Alejandro wasn’t the first client with whom I slept, not by a long shot, but he was the first one who made some part of me care about him rather than feeling the sorrowful condescension of sympathy.
“Easy,” I whispered to him. “Easy. No need to rush this. I simply asked what he looked like.”
“He looked like a creature made to devour.” Alejandro quivered. “He looked like someone designed him to be the enemy.” He shook his head again. “Enemy of whom, I don’t pretend to know. But I have to assume he’s here, and I have to stop him if he is. They lay low—angels do—they lay low between attacks, so people will convince themselves angels must not exist, that they’re not conducting an organized campaign. They are, though. I know that. They are.”
I went back to sleep after that. Alejandro promised to stay with me. I was tired—not only that morning, but all the time. The doctors told me that would happen sometimes until it started happening all the time. I was too tired to think about whether it happened more now than it used to. I’m a detective. I’m always tired.
Alejandro woke me a couple of hours later. While I was out, he gathered my shoes and socks, shook out my shirt, and hung it from a convenient limb. He did a very efficient job of playing house in the middle of a forest. He was back by my side when he woke me, though. He very gently brushed my shoulder until my eyes fluttered open. I felt more rested than I had in weeks. “Oh shit.” My eyes opened wide. “I’m probably late for something.”
He smirked at me. “Another client?” A pause. “Or another lover?”
I puffed air through my cheeks. “I should be so lucky.” I caught his eye. “I mean, to have more clients.” I’m such a silver-tongued devil. I blushed as I sat up and then stood to walk over to my tree. I could hear footsteps approaching through the brush that pressed in around the unofficial entrance to the cruising grounds. I finished buttoning my shirt as a kid who looked like a junkie in need of a fix walked into the clearing. Spotting us, he ran a hand under his own shirt to reveal pale skin around a too-thin frame. He was looking for paying work, not a little fun for its own sake. I shook my head at him. “Blow, kid. Hawk it somewhere else.”
“You sure you guys don’t need to party?” His voice was deeper than you’d expect from a reedy little wisp like that, but strained. He was probably a sticker, slipping down the slope of a dry spell and starting to get the crawls. If he was here, he’d probably been trying to trick all night with no luck. Stickers aren’t exactly morning people. I’d never seen him around Misconceptions, but that probably meant he had a rep. Tom likes to throw out the lowest of the low now and then so the rest of us have someone we can be a little better than. That deep voice wavered out from between cracked lips again. “I sure would like to party.”
Alejandro withdrew an old-fashioned wallet from his pants pocket and took out a couple of bills of folding scrip from what looked like a row of many types and in large quantities. I raised both eyebrows at that. Carrying around paper like that, all the time? But then, golems are supposed to be fearless in their ancientness. Alejandro walked over to the kid and held them out. “Take this.” His voice came out soft and kind. The kid didn’t even realize Alejandro was anything more than a man at first. After a moment, the junkie’s eyes focused on the golem’s artificial skin and slightly off features, and the kid wasn’t sure whether to believe his senses. He must have been further into the crawls than he looked. Hell, maybe he’d gotten used to them. “I know someone who can help you.” Alejandro’s voice embodied compassion. “He can get you exactly what you need.”
Alejandro had the boy’s full attention. The kid thought Alejandro was going to hook him up with a good pinprick. “Yeah?” He looked at the paper again. Spending it could be risky, depending on who made it and where he tried it out, but if they took it, the kid would be set for days. “Where’s this guy? Does he need to party?”
Alejandro gave an address in Shade Tree, one of the border neighborhoods of Autumn, right on the edge between lower middle class and skid row. Lots of people lived there who had lousy jobs and no money and dreams getting thin at the edges. It wasn’t far from my place, and I did not live on the good side of that divide. “Ask for Bronwyn. She will help you.”
The kid’s eyes narrowed. “She ain’t some church, is she?”
Alejandro chuckled once. “No. This is no trick. Simply giving you a good connection. Think of it as a consolation prize for missing our little party.” He winked at the kid, and I had no clue what the hell was going on.
The kid debated Alejandro’s sincerity, but there was maybe a fresh supply in front of him. “Thanks, man,” he wheezed, his voice jumping a couple of registers in relief. The scrip disappeared, and the kid looked around. “Anybody else here?”
“We’re it.” I shook my head. “You missed the morning rush.”
The kid made a noise of disappointment and looked at the ground. “Thanks. You two, you’re okay. Maybe I’ll see you around.”
“Maybe so.” Alejandro wore a small smile: not mocking, but not exactly sincere. It said two things at once, but I could only hear one of them: not likely. “Her supply can be a little unpredictable, though. You should go now. I know she’s open.”
The kid nodded again, still not meeting our eyes, then turned and disappeared back into the woods.
I tucked my shirt into the too-large waist of my pants and hopped into my shoes and socks one leg at a time. Alejandro watched the woods the whole time, as though expecting the kid to come back with a knife. When I was put back together, I shook my jacket and pulled it on. “What was all that about? I wouldn’t expect you to be taking commission on pinprick referrals.”
