In theory, I was working on an old case, like an old Artie works a tooth that’s loose, but the meat of it, of my desire to be kind to a random street whore, was I was scared of dying, so scared I couldn’t think about it or talk about it too long. I didn’t have a lot of friends, but the ones I had were mostly guys like this kid—friends of happenstance, people I’d met in this line of work or another. I turned my share of tricks when I was young and new in the City. I’m not proud, and I’m not ashamed. There’s a class of Plus who finds an Artie to be an exotic bit of barbarianism. I knew some of the pimps by reputation. I hired a couple of hustlers myself from time to time. They hired me in turn, in fact. I figured out eventually that everybody is just people. They want to get laid, hold hands, and wake up warm, like anybody else. I was never in danger among them and never thought myself better than they were. No one, I believe, is better than anyone else—except I suspect almost all of us are better than the very rich or the very powerful.
I don’t even hate the pious types, to be honest. I may hate their religions and what they demand of me, the ways they fail me, the ways they try to lay claim to me and other Arties like we’re interesting bugs in the collection of some acquisitive god. That doesn’t make their true believers necessarily bad, though. Believers are merely broken, like the rest of us, and religion is the plug they could fit in the hole in their heart. It’s when they start trying to stab other people with it, too, that I develop a problem with them.
The flesh down on Edgeward aren’t interested in selling anybody a god. Hookers’ interests are strictly corporeal. They sell a solution you can touch and feel and smell and taste, and with or without the money, they were a great way to remind myself I was still alive. There’s a way the moment of orgasm can perfectly blank the mind and allow me to transcend the base limitations imposed on me by evolution. The future stops existing, the past stops existing; the whole wide world is a moment of pleasure echoing around the cavern of an empty mind. In those precious seconds, and for a little while after, every decision and bum luck and genius idea leading me to that singularity of perfection seems to have served its purpose in a grand design, a wave of forward momentum reaching its crest and crashing against me in the full light of a benevolent sun.
So, I tried to get Yuri—the hustler kid for whom I bought the steamed bun—to go home with me even though I couldn’t afford anything better than the food, and he said no because he hadn’t made bank that afternoon. I walked away with a smile anyway, because he flirted with me for free, and he gave me a little parting gift: a couple of names of kids he didn’t see around anymore. It was still a pretty damned good day.
I collapsed early and woke up a little past dawn. Late nights were getting harder all the time. With precious little time left in any sense—bodily, or with my landlady, or with my client’s retainer—I set off wandering again in the Lower Market, thinking maybe its morning face would get my brain ticking where its nighttime face had failed. Autumn was flying low enough for clouds to be overhead—we must have been headed toward a rain system to refill the cisterns—but we were encountering the edge of whatever system we’d targeted, and so sun burst through the clouds here and there. Wide shafts of light would strike some dingy corner of Lower Market so hard the people around it would put their hands over their eyes and only come out squinting when they got brave enough to look around. Lower Market is the kind of place that’s dark no matter what. Full light serves only to hone an edge onto the shadows.
That light can sometimes improve what sits just outside those shadows, though. Not everything in the Lower Market Market is a smudge atop a stain. Not every person is somehow terrible to behold. Sunlight washed across a booth selling brightly colored candy, and the sweets shone like a rainbow. Mist rising off the pavement had the quality of steam from a good cup of coffee rather than the ghosts of old gas from a swamp. There are a lot of dirty faces in the Market, a lot of tattered clothes, but in the spotty sunlight, there were bright patches and shining eyes, too. The things that made them people were still there, under the dirt, behind the rags, pushed down under the armor they fashioned from others’ low expectations.
The sun intermittently hit me as I walked deeper inside the chaos, and I took a moment to close my eyes and savor the sun. Growing up in the foothills in eastern Pentz, I was used to the heat. Feeling it for a moment was pleasant, like a whiff of my mother’s plum and pomegranate pie, something I lost when I ran the hell away. It was a little bit of the warmth of home without the people or the culture or the holy books, something to be savored even if it lasted only a moment. That’s another thing life has taught me: everything you hate has something you love mixed up in it, too. That’s true of everything, everywhere, from ex-lovers to hometowns.
