A Fall in Autumn

by Michael G. Williams

  He stared me right in the eye in silence.

  “There’s a kind of reverence people have for golems.” I kept talking, plowing ahead. “People are always up their own ass with how wise and kind and otherworldly the golems supposedly are, and they don’t realize how literal it is when they say that: golems are, if Alejandro is to be believed, actual survivors of another world.”

  Blackie started to back away, receding uncertainly from the little pool of light at Solim’s table. I kept talking.

  “But that reverence competes with you, doesn’t it? The business model of the Sincerity Church is to ensnare people with a specific kind of story you can use to beat the general public into compliance if not exactly submission. I don’t know how you got a Spiralist clinic to work with you. Maybe you’re all in this together. Maybe you blackmailed them. Maybe you’re both run by the same people anyway. I doubt I have time in this life to find out. What I do know is, you want people’s money, and you want the faithful not to question you when you tell them what to do, and you maintain very specific supporting narratives to keep that going: like the reservations, and families of Arties like me, and the prohibitions on our participation in modern life. You cultivate a framework of simultaneously fearing and desiring this mythical better time, a time before humanity knew sin, and you squeeze us of everything you need in this world while selling people a polished turd of a version of the last one.

  “And then, what if everything he says is true? What if there really are others? What if they really do remember the old world? You can’t let that sort of possibility hang over your head, can you? So you people took a big gamble and decided to wreck the last true wonder of the ancient world: the flying cities, the two that were left, starting with Splendor. And you set up a frame to make any survivors think an angel did it: dressed up some asshole in a very good costume and paraded him past half the Ghosts in the City figuring one of them would survive to be loaded into a golem and come looking for you.”

  Solim blinked, and I knew I was right. I knew it deep in my gut. It felt correct. It was madness, but this was religious stuff. Of course it was madness.

  I kept pushing. “Once the Ghost was on its own in a golem body, you could fish it in with the fruit and the clinic and whatever else fake evidence you’ve planted around the City that I never managed to find. You’d get your hands on a golem you could dissect and throw away. It’s a line of dominoes, any one of which is a desirable outcome in its own right: fake an avenging angel attack, get a golem, maybe get to pick its brain, maybe get to knock it off, lather, rinse, repeat.” I licked my lips. They were dry and tight and thin. “Even if you didn’t manage to attract the attention of a golem, an honest-to-fuck ancient, you’d still get to scare the shit out of the rest of us.” I waggled my head at the great Out There: the rest of the City, the rest of the world. “You’d get to trot out the death of Splendor and use it to whip up fervor or guilt or anything else by pointing to it and saying, maybe, if it weren’t for us, you’d be next, or maybe, look to us to learn about the ancient world before all of it is gone. You people love saints because they’re gone. They don’t stick around to ask awkward questions or express doubt in their convictions. They hang on the wall and glare at people until those people behave. There’s no better saint than a martyr, either, so you made a whole City into one. You people…” I shook my head and laughed once, very low, very quiet. “You’ll probably hang the last Artie to make sure they don’t get the chance to say something embarrassing about how you treated us.”

  Solim’s hand twisted the stylus, and the fibers of its concealed blade unfurled and snapped to deadly rigidity. I was goddamn tired of knives that day. I’d seen enough of them for the rest of my life, whether that was a month or a hundred years. I would never cut food with anything but a fork for the rest of my life if I could manage it.

  The blade was not a slicer’s, and it did not look like it took a slicer’s skill to be effective. It was long and thin and sharp as hell, visibly old, and the tip narrowed a little unevenly.

  Blackie dropped his order pad and scrambled out of reach, and I was relieved to realize that meant he wasn’t in on it. If it was only Solim and me, maybe I stood a chance. I was tired, though, and the fight in the laboratory took it out of me a few hours before, so I did the dirty street kid thing: I cheated. When Solim came at me with the knife, I let it catch me on the arm, biting deep into my flesh and muscle and producing a hollow knock when it hit bone.

