Flight (33 page)

A Pleasant Surmise

Dicky Baudgew felt like he was ten years old
again. His father, his dull, dumb father who, despite his nearly
absolute lack of mental gifts, hated to lose, once again had swept
the checkerboard from the kitchen table rather than admit
defeat.

Dicky stared at the notebook that nestled in
his hands. He had spent hours reading through Roan Winslow’s notes
and formulas. He had made sense of much of it, but rather than
feeling triumphant, the information he had decoded had only made
him hungrier. The notebook, a small consolation prize after the
morning’s rather dramatic activities, contained some of the science
Trinity had developed to extend life, but certainly not all, nor
even most. The puzzle remained.

Eternal life had been a multi-millennial
dream. What Trinity had created did not achieve that dream, but it
did triple a person’s lifespan. When Fflowers had first told him
about the Centsurety project, Dicky Baudgew had wondered what
better dreams could be dreamed with two hundred more years to dream
them. However, when the original life extension science that
Trinity had developed, while still critically imperfect, had been
hi-jacked by Joshua Fflowers, who had made a gift of it to favored
few, Dicky had seen how dreams could turn to nightmares.
Fortunately, Dicky Baudgew was not among the cursed select. For
that snub, he was grateful because Joshua Fflowers’ generosity had
proven to be a bit of a Trojan gift. The lucky ones, the Chosen
Few, had been given decades more years of life but at the price of
even more decades of a crab-like crippling. The Ugly Dwarf and his
friends grew uglier.

By the time of the explosion, Trinity had
already gone far beyond the imperfect version which Fflowers had
misused. Exceptional scientists that they were, the members of
Trinity had analyzed their errors and corrected them. The notes
indicated that. Trinity was sure that it had found the answers. The
secret of long life, centuries’ long life and all the puzzles that
might bring. By studying Roan Winslow’s notes, which his people had
found in the girl’s apartment while the father was off watching
over her at the hospital, Dicky could decode enough to surmise that
the solution involved the FOXO3A gene. He remembered that the FOX
gene had been identified early in the century with clusters of
long-lived Japanese Americans in Hawaii. Some of the sketches Dicky
found led him to believe that Trinity had found a way to wrap a
complicated prion-derived architecture around the FOX gene. What
that structure was, and, more importantly, how is had been built,
Dicky didn’t know because what Dicky held in his hand was an
expurgated, a seriously expurgated, version of Trinity’s work.
Dicky thought how, like Leonardo and so many other scientists
before her, Roan Winslow must have been a non-trusting soul. Her
notes were in code. Code was fine with Dicky Baudgew. After all,
there had been many reasons at Centsurety for mistrust. And, Dicky,
of course, liked a puzzle. But, a puzzle, to be fair, had to have
all of the pieces necessary to solve it. The pages torn from Roan
Winslow’s note book suggested that this puzzle wasn’t fair. Dicky
got angry when things weren’t fair.

Dicky’s fingers ran along the chad that
remained from where pages had been ripped from the back of the book
before he flicked the notebook onto his escritoire.

To dampen his anger, the little geri took a
shallow breath.

If offered the chance to add two hundred more
years of life, would he take it? He let his breath out. For once,
he didn’t know. It suddenly hit him that longer life to a jade like
himself might not be a gift. At the odd, self-pitying moment, he
had sometimes wondered whether the twenty extra years the gods
curiously had already allowed him were meant as Olympian gift or
gag. What he did know for certain was that billions of people would
exercise the option of to extend their lives if given the choice.
There also was no doubt in Dicky Baudgew’s mind that every
government on earth would do what it had to keep its citizens from
getting that chance. Long life might be a tremendous good for an
individual, but it would bring nothing but trouble for a
society.

Dicky stood in front of his full-length
rococo gilt mirror. He extended his tiny pink fleshy hands to his
twin.

“Would you like to live to be three hundred
years old?”

Dicky sucked his ancient bee-stung lips,
another work of art he had acquired during his oriental exile,
inside his mouth and opened his eyes ingénue-wide. In a high
simpering voice he exclaimed, “I would! I would!”

