A Fall in Autumn

by Michael G. Williams

  I paused as I walked into the open circle surrounding the fountain, even though little kids trying to find a pocket to pick assaulted me on all sides. They fell away when they realized I was there to take a sip. The hawkers and mongers shouting and grumbling their lists of wares and questionable enticements fell silent out of momentary respect. The fountain draws the very worst of the Market to it, yes, and the very worst of the Market respects the fountain for it. They might be there to tell me all about the money they’d give me for one of my kidneys or how much the last guy’s kidney cost, sure, but they were willing to give me a moment first. The moment I finished drinking and turned around, they would be right back at it.

  I wondered whom I’d come to memorialize with this drink and decided the list was too long to get specific. You’re supposed to say someone’s name before you drink, and it felt weird to walk up without one, but I didn’t have anyone in particular in mind as I stood, staring into the water in one of the mythical lions’ mouths. To pick one person out of the long list I’d seen eaten alive by time and other monsters seemed too much. To name one of the many missing faces I chased seemed disrespectful of the rest. Abruptly weak—whether from sickness or memory—I leaned forward, bracing myself against the fountain with one hand held out before me. Then, without thinking, I said the name of the thing I wanted to remember.

  “Splendor,” I murmured. “I drink for the City of Splendor.”

  The last of the early morning run-off dripped into puddles around me. Autumn felt rejuvenated and refreshed, still damp from the bath. The water from the fountain was cool and fresh, and it tasted of the flowers of whatever place we flew through when we collected it.

  Like any location of quasi-legal commerce, Lower Market Market is under constant dispute. Gangs fight each other day and night over who gets to cut tourists’ purses and milk the resident merchants for protection money. I was familiar enough a face to be just inside the bubble of belonging, but only barely. Turning tricks in the darkest shadows of the Lower Em, in the relatively distant past, gave me only a very weak sort of immunity. I was known to most of the career criminals not as a colleague but as someone who had been—and so would again be—too desperate to be worth much. It wasn’t that they sympathized with my position. It’s that I would probably never have much worth stealing.

  The gangs themselves are an ever-changing chaos, a foaming sea of brief coalitions and affiliations, collections of individuals hoping to build something lasting, maybe get noticed by one of the big City-wide operations and graduate from the farm leagues, only to watch it fall apart a month later. Some of the individual actors may persist for months or even years, but the gangs they started or joined are a spinning kaleidoscope of names and philosophies, patchwork territories changing hands two or three times a night when things get bad. They mostly fight with tiny knives, extraordinarily sharp but so short they’re required to get very close to do fatal damage. It’s one of those inverse risk formulas: by using a smaller weapon, they demonstrate greater bravado and physical strength. Small knife, big balls, as they say.

  They wear their narrow scars as badges of honor. Some of the worst afflicted get tattoos commemorating those earned in especially memorable fights: an advertisement of experience and resilience. I’ve always wondered why they aren’t seen as an admission the kid’s lousy at dodging.

  At the time, the three biggest operators were the Lottie Royals (major identifying feature: a crown they carved into their own foreheads), the Busters (they carried football bats and were seen as uncultured party-crashers), and the Hendricks Gang. The last were the ones who were more or less on top, but the other two—and all the lesser gangs, mostly duos and trios of street urchins trying to hang bunting on a diet of regular violence—kept them jumping and kept the turf boundaries moving, sometimes by millimeters a night and others by meters a second.

  There wasn’t actually that much real estate to fight over, of course. The ground was considered neutral and anyone—anyone at all—could walk in and out and do their business in peace if they stayed on the bottom. Down there the Market was a large city square around an oddly shaped fountain. Above that was the rest of the Market, built on long stilts of old wood, rarely repaired, ripe for a fire. Those elevated warrens created what must have been kilometers of essentially contiguous space. It’s said no one ever started at the traditional beginning—the southern end, near the old mag tracks from before they got the steerless buses going—and walked every path and scaffold all the way to the end (up near Left Air). I could believe that. Getting from one of the other, with countless turf boundaries to cross and shit-stained kids grabbing every pocket they could find, would be impossibly expensive in all sorts of currencies.

