Flight (45 page)

Prissi took a last breath, exhaled and should
have launched herself.

But, her wings refused to move.

Freeieekin coward. C’mon, you freeieekin
traitors, flap. Now. Flap.

Prissi had a vision of teal chenille slippers
flapping down a hall.

C’mon.

Finally, Prissi’s wings responded.

A couple of minutes later she was high enough
to see that the land ahead was an unending carpet of what she had
just left. Looking at kilometers after kilometer of brier and brush
caused the girl’s newly regained courage to falter.

Flap. Dambit. Flap….

…And Prissi flapped and flew, and when her
thigh cramped, she let it cramp until it was drawn up almost to her
chest and she was screaming and she still flew. And when the sun
hurtled to the ground and the treetops were painted in a rose that
quickly darkened to red and then wine, she still flew. And when the
treetops faded away under night shadow, Prissi canted her wings and
flew higher and higher until, when she looked back over her
shoulder, she could see nothing but a long string of blackish red,
like a stream of cooling lava, on the western horizon far behind
her. She flew high, and, then, higher, until the cold chattered her
teeth, shivered her body, and distracted her from the cramps in her
thighs. She flew over a long straight strand of seed pearls glowing
north and south all the way to the water. She assumed that necklace
of lights marked the outer edge of the Pale, the end of
civilization. And still she flew.

Once past that point of no return, Prissi
flew even higher. But, as high as Prissi flew, she could see
nothing in all in the darkness before her. Not a single light. No
silvery string of stream. No darker patch of black.

Prissi flew and flew until she got to a place
where she knew that this would be the very last time she would ever
fly. And she flew and thought about her mother and father and what
it would be like, if it would be like anything, when she flew far
enough to be where they had gone. And she flew through the cold and
in darkness and flew until she passed through a gate that opened
her memories of the ineffable joy of flight, of the indescribable
welcome of being in an empty space high above the earth, without a
single soul in sight. High and free of…orange wingers, free of
Africa’s burnt shanties and bloat-bellied babies and mangy jackals
and the swirling earth-bound clouds of red dust and black smoke,
free of Noramica’s greed and power and two-faced friends, free of
mystery and adventure, free of the drudgery of…everything. And,
despite the pain and the fire in her lung and the spasms in her
limbs, Prissi Langue flew in perfect contentment.

And when her right wing popped free and
flapped to its own silent song, Prissi felt only joy. She laughed
at how at peace she was. Then, on a whim, she twisted her good wing
down and flew an off-kilter loop. Laughed more and did a second,
then a third and fourth loop—more than she had ever done before and
done so fast and so well that she had no idea, nor even cared,
whether she was flying up, down or sideways, still headed east or
headed back from where she just had come, or headed straight
down.

Laughing. Laughing in a way that reminded her
of the excited cackle of hyenas.

Prissi pulled her working wing tight to her
body and let gravity tell her which way was down. Then, as she
plummeted to the earth, she noticed a small break in the clouds
letting the moon hidden behind those clouds light a narrow patch of
earth.

In desperation, Prissi flung out her wing.
The wind nearly tore it off. She flapped, but with just one wing,
her flight could only be unstable and disordered. She reached over
with both hands and pushed up on her dislocated right wing.
Dislocated, but not completely useless. Like a luffing sail, it
caught the wind, filled, and she began a slip-sliding glide toward
the large patch of not quite black.

A sudden desire to come to that differently
dark place, a desire stronger than anything she could remember ever
wanting except her mother, swept over her. Prissi knew that only in
a poetical sense would she ever get to her destination. Her
altitude, her speed, her floundering wing and her dwindling energy
could not get her there.

A noise as hysterical as the laughter she had
made before, but sad, sputtered through her lips.

Prissi squeezed her eyes tightly shut, dark
against dark, gave a desperate click of her heels, and flapped with
her one wing toward her fate.