“Bron isn’t a pinprick.” Alejandro shook his head at me. “She’s a healer. She’ll know his predicament when he arrives. She’ll offer him a couch in the back and an immediate hit. What she gives him will be a stick full of medicine, though, not what he’s expecting. It’s…” He shook his head. “Never mind.”
“No. Tell me.”
Alejandro looked a little exasperated and maybe a little embarrassed. “It’s ancient. It’s a powerful psychoactive called ibogaine. He’ll be made to confront the parts of himself and of his life that led him to where he is now. The dead will speak to him. His better self will challenge him. He’ll scream bloody murder for a few hours. He’ll shit everywhere. When he’s done, he’ll be free.” He looked at me then looked away again. “I know,” he said. “It’s silly.”
“What are the odds he’ll go to her?”
“It’s almost certain,” Alejandro replied. I knew he was right, but I wanted to know what was nagging at him. He went on. “He got a lead to an immediate pin. He’ll go right away.”
“Unless he thinks you’re a cop.”
“He walked in on you getting dressed in Down Preserves. He knows we’re not cops.”
“And this whole ‘confront the parts of himself and his life’ thing. What are the odds that works?” I buttoned my cuffs and ran my hands through my hair. It would have to do.
“It always works.” Alejandro was holding something back, so I waited for him to say it. It only took a second of silence. “Or he’ll die.”
We walked together back to the main trail and then down it in silence. A few geezers were out walking dogs, grandkids, and other pets. No garden tours today. I looked like hell, but the extra sleep had me feeling like a million bucks. The doctors told me that might happen, too: energy levels up and down and all around. I decided to ride it while it lasted. I stopped at the parking lot and bought a Pink and drank it standing there. It tasted like sugar and make-believe fruit. I loved it. All of a sudden, I was full of life in a way I wasn’t a few hours before. All the hate and anger had gone out back for a smoke, and I relaxed for a second in their absence.
I asked Alejandro if he had anywhere to be, and he demurred. “I do have some things to which I must attend.”
“Okay.” I realized I wished he would spend the day with me. I hadn’t felt tha
t way in a long time. The thought of taking a day to wander around town with a guy on my arm was something I hadn’t let myself imagine in a long time. Alejandro looked like he’d blush if he could. His head ducked, and he patted me on the small of my back.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t sweat it.” The sudden sadness of having been denied a moment I didn’t even know I wanted threatened to rise up and swallow the joy I felt, but I pushed back. In the end, it didn’t quite make it over the horizon of my mind. I shook it off. “But,” I hesitated, “here’s the thing: I don’t know where to begin looking for an angel. These are creatures of myth with destructive aims and secretive means. You might as well tell me to find a murderer before their victim knows they’re in danger, or a bank robber before the bank’s been built. If somebody did something—had already done—I would have someplace to start. I could talk to a victim’s family. I could go poke around the scene after the cops are gone. I could get nosy. Alejandro, I think there’s something to your story. And I believe you are genuinely scared. But, I don’t have anything to go on.”
“I’ll pay you. I’ll pay anything you ask.” He looked terrified for a moment, like I was the ship passing by his desert island without seeing the signal flare.
“I believe you.” I reached up and touched his cheek. The Sincerity brothers would have to get a fucking grip for five seconds. “But I’m not psychic.”
“It’s going to kill me,” Alejandro whispered. His voice was pleading and sad and very soft.
“Maybe so.” I hated myself for the cruelty I had to call up to finish the thought, but that was my only option if I was going to make any headway. “But we all have to die sometime.”
I kissed him once, very quickly, then turned and walked away. I had to set a very dangerous trap, and Alejandro’s pretty face would only get in my way.
7
Autumn has a library to rival the ancients. You know the saying: “In Autumn’s library, ten books for every hand.” I don’t know if that’s literally true, but I like the idea. The building itself is a great stone thing, rectangular with a peaked roof and gargoyles ogling us from every perch. The steps up the front are like those of an ancient temple. Of course, they did used to be temples—maybe. The Safkhet cult has been gone a long time, and nobody really knows whether to believe all libraries were theirs.
At one point in more modern times, an ambitious Spiralist tried to have the building demolished and reconstructed to remove that religious sense of reverence. It didn’t make any sense—the Spiralists say they love knowledge and learning and new ideas, right there in their oppressively dogmatic literature—but people will spout anything to get ahead in politics and in religion. If I correctly recall, he argued it disrespected “real” religions to have a secular institution mimic their designs. Maybe he said it served to confuse nonbelievers? I remember someone on one of the headies asked him if he was saying religious types were too stupid to know the difference between a church and not a church, and that shut him up for a while.
Sometimes there are still protests outside, though. No, correction: protestors, only one or two of them with a sign with something dumb-witty on it. You know, something that doesn’t actually make sense, but the person holding it seems to think it’s sassy or provocative? Those people are all the proof I’ll ever need that every religion is shit.