  The pain was absolutely blinding, but I pushed the arm toward him so he couldn’t pull back and get the blade free. I grabbed his wine glass with the other hand, smashed it on the edge of the table, and jabbed a sharp edge right up against the flesh of his throat as I staggered forward into him. I wasn’t cutting him open—not yet—but I was trying to give the impression I could. I groaned aloud from the grind of his stylus blade against the bone of my arm, but I kept up the fight.

  The words came out of me a mealy mush, ground up by anguish and anger and strain, but they came out. “Tell me everything, Solim, or I swear to the gods I don’t believe in that I will murder you right here. I have nothing left to lose. They wouldn’t manage to get me to trial before I die of cancer. Tell me where to get the treatments, who to see, how to bribe them, and tell me what the fuck is going on with the fake angels and the trap you set for Alejandro. Tell me anything I’ve gotten wrong, anything I’ve overlooked, or I will slit your throat and hold it open with my bare hands while you bleed out all over this fucking floor.”

  Solim stared at me—no, stared through me—and then he spoke very slowly and distinctly, careful not to dig the broken glass any deeper into his own neck as he whispered to me. “You really don’t see the larger picture, do you?” He paused. “Or you do, Valerius, but you see it from the other side, and only uncertainly, like a child holding a drawing up to the sun to study it in opaque reversal.” Solim didn’t sound angry or dismissive. He sounded like he truly pitied me. “You, the most precious of us, and you think we would do this to harm you? We don’t want to eliminate you, Valerius. We already have the vast majority of you corralled. If we wanted to exterminate you, we would.” He cleared his throat a little, the tiniest grunt of effort, and grimaced with pain. “You look at all of this…” We stood locked in this agonizing embrace, and he drew a breath and smiled a little, his big, beautiful, trust-inspiring eyes welling up. “All of this artifice, and you see a cage, a trap, perhaps an abattoir: a mechanism intended to ensnare and do harm. I am a minister, child. Let me show what I see in its place.”

  I didn’t say actual words. I hissed air between my teeth and held my place against him. Solim could have flung me off. He could have killed me. He didn’t, though, because my genes are a sacrifice his church has made on the altar of my life, and he was a true believer.

  “I see a clockwork, child.” Solim’s eyes closed halfway as he spoke, and his focus softened. In his mind, he beheld the perfection of their plan and he hoped he could make me see it, too. “I see a great many teeth wheels, some large, some small, turning as intended, their coils unwinding as designed. What you see as oppression, I see as order, as control. What you see as the forced isolation of your people I see as preserving an investment. You hated the reservation? The case carved from wood and polished smooth, assembled with care over time. Your mistake is in thinking that you are the most important person in your life, Valerius. No one is. None of us matters. Our culture matters. Our traditions. Our beliefs. Without them, what would be the life of any one of us? Consider the kitchen of the humblest home. Do they throw all their utensils on the floor? Or do they have an organizer, and a drawer, and a little bit of order? The biologist and her insects under glass; the botanist and his pressed clippings; the worshiper with their candles in the path of a coming storm. An orderly world makes all things possible, makes all things endurable. The clockwork I see in all this does what any clock does. It turns disordered events into meaning. It organizes the lives of all who operate under its
benevolent rule. And sometimes, once in a while, it must be taken down and wound, Valerius. And that is what we are doing. We are winding the clock so that it will keep running until such time as it must be wound again.”

  Solim didn’t stop there. He kept going because he wanted me to understand that I was wrong to want anything better than what was handed to me.

  I was also wrong in my theories. The angels in the plass tank weren’t fakes. They were an experiment. Avenging angels were a useful story to the church, so why not try making a few? The Sincerity Church, so obsessed with genetic purity and olden ways, was engaged in engineering a whole new line of Mannies who would look enough like angels to scare the shit out of people. Solim told me that much in the hushed tones of the reverent fanatic, but he refused to tell me the who of it, or how they got the help of Spiralists.