I found it amusing that morning to watch lifelong Autumnals flip their lids when the sun would strike them out of nowhere. These were people who had a mediated experience of the environment their entire lives. They’d never watched the sand wash up the edge of a valley during the stormy seasons. They didn’t know how to handle the heat and the light of anywhere near the forties. This wasn’t anything like that, any more than a spring rain is like a hurricane, but it surprised them all the same.
The Lower Market Market’s makeshift stalls are as often as not constructed from the wares of a neighbor as from anything more independently sourced. All you need to open a business in the Lower Market Market is an empty space. If it happens to be a three-foot gap between the shelves of two other vendors, well, welcome to penthouse living. If a vendor doesn’t show up one day, maybe they’re out sick, sure, but maybe somebody knocked them off to open up a little real estate. It happens, and everyone knows it, and nobody thinks it will ever happen to them. Such is the way we manage risk in our individual lives.
Like any quasi-organized retail space, the Lower Market Market has its self-appointed bosses and enforcers. Think of a pimp, but for people selling homemade meat pies and secondhand blades and religious icons for cults no one remembers anymore. Enforcers sell a lot of “protection,” and it’s usually worth buying. The truth is, the pigs have better things to do than waddle around the Lower Market Market looking for business licenses nobody ever has. Legitimate licenses are so rare, a client once told me, nobody even knows how to counterfeit them because none of the current counterfeiters have seen one. I remember we laughed over that until I said, “So who’s in charge?” That froze the laughter so hard I could hear it snap off in her gut.
I considered a bite of breakfast for myself and wandered down what everyone called Eats Alley: a particular row of shacks from which a boiling stream of smoke and steam roils at all times, heady with the aromas of a hundred different cultures clashing in open-air kitchens. I was going to ask around about those kids Yuri said were nowhere to be found. If a street kid relocates or finds a different line of work, they still probably put down cheap food. Eats Alley is a central hub for innocent comforts, which makes it a perfect place to spot someone who’s recently migrated.
Some things smelled great and some turned my stomach, and I was again reminded my tastes had changed since I’d started getting sick. The body is a funny old thing. For all I knew, I was smelling the sort of thing a chim-pansy would eat.
That’s when the ideas collided, and I spun on my heel. Food.
Clodia told me chim-pansies ate co-evolved exotic fruits. The human collaborators of this chim-pansy angel would probably order food delivered while they were here, and their deliveries would be impossible to distinguish from all the other meals delivered any given day. The food humanity ate was simply too big a stream for me to sift. But what Clodia said sounded specialized. It sounded specific. If the angel was some sort of hybridization or modification of a chimp, maybe they needed the same food as their extinct ancestor-cousins. If that was sufficiently unique or weird, all I had to do was check around for anyone carrying that thing. At worst, I could eliminate one bad idea a lot faster than I could sift the entire City for a delivery drive
r who’s seen a terror cell.
Of course, everyone who knew the street knew I’d gone off to become a detective. I was no stranger to this part of town. I would need a patsy whose questions might put someone a little less on guard.
I didn’t need breakfast: I needed to get to the Ark to do some research, and I needed to find Yuri. Hell, I probably couldn’t have kept breakfast down anyway.
“I need to find something exotic,” I said to Yuri. I was back on his corner, and it was late morning. He didn’t look great, like maybe he had a rough time making his bank the night before, but he looked awake and alive and, for plenty of young hustlers, that’s the cleanest bill of health they’ll ever get. Yuri was still pretty, too, even with the dark circles under his eyes. That deep black skin and the long hair and the emerald eyes were as gorgeous in exhaustion as I imagined they ever could be when alert. Yuri had been smart enough to stay off the pins and other hundred thousand bad ideas for escaping reality, and it showed in the youthful contour of his handsome face.
