A Fall in Autumn

by Michael G. Williams

Upgrade caught up to me, and his arrival was what actually hurt: all hundred thirty kilos of his muscled mass slamming into me in a vicious tackle. I held the mop handle up to try to defend myself, but he swept my wrist aside and pinned it to the floor as he landed on me. I cried out in pain as something snapped inside my increasingly frail body. I’d probably broken a rib. It hurt like very few things in my life ever had before: a sharp pain stabbing me in the side. Upgrade didn’t seem to take it any better, though. He cried out in a strangled moan and began shuddering on top of me, grinding my broken rib and the rest of me into the floor as he spasmed and fell into what seemed to be a full seizure.

  I writhed wildly under him, trying to squirm my way free. The receptionist tossed the gun aside and picked up a big book. She clocked me across the back of the head with it as I squirmed out from under Upgrade and tried to stand. I spun and tumbled, tripping over Upgrade and myself, but I managed to land on the side without the broken rib and launched myself back to my feet. Upgrade was panting and possibly unconscious under me. I scrambled for the broken-off mop handle and smacked the tip of it against the back of his head once to be sure. He sagged more completely and dove away again, skidding under tables.

  One down.

  God on the mountainside, I thought, my surprise so profound I went right back to the secret faith of the people around whom I’d been raised in Pentz. She tried to juice me with a gun. Electricity held in the hand, mech-magic like the ancients, but here, in a clinic dedicated to worship of the future through biotech science.

  The receptionist produced two knives from out of nowhere—slicers like the ones Fiono and his ilk liked to use—and I knew I was in real trouble. She probably planned at first to knock me out so Upgrade could do the dirty work. Now she was on her own, and she was very much up to the task. She crouched the way a street fighter does and made her way slowly toward me.

  The room had a door in the back, but the sign blared VAT-WORKS PROTECTIVE EQUIPMENT REQUIRED. I clambered up off the floor. The receptionist was still advancing. I lifted the mop handle as a weapon and struck my best en garde pose. Faster than I could follow, she knocked it out of my hand. It clattered against the floor.

  My hands went up in the universal pose of surrender without a conscious thought. “Look, we can work something out. Let’s be reasonable about this.”

  The receptionist took another step forward and raised the knives. Their tips were barely two centimeters long where they extended between her fingers, their handles cupped in her fists. She was good. She was the sort of fighter who could get very close and win.

  “Seriously. I mean, what am I going to do? Tell people I’ve seen a room full of angels in plass tanks?” I bumped clumsily against a counter behind me, reaching the end of the line.

  She was maybe six terribly slow steps from me, her knuckles white where they tightened on the knives.

  “I…I’m a detective.” It hurt to talk. “I came here to find out why you gave the fruit seller cosmetic treatments but your church wouldn’t cure my cancer.” I gulped air against the sharp point of my shattered rib. I tried to sound pitiful as I made my last pitch. “I’m going to be dead in a month anyway.”

  The receptionist paused, savoring the moment. She was only a couple of arm lengths away. With one swift step, she could be in range and cut me open. The jacket would probably protect me from the first slice, maybe the first two, but eventually she would work her way through, and I didn’t much look like I had another ounce of fight left in me.

  “Please.” It was more a wheeze than a word, a whisper fighting to get out of me. I put one hand against my throbbing side, my other arm crossing my chest out of protective reflex. A phrase I’d heard before, from cops and from news stories, floated into my head: defensive wounds. “Please.” I tried to sound a little more alive. “I’m dying and I really don’t want it to be like this. I want my landlady to have to clean it up. We hate each other that much. I want my last act to be becoming her problem.” I tried to smirk, thinking maybe I could make her laugh—always a good strategy, make them laugh so they’ll keep you around, ask any jester from history and see what they say—but she didn’t laugh.

  Much worse, she smiled.

  That door—the door into the vat-works—was only a couple of meters away. Maybe there was a roof access. Maybe there was a door into a back garden. Maybe there was a portal into the sewers. Maybe there was a mop I could use as a weapon.

