Flight

by Neil Hetzner



  FLIGHT

  Neil Hetzner

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  Copyright 2010 Neil Hetzner

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  In Flight I have tried to imgine how technology, culture and language as well as the geography of the world will have changed by the end of this century. Yet, while I can only guess at how the physical world will be different, I can be sure the emotional world of humans will remain the same.

  PROLOGUE

  What’s Past…Isn’t.

  The road south from Muyinga, weaving through the mountains of Burundi in East Africa like a mud and gravel stream, was more suited for intrepid goats than the battered truclet negotiating its challenges, but Nora Elieson had driven that twisting, never-repaired, vertiginous track so often she could keep most of her mind free to think about guinea fowl.

  A half-century before, in another, far different life, the octogenarian had been very well-regarded and very well paid for her thinking, especially the kind of thinking that could solve a problem by leaping over it. Now, once again, from that place of creation that had always been a mystery to her, had come a thought for how to increase the guinea fowl harvest in the villages she had just visited. To keep the thought coming, one deeply tanned hand left the steering wheel and began tugging at the snarl of short gray hair that covered her head. Although she was excited, the fugitive scientist knew she must be careful not to be too clever. Being too clever had cost her that previous privileged life.

  It was not cleverness, but a tempered love that had given Nora Elieson her current life. Hanging around a coffee urn at a small New Africa conference, Nora had met Beryl Langue. Langue was a Global Nations’ agronomist who had spent twenty years in Fifth World Africa improving sorghum harvests by altering both the genetics of the plant and the agricultural techniques and habits of those who grew it. That GN work had had small infrequent rewards. It was not until after the age of sixty, when Langue met Nora and they married, that both received rewards greater than their ages and attitudes had allowed them to imagine.

  At his new wife’s insistence, Beryl Langue had left the GN. Nora Elieson had money and an idea for mutating guinea fowl so that a second, third, and fourth wing pair would regenerate after harvesting. That idea took almost ten years to become reality. Progress in science, or anything for that matter, in Africa was a dispiriting slog; however when success finally came, the couple felt the work and wait, and the inroads it had made on Nora’s wealth, had been well worth it. To Nora Elieson’s way of thinking, the work with the wings of a nearly brainless bird was more important than the paradigm altering discoveries she had made so many years before.

  Three years after the breeder stock had been distributed throughout the impoverished villages that clung to life along the steep sides of the Rift, average daily protein consumption had more than doubled. Long-boned, thin muscled children stumbling along the red mud roads had become a less frequent sight.

  Being able to harvest two over-sized wings every ten weeks meant that most villagers no longer needed to slaughter their birds for meat. Harvesting the birds’ wings, instead of slaughtering them, led to families having bigger flocks. Since guinea fowl need little human assistance to thrive, families were able to increase their protein calories at very little expense in either time or energy. An unintended, but welcome, extremely welcome, side effect was that the larger flocks were driving down the insect population upon which they fed. Since many of those insects were vectors for some of Africa’s most virulent diseases, the villagers’ mortality rate, especially among infants, was dropping. Nora thought that decreasing infant mortality was more important than increasing life expectancy, something about which she knew a great deal.

  As she slung the Toymoto’s steering wheel from side to side to avoid washouts and slurries left by the rains, and compensate for its worn-out struts, Nora reluctantly considered just how much longer the work she and Beryl were doing could stay in the shadows.

  After one hundred years of money and manpower from the developed countries had been more than matched by a century of corruption, new disease strains, and tribal and national wars, the rest of the world had looked elsewhere than Africa to ease its conscience and do its good. Poor, benighted Africa had become even poorer, more benighted, forgotten Africa.

  It was the latter, the forgotten aspect, which first had attracted Nora Elieson. She had needed a place to go to ground. Now, she sometimes worried that the benefits that she had helped bring to the forgotten villagers in the forgotten mountains in forgotten Burundi in forgotten East Africa would cause someone somewhere, the wrong someone, to remember.

  The eighty-nine year old woman with the impatient eyes was nursing the dinged and dusty Toymoto through a series of switchbacks forty kilometers north of Gitega when an incongruous sound of civilization intruded. The pulsing of the blades echoing against the steep rocky sides made it sound like a swarm of rotos, rather than just one, was flying up the valley. The sound, a low, slow thump, like clapping underwater, was not totally unheard in Africa. With little infrastructure, but with plenty of weapons and even more hate, rotos were the vehicle of choice for getting those illogical few, who valued their lives but still came to Africa, across her great distances.