  When I was done drinking for Splendor, I stood up and looked around. There was a pause exactly as long as the intake of a small breath before the crowd started shouting their wares again. Their respect for an ancient tradition was over. Profit motive could reassert itself in the usual ways.

  I dove back into the throngs, looking again at the directions Yuri gave me for where to find the fruit dealer. When a legitimate business inquiry results in violence, it’s either a sign of a psycho or of some illegitimate business happening under the table. As I walked, I had to fend off a couple of street kids who thought they could sidle up beside me and filch a few sheets of scrip. They got cuffed for their trouble. A box on the ear sent each running, saying their friends would be back for me. It’s that kind of powerlessness—the kind that makes you lie about having friends and then, eventually, so tired of lying about it that you join a gang—that keeps the gangs going.

  When a third came up behind me as I walked the scaffolding, trying to get a view down onto the lowest level, I grabbed his tiny hand out of my pocket and held tight when he tried to twist and run for it. “Settle, kid. Stay here and make some honest money.”

  That didn’t make him look at me, but it did make him stop fighting quite so hard. It was as close to entertaining an offer as he could probably manage.

  “I need to know the boundaries between here and a certain dealer. You know this place?” I held up the napkin and, standing behind him with my napkin in front of his eyes, I gestured with a thumb. “I’m going there. You tell me who’s between it and me and I’ll give you a little paper.”

  The kid was maybe seven years old. He stopped trying to escape and started dragging me along instead. “Huh-uh.” I tugged him to a halt. “You tell me who. I don’t need a guide; I need information.”

  He looked around and leaned in to whisper to me. I had to squat down and strain to hear him in the cacophony of the Lower Market Market, but he gave me the list: Hendricks Gang almost all the way, Busters at the very end.

  Great.

  I passed the kid a sheet of scrip, and he took it, sniffed it twice, then shoved it inside his shirt. “I’ll give you another if you answer one more question.” His eyebrows went up, so I kept talking. “A friend of mine says a couple of kids seem to be…not around anymore. Unfindable. One’s named Ellis. The other’s named Harka. Heard anything about them? Know who came around to see them last?”

  The kid chewed his lips at me, turned heel, and shot away like a shadow running free. No dice. Not that unusual for a kid down here to run from questions, but a kid running from easy scrip was always notable. I tucked it away and went back to the mission at hand.

  Being top dog in the Lower Em didn’t make the Hendricks Gang nicer to deal with. It meant they had more to lose, so more reason to be ruthless.

  That said, the Hendricks Gang did not acquire their position through mindless violence. They were surgical in its application. They knew how to fuck someone up precisely enough to get the point across but still strike the balance between personal risk and corporate profit. If someone fell behind in payments or tried to steal from the Hendricks Gang, they were punished viciously and in public. That didn’t happen often. They had a reputation, and it did most of the work for them. The rest of their reputat
ion was for actually providing the “services” for which they extorted others. The Hendricks really did keep crime down in their turf and protect their marks from outsiders. A whore could do a lot worse than to work a Hendricks corner. They would undoubtedly give up a little more scratch and a lot more flesh than anywhere else, but they could turn a trick knowing a rough john would wind up with every limb broken, in public, before an audience.

  I was kind of counting on that to make it past the boundary with the Busters.

  I strode into a gap that had grown up around a dogleg in the makeshift paths of the Market and waited. That was where I entered Hendricks turf, and I wanted to make it clear I was cooperating. Two punks stepped out of a shadow to size me up and/or shake me down. One was muscular and compact and wearing the Hendricks blue in her close-cropped hair. The other had a patch over one eye and hair so long and fluffy, and a body so lean, he looked like one of the mythic lions from Lotta’s Fountain. I figured he must have been on probation with the gang for fucking something up, or they would have paid to grow him a new eye.

