Flight (13 page)

Joe knows from his literature classes that
oftentimes the strongest arguments are those half-made. He wonders
if he already had laid it on too thick. He guesses that if Prissi
were here her snorts would be coming like mortar fire. He decides
to shelve the rest of what he wants to say to go off in a new
direction.

“Would men ever returnr? So there could be
fathers?”

“The lair has decided men no longer are
welcome. Men, and all they bring, distract us from The Mother.”

Joe considers the irony of a mother who
doesn’t want her children to bear children. For a moment, his anger
at Blesonus’ cultish stupidity outweighs the necessity of currying
her favor so that he can escape.

“I would think that Mother might like her
worshippers to have an organization that was a little more
sustainable.”

Blesonus nods her head, but her words belie
that action.

“Rholealy says our devotion will be
rewarded.”

“Devotion to whom?”

“Mother.”

“As Rholealy understands her.”

“Yes.”

They are just a couple of hundred feet shy of
the crest of the mountain when Blesonus misplaces a foot on a
section of the path thick with scree. Her legs splay out as if
doing the splits. She yelps, falls sideways and begins rolling back
down the path they have just climbed. When Joe catches up with her,
she is grabbing the back of her left thigh with one hand and waving
her other hand over a lava flow of tea extract oozing across a pure
white field of salt.

“Are you okay?”

“No, no, no, no.”

“Let me help you up. See if you can walk on
it.”

“No. No. You don’t know. The lair will be so
angry. They’ll iso me.”

“What’s iso?”

“Isolate. I’ll have to eat alone, work alone,
sleep by myself. No one will talk to me.”

“Because you spilled some salt?”

Blesonus’ waving hand is redirected from the
spill to the space just in front of Joe’s face. Her voice pitches
up into the hysterical range.

“You don’t know. You can’t know. Our life is
so horrible, it’s made the little things—salt on stringy greens, a
cup of hot tea in a cold, dark, damp room—incredibly important. The
loss of the tea and half the salt is horrible so the punishment
must be horrible.”

Blesonus collapses her head onto her knee.
Her body heaves with her sobs.

Joe realizes that this is the first time he
has ever heard a woman cry. He is caught between wanting to reach
down to touch her shoulder to give comfort and slapping her until
she shuts up. He thinks of the ancient adage about not crying over
spilt latte and how Blesonus’ loss is only tea. He turns his back
on his guide and stares out over the endless miles of forest. He
looks outward to distance himself from the thick, moist noises
coming from close by. He has to get away. And he can not wait until
Rholealy decides it is the proper time. He turns back, drops to his
knees and gently grasps the sobbing woman’s shoulders.

“Ssshhh. Ssshhh. Blesonus, listen. Just
listen for a minute.”

Using a gesture he has seen many times in a
vid, a supposedly comforting gesture, Joe takes the woman by her
chin and lifts her head so that he can look into her face.

“Good. Good. Listen. You didn’t spill the
salt and ruin the tea. I did. My knee. My knee let go and I fell
just like you did. You…let’s see...yeah…I yelled and…you pulled a
muscle when you twisted around to stop my fall. They can be angry
at me.”

Joe watches intently as Blesonus first
vigorously shakes off his suggestion with her head, then, becomes
more tentative, until finally her head is still but cocked at an
angle. The sleek head and the angle at which it is held remind Joe
of a Labrador retriever which can’t quite figure out what it sees
stirring in the brush.

“Why would you do that?”

Joe gives the woman, now growing calmer, his
sweetest smile.

“Because it would help you and it wouldn’t
hurt me—at least, not much. What are they going to do to me? Here,
let me help you up. See if you can walk okay.”

Joe helps Blesonus to her feet, picks up both
paks and starts up the trail feeling as cocky as if he has just
solved a tricky quadratic equation.

Of My Discontent

From time immemorial, dissidents and false
friends have waited until a leader has left his country to mount a
coup. Without the physical presence of their commander, troops and
troupes of bureaucrats and functionaries find it harder to risk
their lives to maintain the status quo.

