Flight (25 page)

After Burgey had watched the teener’s retreat
with amused eyes he asked, “Why are you interested in something
from so long ago?”

Prissi’s first thought was to invent for
Burgey, who was looking incredibly birdlike, with his small bright
eyes and sharp nose, details about…a lost uncle. Instead, for
reasons she couldn’t explain, she decided to trust this slightly
frightening man with the truth.

She explained how she first had become
interested in Centsurety and how her interest had grown and shifted
when she found the pix that showed a woman that looked like her
mother. Did he know if her mother worked there? Had her mother been
married before? Was her name ever Winslow? Someone named Roan
Winslow, who looked a lot like her mother, supposedly had died in
an explosion. What did he know about that? Did he remember much
about a man named Glen Laureby and what he was doing, the kind of
science he was doing? Did he have any pix from that time? Or, any
articles, or records?

When she began to ask another question,
Burgey held up a hand, a hand with fingers thin as pencils and as
gnarled as twigs, a hand that reminded Prissi of the hands of Dr.
Smarkzy and Joshua Fflowers. The old man kept the hand up, as if to
ward off any more questions, even as he disappeared into the
house.

While she waited, Prissi became so agitated
that her butt started bouncing on the railing. Her excitement waned
however, when, rather than returning with a box or worn leather
flash screen, as she had imagined, Burgey re-emerged with a
tattered red cloak covering his wings. He drew one of the faded,
gray plastic perches close to Prissi, flared his wings and
perched.

“May I see the picture…do you mind if I date
myself by calling it a picture?”

Prissi pulled the pix from her kanga. She
pointed, “This is the woman who looks like my mother, but Dr.
Baudgew tells me that she can’t possibly be my mother because she
died in an explosion.”

“Baudgew?”

“Yes, I just came from seeing him. He said
this woman is dead.”

Al Burgey took the paper from Prissi’s finger
and studied it for a long moment before handing it back.

“Sleeping dogs stir. Of which some may have a
vicious bite. I wish that you might have come to see me before
seeing Dr. Baudgew. He’s not a nice man. Do you know I believe that
I may have a picture taken on the same day?”

“Could I see it?”

As soon as she blurted out her wish, Prissi’s
eyes were drawn to the darkness behind the front door. With
everything that had happened over the last day, she figured that
her luck gauge must be close to empty. Al Burgey’s lipless mouth
twitched in the smallest of smiles.

“Wary, are we?” he tutted as he moved his
head back and forth in a way that reminded Prissi of a
metronome.

“Not trustworthy, am I?”

“I don’t know. I’m just nervous. Ever since I
started looking into this I’ve been having trouble. Like I’ve
stirred something up that I shouldn’t have.”

“I believe you may have. Did you find
anything else interesting among your mother’s things besides my
letters to her?”

“No, just some pix, your letters to her and
the notebook.”

“Nothing else?”

“No, nothing.”

“That may be for the best.”

“Except for a piece of jewelry.”

“Hmmm. Can you describe it?”

Prissi brightened, “I’m wearing it.”

“May I see it?”

Prissi hesitated for a second before reaching
under her vest and lifting the spiral crystal over her head. The
ancient hand darted forward and opened just enough that she could
drop it in. Burgey brought the bright object close to his brighter
eyes and studied it. When Prissi tentatively stuck her hand out for
the crystal, Burgey’s hand closed tight. Holding the bauble in his
crippled fist, he brought his hand to his lips and tapped them
before he asked, “Did you show this to Dr. Baudgew?”

“No. I didn’t even mention my mother. He was
too graggy. I didn’t trust him.”

“Are you sure that he couldn’t have seen it
around your neck?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t see how.”

Burgey closed his eyes and cocked his head in
a way that reminded Prissi of people at a Brahms’ concert. When his
head finally straightened, Burgey pointed a finger at Prissi.

“Have you seen the newz? Joshua Fflowers is
dying.”

The geri’s words shot Prissi off the
railing.

“How can that be? I just saw him a couple of
days ago. It’s how all of this got started.”

“His body is not accepting what his mind
conjured. Something many of us have endured.”