  The receptionist took that step and swiped the blade in her right hand in a quick arc. I flinched, back arched backward over the counter, unwittingly throwing open the jacket and baring my abdomen. The knife was so sharp I didn’t feel it. I heard it. And I saw blood—my blood—slash out across her uniform.

  The eyes of the receptionist went wide, and she hesitated, and that was her undoing. There was a big jug of something on the counter next to me. I hefted it, clumsy in my weakness, and tried to swing it at her. I didn’t succeed, she stepped out of its way, but when it crashed to the floor, it shattered and sprayed across her feet and ankles. The smell was awful.

  The receptionist screamed in pain and anger. I clutched my hands to the shallow wound across my guts and screamed back at her, no more than one frightened animal reacting to another.

  “They didn’t tell me you would bleed.” Her voice was loud. She strained to speak so that it came out in a loud groan rather than a growl. Whatever was happening to her flesh smelled terrible. Strips of her skin were sloughing off. Blood was running in thin streams from spontaneous wounds. The big jug had some sort of acid in it. They’d be able to regenerate her later, I was sure, but it was awful to be in the presence of an injury anyway. Real bodily trauma like that wasn’t something we saw much of anymore. I’d seen it a couple of times as a kid, on the rez, but I still wasn’t prepared for the sight of sloughing flesh and raw meat and bone. The receptionist wasn’t going to be able to stand up anytime soon.

  I took one breath while my brain turned her words into thoughts, and everything made sense in a second.

  “I want to know who put you up to this.” I looked at the counter and grabbed from it a smaller, less heavy jug. I didn’t know what was in it—the labels were jumbled letters, and I was no chemist—but that didn’t matter. I’d hurt her with one big bottle of clear liquid. I could now threaten her with another. “And I want cancer treatments.”

  She wrinkled up her brow at that, then laughed at me. Her teeth were clenched with the pain, but I was still funnier than she was hurting. “Cancer treatments take hours, sometimes days. I can’t simply give you a pill and make it all better. You idiot.” She shook her head at me. Arties get that a lot: we’re often assumed to be naïve. Those of us who go out into the world find we’re more often than not the objects of condescension.

  “Patient records, then. I need the files on a specific guy. And I need to know who.” I shook the jug at her. “I need the name of the person who paid you to be here and do this.”

  The receptionist balled up her face like a fist and spat right at me, the classic slicer insult and challenge. No dice. I was never going to get information out of her.

  I didn’t set the jar down, but I did step to the side, around her, away from her, moving backward, never turning my back to a slicer with her knives in her hands. I recognized a little object on the counter from endless stories and videos, grabbed it, and put it in my pocket as I went by.

  I didn’t say another word. As a detective, my most powerful weapon was always going to be information, not my fists, not a knife, not a club, but whatever facts I had and the other side didn’t. I buttoned up before I revealed anything else, stepped carefully over the unconscious form of the Upgrade, and without much of anything to show for this visit but the fear in my eyes and a gash across my guts, I backed out under the hateful glare of the receptionist.

  The lab doors closed behind me, gray and featureless and turned away from me like the backs of strangers shunning my pain. I looked and found a door stop inside one
of the worker-bee rooms. I grabbed four of them, total, and ran back to kick them under the edge of the doors into the lab. They wouldn’t hold forever, but they’d buy me a little time.

  My steps weren’t entirely steady, but I half-walked, half-jogged back out of the place, trailing a little blood behind me the whole way. The front door opened at my touch, and I limped out. All I needed to do was find an alleyway—not the nearest one—and close myself up.

  Then I needed to find Alejandro.

  Then we had to finish this.

