I looked around and caught Blackie’s attention, even though he didn’t look at me or at anything other than that glass he’d been polishing. “Blackie, does Yuri have a tab here?”
Blackie looked up at me, then over at Yuri, then down at the glass again. He shook his head. “No tab. I don’t know this skinner.” I blinked. Blackie never used slurs like that. Something about Yuri pissed him off, and I didn’t have time to figure out what or why.
I looked back at Yuri and reached out to touch his chin, very lightly, and tip his head back up. He flinched away, but he did straighten up and look me head on. “What do you want for it?” My voice was as soft and gentle as I could make it.
Yuri thumbed the money in his coat pocket, his hand a ripple under the dark wave of bioplast. “Where’d you get this much paper?”
“Selling cookies.” I smirked. Yuri didn’t. He opened his mouth to say something smart, but I cut him off. “What, are you going to go knock over a money changer?” There are a very few people who make their living turning one scrip into another. Some even transform scrip into digital currency, the real and legal Imperial stuff, or vice versa, through a complex machinery of laundering it or making it disappear. The best change up their formula too rapidly to get caught. The rest get knocked off by their betters for drawing too much heat. “I didn’t get it there. I got it over time, from one job or another.” I shrugged a little. “You know how it is. Why do you want to know where to find more?”
“Paper scrip is the only thing Mahogany takes for freedom.” Yuri’s voice was very even, but under that surface calm, the sea of his emotions boiled. I was right, he could buy out his contract with scrip, maybe set up his own operation in time. It was a path off the street corner and into a better sort of bed. “It’s all one printing, too.” He took a single bill back out of his coat pocket and held his thumb where the seal was embossed. “So, you got it all at once, or you got a bunch of it exchanged. I’d say the second option. That means you know where to get more. Tell me.”
I clucked my tongue. I didn’t think he’d studied the money that closely, but he had. My mistake. I turned a bunch of different scrips into Hendricks in hopes whoever was selling the fruit would be so interested in the paper they wouldn’t think about anything else. Now Yuri really thought he could go knock over a changer. Well, fine, it was his suicide. “And if I tell you, you tell me where the guy is who did this to you when you asked about Nauclea fruits?”
Yuri nodded. A whole new future opened up in front of him, and it scared the hell out of him. He wasn’t so sure he wanted to look me—or anybody—in the eye until everything was over. I wondered if Yuri even had a weapon or ever robbed anyone before. I wondered if he had any idea how fast he would die if he tried this. “Yeah. I promise. So, tell me.”
I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out a pen. With my other hand, I grabbed two napkins. I wrote down a name and address and a note about it and held the pen out to him. “Write it down. Then we swap. No playing the game of ‘who goes first with the dangerous secret’ that way.”
Yuri snatched the pen out of my hand like the last lifejacket onboard. He scribbled on the napkin, frustrated at the way its nib snagged on the rough fibers of the napkin petals. Eventually, Yuri got the address out and dropped the pen on the bar. Slowly but surely, his hands shaking, mine steady, we traded. He nearly tore them both trying to snatch from me while making sure I didn’t snatch from him, but we managed to make the swap without anyone actually flipping their lid. I looked down at the napkin: a Lower Market Market “address,” an informal patois of directions and counting marks. I could navigate it with some effort. It would do fine.
“What do you mean, ‘don’t’?” Yuri held up the napkin. The note I’d added to the address, in block letters: DON’T.
“They’ll kill you. These are not nice people, Yuri. You’re a sweet guy. I’ve looked into your pretty eyes enough times to know you’re a good person. It’s why you want out of your current life: you’re too good for it and that’s killing you. Trust me, these guys will kill you, too. They’re not good people, and they won’t care that you are, and the goodness you’ve got left is going to slow you down from doing what you’d have to do to walk away from them.” What I didn’t say was the other possibility: that he’d succeed, and in killing the changer and his thug, Yuri would also kill that last good part of himself he was trying to save. It happens a hundred times a day in cities all over the world. That the one we were in was flying simply meant the view was better nearby.
“You don’t understand.” Yuri’s teeth were already clenched. He was going to do it, and when it was over, he was going to be dead in one or another sense and he’d already made his peace with that fact. “You got out. You made it off the corner. I’m stuck. Always have been.”
I looked him in those pretty green eyes and then away again. I wasn’t going to change his mind. Fixing him was only going to slow me down. “Best of luck, Yuri.” Then I looked back. “Let me buy you a drink first.”
Blackie shook his head without looking up. “No drinks.” Then he looked at Yuri for what I realized was only the second time. “You go. Never come back.”
Yuri turned around and walked out, a scared young punk who’d gotten tired of selling his ass. I knew right then I would never again make love to him, never again stroll up and flirt, never offer a steamed bun so we could both feel a little bit alive.
