set. “Nothing. Something I shouldn’t have. I’m supposed to be keeping it all confidential.”

  “Fuck your client’s confidentiality agreement,” the padre cursed. It shocked me. I flinched where I stood. “Tell me what you know about Splendor.”

  I eased back onto my seat, my arm lifting so he could maintain his grip. “And you tell me what you know about avenging angels.”

  This time, the priest considered for a long time. “Instead, I’ll put you in touch with someone else.” I started to tell him what he could do with his someone else, but he put up two fingers—he didn’t even move his whole hand, only his index and middle fingers in the tiniest gesture indicating I should wait. I stopped dead and waited while he produced a sharp, very expensive stylus and started scribbling on a napkin. “She is why I believe in the bogeyman, Mister…?” He laughed suddenly, a single deep chuckle that sounded like a rock coming to rest at the bottom of a dry well.