I started to descend into a well of feeling sorry for myself, dragged down by a body that didn’t have the energy needed for optimism, but I shook it off, stood up, ran my fingers through my hair. I could wallow in self-pity when I was dead. Until then, I wouldn’t have time.
The gate to Little Marseilles was a gate in the classical sense, of course, rather than being a literal gate. A very wide arch in the stone and plaster wall created a portal with no means of blocking ingress or egress. I could feel eyes on me, though. A couple of stalks swiveled toward me as I walked up, panned as they tried to identify me, then looked elsewhere. The whole way there I listened for footsteps behind me or the whine of a big mag somewhere ahead, as though the whole City were crawling with agents of some foreign land, or of some alien time, making their way toward me to take me down. Nothing happened. I got a few stares from the face paint, sure, but ultimately Autumn is too cosmopolitan, too diverse in fashion and presentation, for people to stare at anything very long. That’s one advantage of collecting three-quarters of a million people in one place: there’s plenty of room to be weird because there isn’t room for anything else.
I stepped through the portal, into Little Marseilles, and the sound of the City fell away. It was quiet as a Sincerity church inside. The street lamps were low, casting mood lighting more than anything else. The shadows were deep as stairs down into a human heart full afraid. As I walked that silent cobblestone street, its gutters meticulously clean, more like a painting of a street than the thing itself, I imagined those shadows as the unseen corners into which the whole rest of the world gets swept by people who live in a place like Little Marseilles.
The buildings were low, and long, and the staircases up from the sidewalks were few. Plants and small gardens reflected the land far below, but mostly the whole thing was as sterile as the rest of Autumn. The houses were long palazzos with small, round portholes and large, overhanging bay windows heavily shrouded in curtains. The rich always want plenty of windows, but they can’t stand the thought of anyone looking in. The walls were more stone, a small number of permitted varieties used with enough variation for any one person to peek out a window and not see next door an estate entirely identical to his own. The result was actually very tastefully done, even artful in its architecture, but I suspected their walls were really painted plascrete. I couldn’t imagine someone paying the weight of something as heavy as this much granite. The whole City would be tipped over on one side. Little Marseilles’ obsession with the appearance of stone was its own punch line. The street looked pretty, sure, but no one would ever believe in it. Context destroyed the illusion, like a magic trick that wows at first but obvious after only a moment’s thought.
There were more stalks on the street, of course: some attached to homes and some to lamps. They noted me, gawped as they tried to associate me with an identity, then went back to looking at whatever moved next. A wall had gotten another round of graffiti sometime when no one was watching: MANIMAL RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS, but the letters were unfinished, incompletely outlined by someone who got interrupted by discovery.
Two blocks of semi-urban peace and quiet later, a pair of Upgrades came around a corner on security patrol. I never considered that the whole neighborhood might be a Spiralist enclave, but that certainly seemed to be the case. Spiralist charms peeked out from flowering shrubs here and there, markers of genetically enhanced plant life they like to put out as signs of their devotion. I thought again of the old Octopus I’d seen washing the wall. Spiralists have it as their official dogma that all humaniforms are worthy beings—Arties, Plusses, and Mannies—but history is chock full of religious adherents who couldn’t live up to their egalitarian ideals.
The Upgrades eyed me with suspicion—slight limp, beat-up old coat wrapped around myself, big hat—and started to make their way toward me with the practiced scowls of cops approaching vagrants in all places throughout all time. “Evening, sir,” one said to me, but I didn’t give him time to say anything else. I tilted my head back, looked out at him from under the brim of my hat—with my weird makeup and everything—and sniffed as hard as I could.
“Yes, hand?” I narrowed my eyes into offended slits and jutted my chest out at him a little. “Is something amiss?”
