Wings of Creation

by Brenda Cooper

  Looking over at her, I suddenly regretted not wrestling her back into my arms somehow the night before. When we were children, Alicia had it the worst of all of us, and I forgot sometimes. And now I was looking at a man I was pretty sure she liked as much as me, and he was handsome and winged. His voice and manner were calm and competent as he led us a little distance out to where mounds of earth rose up like upside-down coffins.

  We spent nearly forever balancing, belly down, each on top of the raised grassy rectangle. Tsawo called out right, left, up, and down, up hard, and down hard, and we made the requested shift with our booted feet or our full sets of wings. After that, when we were already tired, he made us raise our wings up over our arched backs and tilt our heads to prepare for landing. Even though the wings were no more than a few grams of weight, after an hour of exercise they seemed far heavier. He corrected each of us on our landing technique, and when it was his turn to correct me, he seemed to spend extra time on my balance. I couldn’t tell if I was more awkward than the rest, or if he simply wanted me to feel that way.

  We stripped our wings and ate fruit and bread and nuts, which seemed to be the most staple food here in spite of the meats we’d eaten at the feast. It made sense for fliers to eat like birds—constantly and lightly.

  Tsawo sat on the outside of the circle. The new flier with the purple wings introduced himself as Miro. Matriana sat beside Chelo, talking about the babies, who couldn’t fly by themselves until they understood the mortal danger of mistakes in the air. Alicia sat beside Chelo. From time to time she looked at me or at Tsawo or at Matriana; her glances furtive and confused. She caught me watching her gaze at Tsawo once, and her cheeks turned bright red.

  Marcus stood up. “Enough of a break. More work.”

  Tsawo frowned and went over and talked to Marcus. I couldn’t hear much of the conversation, but at the end Marcus said, “They have to,” and Tsawo looked over at us and nodded, looking unhappy.

  After that, we drilled takeoffs, and by dint of necessity, landings. The real fliers, of course, couldn’t demonstrate exactly what we needed to know. So Chance did it. Takeoff for Chance was simple—a few steps and a lift of his wings, and then a hop and a downbeat and he was gone. But I, at least, was heavier and more awkward, if stronger. The first time I actually got off the ground it was because I did a series of three of the best low-gravity leaps I could manage, and then pulled my wings down so hard my shoulders screamed. I got three whole strokes of my wings before I fell out of the air and skidded on my knees. But Chance smiled anyway, although I swear his jaw was tight and he had to force the “good” he offered me through clenched teeth.

  He left, leaving me with Tsawo, and I failed twice to even get off the ground. Tsawo was patient, although cool and distant, as if he did this a lot and I was no more or less special than any other student. Which should be right. But his demeanor irritated me anyway. Beet red and determined, I made it up the third time I tried and got twenty searingly painful wing beats in before landing a little sideways so the last half-meter of my wing—the part from my fingers out—crumpled backward and ripped.

  Tsawo frowned. “You’re too tired to fly.”

  Chance came over to examine the break, and pronounced, “Well, you’re out of it for the day. I’ll fix it tonight.”

  So much for impressing Alicia with my grace and gifted flying ability. I’d take a space ship over wings any day. It was beginning to look like I had a list of nearly insurmountable problems. Flying at all. Learning skills in weeks that had taken Marcus years to develop. Keeping Alicia interested in me. Saving the Five Worlds by fixing the fliers’ reproductive life. There were more after that, but as a current list it was enough.

  If the way-too-perfect metronome of data here on Lopali would just gain a few interesting twists, I might even solve one or two of my problems. But right now, I didn’t have an original idea for any of them. Data dipping here felt like thinking through molasses.

  The one bright spot was now I could watch Alicia fly. I settled onto the grass and looked up. I found her, high overhead, swooping with her arms extended. She looked natural, as much a part of the air as Chance, anyway.

  Except . . . it wasn’t Alicia.