The ancient man looked at his crippled hands
before raising the one closed over the crystal to his ear as if he
were trying to hear something. The effulgent eyes clouded over.
Finally, Burgey’s head nodded as if in affirmation of a decision he
had made. When he eased himself off his perch, it took a second for
him to get his balance. Noting Prissi’s concern, he said bitterly,
“A tetch of ALS. Wait.”

“But, my….”

“Wait!”

Prissi was surprised by how commanding the
old man’s voice was. He slowly turned and disappeared into the
gloom behind the door. In the ten minutes that he was gone, Prissi
input a couple of options into her mypod for getting home. She
could fly straight across the Hudson, or she could fly north,
shadow the George Washington Bridge, and fly back south along the
west edge of the city. The first option was much shorter; the
second much safer.

Just about the time Prissi thought that the
geri wasn’t coming back, Al Burgey pushed his way out the door.
Prissi was confounded to see that one of Burgey’s gnarled hands
held a small beaded bag, red and black and seemingly identical to
the one Prissi had found in her mother’s tote. Burgey tipped his
palm to offer it to Prissi. She opened the bag and freed its
contents. A crystal fell into her hand. Prissi frowned. When she
looked up, the geri opened his other hand and said, “Here is
yours.”

At first glance, the crystals were twins.

“Take it. Just be careful. Very careful, as,
now, unfortunately, must I. You may be putting a key into a
treasure chest, but, more likely, you are sticking your hand in a
bee’s best. I shouldn’t be doing this, but with Joshua Fflowers
dying, this might be the right time.”

“But what is it? What’s going on? What kind
of bee’s nest? What…”

The old man slowly shook his head.

“Trinity.”

He started to say something more, then,
stopped. Finally, he just said, “Stars align.”

“Stars benign.”

Burgey shook his head again, “Or, all too
often, malign.”

Even though Prissi had no idea what was going
on and had a dozen questions she wanted to ask, she slowly dropped
her crystal over her neck. She looked at the one Burgey had just
given her, Rather than chancing having the two of them around her
neck bang against one another, she started to put it back into the
beaded bag, but the old man reached out, snatched the bag from her,
and slipped it into his pocket.

“Something to hold secrets.”

Prissi dropped the second crystal into her
kanga and tapped her chest, “You have even more?”

“I’m an old man. All old men have secrets.
Secrets and memories…treasures and curses…but mostly great
regrets.”

Prissi tried again, “What secrets? What
treasures? What’s going on?”

“Be very careful. Be very smart…but not too
smart. Go! Go, now!”

Feeling more emotion than she wanted to feel,
Prissi nodded sharply and said, “Thank you so much.”

“We’ll see.”

When Prissi leaned forward with the thought
to shake his hand, Burgey jerked back so quickly, he fell against
the door.

“Go. Go. Before I change my mind.”

And, even though she had no idea of what had
just happened, Prissi went.

Strikes Twice

After the girl had left him, Dicky Baudgew
had thoughtfully scratched his cheeks with the long yellow nails
growing from his short pale pink fingers.

Baudgew once had been quite rich. Unlike many
twenty-first century scientists, who had accumulated great wealth
because they had invented something useful and, somehow, despite
the odds and all the lawyers, had been able to maintain their
intellectual property, Dicky had made his money by being a manager
and manipulator of scientists for Joshua Fflowers. Early on in his
success, Joshua Fflowers had decided that it made more sense to
make one corporate pit bull rich than to allow dozens of scientists
to rob him blind.

Fflowers had made Baudgew rich once, but he
saw no need to repeat his largesse. Unfortunately for Dicky, a long
life and a largish number of vices had greatly reduced his means.
He still had nice things, but, he knew, that unless something
changed, he wouldn’t be getting any more.

The things he did have—furniture, art,
rugs—meant too much to Dicky for him even to consider selling them.
Instead, as his cash flow slowed to a trickle, he had moved from a
ten-room Central Park West apartment with park and river views to
six rooms in Spicetown with a fifth floor view of petty poverty and
crime. Since Dicky was a realist, he had accommodated himself to
his changed circumstances but, since he could not prevent the
occasional dream, he had not accepted them.

