“I’m a detective. I don’t figure everything out in one go. I produce a list of possibilities and eliminate them one by one until there’s only the correct answer left.” I shrugged. “Don’t hate me for doing my job, and I won’t hate you for doing yours.”
Solim smirked a little. “Okay. I sent you to speak with Henrietta so you could understand how dangerous angels are.” He put his stylus down in the notebook and tied the string to close it up. “I think you should know what you’re getting into if you really want to investigate this topic. It seems only fair.”
I knit my eyebrows together. “Why? Is someone in the church going to get pissed off because I’m asking around about your legends? Or is an angel going to show up in the night and tear me limb from limb like one of Henrietta’s sailors?”
Solim met my gaze, his own steady, his aura of priestly authority and gentle concern fully engaged. “No one in the modern Church knows enough to give a damn about you asking questions.” With that sentence, he consigned his entire Order to irrelevance. “That leaves only one of your two possible answers left. I believe, according to what you said, that means it must be the true one.”
“Padre,” I drawled, “you’re twice as crazy as Henrietta. At least she has the excuse of being old. I don’t know what happens after a Woman Plus runs clean out of telomeres, but you don’t have the same excuse. Yet.”
Solim was not offended. To my surprise, in fact, being told he was simply insane seemed reassuring: he relaxed and leaned back in his seat, pushing away from the table and crossing one of his legs over the other at the knee. He settled in for a moment and smiled softly at something before tapping the pile with the notebook and stills with his fingertip. “M. Bakhoum, I am a historian. I have devoted my career within the Church to the study of our history in an attempt to bring it forward with us into the future. I have sought to understand how our ancestors lived, what technologies they knew at what times in the past, how their cultures formed and evolved and interrelated. I’ve examined questions of how the continents were colonized and when and by whom, of who built the great monuments of the land of your name, of when they were built. I have not answered many of those questions, but like you, I have eliminated some possibilities.”
He reached up and detached the small spectacles he was wearing from the bridge of his nose, rubbing his eyes with his free hand. “Are you familiar with the Bergley Theory?”
I shook my head at him. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”
“Perhaps you’ve heard of it as the False Drought Theory?”
Now I narrowed my eyes to slits. Crazy I could handle, sure, but conspiracy theories were not my area of expertise. Life is never as complicated as they make it out to be. I find them a little insulting on a professional level. “Never mind, padre.” I stood up, downed my cocktail in a swig, and set it down. “Have a nice day.” I turned to go. If this was the kind of time-wasting bullshit Alejandro’s case was going to have me haring off after, I could return the retainer and call it quits. I’d make the rent some other way. I could find another case, or I could go sell my ass to some Spiralist with a kink for throwbacks. Hell, there would probably be one here now.
“The ancients could have cured your cancer,” Solim said.
I stopped walking. I never told Solim about that. I never told anyone. I was diagnosed at a Spiralist clinic. This guy hadn’t been there. He wasn’t even a Spiralist. The Spiralists have a lot of wacky shit going on, but they know their genetic medicine, and they tend to be damned good at the confidentiality clause. That’s why it costs so much. I turned around and looked at him. “Say that again.” My voice was low and tight, and my lips were pressed into a flat line. I barely separated them to speak.
“The ancients cured cancer all the time.” He looked at me with something like real kindness, and I fucking hated him for it. I didn’t need kindness. I needed gene work. That was one of the prices of living in a society where the Sinceres got to call a lot of the shots in the Imperial Senate; as an Artisanal Human, I was off-limits for the genesmiths. In theory, the Spiralists had total freedom to practice their faith as they wished; in practice, that didn’t extend to anyone not Human Plus to begin with. That leaves Arties up shit creek without a genetic retroviral injector paddle. The Spiralists were very apologetic about being unable to treat me. I tried to bribe them, I’m not proud, and that was when they went from apologetic to pitying. I hated their pity, and I hated Solim’s too.
He was still speaking to me. “There are very clear records: they used radiant energy, certain chemicals, any number of things. Their mastery of science far exceeds what we like to think or what we tell our children in school. You’ve heard the standard histories your whole life, of course, so why the hell should you believe me? You shouldn’t. Everyone knows humankind stumbled onto the existence of DNA and RNA at what was, for the ancient world, a time of technological greatness, though it pales in comparison to our own. No Ghost Drives, no Mannies to do the sweeping up, no Plus baselines, no genetic therapies, nothing but whatever chromosomes their parents gave them and enough chemistry to poison their own world to death.” He smiled, but his expression was sharp and bitter, a serrated edge on the knife blade of cynical certainty. “But they could do wonders of which we only dream, too: well, those of us who need such wonders, anyway. I believe in those wonders. I’ve seen too much evidence of them. I think they could do amazing things with their machines. I think someone or something has worked ever since they fell—worked tirelessly and continuously—to keep us from regaining that lost greatness.” He sounded sad as he said it, and I was a little sad to realize he really believed it.
“More fairy tales.” I shook my head. “More make-believe for the factory of dreams you call a religion.”
