Flight (46 page)

Even while she was working on the first wing
mutations, Elena Howe had worried at the price. Flying was freedom,
but wings were slaves—to age and weight and disease. Flying was for
the strong. Old people were not strong. The odds of a winger flying
more than a hundred meters after their seventieth birthday were
small. Given that the average life span of white Noramicans was
approaching ninety, the reality was that most wingers could expect
fifty or sixty years of flight and then twenty or more years of
carrying around a set of useless and cumbersome appendages.
Ornaments…momenti mori…momenti voli.

Old thoughts were moving through a mind that
was as old and twisted as the legs that slowly crab-walked up the
long ramp that lead to the entrance of the Bury. Olewan knew, as
she knew many things without knowing how she knew them, that it
would be Mortos at the door. An impatient hoof banged loudly off
the steel frame and then again, even louder.

Olewan opened the door to an old man dressed
in a raggedy jacket with a small injured bird roughly held in his
arms. He held the girl out like an offering.

In a guttural voice that was more at ease
with consonants than vowels, the centaur said, “From your species.
Get good care.”

Olewan, whose heart had not been touched in
years, reached out a knot of fingers to smooth a small patch of
bent and broken feathers. Suddenly, the old woman was as rigid as
Lot’s wife.

“Where did you find her?”

“In tree by bay. Sky dark. Heard noise, loud.
Took time. No noise. Then, breathing. Rasp.”

The hoary centaur stared hard at Olewan.

“Know that sound. Santos. Merkos.”

The old woman had been so overcome by the
girl’s face that she hadn’t focused on her injuries. Once aware of
all the harm, and despite her hobbled legs, Olewan darted back from
the doorway with the jerky speed of a frightened crab.

“Here, quick, bring her in.”

Mortos brought his hooves to the very edge of
the threshold, then, to Olewan’s dismay, he bent forward and gently
laid the broken girl on the concrete floor.

“No, stop. What are you doing?”

“Freak, monster…non-species…not worthy of
your…normal…home.”

The centaur whirled about and his hooves
sounded like spring thunder as he galloped away.

Olewan bent over the girl whose chest was
jerking about as if she were sobbing. The crone touched the girl’s
face in awe, before she scuttled down the long ill-lit hallway
croaking, “Boy. Boy! Quick. I want you.”

It was hours later. Olewan, her shape
resembling a bag of dirty laundry, was slumped down in a chair
laboriously making her way through an exhausted, twitching
snore-filled sleep. Prissi’s sleep was deeper, drug deep. Her body
was still except for the erratic rise and fall of her chest, which
emitted a discordant mix of rasps, wheezes, and sharp clicks. The
third person in the operatory, a seventeen year old not quite feral
boy, was hyper-alert. He stood immobile over the ancient hospital
bed and took in the sights, sounds and smells of the wounded girl.
After many minutes, the hands which had been hanging at his sides
came to life. With the stealth of a hunting cat, they slowly,
smoothly and sinuously moved toward Prissi. Two fingers on his left
hand, fingers with broken nails and scabbed skin, touched the
blue-sheened skin just above where an IV line punctured the girl’s
wrist. His fingertips moved to touch the girl’s own cracked and
chipped nails. They gathered and smoothed a small hank of gritty
hair. A minute later, the boy moved to the foot of the bed so that
he could stare at the girl’s face straight on. His breathing and
his body calmed until he was as still as when he watched in the
woods. He never had imagined that what he now was seeing would look
like it did. After a time, a noise, neither growl nor purr and not
quite a keen threndled from his chest. Minutes after the noise
began, the teener started as if he had been shocked. He fled the
dim room, raced down the darkened hallway and burst into the darker
night.

From the air, certainly, and even from ground
level an observant visitor would think the Green’s snarl of brush,
vine, shrub and struggling trees was impenetrable. In fact, that
was only mostly true. The all-devouring fire of The Ticklish
Situation had left thousands of square miles of fertilized earth as
inviting of creation as a blank canvas. The warming of the world’s
waters and air had added its welcome. Less than a dozen years after
the fire, the land around the Bury had formed dense green mats
broken only by the encroaching waters, buckled roads and parking
lots, and the steel, stone and concrete skeletons of the burned out
buildings of what once had been Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Within a quarter century, when seen from the air, there looked to
be nothing on Long Island east of Huntington but the green of
jungle and the silver, greens and browns of the insidious waters.
All that had been made by man, including the scientific sprawl of
Brookhaven had been destroyed and, as if in shame, blanketed by
nature.