Yuri smirked at me, lazy as a cat in a sunbeam, and leaned against his light pole. “How exotic? Manny? I didn’t think they were your kink.”
I fluttered my lips, half amused and half disgusted. I don’t have anything against the flesh that rolls that way, but it’s not my bag. “No, I mean a fruit. Nauclea fruit.” I had a stencil of one from a book in the Ark. “Like this.” I held up the picture: a small, mostly rounded fruit with a mottled gray flesh that looked like scales or perhaps the bark of a tree. Not exactly the sort of thing that made my mouth water, but I’m no dessert chef. “It’s about the size of an apple.”
“It looks like an apple somebody left in the window too long.” Yuri gave me an incredulous look. “Why do you want one?”
He asked a good question. When I had gone back to the Ark, I snagged a chair near the agricultural section. As rain poured down outside, I built a bit of a pile around it looking for anything on chim-pansies. It turned out a regular considered that chair his turf. He didn’t like me being in it, and he didn’t like me making a mess of books around it. I gave him a big, annoying smile and promised to move if he helped me out.
He went right to a specific book and shoved it at me: Secrets of Engineered Beings. He pointed out a short section midway through about Avian Mannies—like Talons, my client at the start of all this—and how Avians initially suffered from malnutrition. While the engineers tinkered with genes, they fed the early hybrids Nauclea because the early hybrids were crossed with chim-pansies, not humans, and my distant relatives, as Clodia called them, could get almost all their nutrition from that one fruit. Everything, the book assured me, and anything crossed with a chim-pansy would love Nauclea. In fact, it would probably need them.
I tried to hand the book back to the regular, but he shook his head and pointed at a pile on the end of a nearby table. I set it atop the heap and noticed plenty of other books about hybridization and the creation of the Mannies. I never thought to walk through the library and look at tables to find a topic expert before. It would have been an obvious choice in retrospect. I could think of plenty of times that would have been a nice card up my sleeve.
Back in the here and now, I explained to Yuri, “Because it’s unusual. It’s rare. But the people looking for it don’t want to attract attention to themselves. When you can’t walk into the Market and ask for something—because people will see you—what do you do? You ask someone who knows the market and can find it for you.” I nodded, the light in my eyes.
“Then go ask around the El-Em-Em yourself.” But Yuri was at least still smiling and there was affection there. “I’m on the clock. I can’t exactly turn a trick in the middle of a grocery store to make up the time.”
“I’ll pay you.” I was trying to shove the stencil into Yuri’s hand, and he was laughing. “Seriously, I’ll pay your standard rate. Tell them a client asked you for it. Tell them it’s his thing. I can’t go ask around after it because people know I’m a nosy guy. They know when I ask for something, it’s something bigger than simply the question I’m asking. When a detective wants something, it’s because someone is paying them to want it. There’s a mystery there, a question hanging in the air. When a hustler asks for something…” I shrugged, spread my hands, and felt my coat resettle on my narrowing frame. “It’s fuckin’. That’s the most normal thing in the world.”
Yuri looked at me with his eyebrows a little way up. He wasn’t buying it, but the thought of getting paid to run an errand instead of bending over for some self-loathing Sincerity priest working a little strange before early prayers, well, that sounded pretty appealing. I shook the worm around a little to make it look lively. “The money is right here. Scrip, not credit. The best scrip the street can offer. What are you going to do, say no to Hendricks gang paper?”
Yuri looked at the paper money. It really was the best scrip on the street. I had customers who couldn’t have their involvement with me traced. Legal or no, I got handed a little scrip on a regular basis. I was offering a fair chunk of it. Yuri could make the day’s bank, and tomorrow’s, and maybe the next week’s with scrip like that. He could start to buy himself free with that grade of paper, even if it was only a little. He wasn’t, after all, a very expensive hustler.
