Flight (2 page)

The Dutton School took care, too much care in
the minds of most of its charges, that their young bodies be as
carefully nurtured as their immature minds. Since Prissi knew she
wasn’t close to being overweight, the obvious answer to the double
beep was that some starving chunk, probably Nasty Nancy, had jammed
the machine…again.

The fuming Prissi, gray-green eyes sparking,
bow-lipped mouth spitting noises like an ancient steam radiator,
was back upstairs and half-way down the hall when she heard the
scuffling steps of someone in Drylons coming her way. She peered
down the dark narrow corridor, but the mid-morning sunlight
wriggling through the narrow clerestory window at the end of the
second floor hall made it impossible to see who was approaching.
Since Prissi was far too tired to win and far too competitive to
lose an early session of dorm hall repartee, the half-synapsed girl
took three quick steps and disappeared into the third floor
communal bathroom.

Prissi leaned against the raddled bathroom
door and took a deep breath. Her calm detachment lasted for less
than a second. The powerful magnet of the three meter long mirror
above the sinks tugged at her eyes. Since the greenish bio-phosphor
lights would have made a beauty queen look like something that
belonged in an aquarium, Prissi resisted looking. Her teener ego
had plenty of other battles to fight, but the mirror, evil
truth-teller, pulled, promised, wheedled and won. Leaning over the
vanity counter-top, which held three porcelain sinks, Prissi tucked
her mouse and mange hair behind her ears so she wouldn’t miss any
of her faults and imperfections.

The ears themselves were faulty—the lobes
weren’t detached and there were three small moles, looking like an
ellipsis on the rim of the left ear. The eyes…yes…the eyes…maybe
her best feature…but not today. Those usually laser bright,
almond-shaped windows on her soul were dull and the skin below them
was brownish gray, like…like…a bat’s armpit. The
nose—ohmigodohmigod—the nose. The size of a national monument, the
shape of a soggy popover…ohmigod…and fertile ground
for…for…ohmigod…excrescences. It took Prissi a moment to separate
the water spots and other less identifiable specks on the silvered
glass from the…things… on her nose. She dipped her face down, then
closer, then away. She continued to inspect the day’s crop of
horrorescent…things… until the raspy sound of the Drylons and the
whisper of pinions along the wall faded to silence.

“I hate me. I hate school.”

Freeieekin school.

As soon as she had the thought, Prissi felt
remorse because she loved Dutton. She really did, but there were
days, and this certainly was going to be one, where she could not
deal with all of its rules, rules contained in a two hundred page
catechism of whats, whens, dos, don’ts, and hows: twenty plus pages
on how many gigs were to be awarded for unruly hair, toe peepage,
trans-fat consumption, bigotry, littlery, faddism, fatism, sexism,
anti-gaiety. A chapter on the ins and outs of honor. A huge section
on dorm and dining room demeanor. A chapter on service—service to
one’s roomie, one’s floor, one’s dorm, one’s teams, to the little
village down the hill, to Connecticut, Noramica and the world
beyond. A rule for everything, but not a dambdumb peep about
walkers and wingers.

The biggest difference in school—bigger than
race, wealth, and, in Prissi’s opinion, gender— and the
administration avoided it.

From what Prissi could gather, in the good
old days, a million years or so ago, nearly everyone at any elite
prep school would have been a winger. Now, almost fifteen percent
of her classmates were walkers. She herself had a half dozen older
friends who didn’t fly. Two of those hadn’t fledged because they
came from homes where the money for the mutation was not available.
Mary Ung hadn’t muted for religious reasons. Frank Beese hadn’t
been able to get a permit to mute because of his obesity, according
to Frank a problem that had killed his grandparents and was likely
soon to do the same with his parents. Of Prissi’s walker friends,
the most striking one was her NQB, not-quite-boyfriend, Joe
Fflowers. Joe didn’t want to fly because he wanted to keep playing
hockey. At least, that’s what Joe said, and said, and said, but
Prissi was sure that a big part of his refusal was just teener
defiance because Joe Fflowers was the grandson of Joshua Fflowers,
the man who had invented fledging.

