“Valerius Bakhoum.” I realized I was short of breath, and I didn’t even know why.
Solim nodded at the name. “The Lion. A good name.”
I shrugged. I’d never paid it much attention. “Whose name are you giving me?”
He handed me the napkin and smiled again, but this time much more tightly. “Henrietta’s. The person after whom I asked a few minutes ago. You have your clients, M. Bakhoum, and I have mine. She will have to forgive me for referring you and forgive you for turning up unannounced, I suppose, but she is almost certainly going to be home no matter when you visit her.”
“Don’t worry.” I gave him a nod. “I’ll send a polly to let her know.”
“I wouldn’t recommend it.” Solim still had that same tight smile. “Henrietta has a terrible phobia of things that fly.”
“When I was a girl.” Henrietta spoke it like every fragment was a complete sentence, full stop. A moment later, she drew a breath and plunged on. “I saw an angel.” She blurted it out like that, without any window dressing, and that was how I knew she was telling the truth, or believed she was, no matter how patently crazy she was otherwise. People who lie usually try too hard. When someone tells you something straight out, no frills, it’s because it doesn’t need frills. In their minds, it’s true. It stands on its own two feet.
I nodded at her and took a sip of tea. This was by my count my fourth cup, and I was dying to take a piss, to be perfectly frank, but I didn’t dare stand up. I didn’t dare interrupt her. We sat in silence for a long time after I arrived and told her I was an acquaintance of Padre Solim’s. She didn’t ask about what topic I’d called. She didn’t ask my name. She didn’t even ask if I wanted the tea. She simply nodded, walked over to her kitchcube, and started rattling things around. I wondered if I was being ignored so I would leave or if I was being ignored because there wasn’t room enough in her mind for more than one thing at a time. She was incredibly old, at least a century and a half, and I couldn’t imagine the strain being exerted on her Woman Plus genetics to keep her going. If she were an Artie, she’d be dead already for a quarter century or more, and that’s being generous. Her skin was beige and her hair the sort of white you get if you wash a sheet too many times: not really white but not really gray either, a color you don’t even notice is a color until you see something next to it.
When Henrietta was done in the cube, she turned around with two cups and saucers, spoons, a teapot, the whole outfit. Her place was like one of the “living sincerity” homes the Sinceres liked to show off when you tour a monastery. She brought the cups and everything on a little tray, shuffling over to the small round table between two high-backed chairs. One looked worn and crushed, telling me and her and anyone else who had eyes to notice that it was her chair and she sat in it every day. There was a small screen nearby, kept where she could swivel it and get a good view, and I figured those few details probably summed up a great deal about the day-to-day existence of this woman named Henrietta.
Funny, though: her place didn’t smell musty and there wasn’t dust everywhere. I figured Solim probably kept her in decent cleaning nanos out of the kindness of his heart. Most places, most people this old, the oldness gets a chance to really settle in and nothing comes along to clean it up. Henrietta’s place wasn’t like that. It looked maintained. I would have thought she just moved in except she knew the place too well. Her movements about it were well-practiced.
Because the tray had two cups and two saucers and two spoons, I knew I wasn’t being thrown out. After Henrietta slapped my hand away from trying to help, I slid into the chair and let her put everything in place. Then she told me we would sit until the tea was done steeping, and after that, we could speak.
It turned out to be more like three and a half cups of tea had to be consumed, also in silence, but if a detective has to be anything, we have to be patient.
“We lived in Sea-at-Atoll.” Henrietta paused a long time, but eventually she spoke again and seemed to pick up steam. “There were mining operations. A few hours inland by gyro, to the north.” Henrietta assembled tidy little phrases, cut them off at a specific length, and moved on to the next. “The city was an important supply depot for them.” Her gaze drifted off over my shoulder, into some distance I couldn’t see, a place I’d never been nor heard of, whatever place produced these terse fragments for export.