“Okay,” he said, snatching the wad out of my hand. It disappeared before I was even sure if he shifted it from one hand to the other. “I’ll send you a polly at…” He considered, but I had an answer ready to go.
“Misconceptions. Polly me there.”
He nodded. “Will do.” Then he smiled, and again it had a little real affection peeking over the shoulder of a businessman doing a deal. “Trust me.”
I nodded back. “I never said I didn’t.”
“It’s Lower Market,” he replied. The affection was fading fast, something darker seeping in behind it. “Nobody has to.”
I was sitting at the bar of Misconceptions five hours later, talking the weather with Blackie, when Yuri walked in the door. He was pale and he ignored Blackie’s standard greeting: a nod and a simple “Welcome.” Yuri still wore the black weatherproof pants and the black plastic jacket he had on earlier. They were the grown stuff, extruded from real bioleum plants so they must have cost quite a measure of money: probably a gift from a client who liked what Yuri did. It’s cheaper to recycle the stuff we dig out of the ancients’ trash pits, but it never quite feels the same as the real stuff. Bioplasta has that touch and that aroma you don’t get with yesterday’s trash.
Under it, I could see his white t-shirt with black print, some musical act or whatever the kids these days are into. Maybe it was his, maybe a john gave it to him, maybe he bartered for it. That sort of thing happens a lot in Lower Market. Johns don’t often try to pay with legal digital currency, and they don’t always have access to scrip, so they pay for trade in trade.
Yuri looked like maybe he’d been puking. I hoped he hadn’t arrived to tell me he spent the day on a bender and now the money was all gone.
The scrip was in his hand. “Here.” Yuri set the paper on the bar. “Take it back. Deal’s off.”
He turned to go, but I reached out and tried to grab his wrist. That was a mistake: Yuri was jumpy, and his eyes showed real fear when they met mine. Behind that fear was anger. I could imagine a few reasons why, among them that he’d have to turn tricks another twelve hours on no sleep to try to make up the time lost chasing my wild goose.
“Sorry.” I put hands up, palms out. I took a moment to blink, slowly, because that has a calming effect on people. You learn a lot of psychology in this job. I took a breath, exhaled it, never letting his eyes leave mine. I may dislike most people, but I can be pretty good with them. “I’m sorry. Okay, the deal’s off, but tell me what happened.”
“I found a guy who sells Nauclea fruits, and he choked half the air out of me before he threw me on my ass in the street. Thanks for that.” Yuri yanked down the neck of his shirt, jacket opened, and I could see bruises starting to form there. W
hoever did it had big hands. Beyond the pain, the bruises were going to make it even harder for Yuri to make bank that night. He looked like damaged goods.
Blackie discreetly began polishing a glass, eyes on his work, his big ears not even twitching as we spoke. A good bartender knows the right time to turn invisible.
My gaze softened, and I half-smiled, half-frowned at Yuri. I felt bad now, and I needed to show it, or he’d blame it on me—which, fair enough. “I didn’t know that would happen. I apologize. Look, keep the money. I owe you for your time. Tell me who did this to you, and I’ll take it from there.”
Yuri looked a little pensive, like he was considering not telling me, and I could all too easily imagine why: they probably told him to keep his mouth shut or they’d shut it for him.
“I promise they won’t think you told me.” I wasn’t sure exactly how to go about meeting that promise, but it was what I had to say. Besides, they hadn’t even bothered to rob Yuri. All they’d done was rough him up. If they were serious, they would have killed him and that would have been that. It looked like all they wanted was to spook him so he’d keep his distance.
“What do I get for it?” Yuri’s hand had already slipped the scrip into his pocket. So much for hoping he would be too noble to accept my offer that he keep it.
Yuri looked up at me from beneath brows dipped low in a sulk. He was willing to take the deal, but whoever scared him had done too good a job of it. Yuri wanted the money, and he wanted something else on top.
A Fall in Autumn Page 12