  The fire in Solim’s eyes was a pyre ready to consume the unbeliever, and he trained those eyes on me as he spoke. He went on and on in that practiced, hypnotic voice of a Sincerity Priest with long years under his belt of leading the meditative chants of the faithful, and I could tell he was trying to lull me into inattention. He was trying to talk me into a stupor so he could turn the tables and finish me off.

  But the more he talked, the more I imagined the screams of the people of Splendor as they rode their City all the way down to its violent death in the middle of the sandy wastes. I thought of the lovers who knew they were about to die and couldn’t embrace one last time. I thought of the children who cried out. I thought of the Mannies who probably worked their whole lives to organize and saw it all taken away from them. I thought of the faithful of Solim’s own church who futilely prayed out the last minutes of their lives. Solim’s words had the ring of real and final truth to them. A jury would have believed him—but, of course, I would never get him in front of a jury. I would be left to know what happened and have no way to do anything about it.

  Then he told me the treatments of the fruit seller weren’t real, and that they would never give me the cancer treatments, because what was one dead Artie when you’ve already killed a City full of people whose names you’ll never know?

  “We love your kind.” Solim let go of the knife in my arm and put his hand on my shoulder to comfort me. “We love what you are. And I consider it a tragedy you do not appreciate what we have given you. We made you who you are, Valerius Bakhoum. I am sorry that was not enough for you, but exactly who decided that? Not we. Not I. We live in a world of constrained possibilities. We must live with such curbs and borders. The Ancients did not and look what happened to them: death by excess and lack of foresight. I will mourn you when you are dead, Valerius, but I will be grateful to live in an era when rules matter, and roles are fixed, and so tomorrow can be predicted, and faith can be relied upon when all else has failed. There are many of us who truly understand.” Solim believed what he was saying, every word. “More than you might imagine. And we are well-placed in the churches. We will one day, sooner or later, run the churches ourselves. After that, we’ll run the whole Empire.”

  So I killed him right there, in the middle of the bar, while he talked, and Blackie didn’t say a word to stop me.

  When it was done, I went outside and sent Alejandro a polly. I was hungry. He owed me breakfast.

  16

  Alejandro didn’t talk about what happened, didn’t ask for the story, until I ate my whole meal and drank two cups of coffee. He insisted on the second cup. He said his primary concern was seeing me restored and the rest could wait.

  “That’s not true.” I set the cup down after draining it and smacked my lips with deep satisfaction. It was a good breakfast, and the silence and the civilized people all around me had a palliative effect. I got some stares—for being an Artie, for being an Artie in bloodstained clothes with his arm covered in bandages in a culture where normal people, the Plusses and the Upgrades and the Mannies and the like, never had a cut more than five or ten minutes. I used the adaptive paste on my arm, like I did my stomach, but the cut was too big, too deep, for the paste to take care of it all. Some of it would have to heal on its own.

  Alejandro got a few stares, too, for being a golem. Seeing the two of us together must have been like seeing a pair of unicorns gallop through with hot-pink hay in their mouths.

  “Excuse me?” Alejandro’s look was of pure well-intentioned incomprehension.

  “My health is not your primary concern. Angels—what this case was all about—are your primary concern. I simply turned out to be the guy for the job. But you didn’t pick me because I was so good with the idea of angels. You picked me because you’re smart enough to want an outsider’s perspective. You knew you wanted to believe an angel wrecked Splendor, and you wanted to have someone else sanity-check that by figuring it out for you.”

  “Well,” Alejandro said with a little shrug of his beautifully crafted shoulder, to which I pressed my lips in a moment of ecstatic release the night before. I treasured the whiff of that experience on the breeze of recollection. “That is why I hired you, yes.”

  “But more than that…” I signaled the server for a third cup. I needed sleep, but another cup would have to do. “You didn’t want any detective to find it. You wanted me to find it. You wanted someone who would go into the lion’s den but wouldn’t have any friends to come find him there if he never returned. Am I right?”

  Alejandro settled back into his chair and crossed his arms. “Were you a difficult child? I bet you were, weren’t you?”