Sea-at-Atoll was a city, I knew that, but I’d never been there. The look on Henrietta’s face told me she was seeing it in her mind’s eye, like she was there again, and something about that expression told me it was a place to which she knew she would never get to return. I wondered what she’d done that was so bad. At her age, it may be nothing worse than getting old and frail.
“A lot of soldiers around in those days. Empire and the Expanse always testing each other’s borders. We were near one. There were bases, a shipyard. Things you associate with a frontier. Lots of resources. Easy money and terrible people. Weapons to keep them safe from one another. We had Ghost drones in airspace at all times. Trying to watch for Expanse vessels. We never saw any Expanse, though.” She smiled a little, but it had equal odds of being bitter, sincere, or polite. “All those soldiers and sailors for the Empire. Basically sitting there waiting to be among the first to die in next war. We were selling food and clean water and booze and everything else. To all the miners up and down the Rock. That was our whole industry. Large-scale supplies supply.” Henrietta smiled again, and this time, it reached her eyes. “I always loved that term ‘supplies supply.’ The redundancy is funny, no?”
I didn’t laugh, but whatever. I didn’t make the joke.
“I was eight years old. Just graduated and beginning an apprenticeship in a factory. Near the waterfront. They were dumping the waste right back into the sound. Suck up some water on one end. Run it through the machines at pressure. Shoot it out the other end with all the muck it picked up. Repeat. I was on one of the top floors. There were huge windows facing south and west. That way solar panels on some of the machines would get maximum charge. We had to charge batteries off the sun to keep the place running at night. That was when the utility company shut the power off. We were lucky at the factory because we got power for most of the day. As soon as it was dark, though?” She made a noise with her mouth like something powering down, a sort of dropped off onomatopoeia of a mechanism halting: “Beroooooooop.” Now I laughed, but she didn’t.
“I used to stand at those windows in the evening. I watched the sun set over the ocean.” Henrietta’s gaze took on a slightly dreamy quality. “It was beautiful. It was nothing like what we get up here, yes. But, it was beautiful. It was different. All the pollution.” She smiled again. “It made for beautiful sunsets.”
Again, I didn’t want to interrupt her, but I sure as hell wanted her to get to the point. I cleared my throat, and that seemed to wake Henrietta up a little.
“I was watching out those windows,” she said. “I was watching the sky. Right at sunset. I noticed something dark in the giant, blinding, half-set sun. I shouldn’t have been staring right at it. I did sometimes anyway. It was so…powerful. A part of me thought maybe. If I stared hard enough. Maybe something would be revealed to me. Something from the past. Something from the ageless sun. Something from the future.” She looked at me now, back in the present. “We were Solarians.”
I blinked. They were an unusual bunch. It was funny to think of one converting to Sincerity.
“That day, there was something there. And it was getting bigger. And then it was getting a lot bigger, still. I called out to the other kids. Everyone ran over in time to see the figure. It was a person. It resolved sufficiently for us to realize it had wings. It was flying.” Henrietta shuddered a little at the memory, and that’s when I decided she was telling the whole truth. This wasn’t an act and it wasn’t a lie and it probably wasn’t a hallucination. People can be very good actors, but the viscera is its own lie detector, and she had a real, involuntary, spasmodic respon
se to the memory.
For the first time in my entire life, I realized I felt something a little like fear over someone’s angel story.
“That angel,” she breathed, barely audible. “It was a monster. It was a campfire story come to life. It had no weapons. No armor. But it was gargantuan. It flew straight into the city. Right at the docks. There was a new ship. I read later it was an Imperial Navy ship. Preparing for its shakedown cruise. Very new, very advanced technology. One of the most powerful Ghost Drives ever in a ship that size. The angel swooped down on it, screaming.” She swung around and looked right at me this time, her old black eyes boring into my gray-green ones. “I wrote a report on it. For the factory owners,” she said. “It was important. I remember it.”
I nodded at her, teacup to my lips, no longer drinking. I was afraid if I had another drop I would burst like a balloon.