Death Rattles and Riddles

Even though it had been had been two years
since Olewan had talked to Mortos, when she heard the pounding on
the door she knew its cause. When Santos first grew sick, she and
the leader of the centaurs had seen each other almost every day.
But since the time that Santos, knowing that any help that Olewan
might give to him would be only a palliative, went back into the
Green to die, Mortos had come back to the Bury just a handful of
times. Each time after that, his expressed purpose had been to
report on Santos’ further decline, but his real purpose had been
first to inveigle, then to petition, later to demand and, finally,
to plead that Olewan use her science and skills to do what was
necessary to prevent the extinction of his species.

On those days when Mortos’ anger grew to
where his hooves stomped the pitted concrete floors of the Bury and
his long ebony tail flailed the walls of the anteroom of her
laboratory, Olewan always offered the aging centsur an open face
and sympathetic words. That apparently caring face, however, hid a
cold closed heart.

While Mortos talked of extinction of a
species, Olewan anticipated the proper end of an aberration, the
dark folly, a horrific hubristic experiment .

When Olewan was Elena Howe and first learned
what her husband, Joshua Fflowers, wanted to accomplish with his
collection of young cutting edge scientists in his cutting edge
facility, she had been more amused than horrified. The night Joshua
told her that he had decided to call his new venture Centsurety
because he was confident his people surely would be able both to
develop centaurs and to add a century to a person’s life, she had
laughed at his arrogance. Now, even more than a half-century later,
she could remember how she had ridiculed him—why not dream bigger
dreams: hippocampi and amphisbaena, and Minotaurs, Sirens and
harpies? She had laced her sarcasm with near-hysterical laughter as
she had asked why he was so eager to step outside the bounds of
science, where he was treated as a god, into the role of God, where
he assuredly would be treated as a fool, freak, felon, or all
three.

Her husband’s answer was the one that
explorers had used from time immemorial, an answer that brooked
neither doubt nor interference: If it could be done, it should and
would be done. When Elena had shaken her head at the absolute
folly, the unmitigated arrogance of what he was proposing, Joshua
Fflowers had taken her hand, and, as he had done successfully so
many times during the twenty years of their romance and marriage,
begged that she help him just one more time. And, when, for the
very first time, she had resisted his will, he had promised her
that it would be his last request. He had promised that if she
would use all of her great gifts to achieve his final dream, then
anything he could give, he would give to her.

Elena Howe had gripped the warm strong
fingers of the remarkable and complicated man who was her husband,
had looked into his mischievous brown eyes, which returned her
stare without wavering, and had said, “I want your time and our
baby.” One child, two, twelve, could be got from the eggs harvested
from her womb before that organ had been removed because of a
different kind of growth.

She had asked, and her husband, lover,
colleague, friend had answered. As the warmest smile split his
face, Joshua Fflowers had said, “That, and more, my Elena.”

To invent the centaurs, Elena, joined by
Vartan Smarkzy, had worked, and wrestled and, finally, had
discovered the master key. They took that key and linked it to
seven minor keys other Centsurety teams had seduced from nature.
Putting all their work together, the scientists had ended with a
dozen embryos which Darwin would have been hard put to explain.

Joshua Fflowers, who over those years had
become a mix of Prussian ringmaster and dark cheerleader, was
beyond joy. After a day, or many days, of doing the things he had
to do for Cygnetics to continue to grow and to keep its status as
the world’s most profitable business, he would roto out from
Manhattan to Cold Spring Harbor, burst into the lab and stare at
the twelve little worlds wherein his dreams grew. Stare and rejoice
until the things in the jar died. There had been cycle after cycle
of joy and grief as one generation of embryonic centaurs died and a
next generation was grown.

While one myth was being made real by Smarkzy
and Elena, a far older, far more powerful myth was being pursued by
Roan Winslow and Glen Laureby. After three years of false leads and
blind alleys, they, too, had a breakthrough. A major, though
seriously flawed, breakthrough. That breakthrough was so important
that it was shared with no one but Joshua Fflowers.