However, for those intrepid enough to crawl
under its green covers to seek out the jungle’s secrets, they would
have found a warren of paths—actually, more tunnels than paths.
These dark lush corridors came in many sizes. Some were small
enough to deny entry to weasels; others were big enough that the
largest animals in the woods—deer, black bear, man, horse and
man-horse—could make their way.

The boy, who called himself Fair, ran out of
the Bury’s entrance and into a small courtyard concealed under a
canopy of growth that hid it as well as the scores of shells of
what once had been the central campus of the laboratory. Despite
the almost complete lack of light under the thick mat of trees, the
boy lengthened his stride. At the edge of the clearing, his legs
skipped, darted, stuttered, and then lunged, like a rabbit, as he
entered the jungle. Once inside the tunnel, his arms forced aside
the hungry little hands of the kudzu as his hands held back the
switches of forsythia eager to punish. His head bounced and ducked
like a dervish in ecstasy as he avoided the low limbs of oak, ash,
horse chestnut, willow, maple, river birch and pecan trees.

The boy, much more comfortable now that he
was in the thick dark and thicker brush, gracefully fled down the
tunnel until, ten minutes after leaving the injured girl, he
suddenly jumped sideways through a nearly invisible break,
scrabbled down an embankment and came to rest with wet eyes and
ragged breath along the edge of a small stream. The gently flowing
water, no more than a few meters across, was gleaming argent from
the hovering moon shining down through a small break in the
canopy.

Fair dried his eyes with a quick wipe of his
hands. Slowing his breathing took longer. Finally though, the ache
in his chest and the burning at the back of his throat faded. He
twisted a pinch of flesh below his chin as if it were a stopcock
which would let the tumbling thoughts which filled his mind drain.
After ten minutes, the boy was able to sit perfectly still within
the small grotto of vines. He sat, watched and waited.

In minutes, or hours—with an empty mind he
had no way of knowing—the boy heard a slow rhythmic sound, like a
lazy man sweeping, drift across the water. More sweeping. A rest.
More sweeping. A longer rest. A small, not-to-be-denied smile
appeared on Fair’s face. More sweeping and, then, a small black
bear, blacker than the woods from which it emerged, crouched at the
top of the opposite bank.

The bear half-stood, and, as if being polite
to an old woman or honored guest, bobbed its head before hunching
back down.

Knowing this particular yearling, Fair was
biting his lips to hold back laughter. The bear, too, seemed to
know what was coming. It took two tentative steps forward and
moaned in anguish as it began an uncontrolled slide into the
water.

As its body was engulfed by the stream, the
bear screamed at the injustice of being born a smooth-soled
clawless mutant. Next, it snorted at the folly of its rage.
Finally, it chortled with the pleasure of cavorting in the water.
The bear smacked the stream with its pacific palms. Fair shared a
moment of the bear’s pleasure until the thought that always
came—how long could anything without weapons survive in the
world—filled his mind. The boy held onto that thought as he watched
the bear struggle to pull itself out of the stream and make its way
back up the bank.

After all sounds of the bear had drifted away
like autumn fog, Fair stood in a pool of moonlight and looked at
both sides of his hands before he kneeling down and leaning over
the stream to study the pale doppelganger staring up at him. He
looked for a long time.

The golden snakes of a rising sun were
writhing their way through the heavy brush before Fair pushed his
way back into the Bury. He quietly padded along the hall to where
the girl was.

Olewan was still sleeping, seemingly little
changed except for a thumbprint of drool shining upon her chin. The
girl, though, had changed. Her face, her breaths, the color of her
skin all looked worse than before. As the boy stared at her, a
tingling ran down his arms and out to the tips of his fingers. His
breaths—short and broken—began to mimic those of the girl.