Henrietta didn’t slow down after making her point to me. She looked away again, back in the land of memory, gazing. “We were at least two miles away. But I remember that keen, that wailing. It sounded like madness incarnate. And that’s what it was. It didn’t try to land on the ship. It flew through the hull. You know, in one side. Out the other. Then it spun around in the air. Hovering long enough for half the city to look at it. It shot back through from the other side. Then it turned and did it again. And again. And again. It didn’t seem to hurt the angel. Not at all.” Her eyes had widened a tad, and her lips had gone pale. The color drained from her face. “It was like a child. Putting its whole fist through paper.”
“What about the ship’s defenses?” My mouth was dry. “It must’ve had, I don’t know, cannons or something.”
“Of course,” she said, “but it didn’t get a chance to defend itself. The angel came out of the sun. It was invisible to most. A surprise to everyone. In maybe twenty seconds, the ship was listing to one side. It started taking on water. Its crew began to abandon it.” Henrietta sighed a little. “We live in an age of ignorance and cowardice,” she said. I wasn’t exactly sure why.
We sat in silence for a moment. “So it showed up and sank a boat?”
“I wish it were so simple,” she said. “It sank the ship. Then it threw itself into the mass of sailors. Many of them were on the docks. Some were in the water. The angel killed all of them.” She glared at the surface of her tea, or at the insides of an empty cup, as though there were something hateful there. “The angel killed every single one of them. A few of them had weapons. They tried to use them. They were meaningless. My fellow workers and I stood. Pressed to the window. We watched as hundreds of people were murdered. Where they stood. Where they ran. Where they swam. Screaming in anger and fear. The angel was so fast and so powerful. It killed everything it could see. It killed with its fists and with its bare open hands. It tore people to shreds in its grasp.” The color had gone out of Henrietta’s face, but she didn’t weep. She didn’t even tear up. A liar might have felt pressed to put on some degree of a show to sell the story, but she simply repeated it. She said it in a flat voice without a lot of embellishment or effort or emphasis. She was presenting it as an ugly set of facts on which she didn’t like to think too long.
“So, if I might ask, why did you tell all this to Padre Solim?” I shrugged a little at her. There were a lot of other questions to which I would rather have had the answers, but I didn’t want to offend her. I didn’t want to scare her off from talking. There were a lot of reasons why one might not tell a priest something like this, not least of which included the padre’s legal obligation to notify the health authorities if someone confessed something suggesting mental illness. I couldn’t imagine something likelier to have her branded as a dangerous crazy than telling people she believed in angels. In light of that, I was curious to know why she had.
Henrietta didn’t look up at me. Instead, she looked over at a small bookshelf built into the wall. I couldn’t see the titles from where I was sitting: another cost of being Artisanal. She probably had no trouble reading the spines, with the eyes of a Worker Plus. Maybe that was why her cleaning bots were so good; she would notice dust and grime more than a lot of people. Maybe that was why everything smelled of cleaning solvent. Maybe having to smell solvent so strongly every day was what drove her mad. I couldn’t begin to know how overwhelming she must find the smell. To me, it was a hint, a distant memory of scent. To her, it must have been like getting sprayed in the face with disinfectant.
After a space of two breaths, Henrietta spoke again. “Some things are too great for us to contain them,” she finally murmured, with the voice of a younger woman, a younger woman who had already seen and contained more than she wanted. “I thought at first there would be some…action.” She smiled, and the smile was the bitter smirk of the old woman she’d become with all that stuff still inside. She set the cup down and returned to the here and now in a way she hadn’t since she started speaking. It seemed to take some effort. “I wrote a report on what I saw. So did any number of my colleagues. The thanks we got was a lecture from a factory supervisor. Told us she would have us fired or shipped off. To Wyandot or someplace else. If we kept spreading crazy stories.” Henrietta cleared her throat. “I was a child. I was on my own. Times were hard. Everyone was afraid. Afraid of war. Afraid of each other. Afraid of fickle circumstance. Afraid of starving. I tucked that experience away inside myself. Deep down. Hoped I would never find it again as I rummaged in the drawer of the mind.”
