Flight

by Neil Hetzner

  * * *

  In a different, less current language, Fflowers was thinking many of the same thoughts as Prissi. He thought what black-humored poetic justice it would be if he were to die, his central processor apoplectic, at the dedication of a building he had endowed with the sole thought of nurturing students whose brains were capable of re-discovering something miraculous he had caused to be lost so many years before. What Greek theater it would be, if, at the moment of his death, he should be brought back together with the person… no, it couldn’t be the person, but a startling mirror image of the person, one of three, who had wrought the century’s greatest miracle, and wrestled it into the light before slamming it back into the ignorant dark.

  Despite the press of bodies and wheedling voices around him, Joshua Fflowers could not take his eyes off the girl talking with Jack.

  Moving along with the shuffling sycophants, laughing with his grandson, was a girl who looked how Elena Howe, his wife, muse, science partner, and enemy looked when she was fifteen. The girl’s impossible resemblance to Elena squeezed the insides of Joshua Fflowers like a heart attack. This Doppelganger could not be by chance. Somehow, this impossible girl had to share most of Elena’s double helix, but how? Could she be Elena’s daughter? Impossible. Rapacious Fate struck twice had taken away that option. Could she be a niece? Impossible. Elena had had a sister…Morgana. But, she must be dead thirty years by now. Could she be a grand-niece and look that much like her? Impossible. A daughter that couldn’t be. A niece that couldn’t be. The girl looked too much like Elena to be anything else but a clone. But, how? And, why? Why now? Why here with Jack?

  As the guests in the line shambled along, like refugees from a war zone, Joshua Fflowers pondered. He and Elena had never had children. That was a decision, strictly a temporary decision by Fflowers, to which Elena reluctantly had agreed. He had argued that they were too caught up in changing the world with wings. Children could come later. Of course, they had hedged their bets with frozen eggs and seed. That had been a prescient move given that Elena was to fight ovarian cancer before she was thirty-five. But, the eggs had been stored at the lab where the research for the Centsurety Project had been entering the final stages. The eggs, the knowledge and processes of Centsurety’s world-altering discovery, and worst of all, Elena herself had been lost to him in the explosion which destroyed the lab.

  As he had a thousand times over the last fifty years, Fflowers clamped his jaws tight to keep from wailing.

  By the time Jack and Prissi had their turn, Joshua Fflowers had recovered enough of his equanimity that he could do his Midas and Merlin imitations without a misstep.

  From two steps away, the girl, whom Jack introduced as Prissi Langue, even more closely resembled Elena—the slight epicanthal folds that gave the eyes their almond shape, the almond theme continued with the Shoshone skull, the slight creases, eczema markers, under the Venus-bright eyes, the long neck, an elegant stem for what Fflowers suspected would be a head overflowing with intelligence and derring-do. The girl was so much like Elena that he had a barely resistible urge to ask her to take off her shoes to see if she had elongated toes with the little ones turned nearly sideways.

  Joshua Fflowers held his grandson’s hand as Jack introduced Prissi.

  “Mz. Langue, my pleasure. Have you a chaperone to protect yourself from my Jack of all traits, bad traits?”

  When the old man winked at her, Prissi felt an instant freedom. She shook her head, “No, sir. No chaperone. Just my rapier tongue and Dutton’s shield of honor.”

  The old man growled in pleasure like a dog getting its ears scratched. He felt like he had been yanked back eighty years to those halcyon days when Elena Howe and he first met as post-doc students at Cold Spring Harbor.

  Joshua Fflowers had rarely slept when he was a young man. He had felt that he had no time to waste in sleep. But, he had spent thousands upon thousands of hours in bed thinking and, in a whisper, recording those thoughts into his mypod with the serenely sleeping Elena alongside. In those hours, as he had studied her face in the silver of moon-glow or the amber of street light, he had done what he considered to be his best thinking—how to give freedom to humankind and how to cripple those who stood in his way. As he had thought the thoughts that changed the world, he had studied Elena’s face pore by porcelain pore. Now, from a meter away, Fflowers had no doubt that by some mystery, which he swore he would unravel, the face before him, this wonderful, wily, intrigued, intriguing, bright, never to be expected face, was, somehow, protein of Elena’s protein.

  “Langue? Are you French? Langue is French for tongue and the root of the word language.”

  “No, sir. I’m from Africa. No French there in quite awhile.”

  The old man tipped his head as he considered that piece of information.

  “And how did you end up at Dutton? Are you a legacy student?”

  “No, sir. My mother died and my father moved us to New York. After we were here awhile, he decided that I could get a better education if I went to boarding school.”

  Jack interjected, “Well that’s true…if you’re smart enough to go to the right boarding school.”

  Joshua Fflowers held up a hand to stop Jack, “And, are you getting a better education?’

  Prissi nodded her head vigorously, “Dr. Smarkzy is one of my teachers.”

  “Then, you are. Then, you certainly are.”

  As he continued to talk to Jack and the girl, Joshua Fflowers could feel the force of the receiving line grow, like water building behind a dam. On a powerful whim, he decided he could get to the institute even later than he already was going to be. Organ preservation had come a long way. He asked Jack and Prissi to have dinner with him. When the girl declined, saying that she had to get back to Dutton, the centenarian felt the rejection as sharply as a high school boy.

  A minute later the teenerz said their goodbyes—Jack with a hug and the girl with a wide, but enigmatic smile—and hurried off. Once they were gone, a distracted Joshua Fflowers hurriedly fed the egos of the rest of the hungering parade.