The derisive term caught him off guard. It’s what people used to call Upgrades and other only-halfway-to-Plus servants. A generation ago, it was a standard term of address that saved people the trouble of having to remember or use their slaves’ names. These days it’s an insult in most circles, an ironic paean to times gone by in others. A certain kind of self-absorbed asshole wouldn’t hesitate to use it to put an Upgrade in his place while saying, loud and clear, I insulted you on purpose and you can’t do a thing about it. The Upgrade’s partner looked me over up and down, but the one to whom I spoke was enough of a lapdog not to look away for fear of showing disrespect to a superior.
The other spoke up. “Sir,” he said, voice tight. “Our apologies, but we have duties to fulfill. What has you out at this hour?”
I let my nostrils quiver as I looked slowly at him, death stare at full radiance. “My own desires, of course. Might I not come and go as I please in the community I call home?” My voice had shifted up, and my accent had gone upper class. “Or must I go wade in the shit beyond the wall in order to have a moment of quiet with myself? Hmm?”
There’s a kind of rich that lets you dress however the hell you want, and damn the eyes of the first person to look askance at you. The first Upgrade decided that must be me. As an Artisanal Human, I look my age, but if I were a Plus, I’d be a very old one indeed, and an elderly Plus could make this go hard for them. The face paint wouldn’t even register as strange if I were merely an eccentric who liked to look how he liked to look.
“Apologies, sir,” the first guard said, more readily obsequious than his unconvinced colleague. “We’re looking for slander makers.” Ah, the graffiti. Slander indeed, I supposed, to paint modestly progressive slogans within sight of wealthy isolationists. “We’ll be about our business.”
The other still wasn’t sold, but once his partner stepped aside and I made it a meter past them, there was precious little he could do without raising his voice or touching me. He wouldn’t relish what could happen if he were wrong. He stayed quiet as they watched me shuffle away. Twenty terribly long seconds later, I was around a corner and gone from sight.
I sat down to catch my breath. I wondered if I wheezed when addressing them. If so, it helped sell the show. Thanks, cancer, I thought with a dumb smile. Two minutes later, I lifted my head from my hands, rubbed my eyes, and looked around. Not a hundred meters away, on a corner of a small park and market square, was the very clinic I sought: the one at the corner of Strive and Tester.
Time to go to work.
13
The Spiralist Church has clinics all over the City of Autumn—all over the world, in fact, even in the Eastern Expanse, Lesser Aus, Greater Aus, and all the little places too peaceful to remember—but this one didn’t look like any of the others. The others have giant glowsigns in the shape of the Sacred Helix, two-story high images of smiling people in clinician garb, all the cheapest ways of snaring anyone who walks by. Sure, they do great work, not that I know from experience. They turn a tidy profit on their cosmetic work, and they aren’t shy about saying so. They trumpet how much money they’ve earned doing aesthetic work for clients then funneled into disease research, developing new treatments, improving life for their patients. They really seem to do it, too. In addition to the design work, they cure actual diseases and—for everybody but Arties—they do it for free. Spiralist clinics kick death square in its teeth a million times a day, charging nothing but a smile, because it’s phenomenal publicity for the cosmetic side of the operation.
Curing someone’s sweet old grandma of the Hamlin fits makes everybody feel good, sure, and on the way out, the Spiralists weigh Grandma down with pamphlets about a hundred ways to rewrite their own code. The mott
o on the outside of every Spiralist clinic is the same: “Enter in need of improvement; leave possessed of perfection.”
Most clinics are open all the time. This one was no different, but they had noticeably dimmed the lights around the entrance and the only external signifier of its purpose was that ancient symbol of the Spiralists’ quest for genetic ascendancy: double serpents climbing the winged staff representing humankind’s inventive nature. There are plenty of reasons to walk into a clinic late at night. It’s by no means a necessarily suspicious act. My close call with the Upgrades had me a little spooked, though. I wasn’t sure I could pull off the snob voice and talk my way past the reception desk of an essentially private facility, even if the fancy makeup job hid my Artisanal crow’s feet and hollow cheeks. Neither would I do myself any favors by hesitating or visibly dithering over what to do. No, I would have to wing it and hope for the best.
