If you asked me, “a long line of Artisanal Humans” meant we were simply the result of ceaseless inbreeding. We were genetic dead-ends with nothing to recommend our chromosomal portfolio than the fact a bunch of religious nut jobs wanted to stare at our family tree while it collapsed in on itself. I’d had it up to here and then some, and still going, by the time I was fourteen years of age and trying to find work in an ore plant. I’d heard enough of how valuable my genes were, how important it was I continue the line of Arties living in our lovely MidAtlanta cage. No matter how pretty the leaves turned every fall, I was sick to death of being told I was too special to live my own life.
Sick to death, I thought: another dark chuckle in the night.
I ran away from the reservation. I went into the hills rather than a city because I knew they would look in the towns and cities first. They would assume what I wanted to escape was the rural upbringing. They were right, of course, but first, I had to give them time to forget me. I had to disappear for a while.
Up there, in those mountains, I found parks and other places people would visit from time to time. I found hiking trails where townies came to find a little strange, and I ran into other self-imposed exiles who retreated into the mountains to find some peace from the world. Under their tutelage, I learned there were words for what I am, some of them kind and some not, and I learned there were words for Others, too: Mannie and Genie—because they can have anything they want—and Plusses and on and on and on. On the preserve, we were told the world outside existed in perfect genetic order, and what I found, instead, was a chaos of prejudice dressed in the starched and collared uniform of a caste system. In theory, as an Artie, I was somewhere in the middle. All that really meant was no one liked me.
Self-pity like that ran down the sides of my every thought as I clambered clumsily over the gate into the parking lot of Down Preserves. There were no mag cars—the Obedient and Felicitous Brothers of St. Chandra of the Church of Sacred Sincerity were not above having a car towed from their parking lot overnight—but the lights in the parking lot were on. They were meant to discourage people like me, so I threw a moutza at them as I walked, a slim black shadow, from one pool of light on white gravel to another. Eventually, I reached the beginning of the very same trail where I got slugged a few days before.
The fuck trails aren’t very busy in the early mornings, but sometimes there’s a little action. I went there to watch the sun rise, but now a part of me wanted also to get laid by someone whose name I would never know and whose troubles would never be mine. It sounds bad when I write it down like that, but it’s the truth. I wanted to forget myself for a little while, and I wanted to do so with someone who would do the same. Someone who would forget me.
I walked into the dark tunnel of the trails at night, trees towering over me with slumped autumnal shoulders, the ground beneath me a patchwork quilt cast in tones of gray and black and brown instead of their daylight crimsons and golds. Ten minutes later—with only one or two turns off the main trail itself—I found myself in an out-of-the-way clearing where I was more likely to hear a gasp of pleasure than the call of some preserved tropical bird.
Instead of a cacophony of ecstasy, though, all I heard was my own breathing, labored from the alcohol and the climb and the hard work of feeling so damned sorry for myself all night. I was a little disappointed. Being in a place like this, where strangers get lost in one another’s embrace like amnesiacs being welcomed home by lovers they don’t remember, I hoped for an experience I cherished but rarely had call to describe: being by myself in the company of others.
With no one else around, I decided to climb a tree. I wanted to watch the sun rise over Autumn, her skyline and her various pits and hills a lumpy bedspread. Eventually, I succeeded with only a few false starts and one scraped hand: more scars, maybe, and more marks of the pride of being Artisanal in a world full of genetic baselines designed by the greatest life scientists our era—or any other—could boast.
When I got to the top, I could see the rim of pink forming ahead of the City. The structure of Autumn is such that we never see a horizon other than the City’s own. We never fly so low as to see mountains, for instance, or the tops of terrestrial trees. Instead, we see our own Fore Barrier and the net and the City’s rooftops from all directions except hovering overhead. That was a perspective I never expected to have—I couldn’t imagine having much call to go for a gyro ride—and it occurred to me the angels must see that kind of thing all the time. Rather, it occurred to me they would if they were even real, which they weren’t.