  From a distance, Alicia and Kayleen looked similar, and Kayleen had been the one in a green shirt this morning. So where was Alicia?

  I finally found her only five or six meters above the ground. She wobbled in the air. Her wing beats were erratic, and after a long, tortuous flight that was hard to watch, she landed hard enough to need a few little jumps, her face a storm and her cheeks red with exertion or embarrassment or both. When she noticed me watching her, she turned away.

  We arrived home after dark, tired and sore and hungry. Tiala, with an annoyingly cheerful grin, made us a great big mash of vegetables and bread for dinner. I was too tired to taste the food, and the others looked the same. Even Alicia. She ate with her head down and her hair draping across her face, hiding most of her expression. I wanted to offer her comfort, but her quick sharp movements were a sign she wasn’t ready for it.

  That night, she lay beside me with her mod on once again, like a ghost in the bed. At first, I couldn’t tell if she had her face or her back to me, except once when it flickered for just a second and she lay there watching me with tears streaking sideways down her cheek. I moved closer to her, and she shifted, turning, the solid weight of her real in spite of the fact that I couldn’t actually see her. I pulled her close to me, but she stiffened and got up out of bed. I called after her, “Alicia.” Then, “Alicia, please. I love you.”

  The mod was nearly perfect in the dark and, without an answer from her to give away her location, she could have been anywhere in the room.

  17

  JOSEPH: A MOTHER AND CHILD

  I sat in the dark kitchen. The strong mixed-up smells of Paloma’s herbs filled the air all around me, so it almost smelled like her house back home. Except for Sasha’s soft breathing by my feet, no sound interrupted my thoughts. Even the morning birds still slept. I tried to focus on Lopali. We’d already been here almost three weeks, and so much about it bothered me. I felt like I’d been given a quarter of the pieces of a puzzle. On Silver’s Home, or Creator, or any ship in between, I’d be able to swim the silent fog of data long enough to find the other pieces. Here, the bliss of the surface data swept me along in its current, barely letting me see ghostly shapes below. Not being able to grasp them was driving me crazy.

  Flying lessons had continued every other day, leaving our exhausted muscles a day between to heal, and giving Marcus, Jenna, and Dianne all time in the off-days from flying to force us through long sweaty calisthenics sessions and grueling study. The Integrator’s Dream had not yet returned to the spaceport, but to listen to the urgency that laced Jenna’s and Marcus’s voices, it could come any moment, and it might hold an army instead of two men.

  Alicia and I made no worthwhile progress on the ground. On flying-lesson days, we were simply too tired. The other days, I went to the university and Alicia helped Dianne plow through reams of local news.

  The air became better to us than the ground.

  By the fourth day of flying, our natural ability levels had shown up. Tiala flew gracious circles around most of us. Jenna was fast, and almost predatory; a butterfly with fangs and claws. Chelo, Dianne, and Paloma were steady, measured fliers. Liam was strong and no nonsense and, like a watcher, hovered above whoever else was up. Ming brought her dancer’s grace to the air. Bryan barreled straight on behind her like a cargo tank, but looked deadly nonetheless. If any of us were unsure they were a couple, the way they stuck together in the air swept doubts away. Of all of them, Liam and Jenna were the ones I’d count on to fly the farthest and be in the most control.

  Kayleen surprised us. She was the first of us to master staying in the air for long, the first to relax and let go, to fly as an autonomous act like walking. In the air, she had Ming’s grace and Jenna’s focus, Liam’s stamina, and her own p
layful games. She had, best and scariest of all, no fear. It seemed as if flying let her rise above her demons.

  Watching her brought beads of sweat to my forehead.

  Unfortunately, so did flying. I could do it—far be it from me to let anything at all actually stop me and, when it looked like it might, Chelo encouraged me to the point of embarrassment, which finally got me up long enough to circle Fliers’ Field completely, even if I did land shaking.