  I ignored it. “That’s why you sent Talons. She felt me out for you with her too-typical story: bad boyfriend, see if he’s cheating, and follow him until you know for sure. The role of the boyfriend was played by Buttercup, of course, exactly the sort of guy a less stupid detective might turn down the chance to follow into the middle of Down Preserves. Had I backed off when he went up that shaded path, or if I didn’t follow him at all and told Talons what I thought she wanted to hear, great, you’d go find another dog to do your sniffing for you.” I gestured with my hands, something small that said so it goes. “But it turned out I was the real deal. I was able to keep up with him across a complex obstacle course, and I was willing to face him alone if it meant doing the job for which you hired me. Then Talons put out the lights, and they left me there for you to ‘find.’”

  Alejandro didn’t say anything, and his expression grew blank over the course of the seconds it had taken me to speak. If he were a human, I would have taken it as a sign of guilt. Since he was a golem, I wasn’t totally sure, but I was about nine out of ten on it. Then he uncrossed and re-crossed his arms, and I was ten out of ten.

  “Right.” I kept going. “So you figured maybe I would actually be able to lead you to an angel, but then I’d get out of the way, or report back, or maybe get killed, and then you could go in and clean up. You were leaving all options open because you’re also smart enough to smell a trap being set. You knew things were a little too easy, a little too tidy. An angel gets paraded past you just in time for the City to go boom? Too tidy by half. So you wanted someone to check it out, and you hoped you were wrong about the trap and right about the angel being real rather than the other way around. I was useful, the way the Imperial Army sometimes sends in Mutts to see if there are landmines before they march in the expensive Upgrades.”

  Alejandro was quiet. His face was as still as the surface of a mirror.

  “Anyway,” and then I drank the whole third cup of coffee at once, “thanks for breakfast, but I’m nobody’s collar-dog. I don’t mind that I got to slice open Solim’s throat because that’s only the tip of the tail on what the people who brought down Splendor deserve to have happen to them. But I’m not going to be anyone’s pet.”

  I started to rise, but Alejandro’s arm shot out and his hand covered mine on the table. He didn’t move to hurt me, and he caused no pain, but he made it clear I wasn’t quite allowed to leave. “Wait, Valerius.” His eyes were pained. It was very skillful. A day before, I would have beli
eved him without hesitation. Now I had to hesitate if I were going to get out of all this with my skin in one piece. “Please,” he said. “Let me explain. You’re mostly right, but not entirely.”

  I eased back into my chair. People looked over at us. The tension we were throwing off was being picked up by whoever around us had improved scent receptors, and that was true of nearly everybody. “What have I got wrong?”

  “I never would have knowingly allowed you to get killed. Oh, I used you, and I won’t deny that, but I never knowingly would have…” He searched for a word, licking his lips, and that was one of those human reflexes I couldn’t imagine someone programming a golem to use. “I would never have wasted someone like you.”

  “Explain. What am I supposed to think makes me special?”

  “Because you have eyes to see in an age blinded by its own heightened awareness. You give a damn when everyone else takes things at face value. You care about the consequences of your actions, but you act anyway. Have you any idea how rare that is? How precious? I won’t claim to be in love with you, though I have absolutely treasured the moments of pleasure and intimacy we have shared. It’s been a long time since anyone thought of me as enough of a man to have those times. I won’t lay any emotional traps along those lines. You have character, and that is worth preserving.”

  I smirked. “Haven’t you heard? I’ll be dead in a few weeks.”

  “Not if you let us transfer your consciousness into a golem carriage.” He said it just like that, as though he were asking if I wanted him to pick up my laundry.

  I sat there and stared at him.

  “I’m serious, Valerius. We can’t make one for everybody, obviously, but we do make them. Once in a while, we seek to preserve those who might be needed to see the world through these dark times.” It was a tidy bit of rhetoric, and I recognized it as such, but there was a part of my vanity that stirred at the offer, too. I imagined Alejandro and me, side by side, wading across the centuries helping humankind rise again from the ashes. I imagined myself whole again, whole forever, maybe with better eyes and different hair, and skin that would never grow pale with sickness.