When Joshua Fflowers went into the Juvenal
Institute, there were stirrings, but, really, those were of no more
concern than the slight movements in the straw after the barn cat
pads outside to soak up some sun. It was not until the pancreatic
portion of his rejuve took a mortally threatening turn for the
worse that the stirrings became skitterings and the first
murmurings were heard. The murmurings were of many things:
Adaman—Joshua Fflowers older child, art supporter, political
dabbler, and not so competent co-president of Cygnetics. Would he
be deposed? What of his brother, Illiya, the younger, if not
smarter, then, certainly more respected one, the other half of the
leadership of Cygnetics? What of the old man’s money—more than a
trillion eurollars? Would it be sliced into big or little pieces of
pie? Cygnetics—with its multiple vulnerabilities, would it take a
fall? Would the b-crats at the nation’s Health and Hearth
Department become emboldened and release the supposedly dambing
report that supposedly had been kept glued to the director’s desk
by Fflowers’ supposedly gargantuan campaign contributions? Then,
there was the power—the sweet perfume of power floating above any
stench thrown off by a failing body. Who would inherit the old
man’s power in science, philanthropy, politics, and Cygnetics
itself? Was the Fflower’s family reign over?

When word got out that Joshua Fflowers was
failing, men and women, friends, false friends and enemies, all
began to sharpen their weapons and gird their loins for the battles
ahead. But, how could word get out? The Juvenal Institute was
almost as renowned for its discretion as for its medical skills.
The answer is that while being honeyed and hounded by the press is
something which an eminent surgeon, held to account by Hippocratic
Oath and insulated, to a degree, by wealth, might resist, it is
infinitely harder for an aide or orderly to parry the press’
advances and enticements with the same degree of skill.

For those with the desire to stay abreast and
who have the requisite money, there was information—very good,
although not perfect, information—about Fflowers rejection of his
liver split within hours of that dramatic change. The details of
the failure of his new pancreas found their way to those with an
interest in even shorter order. With each revelation, whether it
was a spiking fever, a leaking vein, or a massive auto-immune
response, the rustlings in the barn grew louder.

Some of that rustling sound and skittering
movement about Joshua Fflowers’ fate was being made by a person who
himself was the object of much speculation, someone who had just
come through the entrance of the Juvenal Institute with everything
but heralds blowing horns.

Adaman Fflowers often had considered how his
fate seemed so much like that of the luckless Prince Charles of
England. It was the Unbonny Prince Charles, whose grandmother, the
revered Queen Mother, had lived to be one hundred one. It was the
Unbonny Prince Charles whose mother, Queen Elizabeth, lived to be
ninety-nine, and who, whether dotty, potty, or not, was still on
the Windsor throne when her son, Charles, ever, always and only a
prince, passed on. But, now the fifty-seven year old Fflowers boy
who would be king was hopeful that his fate might be different.

Adaman Fflowers had had no reason, and even
less desire, to visit his father when the old man first entered the
Juvenal Institute. It wasn’t until the geri was comatose and
fighting for his next breath that Adaman ordered a roto. There was
something powerful within the son that wanted to see his father in
a helpless state. Lear in a johnny.

When he arrived with his entourage of
bootlicks, security guards, media handlers, infectious medical
second-guessers and rabid legal advisors, Adaman Fflowers was met
by Rogger Blaine, head of the Juvenal Institute, along with Dr.
Blaine’s own entourage of bootlicks, excuse makers, medical
explainers and legal defenders.

After twenty minutes of diplomacy and
posturing, those who were paid to argue and threaten were left to
do so. Dr. Blaine personally accompanied the theatrically
distraught Adaman to the suite where his father had been
recuperating until his spectacular reversals. Once there, the son
threw off the rest of his retinue, like a Shakespeare thespian his
cloak, except for Schecty, his head of security. The two of them
followed Dr. Blaine to the observ station above the ICU. Looking
down through the tinted glass, Adaman could see that the Invasive
Care Unit was a large room divided into six glass-walled cubicles,
three along each wall, with an open area in the middle. All of the
cubicles were full of equipment, but empty of patients, except for
one. Adaman Fflowers counted eleven people doing things to help a
twelfth.