  Alicia, with twice the wing time that I had, flew slightly better. Which made her the next-to-worst flier of the lot of us. I had expected Alicia to be an incredible flier, and Kayleen hesitant. But while Kayleen rode data with a dogged roughness heavy with her fears of insanity, she rode the winds of the air with so much grace I often stopped just to watch when she was up. For Alicia’s sake, I desperately wished that their skills were reversed.

  I spent as much time as I could find watching native fliers. The controlled weather provided many sparkling clear mornings to watch them dip and sway, race, and fly on focused missions. Even though we’d spent days studying flier anatomy and flier culture, I didn’t yet really understand what Marcus thought we should be doing. I kept hoping for a flash of inspiration as the graceful winged bodies flew above me.

  Dawn turned the sky gray, then pale blue. Thinking wasn’t helping. I paced, Sasha’s head twisting back and forth with each turn I made across the wide floor. I knelt by her and patted her head. “I’ve got to figure this out.” She returned my worried stare with her own unquestioning acceptance. Even though Alicia still kept her distance, at least I had Sasha for steady love.

  I climbed the steps to Marcus and Jenna’s room and knocked softly on the door. “Marcus?”

  “Joseph? Come in.”

  Of course he knew it was me. He probably already knew what was bothering me. I pushed the door open and found him and Jenna, both already up and dressed. “Marcus, can we talk before we go over to the university?”

  “What do you need to know?”

  A lot of things. I’d start with a question Chelo and I had puzzled over. “In the big picture, we’re trying to undo harm the Wingmakers did to the fliers, so that the fliers will take Silver’s Home’s side in the upcoming war. But the Wingmakers are from Silver’s Home.”

  He picked up a brush and ran it through his hair. “Silver’s Home has a lot of factions.”

  “Yes. And this will hurt one of the richer ones. What will that do to the war?”

  Jenna answered me this time. “We hope that will help stop it.”

  “Do you know?”

  She came over and stood by me. “There are some things you can never know. We all have to be patient, Joseph. You have a part to play. Worry about that.”

  “No. I mean, sure. But it would help to have some context.” I looked across her shoulder to Marcus.

  He gazed at me for a long time, as if contemplating something. His eyes held all of the love and respect they always had for me, and worry as well. “I’ll tell you what I can, when I can. I need you to trust me on that. But information shared is no longer secret.”

  That stung. “I can keep a secret!”

  Marcus came over and stood beside Jenna, near me. He spoke softly. “Words can be recorded. I helped build the data streams on Silver’s Home, and I was able to make them secure. You know that.”

  I recalled times he’d built a shield around us both and shared data with just me. We’d done no such thing here or on any of the ships in between. I swallowed back my disappointment, and found dismay behind it. Where could we really talk, ever? Were we in as much danger as his answers implied?

  Maybe I needed to draw him pictures. “Can we at least go talk about the fliers? What we’re going to do?”

  He smiled. “I’ll go for a walk with you.”

  “Can we take Sasha?”

  “Of course.”

  The shock of the cool morning air made me shiver. We headed toward the fields and crops outside of town. When we emerged from the last line of concentric circles of perch-trees, the sun made us both blink. A few minutes later, we stood warming at a crossroads in the middle of four fields. “We’re going to start today.”

  “Start?”

  “On the fliers. You know how we’ve been developing the computer model? We’re going to study someone real today.”

  “Cool.” In truth, his words made me nervous.

  “I’ll be the conduit. There won’t be any actual changes today, but when there are, I’ll do the work, and you’ll boost my energy. Kayleen and Chelo will support you.”

  “So, I’m the bigger battery?” I suggested, surprised to hear an edge in my voice.

  He laughed, breaking the seriousness out of the moment. He stopped and leaned down and picked up a short, heavy stick. He waved it in front of Sasha’s nose. She crouched, her body still and her eyes following his movements as if nothing else in the universe existed. Even her tail might have been a sculpture. Without taking his eyes off the dog, he asked, “What do you think we’ll be doing?”

  “We know the fliers have the right body parts, but they’re sterile. Have they always been sterile?”

