A Fall in Autumn by Michael G. Williams

Author:Michael G. Williams [Williams, Michael G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Falstaff Books

“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.

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