  Never before that moment was I the beneficiary of modern medicine. I once took generic antibios, and as a child I wore a cast, and sometimes I had my teeth drilled. I experienced firsthand all the unspecific barbarisms of bygone eras. Never before did I feel a wound close thanks to adaptive paste. The thing I grabbed off the counter of the clinic was a tube of the stuff, with an applicator and a handle and a button I squeezed to make it come out fast or slow: standard issue to any paramedic and perpetually in the aprons of docs in stories. A child crying as the tube is produced to be used on them for the first time is one of those cultural tropes, right up there with their first haircut or their first stem bath. I was always told adaptive paste itched a little. It turned out it also stung. I didn’t care. This was something I was legally, socially, culturally, and religiously barred from ever experiencing, and I loved it. I smeared a little of the stuff on the slice across my stomach and gasped as it immediately started to work. It tingled, and it itched, and it burned very slightly: not real pain, merely a reminder my nerve endings were there. Those all faded immediately, though, as its numbing properties kicked in. I was in the back of an alley behind a café, halfway to the exit from Little Marseilles, and I stared at my own regenerating flesh with eyes as wide as one of that restaurant’s platters. Twenty seconds later, the paste was absorbed, and my wound was gone. I had a very, very pale scar where the wound was. If I spent enough time with my shirt off in Down Preserves, eventually that would go away. I ran my finger across it. I couldn’t feel any pain. There was no wound. There wasn’t even a greasy residue. The paste was gone. My skin was healed.

  I smeared a glob, very gingerly, over the spot where it felt like a rib was broken. The paste soaked in right away, exactly like it’s designed to do. Seconds later, my insides started itching. My rib knit itself. A normal person would have had a doctor make sure everything was in the right place first, but I enjoyed no such niceties. What mattered was that it stopped feeling the way a fire alarm sounds and wound down to the remote annoyance of a horn in the distance.

  A couple of minutes of modern medicine and I was practically fixed. And other people got to have that every single fucking day.

  I adjusted my shirt to cover the injury, stuck the paste in an inside pocket of my coat, and limped the rest of the way to the gate. I’d lost my mop handle, but between my rib, my bruises, the exhaustion of the last few minutes and a lifetime on my feet in shoes with a hole in the sole, I’m surprised I was able to stand. All the way out, through the gates, and down the street, I step-drag-step-drag-step-dragged a circuitous route back to where I’d been once before so I could check a hunch.

  I needed to wash the makeup off my face, and I bet I knew an empty apartment where I could do so undisturbed.

  When that was done, I went back to my office, took a long shower thanks to Alejandro having liberated the bathroom the night before, and changed into fresh clothes. I had business to conduct.

  I left a note on my door: no point trying to be subtle now.

  Get low and stay low. Look for me where we first met.

  V

  15

  “I know all about the fake angels,” I said to Solim as I walked up to his table in Misconceptions. Normally it’s the job of the detective to walk into the room, point at the villain, and say, he did it, while holding aloft the evidence. At least, that’s what people think. I didn’t have that luxury this time. I didn’t have a goddamn thing to my name except what I’d seen for myself, and what I deduced from it. I simply had to gamble that was good enough.

  Solim continued writing with that stylus of his, on a big lotus-sized pad, until he finished whatever thought occupied him. Then, very deliberately, he set down the stylus, took a long sip of wine, and looked up at me. “The what?”

  “I’ve been to the clinic. The one in Little Marseilles. I’ve seen the tanks. I’ve seen the fruit seller. I know what y’all were trying to do, and I think I even know why. So tell me, was the fruit seller for real? Did he actually get treatments? Or was that purely for effect, too?”

  Blackie wandered close enough to take an order if I spoke up, but not so close as to intrude. I wasn’t being subtle. My body language was all don’t fuck with me, and by now I must have looked far more strung out, even more withered, than Blackie had ever seen me before. On top of the wild night, I didn’t have long to live, and I was done trying to hide that fact. Death already cast its shadow across me from offstage.

  “M. Bakhoum,” he said very softly, “I’m afraid nothing you’re saying means anything to me.” He produced the tiniest shrug, a look of general pity, and moved to pick up his stylus.

  I leaned forward, slapped the stylus back down against the table with my hand, and growled. “The Upgrade tried to beat my head in. The secretary gave an award-winning performance. The fake angels were very nicely done. You get my compliments on all of it, padre, but you didn’t count on the golem hiring a detective. You thought the golem would follow the trail himself: that he would walk right into your trap. You anticipated easier prey to catch, someone already primed to buy what you were selling. It’s so obvious now, isn’t it? The whole thing laid out in a row, like breadcrumbs in that old story of the maze and the monkey.”

