Flight (6 page)

“Yes.”

As Fflowers sent the man on his way, he
wondered when the little enthusiast last had sent a eurollar to the
school. His gaze drifted back to Dowdahl’s starched stomach. The
excursus continued.

Another hand took Fflowers. He shook and
smiled and shifted his thoughts to something much more
pleasant…Smarkzy. Being back with his oldest friend had been the
high point of the day. He and Vartan had come to Bissell the same
year, 2001. Smarkzy, the sophisticated only son of a New York
investment banker—a banker famous for taking outrageous risks on
untried technologies and earning even more outrageous rewards— had
befriended the poor scholarship student escaping from the skeletal
remains of a Massachusetts mill-town. They met in a Latin class
and, despite their differences in background, found they had much
in common. Both hated sports, abhorred the sweating, swearing
camaraderie. Both loved science—tearing back the veil to reveal
Nature’s close-kept secrets. Both thought the Greeks and Romans,
their art, literature, and history to be far more engaging than the
current product. Vartan was smart, well-bred, well-read, quick with
a quip, slow with a judgment. Smarkzy was…suddenly, the ruminations
stopped. At the edge of Fflowers’ peripheral vision, but no more
than a dozen handshakes away, was his grandson, Jack.

A small hand, a small distraction.

“Thank you for your kind act.”

“Thank you for your kind words.”

As the next well-wisher approached, Fflowers
looked at Jack, but thought about Jack’s father and his uncle.
Joshua Fflowers despised both his sons, the younger one, Illiya,
for being an indecisive moralist, the older one, Adaman, one for
being immoral. He cared little for his grandson, Illiya’s son, Joe,
but Fflowers truly enjoyed his time with his grandson Jack. Jack
reminded the centenarian of how he was when he was young. Brash,
devious, charming, bright, but not afraid of those who were
brighter.

The next few guests, whatever they might have
given or pledged to the school, got their money’s worth from Joshua
Fflowers—a firm though twisted grip, funny words, a twinkle in the
eye. Fflowers charmed like he had eighty years before when,
penniless, he had sought to loosen any number of purse-strings to
pursue his mad idea.

* * *

As they shuffled forward along the
slow-moving line, Prissi studied the famous old man while Jack told
her how close he was to one of the world’s three trillionaires.
Jack spent a lot of time at the Airie, Fflowers’ Manhattan
penthouse at the southern end of Central Park on The Plaza Plaza.
Jack had traveled to Europe and Russasia with his grandfather
during school and summer breaks while it still had been relatively
easy for the old man to travel. Jack amused the wealthy old man.
Although she had no reason to doubt Jack, from the physical changes
she was watching unfold on the old man’s face, Prissi was sure that
Jack’s relationship with Joshua Fflowers must be much more
complicated than he was letting on.

As they had advanced in the line, Prissi had
been watching the icon of fledging, the most famous scienpreneur of
the century. He had been bored, then, after he had seen Jack coming
his way, he had become more animated. Suddenly, the trillionaire
had become extremely agitated. His head was bobbing and twitching,
and Prissi was sure she could see a tremor in his hands. The curve
of his mouth changed so that the smile became a rictus.

Turning her mouth toward Jack’s ear, Prissi
whispered, “Is this going to be okay?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Look. He seems epic upset.”

Jack looked, then, laughed, “Probably just
frantic that it’s taking so long to see me.”

When Prissi stepped hard on his foot, Jack
continued, “Or besotted by your beauty.”

“Jack, be serious. Look. He looks horrible.
He could CPUke in a second.”

* * *

In a different, less current language,
Fflowers was thinking many of the same thoughts as Prissi. He
thought what black-humored poetic justice it would be if he were to
die, his central processor apoplectic, at the dedication of a
building he had endowed with the sole thought of nurturing students
whose brains were capable of re-discovering something miraculous he
had caused to be lost so many years before. What Greek theater it
would be, if, at the moment of his death, he should be brought back
together with the person… no, it couldn’t be
the
person, but
a startling mirror image of the person, one of three, who had
wrought the century’s greatest miracle, and wrestled it into the
light before slamming it back into the ignorant dark.

Despite the press of bodies and wheedling
voices around him, Joshua Fflowers could not take his eyes off the
girl talking with Jack.