Relaxing his face back to that of an old man,
he asked, “Would you be willing to go to work for another two
hundred years so that your longevity does not become a burden to
your family, community or nation?”

The ingénue returned to the mirror, but she
seemed somewhat hesitant, indecisive and, from Dicky’s viewpoint,
angry at the injustice that the responsibility for her longer life
should devolve onto her.

When there was no response, Dicky asked a
follow-up question, “Would you be willing to be neutered, or if you
already have had children, would you be willing to have those
children neutered, so that Dear Mother Earth is not destroyed by
over-population?”

The ingénue’s mouth twitched.

“Are your children, if you have children,
going to be happy if, either you outlive them, or if they must wait
two hundred years longer for their inheritance?”

The ingénue disappeared and old, clever Dicky
Baudgew was staring at his laughing lovely self.

The road to hell was paved with good
inventions.

Dicky’s raucous laugh skittered around his
dusty, shopworn seraglio like a cockroach in a can.

Catastrophic Consequences

The black sky was lightened with small gray
clouds, like fingerprint smudges, when Prissi landed in the
overgrown back yard of a burned-out house three blocks away from
Allen Burgey’s home. Despite her exhaustion, the winger scurried
across the yard to hide in the deeper shadows of the skeletal
remains of the back porch. As she waited for her breathing to slow,
she listened.

She had flown from Nancy’s with her
flite-lites off, which if she had been caught, would have cost her
her license for a year. Since it was long past rush hour, there had
not been a lot of wingers in the air. In fact, there had been so
few, that it had been relatively easy for her to slalom back and
forth to keep away from the paths of the other flyers without going
too far astray from her flight plan. As she flew, to keep bad
thoughts from coming, Prissi had focused on the beauty of the
night.

The lights of other flyers seemed to flicker
on and off as their wings beat up and down in a way that reminded
Prissi of those nights in Dutton’s soccer fields when they were
constellated with fireflies. On the ground far beneath her,
thousands of lights of all colors and forms glowed—the algae green
parallel lines of the aquaphorous street lights, round red ladybug
taillights chasing after the blue white beams of headlights. The
random pattern of yellow, white and blue vid screens made houses
look like space stations.

Like many other fledglings, when Prissi first
began to fly at night, especially when she was away from the lumen
intensity of the city, she would sometimes become disoriented and
think that the lights below were the heavens above. Her flight
instructor had called that kind of disorientation sirening. This
night in her flight there had been many moments of confusion, but
none were about what was earth and what was sky. When those
wrenching moments had tried to overwhelm her, Prissi had fought
back by using the lights, the numbing chill of the air, the clean
smell high above the earth and the infinite shades of black and
blues above and below her as weapons.

Arriving over Verona, the newly cautious
Prissi had circled over Burgey’s dark and apparently empty and
unharmed house twice before deciding to land in the overgrown yard
behind the stark remains of a nearby burned-out house.

Ten minutes after landing, Prissi was calmer
and re-invigorated. And more confident. Her flight and
reconnaissance hadn’t attracted anyone’s attention. With her wings
slightly flared to keep them from rustling, Prissi began hop
scotching from shadow to shadow back toward Burgey’s house. Having
reasoned that if anyone were expecting her, it would be from the
air, she had decided to make her way on foot; however since most of
the homes were likely to have MDs or secu-cams, she was very
careful as she made her way along the winding street. Bars of
light, like spectral marimba, hung in the dark outside
steel-shuttered windows. From the colors of the bands of light,
Prissi could tell which rooms held vid screens—wall-sized screens
filled with the life of the world outside brought inside to edify
and entertain the vidiots hidden behind their secured windows.