9
Years ago, before my time and worries all got eaten up by the business of other people’s trouble, I was in the habit of going to the Ark on Saturndays. I would sit around on Second, which is reserved for books about Autumn herself, reading whatever histories had a spine sufficiently interesting to make me reach out and grab them. I learned a lot about the establishment of Autumn, the deals the Imperial Senate struck to fund them, the crazy ideas behind the first residential hovers launched. A lot of the first people to take to the skies were religious types—the old religions, the ones you only hear about in textbooks anymore. They were doing what true believers always do: convincing themselves salvation would be easier on different real estate. It’s always easier to go somewhere else than to become someone else. It’s been true since ancient times. As long as there have been gods, we’ve been convincing ourselves we’d be a little closer to them over the next hill.
Each of the other flying cities was built as a sort of homage to one of the terrestrial places people always loved: Rome, London, Tokyo, Rio, Memphis, Metropolis, New York, Old Cairo, Persepolis, New Delhi. When Autumn was being planned, centuries ago, they already knew she would be the last constructed. Rather than base Autumn on one place, they based it on all the cities they wanted to use but hadn’t gotten to yet. Apparently, a lot of it is based on Sanfro, some of it on Deecee, some of it on Sydney. Some of those places they had to work from old flats or even paintings to get an idea of how they looked. I’ll never know myself, but my understanding is they did a pretty good job with most of them. Splendor, the one where Alejandro claimed to have seen—no, it was time to stop talking like that, the one where Alejandro saw an angel—was based on Paris. In some of the video I’ve seen, Splendor looks like a second moon in the night sky: all lights and grace and ghostly significance. I don’t know if Splendor was an accurate representation, but in the images we have of it, the City was unquestionably beautiful.
Lower Market is one of the parts based on Sanfro. It has the look of an ancient city: lots of tall stuff all around it, some of it real buildings and some of it façade that never was developed into anything. The idea was to create a high-end neighborhood from the get-go, but the result created a region of near-permanent shadow.
At the center of it is Lotta’s Gift, which in theory is a fountain memorializing Imperial forces lost in wars against the Eastern Expanse, but in practice is where everyone goes on the birthdays of the dead they mourn. The fountain isn’t what that word normally means: a big pool of water with a source in the middle. Instead, it’s a tall,
iron spire, nearly eight meters high at its top. Around its four sides are sculpted mouths of ancient beasts of myth: giant cats, with water shooting out of spouts to be collected in their lower jaws. I’ve read the ancients used to throw pennies into fountains to commemorate the dead, but at Lotta’s, we drink from the water rather than throw something in. The story goes that by drinking from that water, we quench the thirst of the departed for the pleasures of the quick. The water always tastes better to me there than anywhere else in Autumn, and Autumn is a City with very good water.
Almost immediately upon its dedication, an open-air market sprang up in the square around the fountain. The City cops tried to run them off and clean it out a few times before deciding it wasn’t worth it anymore. Now, it’s the unofficial business district of the City for those seeking or selling anything seedy or hard to find. They say everything’s for sale at the Lower Market Market, but more often than not, “everything” is also a little hot or a lot counterfeit.
One of the unspoken conditions of the City’s détente with the first entrepreneurs of the LMM is to use no permanent structures. I think the Council imagined a group of hawkers waddling into the square every day with their inventory on their backs. What they got was highly creative shanty construction. Vendors cram into every available space, and the spaces between them, and the spaces above and below them, and any free square meter is up for grabs by those who want to display their art or their porno or their porno art.
Because it’s always dark in the Lower Market Market—except for times the sun bursts through the clouds at exactly the right angle—the vendors have a lot of glows. Every color manipulated from nature declares this or that on special, and this or that can be as broadly interpreted as you like. Some signs are euphemistic—Body Work—and some are as brazen as it gets. I love it there. It’s as different from where I grew up as anywhere I can ever imagine. The Market’s also a place that eats people. There are souls who walk into Lower Market Market to make a little scratch and are never seen again—and I don’t mean those kids who disappear. No, these people aren’t kidnapped or murdered fast: that would be too easy. They’re eaten up slow, one organ at a time, sometimes from the inside out. They don’t disappear in a wink; they fade from view, sometimes so slow nobody even realizes it’s happening.
There are also literal disappearances. People are too naïve, or too trusting, or get too fucked up in the head. They become prey for others who trade in flesh and sometimes organs. There are stories about what happens to them, of women turned into baby factories, of people whose emptied ribcages and vacant skulls wash up against the grills of Used Water Dispensation. I have a friend who works in Cistern Conditioning who says the sewers under the LMM are caked with the blood of centuries of innocent victims.
I didn’t agree with that assessment, of course. Everyone knows there isn’t an innocent victim anywhere near Lower Market Market. But I do believe in the literal disappearances, and I consider them my very first case, the one that got me into this line of work to begin with and the one I will probably, ultimately never solve.
Where do the missing children go?
Autumn is like any other city full of people whose dreams are never coming true. It baits the hook with a reputation for being where people can go to make it big or to get away. A lot of kids who run for it come to a place like Autumn once they escape wherever they were. They want to drown in the ocean of anonymity a place like this offers. They want to go where no one remembers things they did, or the things done to them. Very few of them are predators, which makes the vast majority of them prey.
And once they get here, something happens to a lot of them. They don’t only disappear from their old lives: they vanish from their new one, too.
