Flight (47 page)

The herd in those days was still healthy and,
mostly, happy. Mortos and Elena would rest in a shadowy haven.
While the centaur flicked insects away from his birth-giver with
his long, black curried tail, they would talk about the world about
them. When they first began their talks, each had difficulty making
the other understand. As is true with any insular group, be it prep
school or mountain tribe, the centaurs’ language had diverged from
what they had first taken into the woods. It wasn’t just the
sounds—diphthongs, occlusions and plosives—that had changed. Those
years engulfed in wood and water, surrounded by a thousand greens,
had evolved a language different from the one used by someone who
had spent those years filled with the microscopy of her research
and social relations.

The language barriers were difficult, but
could be, and were, hurdled. Mortos helped Elena to see the
physical world at a level she had never seen before. She was used
to looking at the world one cell or DNA strand at a time. Mortos
helped Elena to pull her perceptions back from the eyepiece to
really look around. Some of the best moments of Elena’s life,
moments equal to if not exceeding the excitement of the day-nights
and night-days when she and Fflowers had unraveled the secrets of
fledging, had come while riding atop Mortos broad shining back as
he trotted down unending green tunnels. The undulation of the
centaur’s back, the humidity, and, especially, the aqueous green
light as the sun fought its way through the tangle, would give
Elena the sensation she was back snorkeling off Grand Turk Island
where she had vacationed as a child.

The conversations had grown longer and the
friendship between Elena and Mortos had grown deeper over the
years. She was as comfortable in the Green as he came to be in the
Bury. Carefully comfortable—because there was as much that could go
wrong in the Green for someone with Elena’s concrete and subway
origins as there was danger in the smooth-tiled narrow corridors of
the Bury for the hard-hoofed centaur. The fact that Elena had
created Mortos and his brothers became less important as the years
passed. All was good until Santos became sick. Santos’ sickness
awakened the herd to the fact that sickness was the precursor of
death and death was the precursor of extinction…if something wasn’t
done.

Olewan remembered the conversations Smarkzy,
Fflowers and she had had sitting atop the counters of the lab at
the end of another all-night session. What aspects of their origins
would the centaurs mimic? Would they be as wise as horses or as
dumb as men? To which diseases would they be vulnerable? Cancer or
colic? Would their lifespan be more equine or human? How would
their senses manifest?

At the time of the centaurs’ genesis, Elena
had been both fascinated and horrified by what she and Smarkzy were
doing. But, it wasn’t until after the Fflowers’ birthday gift of
unwanted wings, a time when it seemed like a viable generation of
centaur embryos finally was growing, that Elena had to make a
decision.

As Winslow, Laureby and Elena Howe made plans
to destroy the laboratory and the knowledge that had been acquired,
they had argued about what to do with the forms living in their
glass worlds. In her desire for revenge, Elena had called them
monsters and wanted them destroyed, but Roan Winslow and Laureby
both had insisted that the human part was transcendent and must be
saved. To win their cooperation, Elena compromised. Her thought had
been to save the centaurs until the others were gone before doing
what needed to be done. However, once the brood had been
transferred to the Bury, once Laureby and Winslow had disappeared,
and once a two-faced Smarkzy had weaseled his way back into
Fflowers’ good graces, Elena had been mystified by her inability to
open the incubators to end the twisted life within. The bitter,
childless scientist had been blind-sided at how quickly and deeply
a maternal instinct had grown.

During the remaining months of gestation,
Elena closely monitored the fetuses’ development. Despite the harsh
conditions the small demoralized group was working under as it
tried to figure out a new way to live, Elena would take as much as
an hour a day to do no more than stare at the creatures forming in
the low-light of their improvised environment.

When the centaurs were developed enough to
survive on their own, it had been Elena who had lived with them for
two years in a dormitory setting filled with nippled bottles and
nests of dried grass.

With their round, bald, big-eyed heads and
long gangly legs, the infant centaurs had been endearing. However,
at six months they weighed almost two hundred pounds and were
anything but cute. Even with the accelerated growth of the torso
and head, they were bizarre looking. The heads were adult-size, but
they had the moon-faced look of a three-year old child. That
lost-in-space face topped a ten year old’s torso which emerged from
a colt’s broadening back and increasingly powerful legs.