Prissi herself, who only had had her wings
for ten months, still was obsessed with what those wings could do.
When Prissi fledged, just before her fifteenth birthday, she was
1.6 meters tall and weighed 46 kilograms. As a result of her small
size and proportionate weight, she was qualified to choose from a
wide choice of wing shapes. With fledging, the general rule was
that the larger the subject, the fewer the choices. After
discussions with her father, which, if she were truthful, were more
arguments than discussions, Prissi wheedled LT wings with a red and
silver rippled feather pattern. Least Tern wings, with their delta
shape and small surface area, had been designed for quick turns and
great speed; however, there were trade-offs. LT’s were much less
effective for soaring or long flights. Although they took extra
energy to fly and were ineffective for long distances, Prissi loved
her LTs because they let her do acrobatics and stunt flying most
other wingers couldn’t come close to duplicating. Another benefit
of the stubby delta design was that they took so much energy they
pretty much self-regulated body weight. Prissi thought that an LT
teener winger would have to be pretty lovelorn, heartbroken or
acnefied to get too fat to fly.

Prissi Langue loved flying. For her, it was
the ultimate freedom. When she was in the air, two hundred page
rulebooks, intractable math problems, the slights and slurs of
classmates and the sadness that clung like cobwebs from her
mother’s death in Africa three years before stayed on the ground.
Many of Prissi’s friends were ambivalent about flying. They liked
their wings because people like them, privileged people, were
supposed to like their wings. They liked the freedom flying
brought, but they feared the danger. More than eighty thousand
Noramican teenerz died each year from crashes. But, for Prissi,
being in the air brought nothing other than a great sense of
well-being. From growing up in Africa, where two and four-legged
dangers existed everywhere, the girl had a well-developed sense of
what was safe. Her mother’s death only had confirmed what she
already knew—the earth was a dangerous place to be alive and an
easy place to die. Yet, when Prissi first began to fly, even while
she wobbled her wings and bobbled her landings, one of the biggest
and most unexpected benefits of being in the air was how safe she
felt. The higher she went, the safer she felt. At two hundred
meters, looking at the insignificant details far below, Prissi felt
as secure as when she and her mother had snuggled in a string
hammock on those sloggy, slow, Bujumburan mornings. Mornings where
sunlight and mist coming off Lake Tanganyika swirled around one
another in a slow dance. Misty mornings. Missed mornings.

Prissi shoved her face closer to the mirror
to shove away her thoughts. What a minefield. She loved science,
idolized scientists, but how was it be that they could grow wings
on kids and regenerate organs, but couldn’t do a freeieekin thing
about pimples. Science—key to the mysteries of the universe. No,
not, quite yet.

Prissi tipped her head to keep her hair,
which tended to fall around her face like a tattered flag, out of
the way before she put the tip of an index finger on either side of
an excrescence centered over her left eyebrow. She pushed down and
away. The growth, like a miniature nebula, exploded onto the
mirror.

“She shoots, she scores!”

Prissi stared at her contribution to the
communal killing field until a panicky flutter told her to look at
her mypod.

She swore.

If she didn’t flame, she was going to be late
for Fi-Sci. Dr. Smarkzy, even though he was her counselor and
mentor, did not tolerate students walking in late. Despite her
being his star pupil, if she came in late, he would have an
aneurysm, and Prissi didn’t want her favorite teacher dead. Plus,
if she got one more gig during Winter Term, which was almost over,
she’d be over the limit and back on Skru Kru scraping plates and
ignoring sniggers.

“Freeieekin stupid idiocracy.”

Prissi yanked the bathroom door so hard, it
snapped back and caught the tip of her left wing. Making a sound
that was more expressive than any words could have been, Prissi
jerked her wing free. A half-dozen silver feathers fluttered to the
grimy floor as the re-energized and re-angered girl accelerated
down the hall toward class.

Prissi Langue’s favorite subject at The
Dutton School was science. She liked Chinese—it slowed her mind
down, especially when she had to focus hard on the tonals. She
loved her English class—she had spent more time with books than
parents or peers growing up in Africa. But, she adored science.
Despite being on the verge of finishing her fifth term, Prissi was
still amazed at how good the science at Dutton was. While it had
been 2094 in the rest of the world, in a science classroom in
Bujumbura when she was a student there, it might just as well been
1994. To Prissi, science in Burundi was an overly-Christian white
woman droning. In contrast, sitting in Advanced Field Science,
Fi-Sci II, was like having a bag of popcorn going off in her
head—fifty minutes of thoughts careening and ricocheting around
inside her head.