Moving along with the shuffling sycophants,
laughing with his grandson, was a girl who looked how Elena Howe,
his wife, muse, science partner, and enemy looked when she was
fifteen. The girl’s impossible resemblance to Elena squeezed the
insides of Joshua Fflowers like a heart attack. This Doppelganger
could not be by chance. Somehow, this impossible girl had to share
most of Elena’s double helix, but how? Could she be Elena’s
daughter? Impossible. Rapacious Fate struck twice had taken away
that option. Could she be a niece? Impossible. Elena had had a
sister…Morgana. But, she must be dead thirty years by now. Could
she be a grand-niece and look that much like her? Impossible. A
daughter that couldn’t be. A niece that couldn’t be. The girl
looked too much like Elena to be anything else but a clone. But,
how? And, why? Why now? Why here with Jack?

As the guests in the line shambled along,
like refugees from a war zone, Joshua Fflowers pondered. He and
Elena had never had children. That was a decision, strictly a
temporary decision by Fflowers, to which Elena reluctantly had
agreed. He had argued that they were too caught up in changing the
world with wings. Children could come later. Of course, they had
hedged their bets with frozen eggs and seed. That had been a
prescient move given that Elena was to fight ovarian cancer before
she was thirty-five. But, the eggs had been stored at the lab where
the research for the Centsurety Project had been entering the final
stages. The eggs, the knowledge and processes of Centsurety’s
world-altering discovery, and worst of all, Elena herself had been
lost to him in the explosion which destroyed the lab.

As he had a thousand times over the last
fifty years, Fflowers clamped his jaws tight to keep from
wailing.

By the time Jack and Prissi had their turn,
Joshua Fflowers had recovered enough of his equanimity that he
could do his Midas and Merlin imitations without a misstep.

From two steps away, the girl, whom Jack
introduced as Prissi Langue, even more closely resembled Elena—the
slight epicanthal folds that gave the eyes their almond shape, the
almond theme continued with the Shoshone skull, the slight creases,
eczema markers, under the Venus-bright eyes, the long neck, an
elegant stem for what Fflowers suspected would be a head
overflowing with intelligence and derring-do. The girl was so much
like Elena that he had a barely resistible urge to ask her to take
off her shoes to see if she had elongated toes with the little ones
turned nearly sideways.

Joshua Fflowers held his grandson’s hand as
Jack introduced Prissi.

“Mz. Langue, my pleasure. Have you a
chaperone to protect yourself from my Jack of all traits, bad
traits?”

When the old man winked at her, Prissi felt
an instant freedom. She shook her head, “No, sir. No chaperone.
Just my rapier tongue and Dutton’s shield of honor.”

The old man growled in pleasure like a dog
getting its ears scratched. He felt like he had been yanked back
eighty years to those halcyon days when Elena Howe and he first met
as post-doc students at Cold Spring Harbor.

Joshua Fflowers had rarely slept when he was
a young man. He had felt that he had no time to waste in sleep.
But, he had spent thousands upon thousands of hours in bed thinking
and, in a whisper, recording those thoughts into his mypod with the
serenely sleeping Elena alongside. In those hours, as he had
studied her face in the silver of moon-glow or the amber of street
light, he had done what he considered to be his best thinking—how
to give freedom to humankind and how to cripple those who stood in
his way. As he had thought the thoughts that changed the world, he
had studied Elena’s face pore by porcelain pore. Now, from a meter
away, Fflowers had no doubt that by some mystery, which he swore he
would unravel, the face before him, this wonderful, wily,
intrigued, intriguing, bright, never to be expected face, was,
somehow, protein of Elena’s protein.

“Langue? Are you French? Langue is French for
tongue and the root of the word language.”

“No, sir. I’m from Africa. No French there in
quite awhile.”

The old man tipped his head as he considered
that piece of information.

“And how did you end up at Dutton? Are you a
legacy student?”

“No, sir. My mother died and my father moved
us to New York. After we were here awhile, he decided that I could
get a better education if I went to boarding school.”

Jack interjected, “Well that’s true…if you’re
smart enough to go to the right boarding school.”

Joshua Fflowers held up a hand to stop Jack,
“And, are you getting a better education?’