So I walked up, opened the door, and removed my hat as I stepped inside. In four hobbled strides, I crossed a lush waiting area full of overstuffed upholstery and carpet so thick you could lose a small child in it. There was an Upgrade+Plus receptionist-security-guard-bouncer in a sleek white uniform and a little paper hat that said to anyone meeting her that she wasn’t that important in the grand scheme of things but she was certainly more important than they. What the presence of someone so meticulously engineered told me, on the other hand, was that this was pay dirt. The Church had plenty of muscle around. It didn’t need to waste one of its trickier achievements on overnight front desk duty in a nice, quiet neighborhood unless they really had something to protect. The receptionist looked up, her eyes flaring microscopically to indicate she was surprised to see anyone, much less to see someone dressed like me, and her refusal was getting warmed up before I’d even taken the second step.
“Sir.” She was going to say something else, but I didn’t let her finish.
“I have an appointment with Surgeon Lee.” I tried to smile broadly and innocuously. “My name is Jonas Daven.” I gestured slightly, an apology of hands and pointy elbows. “I’m a little early, actually.”
“I’m sorry, but we have no Surgeon Lee at this facility.” Her smile barely stuck its head into the room and looked around before getting the hell out. “You must have the wrong clinic. Perhaps I can look them up for you?”
I looked around, trying to seem a little nervous but not too much so. “This is the Little Marseilles clinic, yes?”
She gestured at the walls, beyond them, at a city within the City and its posh population resting well in comfortable beds. “Of course.”
“Oh.” I blinked a little owlishly. “I’m quite certain this is where I was told to go for my appointment.”
She wasn’t having it, and I didn’t blame her. “Well, I’m sorry, but you misunderstood.” There was no chance I had been misinformed—the fault, she made clear in tone and in posture, was entirely mine. I didn’t blame her for this. She got paid to keep bums out, and I was a bum. “I take it you were referred, so perhaps you should polly the referring clinic.”
“That does seem the wisest option.” I was making noise while the rest of me tried to think. There had to be a way past the desk. I couldn’t threaten her; she had the Upgrade genetic encoding for a big frame and endless muscles and a decisive tone that all said nobody was going to have much luck trying to push her around. I couldn’t charm her. The most obvious and believable lie—that I was a patient—hadn’t done the trick. I hesitated for a moment, the brim of the hat in my hands as I clenched my fingertips around it.
A very quiet beep sounded, and her attention was elsewhere. I realized she had a whisper in her right ear. “Have a good day.” She was dismissive when she spoke my direction, condescending, speaking as though my back were already to her, but she was the one leaving. The receptionist stood and, without further discussion, disappeared through a door I hadn’t even realized was tucked behind her station.
Okay. That was not normal, and there was no pretending it was. A religious person might have thought their preferred flavor of gods were looking out for them, creating an opportunity where none was before, but I think at this point we all know how I feel about religion. The receptionist left for a reason, and she didn’t throw me out first.
This was all an obvious setup. I’d been made, and there was something they wanted me to see or to do while I was here.
To my left was a large and heavy door proclaiming ACCOMPANIED PATIENTS ONLY in a script suggesting they smiled when they wrote it but their free hand made a fist. It had a slim window down one side to keep people from opening it and hitting another in the face, and the hallway beyond was invitingly empty.
I hobbled over and tested it. The door was unlocked.
Obvious bait. Too obvious. To take that bait would be madness. To walk into a trap this ornate was insane.
Well then, I thought to myself. Into the trap I go.
The thing about a trap is, you’ve only got two choices: avoid it, or spring it yourself. I couldn’t think of a way to avoid it. One or both of two things were in this place: the truth of Alejandro’s mad case, and the truth of the fruit dealer’s genetic treatments. I couldn’t see a path to either of them that involved avoiding this trap. I would have to spring it. Doing that might get me killed, but, joke’s on them, right? I was too distracted dying to be scared of getting killed.
The hallway was like that in any other clinic, but all the hard surfaces were heavily carpeted. An upscale place like this probably didn’t see as many bloodstains and other bodily fluids as the one in, say, the Shade. Where the latter was designed so every surface could be attacked with a mop or a sponge, this one gambled on comfort instead. Of course, these were Spiralists: they probably engineered the carpet out of a moss capable of releasing enzymes to consume spills.