  Solim now set down the glass of wine. He didn’t look at the hand I’d placed over his stylus and pad. He looked at me, right in my eyes, unabashed. Blackie was as still as he could be, blending into the background. One—only one—of Solim’s eyebrows twitched.

  “It’s like everything else in our society.” I lowered my voice, and I let myself smile the way people smile when they’ve finally given up. “We don’t ask ‘why’ or ‘how’ anymore. Everyone has their place, their stratum, and we’re all told how to behave, how to stay in that place, and we do it. We don’t ask how things got this way, or why we should listen to anyone. We accept it because it’s all laid out for us and that’s always easier than thinking. But ‘why’ and ‘how’ are a detective’s meat and potatoes, a detective’s bread and jam. That’s why people don’t like us. That’s why members of my profession are seen as impolite, as unwanted, as undesirable. It isn’t because we bob up and down in the wake of cheating husbands and uncertain parentage. People don’t like to think on us too long because they don’t want to think about the truths we reveal behind small lies and tidy alibis. They don’t like the way we won’t take things at face value.” I stood up, starting to relax, starting to get into my groove.

  “Do you want a drink, Valerius?” Blackie was trying to bring us back to normality in one of the two ways a bartender knows how: offering to get everyone drunk.

  “Sure.” I was speaking to Blackie, but I didn’t look away from Solim. “Something in a glass, preferably a brittle one. I need it to shatter easy into big, sharp shards.”

  Solim rolled his eyes and downed the rest of his wine in one swig. His chair scooted back, he started to stand—and I reached out and put a hand on his powerful shoulder. He could shake me off without a thought, like a fly on the flanks of a dog, but I was so angry and so certain I frankly didn’t care.

  “No. You’re not going anywhere.”

  Solim did shake me off, then—one swat of his hand, and mine was off him. “Don’t touch me, Valerius,” he murmured. I had him good and pissed off, and he wasn’t afraid to show me. He was, perhaps more properly stated, afraid enough to show me.

  I smiled. “What are you going to do, knock me off? I have notes. You don’t know where to find them
. I know people who are always looking for an excuse to go after the Sinceres. I know people who are always looking to prove or disprove this or that about the myth of avenging angels. Sooner or later one of them will find the gap in your armor and that will be my revenge. You can’t scare me, Solim. You can’t threaten to rough me up: I’m dying. You can’t threaten my reputation: I’m a detective and an Artie. The people who worship me always will, and the people who revile me always will, and nobody’s in a hurry to switch teams because they’ve already found their place. I went by the old lady’s place. The apartment is empty. I don’t know if she really saw an angel one time or if she’s the best performer the world has ever known. I suspect it’s the former. But I also suspect it doesn’t matter. What matters is, the setup is gone because you didn’t need it anymore.”

  Solim still stared at me, expressionless, giving nothing away.

  “I know slicers and street thugs.” I was starting to breathe heavily. This was an awful lot of talking, my throat told me. “I know what they’re like when they fight, what they do when they want to kill. I’ve seen them do it hundreds of times. The receptionist didn’t want to kill me. She wanted to scare me because that was Plan B: scare me into running off and believing the ‘secret’ I’d found was worth killing me for. But she was scared, herself, when the electric gun didn’t take me out—and a scared slicer doesn’t hesitate. A scared slicer goes in for the kill. I’m guessing she was surprised the electric gun didn’t take me out because it was meant for my client. He was supposed to follow the trail of clues, not me, and she was supposed to shoot him, not me. I bet it would have hurt him something awful. Maybe knocked him clean out. And that’s what this was all about, wasn’t it? You wanted to get your hands on him, or someone like him, because you want to destroy anything you can that might threaten your storybook version of the past. He goes around telling people he remembers what everything was like before the Big Belly-Up, and whether it’s true or not, what if his version of events doesn’t match yours and people start to believe him?” I licked my lips and waited for Solim to say something, but he didn’t.