The tatter-clothed boy spun around, took two
steps and yanked on the old woman’s threadbare sweater. When
Olewan’s eyes snapped open, they were bright blue and as happy as a
child’s.

“Quick, quick, something’s wrong.”

The boy tugged Olewan’s arm twice more. Using
Fair’s impatiently offered hand as support, the stiff-jointed geri
managed to get on her feet. However, when the old woman required
another second to find her balance, the impatient boy tugged a
third time and Olewan lost her balance. Luckily, when she fell, it
was back into the safety of the warm nest she had just left. When
Fair offered his hand again, the old woman knocked it aside with a
vicious swipe. The boy retreated a step before he turned back to
the dying girl. The ancient scientist squirmed her body to the edge
of the chair and pushed herself to her feet.

“See, look, something’s wrong.”

“Mmmmm. Yes, it is. Dislocated wing, broken
leg, intestinal bleeding, probably her pancreas—and a concussion—if
not more. Very wrong.”

A frightened Fair barked, “Do something.”

“I have. The bones are set.”

“The bleeding?”

“Patience.”

The boy yelled, “No! Not patience. Fix
bleeding!”

The hag shook her head.

“Fix her,” the frantic boy directed.

“I’m not a doctor.”

Fair’s arms flew up in the air like a
marionette’s.

“You fix snake, raccoon, squirrel, bear,
woodman.”

The teener flung his arms wide at the large
room, a combination laboratory, operatory, dispensary and morgue.
“You save a life. Take bird wing. Fix. Take squirrel heart out.
Fix. Save things that should die. Kill things that could live.
Basement god. Now, here,” Fair stabbed his finger at the twitching
form on the bed, “Fix.”

Viper fast, Olewan’s twisted hand darted out
and slapped the crying boy’s face.

“Go. Go! You know nothing. Nothing of life
and even less of death.”

Shocked by his mother’s slap, Fair ran from
the room. After he was gone, a mumblng, finger-fidgeting Olewan
stood over the girl.

How had such a mirror of her genes come to be
dying before her eyes?

Even with her age and ills, her porous mind
and trickster memory, Olewan had no doubt that she was looking at
her daughter. The moment she had seen the girl in Mortos’ arms, she
had known what she was seeing.

What she didn’t know was what to do.

Should she try to save this strange atavism
from a distant past? Whom or what would she be saving? Who grew
this? Joshua Fflowers? Someone else from the Centsurety group?
Baudgew? Smarkzy? A stranger? Who had stolen her eggs? Winslow?
Laureby? Was the girl here by chance or was she an astounding pawn
in a chess game suspended for a half-century? Was this broken form
here to test her skills and science, assassinate her heart, bring
her old age comfort, test her deepest, most hopeless beliefs, or
was she here with no intentions, a random act of immeasurable
consequence?

When Elena Howe first secretly colonized the
ruins of Brookhaven it was with a half-dozen zealous young
scientists fleeing from both the criminal consequences of their
work at Centsurety as well as the unknowable wrath of Joshua
Fflowers. They had brought some of their science with them. With
what they could scavenge from the scores of undamaged underground
labs, and with the help of friends left behind, they were able to
feed and shelter themselves and forestall boredom. For a time. At
the end of the first year, deciding that there must be better forms
of exile, two scientists left. A year later, when the weight of
isolation exceeded that of fear, another disappeared.

Each time someone left, the difficulty of
living among those remaining grew. Within a dozen years Elena was
alone. In the first of the alone years, Elena had enjoyed the
solitude. It was more than a small pleasure to hear no complaints
about the monotony of the food. There were no arguments about the
meager lab supplies. There was none of the energy-sapping Donner
Party politics of a small group of people living under duress.

After the last of the party had slipped away,
too shamed or chagrined, or, most likely, angry to say goodbye,
Elena had taken a deep sigh of relief that had lasted most of a
year. She had emptied her mind of decades of decisions and
compromises, stress and sympathy. She emptied her mind and filled
her pockets with rocks, leaves, buds and flowers as she wandered
the woods around her. She spent time with Mortos, Portos and the
other centaurs whom she had rarely seen since they had been
released into the woods four years after their release from their
gestation jars.