Burgey’s house was dark and, as she had
noticed during her first visit, ridiculously under-secured. She
couldn’t see a single motion detector. When Prissi found a small
window at the back of the house unlocked, her first thought was
that Burgey was either senile or dangerously defiant. Her second
thought was that maybe the window was unlocked because it had been
forced open by whoever had killed the old man. That thought led to
whether the killer might still be in the house. Which led to
Prissi’s wondering why there was no evidence that the hawks had
been at the house. Which led to being slammed full force when it
suddenly hit her that it was still the same day she had begun in a
hospital bed. Which led to the thought that she was leaving a
parade of physical evidence on a house that contained an
undiscovered dead man.

Prissi took her fingers off the window sill
and let them float there as she tried to guess which of the
possibilities she had just enumerated were most likely to be
true.

Finally, the lure of finding something—debit
card, credit card, uni-stamps, jewelry, even cash, and, least
likely, but most valued, an explanation—pulled her through the
window.

She landed with her head up, back arched,
wings tightly compressed and her hands deep in a sink of dirty
dishes. Despite feeling incredibly vulnerable, she snorted when it
struck her that she probably looked like a lizard waiting for its
lunch to come buzzing over a swamp. Prissi worked her hands out of
the sink onto the counter’s edge, then, slithered forward until all
of her was on the kitchen floor. Being careful to protect her
wings, Prissi got to her knees and pulled herself up using the
chipped edge of the ancient granite counter top. Once up, she took
a deep breath.

The house smelled like one of those mixed
scents that has no name—dust, lonely cooking, skin flakes, ancient
soap, loss, bitterness—Prissi flailed her arms in a sweeping
crisscross to stop her list of adjectives. She told herself that
before she got too deeply involved in the quality of the old man’s
emotional life, she should determine whether his body was still in
the house. Although she could feel fear sniffing around her, she
reminded herself of all the bodies she had seen in Africa dead from
unease, disease and worse.

The LEDs of a half-dozen appliances emitted
enough light that Prissi could see an archway leading out of the
kitchen. Standing just behind the arch, she could make out a large
ovoid shadow. Gliding into the darker space of what she assumed was
the dining-room, she stared at the bee-hive hut until it revealed
itself to be an oval dining room table stacked high with papers. A
second archway at the far side of the dining room led to a hallway.
Prissi tiptoed forward. To the right was the front door. To the
left, a couple of meters back, a steep staircase led to the second
floor. Prissi slunk across the hallway and paused under the arch to
the room beyond. She opened her eyes wide, then, squinted as she
tried to see into the blackness of what she assumed was a living
room. So little light came through the heavy curtains from the
street aquaphors that Prissi could not make out more than an
indistinction of black and even blacker shapes. She had just
started to ease into the room when she heard a noise.

The high strung girl froze. The noise was so
slight that in the ensuing silence she wasn’t even sure she had
heard anything. But, the prickling of her skin told her better than
her ears that she was not alone in the house. Her heart started
pounding so furiously that she was sure it was going to cause her
feathers to rustle.

There.

Definitely something.

A step.

And again. And this time Prissi was almost
sure the noise was coming from behind her. From the dining room.
The thought that she had walked past someone hiding behind a door
or curtain caused her stomach to surge up and down like a dinghy in
a following sea. She slid into the living room knowing as she did
so that she was going farther away from any means of escape.

She tentatively touched the first shadow
before her.

Leather.

She carefully skirted left even though she
was terrified that she was going to catch a foot against one of the
chair’s legs or something the old man had left on the floor—a
mahjong set, a huge bag of marbles, a set of cymbals, or a ten
pound bag of potato chips.

The snigger at the idea of stumbling onto a
hassock-sized bag of potato chips, something she had already done
earlier in the day, with a murderer in pursuit was past Prissi’s
lips before she could squeeze them tight. She knew, now for sure,
that she was hysterical.

A small clicking sound. Coming closer. Pause.
Closer.

Prissi took two more steps. Suddenly,
something touched her leg. She lurched away. Her knee caught the
edge of a table. As she hurtled forward, the black was torn by a
horrible shriek. Prissi threw out her arms to break her fall. The
table and whatever was on it fell with a loud crash. She landed on
the floor. Something landed on her for a split second. Then, was
gone.