I settled down on my branch, the weight of my failing body suddenly greater than I remembered it being on the hike up. Exhaustion tied itself to all my corners and sank: exhaustion from the night spent drinking, from my liver working overtime to deal with all that booze, from my walk across the City’s landscape, from too little sleep gotten on a lumpy couch in a cold office I could no longer afford. The pink edge of the sky turned red and then yellow, and as a tiny crescent of the sun himself started to crest over the Fore Barrier and golden spotlights shot westward between the buildings of my beautiful City, I heard rustling from below as someone approached quietly but not stealthily: the footfalls of a person who didn’t want to disturb their own reverie by stomping around.
Alejandro walked into the clearing at the climax of the fuck trail, and he turned to face the sunrise and closed his eyes as the rays struck him all at once. I stayed where I was, quiet as I could be, my gaze shifting back and forth between the absurdly beautiful light show on the horizon and that same light playing across Alejandro’s simultaneously too-smooth and too-human features.
“Do you often come here in the morning?” His voice was quiet, but it carried anyway; he didn’t exactly have a lot of competition to be heard. Alejandro turned to face me, or at least in my direction, despite me thinking I was hidden. “I do,” he went on. “I come here to watch the sun rise once or twice a week.” He—it—walked closer to me. He seemed not to know where I was, though it occurred to me he might be pretending to be polite. I couldn’t stand the thought of that—couldn’t stand the thought of being pandered to by a machine designed to make me like him in the first place—so I half-jumped and half-tumbled right out of the tree and onto the ground, the alcohol cushioning me for the moment against the worst of the pain of impact. I could tell when I landed I was a little thinner in the bones than six months before. That was the first time I felt frail.
“I love to come here,” I said from where I lay, still crumpled awkwardly on the ground, my coat twisted up around me and my hat fallen to the side. “And I love to cum here.” I rolled over onto my side and then up onto one leg, then another, standing unsteadily and half-heartedly dusting myself off. I hoped to bother him with that. I wanted to offend the delicate sensibilities I associated with these timeless, semi-legendary creatures of metal and soft eyes and room temperature false flesh.
Alejandro walked over to outside of arm’s reach and looked at me with those eyes narrowed in sympathy, a surplus of forgiveness for whatever dumb idea resulted in me being here at the literal crack of dawn. “You’re dying, aren’t you?”
I blinked. How did everyone know? Did the Church of the Infinite Upward Spiral of the Double Helix tattoo it on my forehead?
“We get used to noticing things,” he said in response to my frown. “Golems, I mean. We spend enough time around people to detect patterns.” He tried to look a little self-conscious about it and almost succeeded. I figured he did the best he could do with the false facial musculature his designers gave him. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m dying,” I muttered. “Apologies are a waste of time.”
“So is anger,” Alejandro countered. His voice was infuriatingly reasonable.
“No, it isn’t,” I snapped. “Sometimes anger is the closest thing I can find to a reason to live. There are mornings when the only thing getting me out of bed is the desire to piss someone off.”
“What about the other days? Wh
at gets you out of bed when you aren’t angry?” He looked sad, like he’d heard these sorts of antics before, and maybe he had. Maybe he’d been around since before the ancients popped their big balloon. Maybe he’d had a hundred thousand humans tell him all about how sad they were. I hated them, too.
“The same thing getting anyone else out of bed: the rent, a cup of coffee, and the hope I’ll maybe get laid if I’m lucky. I sure as shit don’t do it for the home-cooked meals.”
That was when he kissed me, and I kissed him, and the two of us did something halfway between fucking and making love right there in the middle of Down Preserves while the sun came up on Autumn and a virtuously busy morning wound its springs without us.
6
The sun was over the trees at the southeastern edge of the sloped opening in the forest when I awoke. The sun woke me, actually: its rays on my face, the flicker of shadow and light as it played across my closed eyes. I was half dressed: my shoes off, my feet bare, and my coat spread over me in lieu of a blanket. My shirt was somewhere, probably. I wasn’t wearing it, anyway, and my eyes hadn’t opened yet, but I could feel it nearby the way you can sense an old dog by your chair or a former lover on the opposite side of an otherwise perfectly nice party.