She smiled a little, and as I reached to set my empty tea cup on its saucer, her hand snaked out and grabbed mine. I dropped the cup. It didn’t break, but it made a clatter. She didn’t startle. She simply stared at me. Her eyes bore into mine, intense and dark and angry at someone or something, maybe at me if that turned out to be convenient, and they held a spark of madness anyone could see. “I dreamt of that angel. Every night. For twenty years. I found myself doodling it. In the margins of magazines. On the steerless. I found myself drawing it in the dust of the factory’s ladies’ room. I converted to Sincerity. I thought they would be able to sit me down and tell me none of it had been real. I thought I could forget it if I tried. I spent a while trying to drink it away. I couldn’t, you little bastard.” The mad gleam grew and became all the light there was in Henrietta’s eyes.
Henrietta went on, more animated than ever. She dropped my hand, but I didn’t move it, too entranced by her sudden transformation from sweet old lady to mad hag. “That angel kept flying. Out of the sun of recollection. Across all my attempts to wipe it away. If I could have stabbed my memory. In its own eye. With an ice pick. To blind it. I would. I certainly goddamn tried. I’ve lain in an alleyway sticking drugs you’d need two friends and extra letters to spell.” She laughed all of a sudden and her teeth were almost all gone. The ones still there were bright orange, the color of someone who’s done a lot of street plenitude. “I hated myself for seeing it. I hated it for existing. No one would help me with seeing it. Nobody wanted to believe. The Church of Sincerity. Its priests. Its Hexagonal Pope. They didn’t want to hear about the crazy junkie. Who watched a few hundred people die. At the hands of the monster. At the back of their closet.” She smiled as though she had made a grim joke. “They didn’t want to consider. All those stories they tell their children. About being good. Or the angels will come. How maybe they’re true. How maybe they really do have something to fear.”
I swallowed air that felt like a mouthful of sand.
“But one Sincerity Priest listened,” Henrietta said, and just like that, all the wind was gone from her sails. She sagged backward in her chair, her eyelids drooping, her face falling inert. “Padre Solim at least listened. I don’t know if he believed me. He never said. But I believed he believed me.” Henrietta’s eyes fell closed. “Those are the depths to which that angel forced me,” she said, her voice softening, not bothering to reopen her eyes. “To be so desperate. As to take a belief in belief. Recursive faith. Nothing…more.” She made a soft noise of gentle but thorough disgust. Her chest rose
and fell but more and more gently so that a minute later, I was unsurprised when she snored.
I let myself out. I wasn’t sure I had any answers now, but I could be certain there were people who still really believed in angels. As with Alejandro, I knew in my gut Henrietta had seen something and was so traumatized by it her Woman Plus psychological baselines had been stretched until they snapped.
5
“Why do you think I sent you to speak with Henrietta?”
Solim was again at Misconceptions, this time with a small stack of stills on paper and a little paper notebook on which he was taking notes in a script I didn’t recognize. I wondered if it were some sort of custom shorthand, maybe something Sincerity Archivists learned for their work. It looked very fluid and he could write—notes to himself, maybe, or some other observation—without slowing down. But he used an alphabet completely unfamiliar to me and drastically different from the complex script the Empire uses in its official documents, the one that uses both hands and the bureaucrats spend years practicing before they’re allowed to produce it for actual public consumption.
I slid into the seat across from him, Blackie hot on my heels with my drink and a fresh one for the priest. I considered for a moment. “Either you wanted me to understand how crazy someone has to be to believe in avenging angels,” and here I held up my hands, miming weighing the options against one another, “or you wanted me to know how terrible they really are. If the latter, assuming they’re actually real, it would go a little ways toward explaining why everyone pretends they’re not.”
“That is not an answer.” Solim looked a little disappointed. He capped his stylus and set it to one side before turning his notebook over onto one of the stills, so I could see neither the writing nor the pictures. “That’s a list of possible answers.”
A Fall in Autumn Page 7