It was at this point that that the care Elena
gave to the centaurs transmuted from a mother’s to a warder’s. She
held down her growing horror and disgust with a sense of duty—duty
rigorously defined and rigorously executed. That duty was kept
until the centaurs could survive by themselves in the Green. After
that, Elena banished the centaurs from her thoughts…until all of
the other things that held her thoughts disappeared and she was
alone. It was not until then that she thought to go to the Green
and see how her husband’s experiment continued.

First, she had been surprised and, then,
engaged. Until Santos had become sick. After that, Elena isolated
herself until she could not bear another monologue. To relieve the
tedium of self, in imitation of a bored God creating Adam and Eve,
Elena made Fair from one of her eggs and a seed left by one of
those who had run away so many years before. That experiment, too
soon and too like God’s, had been a disappointment.

Hide and Seek

From the moment he was dragged from the
Hudson, Joe has never questioned how accomplished Bob Tom Damall is
on a river; however given the events of the last three days, Joe
certainly questions how sane the old man might be. Even as Joe
bounced down the Hudson on his collection of PDF’s, he could hear
Bob Tom lamenting the loss of his fishing pole. After a few
minutes, however, Joe realized that all of his attention needed to
be on the river, his kidnappers, and their actions, and not on Bob
Tom’s antics.

It was four or five hours later and two hours
after a curve in the Hudson had allowed Joe’s mound of PFDs to
break free of the current when Joe’s walk along the shadowy edge of
the eastern shore of the river in interrupted by the old man’s
call. After a few minutes of helloing back and forth Bob Tom drops
out of the night and lands by Joe.

The old man’s face is covered in dried blood
as is one of his hands, but Joe can see that Bob Tom’s favorite
fishing pole is tucked in his pants.

“You got it.”

“Course, I did.”

“What happened?”

“There was some discussion as to ownership,
but once that got resolved, they handed it over.”

Joe stared at Bob Tom’s wound before saying,
“Just like that.”

“Power of persuasion, Noby, rhetoric can be a
powerful thing.”

During the ensuing days as they made their
way south toward Manhattan, Joe kept expecting Bob Tom to say more,
to gloat, to sing his own praises as he always seemed to do, but
the old man never did offer any more explanation that those first
sentences. It wasn’t until they were ten kliks north of the city
and Bob Tom insisted that they scuttle the small power boat they
had stolen the night before, that Joe wondered whether the riverman
had done something so bad to the crew that he was worried about
hawks looking for him.

* * *

Joe crawls out of the foam-edged river onto
shore at 215th Street, just south of where the Harlem River marks
the northern edge of Manhattan. Although Joe is very happy to be
back on land, he can’t help but worry about what aquatic parasites
might be attacking his body through the scratches and scrapes he
has gotten during the last days. After Bob Tom lands and busies
himself coiling the rope he has used to pull Joe ashore, Joe tells
the old man he needs to find someplace where he can thoroughly wash
himself. The old man snorts, “No real riverman’s gonna get sickly
from a bitty little bug you can’t even see. Besides, it’s good
insurance. You walk around this here town smelling like you do and
folks might sniff twice, but they ain’t gonna take after you like
they done in Albany.”

While Joe takes some extra comfort in
thinking that Bob Tom might be right, he is mainly basing his hopes
that he goes unregognized on the transformation he has made by
shaving his head and eyebrows with an ancient octo-blade they had
requisitioned from a summer camp lodge. Joe hopes that his bald
head and eyebrow welts, plus the patchy stubble on his chin be
enough to keep people from recognizing the missing son of the
Co-president of Cygnetics.

“And even though you still got lots to learn
about river life, Noby One, any bug that looks at you the way you
look now is gonna figger you’re already desperate sick with
something a whole world worse than whatever it could inflict on
you.

“Now, where we goin and how we getting
there?”

Joe has wanted to call Nancy to see if she
has heard from Prissi, but he doesn’t trust Nancy to keep a secret.
He guesses that if she hasn’t heard any newz that he has reunited
with his family she will assume that he is trying to find
Prissi—which can only mean that Manhattan is his destination. Even
though Joe’s has spent many of the hours they were captives
thinking of the best answer to Bob Tom’s question, he still wavers,
“I don’t know. Maybe at the NYPD.”