I wound up a part of this world the same as most everyone else in it: I slipped under the razor-wire of the life assigned to me, the awful ankle chains of expectations and cultural norms, and went somewhere I thought no one would have so many preconceived notions of what was good and proper. I was wrong—people here could spot an Artie as well as anywhere else and had plenty of ideas about us—but unlike back home, there were some people here who, on recognizing what I am, didn’t condemn me and didn’t fetishize me. They let me be. That kept me here. That allowed me to hang on.
A lot of us—street kids—survive by crime. We turn into thieves, or we turn tricks—and some of us steal from the tricks. We take from others or we sell ourselves or both. There are not a lot of other options for getting by. It isn’t a case of moral degeneracy. It’s self-preservation. We engaged in the only available approaches to the most basic human instinct, and judging it won’t change that. That’s why I couldn’t hate Yuri for the choice he made, even if I thought he made the worst available: he didn’t have another option to choose. He could spend the rest of his life handing Mahogany seventy-five percent of his take, or he could become a real criminal. The street rarely leaves room for a person to come up with Plan C.
Of those two options, I picked selling myself. I knew from the beginning that was preferable to staying on the rez, smothering under the weight of what others wanted of me. The reservations are basically a seed bank: tuck away a supply of unmodified DNA in case the rest of humanity finds itself stuck in a genetic dead-end, insufficiently varied to weather some crisis or another. You know, keep the Arties all wrapped up in religious obligation and tell them they’re special and feed them organics and require them to breed.
No thanks, bucko. Not me. It isn’t simply that I’m queer. It’s that nobody asked my permission to use me as a walking, talking, living-history sperm bank. I took what I had and sold it before they could take it away from me.
When I was in that life, I noticed other kids who seemed to get swallowed up by the shadows all around us. They went with a trick, or they took a courier gig, or they made enough of some gang’s local scrip to buy their way into a better hole in the wall, and then they were gone. They didn’t show back up. The tricks weren’t keeping them long term. They did not become full-time messengers. None worked their way back up the cliff face of polite society. All those things happened sometimes, sure, and when they did, when someone pulled themselves out of the ditch, they always came back around once or twice to make a little show of dusting themselves off. These kids just vacated their lives. Maybe they left behind a mat, or a change of clothes, or a couple of trinkets they thought were lucky charms: the sort of thing no one would willingly give up in that sort of desperation.
These were kids who didn’t have anything else, and then one day, they didn’t even have themselves anymore. Someone else had them, if you asked me. And I wanted to know who, and why, and how to stop it.
I’m not so vain to think I can save every street kid selling every penetrable orifice they’ve got just to get by. I’m not the messiah, returned to the street to offer salvation to all those who come after me. But those kids are human beings, desperate, unnoticed, unaided, and terribly alone, and I know how that feels, and I cannot make a life out of solving problems without at least occasionally turning my limited talents to the very first mystery to catch my eye. It wasn’t something I ever really stopped working on, either. Instead, it became a continuous humming question in the back of my mind, never quite inaudible but rarely my chief concern. Every new face in the Market made me wonder if they would be the next to disappear, and every old one made me wonder if they were involved in whatever was being done, so that even as I attended to a very specific mission—pay a visit to the address Yuri gave me—some portion of my mind never stopped adding notes to the case file on the Market’s missing kids.
The “address” Yuri gave me was a stall—there are ways you get to recognize this or that about how a place is described. That meant it was enough of a going concern to have a permanent space and possibly a rain cover. That was really pushing the “no permanent structures” rule, but the vendors in the LMM have gotten really good at knowing exactly how far they can go. The ones with real money bribe whomever
they need; the rest count on nobody nearby being any more or less legal or interesting.
Following Yuri’s directions, I turned at the old clock post, then again at the hay bale art stand. A few old tricks and former colleagues were hanging around on Yuri’s corner. Yuri had been at this game long enough to work up to a good corner. The absence of one good whore, no matter how brief, meant an opportunity for a bunch of lousy ones. I’d been with most of them, and a couple of them recognized me. They tried to slow me down, but I didn’t let them, spinning a three-sixty as I winked and nodded and smiled at a few on my way past. A chorus of greetings: oh Valerius, it’s been too long, and other examples of the usual soft-pitch patter, the old game of getting a mark to stop and talk to you and you’re already halfway home; there were fewer goodbyes as they moved on to getting the attention of other men and women when they realized I hadn’t taken the bait.
At Henry’s Den (where you go if you need a pinprick but the more reputable ones—chew on that for a second—won’t take you anymore) I swung another right and found myself on cobblestones. That meant I was nearing Lotta’s Gift. I had to go past it, and right around it is some of the cheapest real estate, so it’s the sketchiest stalls and hawkers and mongers in the whole Market. You might think that would be the high-rent district, but it’s the worst of the lot. The people who go in search of Lotta’s Gift are not usually in the mood to buy something nice from someone who smiles. They’re sad or they’re angry or they’re silently contemplative. Only the sharpest pitch, for the very worst the Market has to offer, stands even a chance to break through. Everybody knows it’s for the best that way. Someone who’s come to drink for the very first time is so swallowed up in grief anyway that they probably want the worst so they can lose themselves in it for a time.
A Fall in Autumn Page 13