  “Need help finding something, grandpa?” She sneered it, cocky as the first ray of dawn. “Forget your war bonds?” That was one of the ways in which the Hendricks Gang had professionalized things in their turf: you could buy a chit and go unhassled for however long it was before they decided everyone’s chits had expired. That usually happened when the gang needed to raise funds, roughly every couple of months. They called them “war bonds” because they mostly went toward feeding the best slicers and buying them new blades.

  “War bond?” I tried to smile in a way I hoped looked sly and not stupid. “I haven’t had to buy one of those since the long-ago days when I was selling my ass a block from Lotta’s.”

  “Oh, used to be a commodity boy?” She spat on the ground. Remember that observation from before—being a whore in the past didn’t make me a colleague, merely worthless as a victim. “Used to give it up to get by?”

  “Sure.” I put on my confident face. “Ask Tanawat. I bought a lifetime membership sucking his cock every time he came around on patrol. I’m not even here to do business in Hendricks territory. I simply need to get somewhere else.”

  “You know how it is, mate.” She shifted her stance. The leo still hadn’t said anything. “Inflation and that. Five scrip swap and on your way. Ten if you’re using dinar.” There was a tax on using the legal currency. Money laundering can be an expensive endeavor. A lot gets skimmed off the top along the way.

  I looked from her and to the leonine young man with the eye patch and licked my lips. “You sure the old pass isn’t still good?”

  The two of them didn’t look at each other and didn’t speak. After a few seconds, the little one pumped her fist down toward the ground and grunted. “Goddamn it, Fiono,” she growled at the eye patch, “this is the shit that got you in trouble before. What, you want to be blind?” But he and I were already receding into the shadows, and I heard his zipper drop.

  He didn’t utter a word the whole time, and it didn’t take long. When I got off my knees, he looked at me with his remaining eye and nodded. Then he sank back into his invisible corner, and the short one walked over to hand me a bond.

  “Here, grandpa.” Her voice dripped with disgust. I guess early thirties looks like good-as-dead to everyone her age. “Hope you’re proud of that. Good luck dealing with the Busters.” Then she, too, sank back into her shadow of origin and I was left standing in the street, wiping my lips on the sleeve of my coat and holding a War Bond.

  “That isn’t all I need.” I spoke in Fiono’s direction even though I couldn’t see him. No movement from the shadows, no responses. “I need someone to help keep trouble at bay when I cross the boundary.”

  Fiono stepped back into view and nodded. Apparently, I’d impressed him: with no negotiation and no further payment, he started up the tunnel. I had a bodyguard, and I’d bought him the old-fashioned way. I was glad to know I was still good for something.

  We walked for maybe twenty minutes. Different people here and there greeted my Hendricks protector in various ways. Some of them were rent boys, some were rent girls, some were hawkers whose tone was the forced joviality I recognized as fear on seeing him. I wondered if he were especially cruel. Perhaps he had a reputation as a gifted slicer. From what his partner said, he was bumped back down to working the door because he fucked the wrong person, which meant he’d been high enough up to get knocked down. And, of course, maybe these people reacted less to him and more to the organization he represented.

  I tried engaging him in conversation—I told him my name, offered a hand to shake—but he kept walking without even looking at me. Maybe he pissed off a trick who then made trouble to get back at him. Maybe he was mute. I found myself manufacturing a hundred different reasons why a street tough like Fiono would get blown in the shadows by a wrung-out stranger like me, then walk a mile without saying a word. In most of my manufactured scenarios, he did it by choice. I imagined Fiono aloof in that way a teenager might find romantic but I found a little sad. In some of them, it was tragic circumstance: Fiono cast in the role of my One True Love, found too late to save him from the gyro accident that stole his speaking voice; or the damage to his larynx from a case of Child’s Malady had been too severe; or he was born silent and would, like a swan, only speak on the day of his death at which time his voice would be shockingly beautiful.