The teacher of Fi-Sci II, an exceedingly old
and horribly crippled man, a gnome with a slow smile but a fast
gnomic tongue, Dr. Smarkzy, seemed to know all science well and his
specialty, a combination of prionology and sub-molecular chemistry,
cold. Like some of the particles and strands he described, Smarkzy
himself could be volatile, maybe even a little unstable, but to
Prissi he was a god—Prometheus. An old arthritic Prometheus, except
Prissi guessed that Dr. Smarkzy didn’t feel that his time with
students was as bad as being chained to a rock—at least, most of
the time.

As soon as she had walked into her first
Fi-Sci II class the previous September, Prissi had known it was
going to be a disaster. It was her last class of the first day of
her second year. All of her other classes that day had been had
been taught by young, energetic and, mostly, attractive teachers.
In contrast, the man standing at the front of the lecture portion
of the small auditorium looked to be more than a century old. He
was a tiny man, almost as short as Prissi, with a gargantuan head,
bald except for a few tufts of pure white hair springing out from
above his enormous, translucent ears. The ears were extraordinary.
Despite the many hours she had spent studying them since that first
day, they continued to have a kind of abhorrent attraction for
Prissi. Pink and gray with a blue-tinged rim, they reminded Prissi
of the shells of some kind of mollusk—a kind you wouldn’t want to
eat. When Dr. Smarkzy talked, the ears slowly waved like anemones
in a tidal pool. Going along with the old man’s ghastly ears, were
hands and legs so crippled that he shuffled and scuttled, like a
scorpion. That first day, when Dr. Smafrkzy pointed at Prissi to
take a perch in the first row behind the walkers’ chairs, all of
his fingers except for his pinky actually pointed back at
himself.

Prissi slowed from a flog to a walk as she
spotted the Weiners, a old couple who were the heads in Mickelson
House and famous for giving out gigs for the least of infractions,
standing out in front of the Mu Datarium. The old furtz were going
to make her late. A second later she forgot her frustration when
she heard Nasty Nancy squeak, “Priscilla Langue, you are going to
be TARDEEEE.”

When Prissi whipped around, she almost caught
her roommate with the edge of her wings.

“All because of you. You ate my Snoogles and
my Yogiyums. I could have starved to death!”

The vehemence of her denial made Nasty
Nancy’s hair, which resembled a large red-dyed cotton ball, toss
about like tumbleweed stuck on a fence post.

“I hate Yogiyums.”

“You’ve been known to inhale what you
hate.”

“Not Yogiyums. They’re like mayonnaise-filled
marshmallows.”

Despite knowing that speed and Nasty Nancy
were antithetical, Prissi pleaded, “C’mon. Hurry up. We’ll be
late.”

“Doesn’t matter to me. I’m not even close to
Screw Crew and spring break starts in five days. After that, the
academic gods wipe the slate clean—which means what? Isn’t slate a
kind of rock? Why does it need to be wiped?”

“African thing. Tell you later. Gotta
go.”

“To see Dr. Crab?”

Looking around, but not seeing the Weiners,
Prissi resumed flogging toward class. As she half-flew and half
jogged toward the worn double doors of the scientatory, she
returned to her memory of that first day, of how Dr. Smarkzy had
stood quietly in front of the class, waiting for the bell to briz.
It was only his eyes, amazingly bright and improbably turquoise,
that led Prissi to guess that his mouth was twisted in a grin, not
a grimace. Afraid to defy his direction, Prissi had moved to the
spot he had indicated. She reluctantly had climbed onto her perch
and had been horrified at the thought of spending a year with such
a repulsive looking person.

Six months later, Prissi could not deny that
Vartan Smarkzy was ill-made. In fact, she had had to concede that
point to Nasty Nancy more than once. But, and this is what her
roomie did not get, any distraction that Smarkzy’s looks might
cause stopped the moment when his sparkling eyes, melodic voice and
irresistible enthusiasm for teaching science began.

Prissi was half-way through the door to Room
320A of the Katharine Zoeg Scientatory just as the bell brizzed.
When Prissi hesitated at the door, Dr. Smarkzy shifted his
smartstick from the glowing three-foot hologram of pockmarked
tissue caused by the prion responsible for bovine spongiform
encephalopathy to Prissi and then down to her seat in the first row
of perches. While the chagrined teener made her way toward her
perch, ignoring the smirks and sibilant sniggers of her classmates,
Smarkzy drew his neck down into his shoulders like a turtle waiting
for a fish. The second Prissi perched, Smarkzy, like a mad
Wagnerian conductor, was using his smartstick to lead the class to
a deeper understanding of the Escher-like folds and structures of
prions and their effects in DNA.