With remarkable progress being made on his
two dreams, Joshua Fflowers was so filled with largesse that he
decided to give Elena an even better gift than the two she had
wished for. On Elena’s forty-fifth birthday, Joshua Fflowers threw
a party at the Centsurety lab. It was a perfect party for
Elena—beer and hotdogs and hamburgers on a grill with music from
the ancients—Meatloaf, Mayall, and Mayer. Fflowers made an effusive
toast to Elena, the rose compass of his soul, while the partygoers
toasted with small glasses before drinking the aquavit they
contained. Late that night, Fflowers, although angered that Roan
Winslow had already left and would miss the toast, gathered
Smarkzy, Elena, and Laureby, together. He offered them small
glasses of what he said was the rarest aquavit, the water of life,
in the world, and toasted their genius.

When the party was over, he whisked Elena
away.

Three days later Elena awoke to her gift—she
was the first person in the world to be given wing transplants.

As a result of Fflower’s gift, Elena’s two
wishes, for a child and Fflower’s time, were never fulfilled.
Repulsed at his arrogance—how could someone who said he loved her
have her body cut and carved to fasten on a dead person’s
wings—Elena plotted a fitting revenge.

She would take what he valued most—she would
take his dreams by destroying the centaur embryos, the Centsurety
research and the laboratory that created them. She would take his
future by substituting the clutch of her eggs stored in the
Centsurety lab. Finally, she would take what he often said he
valued most—herself, especially her brains, and disappear.

Elena had no doubt that what she planned to
do to Joshua Fflowers was more than justified, but, as she readied
her plans, she realized that the consequences of her actions might
not be permanent. She could kill the embryos, but as long as
Smarkzy had knowledge of the processes, more centaurs could be
created.

When Elena talked to Vartan Smarkzy, she
found him to be as horrified at what Joshua Fflowers had done to
her as she was herself. Horrified, yes, but not quite ready to
sacrifice his career and, given how megalomaniacal Fflowers was,
perhaps, his life.

To win Smarkzy over, Elena told him of the
discovery made by Roan Winslow and Glen Laureby. While that
definitely shifted Smarkzy’s thinking, it wasn’t until Fflowers
announced that liquid they had toasted with on the night of her
birthday was truly aquavit—the water of life, that Smarkzy became
Elena’s ally. Standing before that small group of phenomenal
scientists, Fflowers, the arrogant arbiter of their lives, told
them how humbled he was by their intelligence, their creativity,
and their persistence. Seeing them, their work, their results, had
inspired him. Fflowers told them how he had taken the output of
Winslow and Laureby’s research, linked it with human growth
hormone, and, here he brought his fingers to his lips like a video
chef, made a recipe for long life. It was his secret triumph. He
had to admit to all of them. He was jealous of what they did. As
Cygnetics had grown, he had had to spend more time in hyper-kinetic
corporate offices and quiet banker lairs. He missed the excitement
of the lab. He had wanted to prove to himself that he could still
do science. Real science. Eye-popping, paradigm shifting, capital
S, Science.

He had tested this miraculous mixture, which
had spilled from his unconscious, on mice, rabbits and dogs. The
mice had lived almost twenty percent beyond their expected life
expectancy…and he was sure the rabbits and dogs would do as well.
They might think he had rushed things, but it was important to have
the gift be ready for the birthday party. He apologized that he had
not discovered the secret of everlasting life. No, nothing so
grand. Just the much more modest gift of probably twenty more years
of this glorious thing life. He knew that he had taken three years
of their lives in round-the-clock research. He was eternally
grateful for what they had done. To repay them, he gave them back
those years many fold.

Olewan’s head shook back and forth as she
recalled how happy, and apparently guileless, Joshua Fflowers had
been while the recipients of his largess fought off panic.

Olewan’s head continued to shake. The ironic
thing was that their fears had been both on target and misplaced.
Now, Olewan was almost twenty years beyond her expected lifespan.
As was Fflowers. She knew from her last message from Glen Laureby
that Smarkzy still lived. All of those who had unknowingly drunk
Fflower’s elixir had lived longer than their peers, but she
wondered how much gratitude they had for that extra score since it
had been spent with twisted hands and feet and atrophied muscles.
Longevity, like flight, had come at a price.