“Do you know the ancients had universities?” Solim picked up his stylus and stared at it, his voice sounding deeply sad. “You don’t even know what that word means, probably. It’s an ancient one. They were places of advanced learning. People would study for decades to get into one so they could study a specialty, discover new things, share their learning. They generated knowledge beyond our comprehension or imagination. They left detailed records. Some of those records were paper, and I’ve read them myself. It’s no conspiracy, M. Bakhoum. No one made up whole buildings full of dissertations on the electronic devices they developed. No one made up floor after floor of writings about their sciences and their advancements. The ancients destroyed themselves, yes, but I think we could have rebuilt from what they had. I think we could have a world with at least some of the things they created.”
He drew a breath, long and deep, but slow and weary, and also wary of what it was about to be used to say. “I think someone has been keeping us from doing that. Throughout the history of our culture, from prehistory on, every time we nearly achieve some new breakthrough—every time trade increases or collaboration between the Empire and the Expanse looks promising, or there might be real cooperation and unity between different factions within the Empire, every time people start to discover things, every time someone starts trying to use science to lift us all up, something happens. Our best and our brightest disappear. Our proudest achievements are destroyed.”
He gestured around himself vaguely with his empty hand, then looked at me, right in the eye, and I could see he was not insane. Henrietta had in her eye the gleam of the true believer whose faith is a kind of madness. Here, in front of me, the nearest priest of her faith was telling me something equally mad but with perfect rational certainty. “Our Great Cities fall inexplicably out of the sky and no one can figure out why. Every now and then, we figure out a clever machine and we strap a Ghost Drive to it, and it works—but we can’t explain it, and when it breaks, we can’t fix it. We simply build another and let the Ghost figure it out.” He looked around the room, gesturing sharply with the stylus at the world beyond. “But there are fewer and fewer of us who can even do that. The ancients went to the moon. They went deep beneath the sea and found l
ife there they could never explain. They sent machines to Mars. They photographed the surfaces of other worlds.
“M. Bakhoum, we refer to the time of the Fall as the Darkest Ages, but I am telling you that for all the wonders of our world, we are living in a far darker era. Our achievements are nothing compared to theirs. At best, we have stolen the good ideas of the Expanse and turned them to our own ends and gotten very, very lucky. Someone is keeping us stupid, M. Bakhoum, and I think it’s the angels. Over and over again, for thousands of years, we take a few steps forward and then an angel shows up to wash all that away. What did Henrietta tell you about the ship she saw destroyed?” I didn’t say it, but I thought it: the ship had been new, one of the biggest Ghost Drives ever installed on a seagoing vessel. “What did your client tell you he saw destroyed? It brought down the greatest of the flying cities, the one where people were actually happy again. Think of Leonidas Minos and Baelor Unconquered and their gyrocopter battle from ancient myth: an angel was attacking the city we now know as the capital of the Empire. It had been the first city where humans and Mannies tried to live in peace and the first place, after the Collapse, to assert itself over other places in a stable way.” Solim looked at me as though a few anecdotes, a few historical oddities and bedtime stories, added up to a convincing argument.
“How did you know I have cancer?” I walked back to the chair in which I’d been sitting, but I didn’t sit down in it.
“The faint circles around your eyes,” Solim said. “To most people, it probably looks like you don’t sleep well, but I know metalspur when I see it. You’ve been taking dried metalspur to try to control it, yes?”
I nodded at him.
“It’ll kill you even faster than the cancer,” he said. “The ancients knew of it, too.” He sighed. He didn’t love saying this, except for the part of him that did, and that was the part of him I hated. “They considered it quackery. The ancients saw it as a poison.”
“Maybe I’ll start listening to those assholes,” I said, “when they show up in their magic machine and tell me themselves.”
“Keep taking metalspur,” Solim replied, “and you’ll be able to ask them yourself in the afterlife.”
I went out that night and got good and drunk. I didn’t go to Misconceptions because I was afraid I’d run into that bastard Solim again. I didn’t want to look at his smug face. I didn’t want to watch him judge me from behind eyes that could put on wisdom and a kindly demeanor the way most people put on a pair of boots. I didn’t know whether to believe eyes like that. Normally, that isn’t such a problem—who gives a goddamn what some cultist says?—but in this case, just this once, I wanted part of what he said to be true and part of what he said to be false, and I couldn’t quite see a way to only getting to believe what I wanted of it.
The stuff about angels showing up every time we get too big for our cultural or technological or historical britches, that part was crazy on the face of things. All I had to do was walk around the Great City of Autumn and know it. We had achieved a greatness with which no prior iteration of humankind could compete. Neither our parents nor our grandparents, nor the pre-Fall ancients, nor whatever hut-dwelling savages they considered to be their own forebears, had done anything so great as what the Empire and her Cities had done. There were those who might say the Expanse and its Armada were as great, maybe greater, but those were ships of war, not ships for people. I considered that one of the greatest of the many things that makes the City of Autumn so special: it’s for people. Oh, there were the haves and the have-nots, and you can bet your last credit the haves all had PlusPlus™ Genes and the have-nots mostly had scales or whiskers or plain old Artie lotto genetics, but ultimately, we were all people and we all had to share this town whether we liked it or not.