Dr. Blaine was far too skilled and far too
arrogant to explain, apologize or offer any condolences to Adaman
Fflowers. Instead, benignly, he observed for a moment before making
his goodbyes. Just as the director was making his recessional
through the door, Adaman asked Dr. Blaine what his brother, Illiya,
thought should be done.

Dr. Blaine responded with a head shake. As
far as the director was aware, Illiya Fflowers had not been to see
his father.

After the doctor left, Adaman spent ten
minutes watching the body of Joshua Fflowers being swarmed over
like a race car in a pit stop. As he walked back to his father’s
suite, he nodded to himself in amusement at how remiss his brother
had been in not attending to the patriarch. And what a fine show he
was missing.

Back in the suite surrounded by the blanket
of his retinue, Adaman found that The Juvenal Institute and its
staff planned plans. They didn’t plan results. That is what his
people said they had been told by the institute people. It had been
explained to Adaman’s advisors by Dr. Blaine’s advisors that Joshua
Fflowers, inexplicably, had rejected his replacement parts. Their
only guess as to why the old man’s body had done that was some
evidence that Fflowers had undergone some unusual localized and,
assuredly, illegal, genetic transformation at an earlier point in
his life. It was the extra DNA, formally named supernumerary
accentric fragments, which were triggering the rejections. It was
that same DNA, and its supposedly illegal aspects, that were
supposed to trigger an acceptance by Adaman Fflowers that the
Juvenal institute had done nothing wrong.

Adaman was wandering around his father’s
luxurious suite, half-listening to the briefing, which seemed too
long to be worthy of its name, as his legal and medical aides
worked to one-up one another, when he picked up an a large envelope
emblazoned with the familiar Bissell School logo. It amused Adaman,
illustrious alum, to see an actual letter—the paper and frank. It
was so gracious and so old-fashioned and just exactly the thing
that Binny Dowdahl, whose name appeared handwritten in the upper
left-hand corner, would think to do to appeal to Joshua
Fflowers.

Within seconds of opening Dowdahl’s letter,
Adaman felt like he had been thrown overboard in a wintry sea.
Gripping the letter in one fist as if it were an assassin’s wrist,
he slid the accompanying pix from the envelope. His breath stopped
while he stared at the dedication day image of his retrograde
father being smiled at by Jack and a young girl whose face stabbed
deep into some self-surviving, cunning reptilian portion of
Adaman’s brain. Who and what was this person who so interested his
father? Something tugged, but just what it was wouldn’t come to
him, but he knew it must come because it was important. Critically
important.

Adaman Fflowers accepted that his father
despised him. That acceptance had not come easily. When Adaman was
a child, he had tried in many ways—pleading, fawning, adoring, and
even, obeying, to get his father to like him, but by the time
Adaman was twelve, he knew that his goal was hopeless. In the years
that followed, rather than expending useless energy to get his
father to like him more, Adaman had done his best to inveigle his
younger brother, Illiya, to behave in ways that would cause Joshua
Fflowers to like his second son less. However, Adanan’s efforts,
Joshua Fflowers had continued to prefer and favor Illiya over his
first-born.

It was not until Jack was born that Adaman
realized the game did not have to be played out between Iliya and
himself. Seeing a possible opening, Adaman had coached, mentored
and directed Jack to become what his grandfather wanted. To
Adaman’s great relief and satisfaction, Jack Fflowers proved to be
both an eager and apt grandson.

When, just two days before, Schecty had told
Adaman that he had heard from Nathn that his nephew, Joe, had taken
the bait and was on his way to a new life, Adaman Fflowers had been
ecstatic. He felt the end game of a long hard played match was
coming and he held the more powerful pieces. Although Joshua
Fflowers continued to despise Adaman, he did love Jack. Now, he
would feel betrayed by Joe. That feeling, that Joe was a traitor,
was sure to redound badly for Illiya.

Upon hearing Schecty’s news that the plan was
working, Adaman had allowed himself some time to gloat and dream.
Finally, his years of scheming were paying off. The chess match
would be over as soon as Joshua Fflowers heard the news. The match
still might not end in checkmate, but a stalemate was better than
an outright loss.