  Re-feathering. That was the idea Nora was running through her aging but ample circuitry. Burundi had been wet and hot for ages, but when the world began to warm, it had become even hotter and wetter. That change in meteorological conditions had caused certain species of flora and fauna to thrive and others to wither. Guineas could tolerate a great deal of heat, but it took a lot of calories to do so. Re-feathering could lead to both better insulation and heat dissipation. If the feathers….

  The thick foliage on the other side of the Toymoto’s bug-spattered windshield first began to sway and then to bow up and down in a way that reminded Nora of dancers at a harvest ceremony. The thump of the roto, like the beat of a ceremonial drum, quickened and grew louder, as it dropped down toward the earth.

  Rather than just noticing that a roto was overhead, Nora, who had lived much longer than some wished, began to pay close attention to it. She slowed down so that she could divert some of her concentration from the winding, muck-wrecked road to what was going on above the thick canopy that was concealing her.

  The machine darted, hovered, darted and hovered in a way that reminded Nora of a humming bird before a flowering trumpet vine.

  Having no rational reason to think that she was in danger, but having no reason to dismiss that she felt that way, Nora turned off the truclet’s motor and coasted to a stop under the green canopy.

  The machine above quieted as if it were listening before it zigged, jigged, zagged and sped off north, back-tracking up the serpentine valley through which Nora had just come.

  Even after dismissing all of the adrenaline coursing through her ropy body as mis-applied biochemistry, the old woman waited another ten minutes more before starting on her way. She told herself that when she got closer to Gitega she would try to see if there was enough civilization in Burundi’s latest capital to bounce a call to a former capital, Bujumbura, to ensure that Beryl and their daughter, Prissi, were alright.

  Less than an hour later, Nora made the call and she found that everything at home was fine except that, after her week’s absence, her husband and only child daughter greatly missed her.

  They missed Nora even more that afternoon when she didn’t arrive when she should have. All through the night as their patience grew thin and their panic grew deep, they missed her even more. The next day they missed her twice more as they drove up and down the road north of Gitega, but on the third time, along with two retired muzungo mercenaries, they found the truclet and those remnants of Nora Elieson that the jungle hadn’t harvested.

  The truclet had careened off the r
oad in an implausible place. Nora Elieson had come to her end crossing over a ridge that offered a relatively dry smooth surface as well as a tremendous view to the north of spiky mountains burdened in green, like the mossy back of an alligator. To the west one could see the deep shadowy Rift from which hominids first decided to leave their trees. To the south was the badboard stew of slums and worse slums, those canted shanty boxes which had replaced the hominids’ trees. Just part of the splendor of Gitega, Burundi’s newest capital. Further to the south, no larger than silver threads, one could see, piecemeal, if enough tears could be blinked away, the twisting, snaky waters of the Ruvyironza, source of the Nile.

  When the police finally arrived, there was less investigating than philosophizing as the two detectives, all wrinkled khaki and sweat-smeared sunglasses, wondered whether it was the distraction of ‘from whence we came’ or of ‘where we go’ that pulled Nora Elieson’s eyes from the road at the wrong time.

  Beryl Langue, remembering the phone call and noticing the clean swept circle in what should have been a dusty road, thought that the accident might have been something else. Prissi Langue, the couple’s twelve year old daughter, despite being warned to stay in the jeep, had been compelled to look when her mother’s body was carried back up the gash made by the Toymoto’s plunge. She was stunned by what the jungle had done to her mother.

  Despite being frightened and confused, Beryl Langue, immediately upon his return to Bujumbura with his devastated daughter, took action. The usually unassuming man called in favors and insisted upon irregularities. After a hurried funeral, more hurried packing, and within seventy-two hours of her death, the remainder of Nora Elieson’s family was on a boat on Lake Tanganyika crossing from Burundi to Congo. When Beryl Langue looked back, the battered buildings of Bujumbura glinted in sunlight. When he looked ahead, mist roiled from the lake. Beryl Langue thought that captured things perfectly.

  Despite what the police report and death certificate said, Beryl Langue’s thinking atop the ridge was correct. Ironically, the aged passenger in the roto who caused Nora Elieson’s death, himself a man of great intelligence and greater patience, lost what he, too, valued most.

  It was those two losses, high above the turbid life and death of Africa, a continent where a half-bowl of millet could catalyze friend to foe, which gave birth to the troubles would so threaten Prissi Langue three years later.