My back curled against something firm and supporting, and I felt gentle fingers stroke the tufts of silvery black at my temples. Hematite, a man told me once. I would always love him a little for saying that. My hair there wasn’t yet gray but no longer black and, when wet, it looked like hematite, and he said it like that meant something deep and significant and mystical I didn’t understand. Having someone’s fingers run through it felt good, though. It felt like a happy memory, like something I didn’t expect would happen much anymore if it ever really happened in the first place.
That simple touch was a comfort to me. It’s the most minor thing and, for that reason, the most missed when it’s gone. I don’t go long stretches without being touched, but it had been a while between caresses. This was that: a caress, and more, not exactly sexual but not exactly platonic. It was that happy in-between we call intimate. I made myself vulnerable to other men, and they themselves to me, more times than I can count in my too-short life. It didn’t always work out, though, that my usual flavor of street trade would show basic human kindness in return for mine.
None of that mattered, though. Those guys were long gone. Right that second, someone ran his fingers through my half-asleep hair, intimate and kind and caressing. I felt vulnerable and that was okay. For a few moments, I wasn’t dying, and I wasn’t scared. I wasn’t lonely, and I wasn’t alone. The sun felt good, and the breeze through the branches sounded like Gaia herself telling me to go back to sleep. I thought for a moment I might be okay with dying fairly soon if I got to wake up like this every morning for the rest of my life.
“Okay,” I groaned. I didn’t move, and I didn’t open my eyes because I wasn’t quite ready for the moment to go away, even as I lifted the pin to pop its balloon. “You want something. So tell me what it is. Because if I say yes—if—I may not have much time to hold up my end of the bargain.” My voice dispelled all the magic of the moment, but his fingers were still at my temple, resting there, ready to go back to what we shared moments before. I rolled over and looked up at Alejandro, his purple hair down over half his face as he leaned on one elbow. I didn’t kiss him, but I did put one hand to his jaw and brush his cheek with my thumb. I wondered if he could feel that—really feel it, like skin feels it. “Let’s not pussyfoot around this. You want me to do something. The whole story about the angel and thinking someone was trying to kill you was bullshit, but there was something there, something worth chasing, so let’s have the truth now and get on with things.” I tried to smile at him. His expression was completely blank.
With the hand he used to brush my temples, he laid a fingertip behind my ear, cupping my face with barely a single point of contact. He still didn’t smile, but his eyes searched my face, my own eyes, for something. It occurred to me the correct phrasing might be to say he searched my eyes for someone. I assumed he’d been alive long enough to know a hell of a lot of people, and I would bet a nickel he looked for one of them in me. There are a hundred romantic stories about golems: meat sacks like me throwing ourselves at a golem out of infatuation with their embodiment of agelessness.
If he’d been there before, heard a hundred thousand of us wail about mortality and still willing to hear number one hundred thousand one, he must have a lot of love for humankind. No, I thought, more than that: he must have loved the hell out of one of us at some point. Maybe he was waiting for that guy to walk back into his life, reemerging from the vast but finite pool of genetic factors we possess as a species. I wondered if I simply seemed close enough to that long-lost lover to pass muster for a night.
I also wondered what made a golem want to get laid in the first place: ever the detective, after all.
“I really did see an angel in Splendor,” Alejandro said. He still wasn’t smiling. If anything, he had the muted seriousness, the understated gravitas, I’d long since come to recognize as the posture of someone telling the truth at long last. I wondered how long it had been. “I swear it to you. I swear it.” He surprised me, then, because he didn’t cry, golems don’t have tear ducts, but his eyelids quivered with the autonomic response to strong emotion. He still hadn’t moved at all, and we were shielded from the breeze so that his hair hung straight down like a perfectly still and settled curtain across half the stage of his face. “And I believe it would try to kill me if it knew I were here.”
“Of which,” I replied, “you seem genuinely afraid, so you must believe it is here.”
“Yes,” Alejandro said. “I am convinced it has come here or will come here in the future, so it might bring down the last of the Great Cities the same way it brought down Splendor before.”