  “They were made that way.” He kept swinging the stick through the air above Sasha’s nose, watching her watch him. “And their genetics, and the nanoprograms that make them fliers, are owned by the Wingmakers.”

  “So how does that change? If we change the genetics is it then their property?”

  He grimaced. “Power is more than business law. If they can reproduce, they’ll be empowered enough that it won’t matter. No sentient being itself is patented or owned, just their DNA signature and any biomechanics associated with making them. In fact, there’s precedent. Two species of dog and a bird have been declared semi-sentient, which is enough to get them free of slavery even if it doesn’t give them our rights.” He threw the stick in a great even arch, so it landed far ahead of us on the same straight path we were walking between fields. Sasha exploded after it, a blur of black-and-white fur.

  “But the fliers are sentient now, right? I mean, legally? Not semi-sentient.”

  “They have so much support from so many factions—followers, almost—that we’re pretty sure they can’t go backward. They aren’t politically naïve.”

  “You didn’t answer me.”

  Sasha brought him back the stick and he threw it again, not quite as far this time. “Darn. I believe they’re human. So they can’t be semi-sentient. The Wingmakers tell us they’re human, too, and they can’t help it if they can’t make them able to reproduce. There is bad precedent. The Court has found creations that can’t reproduce aren’t sentient, or even semi-sentient. No one had brought the case about the fliers.”

  I didn’t blame them. The morning flights were starting to rise from SoBright, far enough away they looked like butterflies as much as winged people. “What about Tsawo and the other younger fliers?” Alicia had told me some of the older fliers called Tsawo and his compatriots the Rebel Flight. “He seems polite enough helping us fly, but he still spends a lot of time with Alicia. I’d hate to see her get in trouble.”

  He offered me a sympathetic look, clearly hearing the subtext in my question. “When I ask, the most common answer is that they’re just young. Some of the older fliers claim they remember being like that.”

  Sasha had been sitting at his feet, waiting for him to toss the stick. She turned her head, whined once, and darted into the taller grass on the side of the path.

  Something screamed.

  She came out with one of the small rabbitlike grazers hanging dead in her jaws, sat down in the middle of the path, and began consuming it.

  Marcus stopped talking and looked at her, his expression partly horrified and partly bemused.

  “Breakfast,” I said.

  “Does she do that every day?” he asked.

  “She can’t live on nuts and golden grapes.”

  He shook his head. “No, I suppose not.”

  We watched Sasha until sh
e’d finished everything but the skin, which she picked up in her mouth. She trotted off and started digging a hole.

  “Smart dog,” he said.

  “Yeah. So do you believe the Rebel Flight is harmless?”

  He nodded. “That’s not what they call themselves. Tsawo is on our side.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You’ll see.”

  As soon as Sasha came back, we threaded our way through some trees and found a thin path that wound around a bigger grove. Ever since Kayleen’s discovery of the link between the seductive nature of the data fields and the physical world here, I felt the link in my body. When we neared places of calm, I felt calm. When we got near running water or faced down a cool wind, I had more energy. “What about the men on the ship?”

  He shook his head. “Escapes are being prepared.”

  I expected to go to the university again, but Marcus led us to Fliers’ Field. When we streamed up into the air and headed south, I was the worst flier by far. Marcus and Chelo stayed with me, flying under their normal speed, encouraging. Kayleen stalled by doing beautiful full loops and twists in the air. About the time the strain was truly telling on my shoulders, Matriana, Daniel, and Chance joined us.

  I felt even slower.

  We turned east, and Chelo looked over at me, and called out over the air, “Joseph! Want to rest?”

  I did. But I wasn’t about to be a reason for the whole group to stop. I tried to remember everything Tsawo and Chelo and Kayleen had told me. Relax into the air. Let your wings be a natural appendage. Turn slowly; no fast movements. Ever (although Kayleen moved fast). Don’t stiffen your arms. None of it really helped.