  After a sensory-numbing slideshow of spice merchants, back-alley pinpricks selling unfiltered shit in dirty needles, an arcade of manual games operated by the few kids not out trying to steal dinner, furniture huts, games of dice huddling in gaps, accusations of counterfeiting, and who knows what else, we walked down some rickety steps one at a time. Fiono, The Boy Lion, nodded in the direction of one of the warrens and turned to go.

  “Wait.” My voice was quiet, but I didn’t push my luck trying to sound intimate. He paused. “I may need them to see a little muscle to let me get through. I mean, these are Busters we’re talking about.”

  He shrugged, leaned against a post, and a knife appeared between his fingers without his visibly removing it from anywhere on his person. Fiono started picking his nails with it. The knife was tiny, the weapon of a guy who enjoyed feeling a foe’s dying breath gutter out against his own face.

  “What’s Hendy trash doing sitting on our curb?”

  I looked in the direction of the new voice and saw two women with football bats and bandoliers of knives walk to within ten meters and no closer. The one speaking appeared the older of the two, but neither of them would have qualified as an adult in the Imperial census. Busters will take anybody desperate enough to volunteer, but these two looked like they had skills and intentions.

  “He came with me. I need to get to a fruit dealer. Let us by.” I tried to sound proud but compliant: the default state of one who knows he’s been beaten by a larger foe. There was a middle finger in my voice, but my eyes didn’t meet theirs.

  “Let you by, you mean. We’re not letting a Hendy onto our turf.”

  Fiono turned to go at that, hands up in a gesture indicating very clearly he was done participating in this minor melodrama.

  “Wait.” I didn’t try to hide that I was begging. “Please, wait. I need all three of you to go with me, and I’m willing to pay.”

  Fiono turned back and stared at me. The Buster who’d done the talking burst out laughing. “You want Busters and Hendies to help you out at the same time? Buddy, you don’t need to work so hard to set up a fight. Usually throwing something will get it started.” She laughed again. “Now come with us, and we’ll figure out how to get you there and how much it’ll cost.”

  That’s the thing about the Lower Em. I could have found the place on my own. I could have probably paid off the guards and kept walking, or bluffed my way through, but I needed some muscle for this trip to the fruit dealer. Yuri might have gotten bounced out because he didn’t know what he was getting into, but I did. I needed this guy to see I ha
d friends and, even better, I wanted him to see I had friends in at least two of the big gangs.

  “No.” I shook my head. “He comes with me, and we all go together. You and he make nice and it’ll be worth your time.”

  They exchanged glances, and the younger one blinked at the older. Apparently, that was enough. The older went from pensive to sneering again. “Alright, buddy boy. I mean, it’ll be a hoot to tell the rest, right? For both of us.”

  Fiono met my eyes and shook his head once to the left. No dice. He wasn’t sold.

  I walked over and leaned in close enough to whisper. “You do this for me, and I’ll put a smile on your face twice a day for a week.”

  Fiono considered for a long second, then stepped forward. This kid was going to get himself in real trouble one day.

  The three of us drew stares as we walked. Most conversations stopped, but some others took on new vigor—and new subject matter—as we passed by. There were people who were too stunned to contain their reaction on seeing a kid in Hendy blue walk with two beat sticks in Buster yellow rags. (Busters identify themselves with tufts of yellow woven into complicated braids in their hair.) I heard something metallic clatter against the scaffolding as we rounded a corner. The Busters refused to tell me their names, but they made constant patter with one another. One was in front, the other in back, with Fiono, The Boy Lion, walking beside. They joked with one another, they joked about one another, they joked at my expense, and they openly mocked the surprise of the people around us.

  “Wot,” the one in front said to a pottery merchant selling plastic painted with shellac. “You never seen blue before? Look up sometime, grandpa!” The other shot back, “He can’t, when he does, he gets shit in his eye!” and then they both laughed these high, keening, vulture laughs, like harpies from prehistoric times. They snorted and farted and pointed at people, stuck their tongues out, made rude gestures. Where the Hendricks Gang has turned their turf into an operating business environment with sustainability and stability highly prioritized, the Busters keep people afraid and have fun doing it.