  As Binny Dowdahl accompanied him to the roto, Joshua Fflowers rattled off a dozen questions about Jack, Prissi, and Jack and Prissi. Dowdahl had the right answers about Jack, knew nothing of Prissi as she wasn’t a Bissell student, and raised his eyebrows until they resembled the St. Louis arch as answer about the two of them. When Fflowers asked him to find out what he could, Bissell’s headmaster and chief Myrmidon nodded eagerly.

  As soon as the wheelchair was locked in place and the roto’s blades were spinning, the trillionaire began ogling Prissi Langue and her family. By the time he landed at the Juvenal Institute, his biggest finding was how little he was able to discover, despite access to innumerable interlocked databases and a host of search engines, about Prissi Langue and her parents. However, Fflowers was still far too much the scientist to be stymied by initial failure. He knew that as soon as his rejuve surgeries were over, he would be back on the trail. He had no choice. He had to know about the girl.

  As Joshua Fflowers considered who and what Prissi might be, he necessarily thought about his two sons. Even as he was prepped by a host of nurses to receive his new parts, he reviewed for the millionth time how those two sons were the unfathomable punishment he had paid for a well-intentioned act.

  Two years after the Centsurety lab explosion, in an effort to relieve his pain and divert his anger, Fflowers had had his seed mated with Elena’s eggs. Adaman had been the result. From the moment of his birth, Fflowers had felt that the son was nothing like the mother, nor the father. He neither looked like them—an outcome which belied the supposed advances in genetic engineering—nor did he act like them. By the time Adaman was two, Joshua Fflowers learned why. He had thrown the die and lost—because the die had been loaded. The egg that had been fertilized with his sperm had not been harvested from Elena’s ovaries. A DNA scan had revealed that. Months of investigations as to who was the source of the egg resulted in nothing but dea
d ends. Knowing that Elena had switched eggs on him finally brought full force to Fflowers how much she despised him.

  As Adanan grew into a snarky, oily, needy boy, Fflowers’ revulsion grew alongside. Finally, since he could not change his feelings, he tried to change the paradigm by having a second son. Fflowers was fifty-seven when he grew a second son from an egg that had been carefully considered and even more carefully tested. The result, Illiya, was somewhat more to his liking…at first.

  Even before the arrival of Illiya, Fflowers could not think of Adaman as his real son. The boy was a burden, a disappointment, even his heir, but not his son. Night after night, Fflowers would wander through the dozens of rooms of the Airie, which felt twice as big and frighteningly empty since Elena had gone, and consider the child whom he and Elena could have, and he had convinced himself, would have made. A child more like Elena and less like himself.

  In the late night chiaroscuro made by the swirling beams of winger beacons, hawk’s roto searchlights and the spatter of late night revelers’ erratically weaving flight lights, Fflowers would walk his own personal stations of the cross. The high-ceilinged library, crammed with science and myth, where over and over he had insisted to the doubting Elena that they were too young and their lives too full to have children…yet. The baronial dining room where Elena first had mentioned in passing the anomalous results of her pap exam. The statuary gallery, at that time his sanctorum, the place where he first had had the idea for the Centsurety Project. The parterre, with its central allee lined with marble and alabaster imaginings of all the forms the gods had left undone. The parterre, where the best and worst of his memories had been born….

  Fflowers looked past the flurry of hands preparing him for his rejuve….

  ….It had been on starry night in late winter, just before the Ides of March, in the parterre which was filled with art and flowers, that a sleepless Joshua Fflowers had had the idea for the very best present he could give to Elena for her forty-fifth birthday.

  It was a time of congruence. Things long worked for were falling into place. Finally, after fifteen years, the China market was exploding. Cygnetics just had reported record quarterly earnings for the twentieth time in a row. The delayed fledging process had been making remarkable progress. After a dozen tries, the special embryos of the Centsurety Project, still no bigger than beans, seemed to be thriving. It was time for him to give Elena her wings. It was not that he had had no doubts about his gift. After all, the wings would be grafted, not grown. And Elena, who had helped millions to fly, had never expressed her own desire to fly. Soon after Elena’s battle with ovarian cancer and resultant hysterectomy eight years before, Fflowers had argued with her to get wings as a balm to her wounds, but she had wanted nothing to do with it. Rather than flying in an empty sky, she preferred to lose herself in work.

  At the time, Fflowers had heard his wife’s wishes, but he hadn’t believed them. There had been too many other times when Elena’s initial resistance later had turned to acceptance. Fflowers had convinced himself that, once the gift was made, Elena would be immensely grateful that he had taken the initiative.

  But, Elena had not been grateful. She had been horrified. And as her revenge, she had left and taken all of her, and so much of him, from him. He had been left with an incurable emptiness, and progeny he could not own within his heart. Now, with the appearance of the girl, who, in some miraculous way, must be egg of Elena’s egg, the girl who had conjured herself at this auspicious moment, Fflowers knew that he was about to be rejuvenated in both body and soul.

  As he was wheeled into the surgery, Joshua Fflowers was more hopeful and more excited than he had been in more than fifty years. Fate had come round. He was forgiven.

  Seventy-two hours later, a half-dozen slight sighs away from death because of a rejected liver split and a pancreatic transplant gone spectacularly wrong, hope and promise as well as any interest in Prissi Langue, her history and kin, were far removed from Joshua Fflowers’ guttering thoughts.