Flight

by Neil Hetzner

CHAPTER ONE

  A Teacher Is The Best Experience

  Prissi Langue, a fifteen-year old second year Dutton School student, came stomping up the stairs from the Carver Common Room. Prissi was stoking a hissy fit and enjoying every molecule of the volatile chemistry jumping within her body. After a late Thursday night marathon studying for a test in Chinese and finishing a problem set for Fi-Sci II, she had bunked breakfast to sleep late. When she woke, she was ravenous as only a fifteen-year-old girl can be. There was nothing left in her snack-cache but empty bags and boxes containing pitiful corners of salty crumbs or sugary dust. It didn’t take a genius to know that her roomie, Nasty Nancy Sloan, had been on a pillage again. To silence the animal growling in her stomach, Prissi had run downstairs to the Common Room to get a tofusicle from the venderator, but when she had stepped on the biometric pad in front of that glowing tabernacle to teener desire, it had beeped twice. A single beep was a warning. Two beeps meant that the machine thought that she was too fat. Two beeps meant the machine, regardless of how much money was inserted as a bribe, wouldn’t open the little tabernacle doors behind which a host of secular treasures could be seen.

  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 win
gs 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.

  DNA. Stairway to a trillion possibilities.

  Although her mother and father always had laughed at the absurdity when Prissi would accuse them of not being her real parents, Prissi often wondered whether she was made from her parents’ DNA. As early as fourth grade, when she began to learn of all the parenting possibilities—GEEs (genetically-enhanced embryos), surrogation, hy-babes (hybrid babies with either sperm or egg from a donor), and the ancient stand-by, adoption, Prissi had fantasized about how she came to be with the people who called themselves her parents. Those tales, first thought while lying on a cot under mosquito netting on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika, usually involved exotic people in even more exotic circumstances.

  Prissi stared at the ladder of life pulsing inside its glowing sac at the front of the room and considered the wisdom of bringing some of her parents’ DNA back after winter break to prove that she could not possibly be their spawn.

  Prissi snorted so loudly that Smarkzy’s smartstick swung in her direction. Her face reddening in dismay, Prissi covered her mouth to squelch another outburst.

  Spawn. Prissi Langue loved that word. Evil
spawn. Like corn smut, but with shoes and underwear. Prissi toyed with the idea of bringing back a gatherum of hair from her father’s brush, then bribing an honor’s senior to type it to see if she really was flesh of his flesh. But, that would only answer half the equation. Finding out about her mother would not be so easy. The only possession Prissi had of her mother’s was a small, ornately carved rosewood box. After her father gave it to her, Prissi had been caught within a labyrinth of emotions as she opened it and found her mother’s engagement and wedding rings, as well as a strand of pale green pearls. Even after hundreds of times, looking in the box still released a rat’s nest of feelings in the girl. Prissi shook her catfood brown hair to sweep away her thoughts.

  Coming out of class, Prissi saw Joe Fflower’s broad back half-way down the hallway. She sped up and darted left and right around her classmates to get closer. Like with a lot of teener relationships, Prissi sometimes had a much better time watching Joe than actually being with him. Even from the back, she could tell that, like always, he was walking with his nose in the air. She rode her loving loathing like a favorite horse as she scanned down from his shiny, blond, perfectly curled, but perfectly uncoifed hair to his too broad shoulders and down to his VCB. The first time Prissi had noticed the VERY CUTE BUTT, it was so distinctive that she had nicknamed it Hector. When she found out who its owner was, that he came from a family with more money than Mombai, came from the family that had dominated the meta-mutancy business for three-quarters of a century, she was sure the VCB would never have a place in her life. But, in another example of Dutton’s famous tradition of diversity, Prissi Lange and Joe Fflowers had become friends, and, finally, after a months-long fencing match of feints and counters, more than friends.

  Following three steps behind, Prissi had a bittersweet feeling in knowing that Hector would soon go behind the feathered veil. There was no chance that Joe’s family would let him remain a walker. Prissi had listened too many times while a cavalierly defiant Joe explained why he didn’t want wings—at least, right now. He wanted to play hockey. Prissi knew that Joe’s reputation was that he was one of the top ten high school hockey players in the country. But, even if that were true, Prissi could not imagine Joe’s father, Illiya Fflowers, the Co-President of Cygnetics, a company that fledged over five million teenerz a year, letting Joe have his way. Whether he wanted it that way or not, the Joe Fflower’s was going to have to accept that tomorrow would be his last hockey game as a walker. Four days after that, Spring Break would begin. Prissi was positive that when Joe returned from break, he would have been muted. And, while the world would have gained a winger, unfortunately, Prissi’s eyes would have to bid a fond adieu to a visible VCB.

  Prissi skipped around Kipo Phelps, wrapped an arm around Joe’s waist and laid her head on his shoulder.

  “Hi.”

  Joe wriggled himself free.

  “No PDAs, miss.”

  “Well, what if I hit you in the arm, would that be seen a public display of affection?”

  “An attack on me is an attack on Dutton.”

  “Wouldn’t want that. I’ll see you later. In private.”

  Joe turned toward Prissi, and gave a slight nod toward the restroom door, but said nothing.

  As Prissi watched Joe’s VCB go through the doorway, she sighed.

  Once again, for the billionth time, commerce would trump art.

  Oh, woe. Goodnight, sweet butt of a not always so sweet prince.

  Prissi snorted, then immediately chastised herself. Next to her flourishing farm of excrescences, her high strung ever-talking hands, her mutation into a fizgig whenever she had too much caffeine, and the nose, of course, the monumental nose, the thing Prissi hated most about herself was her snort. It was a horrible noise. Like the sound a javelina would make before it gored a dog. The snort was her unedited laugh and it made her want to cry when she heard it.

  With gallimaufry thoughts of love and hate, like and dislike, bubbling in her brain, the girl hurried down the hall and burst from the Zoeg. The sun was shining, the wind was blowing. The tulip heads wee bobbing in a way that reminded the girl of Twa tribe dancers. Another snort was triggered by the massive snowflakes dancing in the sky. Snow in March was unknown. Snow from a blue sky in March was magic, and, for Prissi Langue, magic always drew a snort.