The interior of the Autumn Repository of Human Knowledge is wall-to-wall dark wood and thick rugs piled two or three deep. The carpets run between shelves and up the wide stairs like a waterfall in reverse. A huge card catalog in the cavernous main room stood in perfect parade-rest formation, banks upon banks of tiny drawers filled with index leaves bearing tiny writing. The system they use is the ancients’ system, part of their way of making everything feel connected to that misty past whence all the classical learning and the confusing mythology came. Walking into the ARHK—“the ark,” as we call it around town—is like using a time machine. Windows depicting ancient scenes of knowledge transfer—of Prometheus giving fire, of Curie on her deathbed, of Eve with an apple in her hand, of Safkhet and the Door to Heaven, of Leonidas and the Scrolls—are depicted on huge windows of colored glass. Their jewel-tone mosaic washes over everything when we fly through sunny skies.
I like to go there to think sometimes. I pick up a book at random from a shelf, take it to one of the reading galleries on the third floor, past the noses that sniff us for books and keep us from stealing any, and stare out a window while my thoughts run around thinking themselves a while.
This wasn’t one of those days, though. I knew exactly whom I’d come to visit and where to find her.
Clodia is one of those rare delights in a detective’s career: she paid on time, in full, and she stayed a contact. The job she hired me to do is a long story for another time. Suffice to say, it was years ago, and she was about as clean as a client can reasonably be expected to be. I didn’t feel dirty after taking her money, and it spent as well as any that ever passed through my hands. I hoped she’d be the ticket to a higher class of client, but no such luck.
Clodia’s last name is Tomikio, and I do mean those Tomikios. She doesn’t actually have anything to do with the running of the company, though. She earns a fat dividend on some inherited stock she pays someone else to manage on her behalf. It isn’t that she can’t do it. Not at all: she has that incredibly precise mind her family is known for. Every time she speaks to me, I feel like my thoughts are being audited. I doubt she knows she has that effect on people. Looking at the world as something to assess is in her blood. It’s how she processes things—anything. Some people organize their minds like a sock drawer. Clodia’s is a ledger. She hates being called by her last name because, she told me, it makes her feel like she can’t relax. It’s too businesslike. In a family like hers, I imagine one gets sick of business. She resolutely adheres to convention when addressing others, though.
All that money frees her to pursue her own real interest: the myths and legends of the ancient world, before the big collapse. Whereas the Sinceres gather this stuff up and put it on display to support their claims about the Time of Only Man, Clodia turns her jewelsmith’s eye on the great body of myth and tries to sift it for history. She points out what she thinks is real and what she thinks is probably false and what was probably false that people believed to be real.
Unlike all the many naysayers out there, though, Clodia also leaves open the possibility that there are things people believed to be false that were—maybe are—in fact real. For instance, everybody knows the ancients held sex to be sacred because they produced so much religious instruction about the right and wrong ways to have it. Clodia thinks they were simply obsessed with telling other people what to do, and sex was an easy way to use shame to control them. If that’s the case, well, I guess things never really change.
Clodia finds evidence for these theories by spending literally all day, almost every day, sitting in the Ark with a big stack of ancient texts around her. She takes notes in a small journal she carries with her everywhere and frequently consults in conversation. I’ve never understood exactly what rubric she uses to make her judgments, and she seems to be as interested in the ones she categorizes as false as she is in the ones she thinks true. I asked her once why the questions of what was and was not real fascinated her so and she answered, “Ancients thought all this important enough to preserve. They must have had a reason. The texts contain something they wanted to say.”
I strode up the grand central staircase of the Ark—dark wood in a long double spiral, as the DNA helices are not exclusively the turf of Spiralists, and yes, that did make the whole “libraries confuse believers” thing intensely ironic—for what seemed a very long eighty seconds. It was quiet down below, but above was absolutely, oppressively silent except for the rare crinkle of a turning page or the susurrus of nib against paper. The top floor is generally the domain of the serious researcher. Random kids who wander too far up get stopped before they can mak
e it there. Outsiders who don’t seem to have a purpose are looked at askance. It’s the sort of place where nobody ever shushes anyone because no one ever needs to be shushed.
I turned a corner at the top of the staircase and walked like I knew where I was going. Disappearing into the stacks at the top of the Ark is a good way to avoid recrimination. At the end of a row, I turned again, walking along an outside wall. Glittering multi-colored illustrations of the price of knowledge—the deaths of ancient scholars, the wars fought for ideas—washed over me. The Safkhet cult certainly didn’t want to focus on how the pursuit of knowledge sometimes kills people, but they did unabashedly want to remind the rest of us that knowledge could be worth a life. They weren’t actually very nice people, but they built a hell of a book collection.
Occasionally, I would catch sight of one of the great tables, easily three meters on a side with a row of lights in the middle and a single chair. There was usually a person at the table. Once in a while, what I saw instead was a giant pile of abandoned books, left for a moment or perhaps for a week. The regulars up there tend to get a little comfortable. You might even say territorial.
Eventually, I saw the one where Clodia worked. She had on a severe black business suit, well matched to her very dark skin. She was fluent in seven languages, literate in nine (the extra two are dead, so no one knows what they sound like). She’s tall, physically solid, and her eyes scream genius intelligence. People find her intimidating, and she doesn’t try to blunt that impression. She told me it made it a lot easier to get work done.
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