“I think we should start where she and her pa
lived.”

“That’s the last place she would be.”

“I know that, but mebbe we’ll find something
that’ll get us started. Kinda like given a dog a scent.”

Joe disagrees, “Don’t you think whoever is
after her will already have done that? If something is there,
they’ll already have found whatever it was.”

“Good God in heaven, Noby, what do they teach
you at that school of yours? You think if you want a huntin dog,
you just go git the first thing with a waggly tail and floppy ears?
There’s a wide world of difference between this here dog’s nose and
some others. And let me remind you that yore lucky to be spending
yore days with the best-nosed Damall dog in this here quarter of
the country.”

Joe gives Bob Tom a deep bow, “I know. And I
also know I’ll never be allowed to forget.”

Bob Tom slaps his thighs and shuffles his
feet, “There you go, son. Now, let’s git.”

Two hours later, Joe stands a half-block down
and across the street from the entranceway of the Gramercy Arms
partially camouflaged by the lush ficus tree he is holding in a
cerulean ceramic pot. Bob Tom Damall is directly across from the
apartment building’s entrance taking an interminably long time
trying to re-pak his chest pak. Joe watches him and as soon he sees
the flick of the old man’s hand, he picks up the pot and starts for
the door. When Bob Tom picks up the pak and shakes it as if to
settle its contents, Joe picks up the pace. As he gets close enough
to see in the lobby, he adjusts his pace. He watches the elevator
light switch from 2 to L. Three seconds later the elevator doors
slide open. Joe reads the speed of the roly-poly woman leaving the
elevator with the instinct he has honed in hundreds of hockey games
so as to perfectly time his arrival. As the woman reaches for the
handle on the door, Joe hefts the pot to make it more difficult for
the woman, whose eyes have the shallow bright shine of costume
jewels, to see past the ficus leaves to his newly bald head and the
red welts where his eyebrows should be. When the woman’s hand
falters, Joe wiggles the tree a second time. The door opens. Joe
tips the tree away from his face and, grinning like a drunken
monkey, staggers in. Seeing what she has let in, the woman begins
swatting away Joe’s word of thanks, like they were midges on a
muggy night, as she totters out the door.

Joe walks toward the elevator, but as soon as
the woman is out of sight, he hurries back to the door. Bob Tom is
already half-way across the street. Once the old winger is safely
inside, Joe dumps the pot in a corner of the lobby and races to the
stairway door. He and Bob Tom have agreed that Joe should stay two
flights of stairs above the old man to warn him if the
improbable—someone using the stairs in the middle of the morning—is
happening. When Joe arrives on the fifth floor, he waits behind the
stairway door until a wheezing Bob Tom catches up with him.

Once both invaders are in the quiet, low
lighted hallway, Joe stands guard as Bob Tom hunches over the door
handle to do whatever magic he is going to do to get into the
Langue’s apartment.

In the action vids Joe infrequently watches,
thieves use sophisticated sensors and decryptors to get past locked
doors. Joe doesn’t expect to see those kinds of tools get pulled
from the old man’s pak, but he realizes that he won’t be surprised
to see Bob Tom bring out some small box with a glowing screen and
lots of buttons. Instead, the riverman taps the wall alongside the
door frame a half dozen times with a knuckle. When he is satisfied,
he tells Joe to take off his coat and spread it on the floor
beneath the door handle. When that is done, he pulls out a worn
canvas scabbard from his pak and withdraws a shiny fish gutting
knife. Bob Tom stabs the wall and begins hacking downward.

Debris falls onto Joe’s coat.

“That orta kill the alarm.”

The old man withdraws the knife and flips it
around so that the serrated edge is down and begins sawing away at
the wall until he has three sides of a rectangle cut out. He scores
the bottom edge, then, pushes in that section of the wall like it’s
the flap on a cat door. The old man’s arm disappears into the hole
and he begins cutting through the interior side of the wall. A
minute later, Joe watches the old man’s arm disappear into the hole
up to his elbow. There are two clicks and Bob Tom opens the door
with his free hand. He steps back and makes a gracious sweep of his
hand.