The walls were not quite white, what I suspect my mother would have called “eggshell” had she been here to see it. There were representations of nature scenes, impressionistic, realistic, hand drawn, captured by eye, color, black and white. They weren’t dupes, they were originals—the way the paper on the drawn ones was creased in the center of the ink, from the pressure of the pen, was visible on close inspection. Money everywhere, even on the walls so you could ignore it on your way to one of the half-dozen examining rooms staggered across from one another like the teeth of a zipper.
I wasn’t interested in the examining rooms. There would be no secret to reveal in any of them. It wasn’t like they would have a special one set aside for their illicit genetic treatments. They would conduct that hidden business in a more remote corner of the clinic. In the back, though, or somewhere, they would have one of two things I hoped I could use to secure some proof Adolfo had been bought off with cosmetic regeneration: an inventory list or a patient file. I hoped they didn’t give Adolfo a codename. And I hoped I could anticipate whatever box they would try to drop around me before I got to it.
To be honest, I wasn’t exactly sure what I would do with evidence if I found it. I supposed I would try to get back out and then later inform them I had proof they treated an Artie and see if that made them talk. That wasn’t much as plans go, I admit, but I wasn’t thinking totally straight. I was so furious that Adolfo would be selling his stupid fruit with the dark hair and taut skin of his younger self while I would be, at best, another gout of ashes in the exhaust of a City that wouldn’t even notice I was gone.
The six medical chambers were all empty, their lights out, their doors open. Each had an elaborate upright display of lurid status flowers. Think of a sunflower blossom but growing out of the surface of the door like a flowering vine instead of out of the ground. When a patient was in the room, the blooms would open. The colors of the petals would shift over time to indicate things to the staff: how long since they were checked on, how soon to give medication, that sort of thing. It was all a part of the Spiralist aesthetic to make incredibly and unnecessarily complicated living things simply because they could.
The rooms
themselves were lushly appointed: more carpet, thick drapes over false windows, heavily upholstered companion chairs for parents or kids who had to wait while someone else got all the attention. There was a seventh door before the end, throwing off the already-offset symmetry of the place, but it went to a restroom with a shower cubicle and a heavy smell of gingermint oil cleansers.
There was an eighth door at the very end, unmarked, kept in shadow in a way clearly intended to discourage the curious. Everything about it indicated being closed to anyone who had to ask. I reached out and pulled the handle. It held fast, but it did rattle a little when I tugged it. A closer look showed a recessed key slot built into the door near the bottom.
This had to be another lure in the trap. A mechanical lock struck me as unusual. Since when were Spiralists afraid to trust technology to control access? Where were the palm readers or eye-eyes or noses? But instead of those, they gave a lock someone could pick. Someone who didn’t think to question when something was a little too easy would count this as a lucky break. This all made me nervous—were they luring me into a setup involving the law? Get evidence of me perpetrating a break and enter and then blackmail me into silence after? Only one way to find out. I reached into my coat and felt the small leather pouch with my picks in it—every good detective has them, even poor ones like me—but as I started to withdraw them from my pocket, I heard the receptionist’s voice approaching the door from the lobby, fifteen unobstructed meters behind me.
“Said he would go somewhere else, but, obviously, he was making shit up,” she said, her voice muffled by the door, the handle starting to turn. “He was probably hoping for an ‘emergency’ treatment for something big. Like they all are. If it seems like a crisis, no one will say no. Typical.” I gave her credit: she did know the way it usually works when someone random wanders into a clinic in the middle of the night. It was all too picture-perfect, though, just like her disappearance from the reception area and the mechanical lock in a Spiralist clinic. Her tone wasn’t that of one explaining a fact to another, but instead of one trying to convince herself something was okay. Would an amateur hear that and be assured they were getting away with breaking in? Was the person she was trying to convince actually meant to be me?
A Fall in Autumn Page 19