Prissi nodded her head vigorously, “Dr.
Smarkzy is one of my teachers.”

“Then, you are. Then, you certainly are.”

As he continued to talk to Jack and the girl,
Joshua Fflowers could feel the force of the receiving line grow,
like water building behind a dam. On a powerful whim, he decided he
could get to the institute even later than he already was going to
be. Organ preservation had come a long way. He asked Jack and
Prissi to have dinner with him. When the girl declined, saying that
she had to get back to Dutton, the centenarian felt the rejection
as sharply as a high school boy.

A minute later the teenerz said their
goodbyes—Jack with a hug and the girl with a wide, but enigmatic
smile—and hurried off. Once they were gone, a distracted Joshua
Fflowers hurriedly fed the egos of the rest of the hungering
parade.

As Binny Dowdahl accompanied him to the roto,
Joshua Fflowers rattled off a dozen questions about Jack, Prissi,
and Jack and Prissi. Dowdahl had the right answers about Jack, knew
nothing of Prissi as she wasn’t a Bissell student, and raised his
eyebrows until they resembled the St. Louis arch as answer about
the two of them. When Fflowers asked him to find out what he could,
Bissell’s headmaster and chief Myrmidon nodded eagerly.

As soon as the wheelchair was locked in place
and the roto’s blades were spinning, the trillionaire began ogling
Prissi Langue and her family. By the time he landed at the Juvenal
Institute, his biggest finding was how little he was able to
discover, despite access to innumerable interlocked databases and a
host of search engines, about Prissi Langue and her parents.
However, Fflowers was still far too much the scientist to be
stymied by initial failure. He knew that as soon as his rejuve
surgeries were over, he would be back on the trail. He had no
choice. He had to know about the girl.

As Joshua Fflowers considered who and what
Prissi might be, he necessarily thought about his two sons. Even as
he was prepped by a host of nurses to receive his new parts, he
reviewed for the millionth time how those two sons were the
unfathomable punishment he had paid for a well-intentioned act.

Two years after the Centsurety lab explosion,
in an effort to relieve his pain and divert his anger, Fflowers had
had his seed mated with Elena’s eggs. Adaman had been the result.
From the moment of his birth, Fflowers had felt that the son was
nothing like the mother, nor the father. He neither looked like
them—an outcome which belied the supposed advances in genetic
engineering—nor did he act like them. By the time Adaman was two,
Joshua Fflowers learned why. He had thrown the die and lost—because
the die had been loaded. The egg that had been fertilized with his
sperm had not been harvested from Elena’s ovaries. A DNA scan had
revealed that. Months of investigations as to who was the source of
the egg resulted in nothing but dead ends. Knowing that Elena had
switched eggs on him finally brought full force to Fflowers how
much she despised him.

As Adanan grew into a snarky, oily, needy
boy, Fflowers’ revulsion grew alongside. Finally, since he could
not change his feelings, he tried to change the paradigm by having
a second son. Fflowers was fifty-seven when he grew a second son
from an egg that had been carefully considered and even more
carefully tested. The result, Illiya, was somewhat more to his
liking…at first.

Even before the arrival of Illiya, Fflowers
could not think of Adaman as his real son. The boy was a burden, a
disappointment, even his heir, but not his son. Night after night,
Fflowers would wander through the dozens of rooms of the Airie,
which felt twice as big and frighteningly empty since Elena had
gone, and consider the child whom he and Elena could have, and he
had convinced himself, would have made. A child more like Elena and
less like himself.

In the late night chiaroscuro made by the
swirling beams of winger beacons, hawk’s roto searchlights and the
spatter of late night revelers’ erratically weaving flight lights,
Fflowers would walk his own personal stations of the cross. The
high-ceilinged library, crammed with science and myth, where over
and over he had insisted to the doubting Elena that they were too
young and their lives too full to have children…yet. The baronial
dining room where Elena first had mentioned in passing the
anomalous results of her pap exam. The statuary gallery, at that
time his sanctorum, the place where he first had had the idea for
the Centsurety Project. The parterre, with its central allee lined
with marble and alabaster imaginings of all the forms the gods had
left undone. The parterre, where the best and worst of his memories
had been born….