Before Dicky met them, Joshua Flowers and
Elena Howe had been employed as post-doctoral researchers by
Reiklein and Grammai, a team of Cold Spring Harbor primaries. At
the time, much scientific research resembled investment banking.
The people with lots of good ideas rarely had the money to carry
them out. The people with lots of money rarely had good ideas. The
principal researchers had gone to Grant Larkston, who had agreed to
put up fifty million dollars to fund research into the
possibilities of curing certain late-presenting hereditary diseases
by insinuating a genetic splice into the patient during the
bio-chemical turmoil that was present during puberty. The Reiklein
and Grammai’s thesis was that hereditary diseases were a mutation,
but of a very minor scale compared to the mutation that took place
in pubescent teenagers as they were transformed from children to
adults. Their strategy was to piggyback their defect-altering
genetic changes onto the natural changes occurring during
puberty.

Within a year the team had made enough
progress to be sure they were on the right path. Larkston was
pleased at their rapid progress. It was in the second year that an
outcome of one of Elena Howe’s experiments and an insight by
Fflowers as to the commercial importance of that finding led those
two to leave Cold Spring Harbor.

In the following year, Reiklein and Grammai
announced their breakthrough —thousands of lives could be improved
by the techniques they had developed. The two researchers, Cold
Spring Harbor, and Larkston shared ownership of the patented
processes. The researchers would make millions, Cold Spring Harbor
would make tens of millions and Larkston would make hundreds of
millions. Everyone was very happy….

…Until less than four years later, when
Fflowers stunned the world by having fourteen-year old Brianna Brim
fly above Cheney Stadium and land on the fifty yard-line during
halftime of the Superbowl LI. The millennial dream, humans flying
freely, was realized…could be realized…for a price not much more
than the cost of a year’s college tuition…well, the cost at a very
good college.

Then, everyone was unhappy. Larkston and CSH
sued. They argued that the meta-mutant techniques and procedures
leading to flight should be theirs because Joshua Flowers and Elena
Howe had derived the fledging process from the original research.
It took three years, but Fflowers prevailed. Reiklein and Grammai
got a footnote in some textbooks about meta-mutancy, a number of
legal citations and a bitterness that lasted the rest of their
lives. Larkston got a laboratory at CSH named after him. Fflowers
got fame, fortune and Dicky Baudgew to make sure that no scientist
ever did to Joshua Fflowers what he and Elena had done to Reiklein
and Grammai.

By the time Fflowers was thirty-nine, he was
the richest man in the world. And one of the most benevolent.
Despite being born poor, Fflowers did not hoard his wealth. He gave
huge amounts to Bissell, much more than the already richly endowed
school had ever received before from an alumni. He gave money to
Yale and MIT, his alma maters, and even to Cold Spring Harbor. His
fortune funded billions of eurollars of CE research. For the
recipients of those grants, the only requirement was to take big
chances. Those individuals and the organizations they worked for,
usually universities were given all rights to whatever came from
their efforts; however the story was very different at Cygnetics
and its many subsidiaries. Dicky Baudgew’s job was to make sure
that whatever the scientists at Fflower’s companies developed, that
the financial benefits of those efforts stayed with Fflowers.

Dicky had found that his snaky charm and
well-honed manipulative skills were usually enough to keep
productive scientists working for Cygnetics. When those skills
weren’t enough, Dicky had added a certain subtle menace, which,
because it was so subtle, got and kept people’s attention.

At the time, Baudgew took great satisfaction
in the power he wielded as Director of Research. He was good at
finding the scientists, usually young, with the most promise and
matching them up so that a synergy was created.

Dicky Baudgew loved a puzzle and keeping
successes coming out of Fflowers lab had, for a long time, been the
best puzzle of his life. Dicky loved everything about his job
except for standing in Joshua Fflowers’ shadow. Fflowers wealth
rankled, but what rankled more was the fact, and Dicky knew without
a doubt that it was a fact, that he, Dicky Baudgew, was far smarter
than Joshua Fflowers. Dicky coped by swallowing his anger when he
was around Fflowers and spewing it about when he was not. As a
result, Dicky’s power and wealth grew, although not as fast as his
dissatisfaction. Then, when things turned bad in the aftermath of
the Etruscan Project and the destruction of Centsurety, Fflowers
swept Dicky Baudgew aside with all the care of a hash house
waitress cleaning a table.