At the back of my mind, a little voice whispered. It said, Splendor was for people, too, and was better at it, and an angel showed up and destroyed it. I shoved a booze-soaked sock in its mouth, though, and kept walking.
In the absence of being able to wash up at my usual haunt and drink until the dead went back to sleep, I wandered the crisp, cool night of a springtime sky somewhere over Afrique Nur. I had plenty of false warmth running through my veins, and I wondered to myself whether we were actually over Afrique Nur yet or instead flying through the dark night over NurAtlanta. In my mind’s eye, I saw endless crashing waves, the violent turbulence of NurAtlanta that makes it so difficult to get small ships through that blighted ocean, one of the vast plastic Sargasso seas the ancients left behind. I imagined Solim standing before me, going on and on about the advancements of the ancients, the dead cultures he believed knew so much more than we do. I imagined kindness and cloying wisdom clouding those patient eyes until I realized I’d balled up my fists in hopes of landing a punch. Then, I imagined pulling a big lever so a trap door opened under him. In my mind’s eye, Solim fell, screaming the many thousands of meters between Autumn and that dead ocean. NurAtlanta roiled and crashed upon itself in the infinite patternless repetition of the sea at night, swallowing him up and sealing him away.
Wherever we were, it had been winter not too long before. The air beyond the City’s net was cold enough still to be chilly when it got to us. Moist and salty air washed over the City. It smelled and felt good, and the tension between the warmth of the cheap hooch in my blood and the heat-sucking chill of the air was perfect. They kept me balanced on the knife’s edge between anger and intrigue, or perhaps between rage and bleak sorrow.
Solim was right, of course: I was dying, and I knew it, and the medic knew it at the Spiralist clinic, and nobody could do a goddamned thing. They said it was my pancreas and it would kill me, but not for a little bit longer. Until then, I was going to have to work and try not to think about it.
They told me that a long time ago. I didn’t really have very long left, probably, and the closer I got to my drop-dead date—a dark chuckle in the night—the harder it became not to think about it.
I snorted aloud, like I was huddled in a corner with myself and we were sharing a joke. Try not to think about it, they said. Fat lot of good that sort of advice was going to do me, wasn’t it? Try not to think about it. Try not to think about dying, about pain, about your body coming after you with the thin knives it can hide in its sleeves. Try not to think about how they could cure this ninety-nine times out of a hundred if you didn’t scream Artie at them every time you walked into a room. Try not to think about how the Church of Sincerity, the very same assholes who tell any idiot who will listen that Arties are the best humanity can ever offer, are the ones who won’t let you get worked on. Try not to think about how you’re a pawn at the bottom of the box in a game they are constantly playing in the Imperial Senate. Try not to think about death. Try not to think about it.
So, there I was, thirty years old, scarred, my hair turning a little gray at the temples, my cheeks starting to sag, my guts waiting behind the door to wrap a garrote around my neck, trying to make enough scratch to keep the landlady off my ass and the nearest willing fellow in it. Try not to think about it, they said.
Merely remembering that kind of talk could even happen—that we lived in a world where one person could say that to another—made me need another drink, and the thirst didn’t seem to go away after one or three or six or ten.
Eventually, it was so late at night as to be nearly the next morning, and I was on my feet mostly to spite the rest of me. If I was going to die at some point because of this shit, then I was sure as hell going to the grave exhausted. I drank my way through all the bars where I could get a drink on a promise or with a kiss, then I worked my way down to places where I had to spend actual coins to bank the fires of intoxication. What was at first a manic, drunken carouse turned into more of a busman’s holiday of staying drunk and thinking too much. I needed to drink because I needed to drink, and I was going to see the job through to the end. Now, with light starting to appear over the eastern-facing Fore Barrier, I was slogging my way west through streets
already bustling with the early risers. The sun had not yet risen, and I was determined to watch it do so from above the snowline in Down Preserves. If I was going to die frightened and in pain and very probably alone because of those Sincerity Church bastards who maintained the Preserves, who funded them, and whose coin and affectation of gravitas bought them anything they wanted, then I was going to take with me every single sunrise I could find, and I was going to steal them right out of Sincerity’s own goddamn park.
That’s the sort of thinking death and hooch make happen when you let them slosh around together for too long.
Technically, Down Preserves closed at night, but that didn’t matter to a very specific segment of the population. By this, I refer to people who go somewhere public at an hour when that place is very nearly private and fuck each other in the shadows. I’d discovered this when I was a teenager and I ran away from home. It was a thing that happened between men who are in the closet, people in a committed relationship wanting something different, and with beings of all sorts who can’t go to a bar and get laid for whatever reason like the rest of the people on their block.
I grew up in Pentz, where it’s often warm all winter and the summers are blistering hot. The mountains aren’t far, though, and eventually I got tired of my parents selectively basking in and reviling the Church of Sincerity’s attentions and flattery. We were from a long line of Artisanal Humans, they told us, and they had such glib pride in their voices. The hand they used to stroke our genetic fur was as gentle as could be, but they used the same hand to scruff the few of us who wanted to find a life outside the borders of our genetic preserve.
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