“So that part’s legit.” I shifted around to put one arm under my head, but Alejandro glided to intercept me and put his own there to cradle my head instead. It put our faces closer together. I thought he was about to kiss me, but instead, he was whispering as quietly as he could. I realized he had vocal chords and pushed air through them like the rest of us rather than having a speaker installed. I could feel his false breath on my face as he spoke. It smelled like me.
“Yes.” He spoke very softly. “That part is absolutely true.”
“You really did see an angel pass through while you were in the storm?”
“Again, yes.” He didn’t seem annoyed to be made to say it over and over again. “I really did, and it really did have a squad of human…” He trailed off, searching for the word. “Accomplices. Yes. They committed a murder, after all.” He looked me right in the eye. “Again, I swear to you.”
“Tell me what it looked like.” I’d seen plenty of drawings of angels in books and ancient histories, of course: big, masculine, rippling with muscles like geological strata, impossibly beautiful, with vast white wings and harps and sometimes flaming swords.
Now, Alejandro looked away, searching his memory—or making something up. That cynically suspicious part of me was never going to give up, but it was a little slower off the starting block this time. There was something sincere, something truthful in Alejandro’s demeanor I didn’t see when he spoke to me the first time. On that first occasion, in retrospect, he seemed a little rehearsed.
This question, about its appearance, caught him a little off guard. That was good. “Tall,” he said at first. “Taller than you think when I say that: at least eight feet in height and tremendously thin.”
“Eight what?”
Alejandro calculated for a moment. “Two and a half meters. More or less.” He shook his head at the memory, like a mother lamenting over her child who won’t eat like he should. “It may have weighed less than forty-five kilograms. More than merely thin. Sickly.” Again, Alejandro surprised me with a reflex reaction: he shuddered subtly. If I weren’t half underneath him, our bodies pressed together with
my thin jacket between us, I might not have noticed. “It looked like it had been put on the rack and stretched until it got stuck that way. Its hands were twisted and gnarled, the joints thicker than any given bone of a finger or palm. They looked painful, intensely arthritic, but he could move them a little. He would point and gesture and the like when he gave orders to the humans in his employ.”
Alejandro paused and drew a breath. Whoever designed him wanted to build a machine very much like a man. Everything about him said accept me, be not afraid, but know I am not you, and I again reflected on what that might tell me about the designer—ambivalent, self-conflicted—or the team of engineers who designed him: at odds with one another and possibly themselves over his purpose and the best path forward.
“Did it have wings?” I couldn’t help but ask. I mean, they couldn’t call these things angels for nothing.
“They were the worst thing about it,” Alejandro whispered. His voice sounded dreamy, distant, lost in the moment as it replayed itself across the memory banks in his very handsome head. “The rest of him looked like a stretched and mutilated thing, no more human than a chimpanzee.” I started to ask him what a chim-pansy was, but I didn’t want to put any stumbling blocks in the way of an honest answer. “His wings, though, were perfect. They were sixteen feet—” He caught himself and looked at me. “Slightly shy of five meters, yes. His wings were five meters across and as white as polar snow.”
I chuckled. Alejandro looked at me strangely before going on. “When he walked through, having waded through unknown amounts of water washing down the streets of Splendor while everyone stayed inside, his wings were pristine. They practically glowed. When they left, when the first engine blew and people started screaming, they were splashed here and there in blood. Bright red ran in viscous streaks down those pristine white feathers like an oil slick on the surface of a pond. One of the people carrying their comrade—the one blown half to pieces—said something and the angel laughed.” Alejandro’s gray lips rasped when he ran his mechanical tongue across them. “The angel laughed, and I could see its mouth.” He looked back down at me, right in the eyes again. “Valerius, I saw its teeth. Imagine a shark’s mouth in a nearly human face: a couple of rows each on top and bottom, at least, and full of what look like shards of broken bone. Its teeth were like a saw waiting to devour the trunk of a tree.” He shuddered again and pressed himself closer, and much to my surprise, I found I was the one with an arm wrapped around him to lend something like comfort.
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