Flight

by Neil Hetzner

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Enmity and Amity

  Just after eight the next morning, Prissi was in the air and flying north along the East River levee. Although it was Friday and only just past rush hour, the city seemed sadly empty. Very few wingers were along the river or flying across from Queens. The ten meter flame jutting from the building’s rubble made the old United Nations memorial look, as it always did to Prissi, like a gas well being flared off. North of Fiftieth Street, Prissi veered out over the river and split the distance between Manhattan and Roosevelt Island. She swept under the remnants of the Queensboro Bridge. The sun over her right shoulder warmed her right wing, which was feeling good. A balmy wind blowing out of the southwest lifted her wings. She climbed just past fifty meters, pulled her knees up to her chest and soared. As she approached 90th Street, orange helibuoys at thirty and sixty meters pushed her farther out from the island and away from the site of where the members of the Ghost Brigade of Darfur had exploded three bombs in an attempt to breach the levee and flood the Upper East Side. A half-dozen E-cops, three wingers and three walkers, followed her flight with their weapons held at half rest.

  Spiceville, the area between 138th and 149th Streets, from river to river was home or hovel to a great number of immigrants and foreign students who went to Columbia International University. Many of the dilapidated buildings that crowded against one another were owned by foreign governments. From a law passed back in 2068 that was intended to pay homage to, but also diffuse, the growing nationalism of many Middle East, Far East and African countries, certain buildings, owned by foreign governments, were afforded a sovereignty equal to that of an embassy. One unintended consequence of the Harmony Act was that those sovereign buildings were not subject to city or state building regulations or codes. When aspiring nations were dragged back into the Fifth World by war, disease, or, most often, corruption, their sovereign buildings were left to rot. As Prissi flew a tightening spiral over the motley neighborhood, she studied the rooftop tent cities and networks of eight and ten story buildings lashed together with ratlines, rope and wood bridges, and metal ladders. On 141st Street, she saw where a lattice of narrow steel beams connected the roof of one brownstone to another across the street. Most of the platform was covered in sheets of badboard while the shacks and sheds, hunched close together like huddled beggars, were constructed of re-used re-side. Even as high as she was, Prissi could smell heavily spiced grilled meat and the fetid sweetness of rotting garbage.

  Prissi keyed her mypod for a PS report. The public service screen scrolled up, identified the area, and reported that the neighborhood was red level for crimes against property but just a blue for crimes against persons—although females were seventy percent of the victims. Of those, only twelve percent were wingers. Prissi knew that it wasn’t that the area was kind to wingers, but rather, that most wingers were smart enough not to come to the neighborhood. It was because of that dearth of wingers that, Prissi had to fly two blocks west of where she wanted to be before she found a spot where she thought she could safely land without catching a wing on a clothes line or sliding on a smear of garbage. Despite her caution the teener’s left leg slid out from her as it landed on something as dark as the pavement but much slicker. She threw out her right wing to catch herself and managed to keep from falling backward onto her head, but at the expense of hearing a loud pop in her wing joint.

  “Hieronymus freeieekin Bosch. Not again. Heaving Zeusus.”

  The pain was so sharp that Prissi bent forward to vomit onto the street to try to rid herself of it.

  After brushing her lips clean, she hobbled over to the sidewalk and limped along until she came to a narrow unfenced space between two buildings. She looked all around before she scuttled three steps deep into the dark space, took a deep breath and slammed herself against the moldy wall of the building on her right.

  She hit the wall so hard, her head snapped sideways, but nothing else happened. She screamed something that if heard at Dutton would have put her on Skru Kru for 6 hours. She shook her head violently, sucked down as much air as she could hold and slammed into the wall a second time.

  The same pop, the same exquisite pain, the same puke, although not as much, and her wing was relocated.

  In the ten months since she had first flown, Prissi had dislocated her wings seven times—every time on the right. She had considered telling her father so that he could put in an insurance claim, but she thought that as she got a little older, the ball at the end of the humerus would expand enough to better fit the socket. Anyway, she always told herself, a dislocated wing was better than lockwing.

  Prissi favored her wing as she walked back toward the river and Richard Baudgew’s apartment.

  In the picnic pix, the man she was going to see was looking at the camera with a pair of XXUV sunglasses in one hand, as if he had just taken them off for the photographer, and a dark drink in the other. He was a tiny man, by far the shortest man in the group, shorter even than two of the women. Below the swirl of brown hair that fell across his forehead, his eyes were so deep-set that it was hard to tell what color they were. The eyebrows were dark and curved in a way that reminded Prissi of a wooly caterpillar. His nose was as small and dainty as his bow-shaped mouth. His chin was as small and smooth as a chicken egg. From her experience with a couple of her teachers at Dutton, Prissi guessed from the pix that Baudgew had been in his early thirties and smart, cynical, sexless and very funny in a cruel way.

  The building, whose armor doors and elevator were broken, was a prime example of the Afro-mask architectural Renascence which had permeated the area in the 2040s. Prissi climbed to the fifth, and top floor, and rang the briz. A minute later, safe behind its slide screen, a shadowed face with bright bird eyes stared at Prissi. The apartment dweller’s breath caught so sharply that his, “Yes?” became two long syllables.

  Brightening her smile as much as she could, Prissi said, “Hello, my name is Priscilla…Prissi.”

  Baudgew’s nose twitched as if he had gotten a whiff of tainted fish.

  “I assume the doors are broken again?”

  When Prissi nodded, he asked, “Are you selling something…sweet?”

  “No, no sweets. No selling. I’m hoping you can help me with a school project. I have a question about a pix I found.”

  When the old gnome stayed quiet, Prissi continued, “From a long time ago.”

  She pulled the pix from her kanga and held it up to the slide screen.

  Baudgew’s response was a pendulum swing from a moment’s pleasure to a cold distancing.

  “Where did you get that?”

  Remembering that what Pequod Jones had allowed her to see what forbidden to the public, Prissi stammered, “I…a…a friend found it…somewhere. I’m writing a paper about blind alleys in science.”

  Prissi steeled herself, “Could I come in?”

  The old man’s head tipped ten degrees to the left and then to the right, like a parakeet on its perch, as he studied Prissi through the hardened glass. He stared at her with no more embarrassment than if she were a mannequin in a dress store. Finally, she heard four quick clicks and the door slowly opened.

  Prissi thought that, in person, the old man, dressed in a flowing paisley robe, resembled a eunuch in an Ottoman court portrait. His small pursed pale pink mouth looked like the end of a piece of chem lab hose.

  Given the neighborhood, Prissi was surprised at the faded opulence of Baudgew’s apartment before she remembered that a half-century ago, New Harlem as it was called then, was one of the most desirable locations in the city. All of the Oriental rugs, filigreed brassware, and heavily carved dark furniture again made her think of a Turkish court. As Baudgew darted and glided quickly from living room to kitchen and back to living room carrying a brass tray with tiny cerulean blue cups, a pot of coffee and a dish of cardamom seeds, his silk robe swirled and swished about his cropped pajama pants. Prissi was sure that, if she were to walk to the far end of the long narrow, red wall-pape
red living room, none of the pix she could see hanging there would be of her host with wife and children. When he finished his hurly-burly of hosting duties, the little man sat primly on a gold and ivory love seat and tightly tucked his robe close around his short, thick and, apparently hairless, legs.

  The syrupy black coffee was poured and, at Baudgew’s insistence, Prissi agreed to float a cardamom seed on its surface before the old man’s tiny, pink, strangely smooth hands reached out for the pix. He held the image close to his face before snapping several of the faces with a lacquered fingernail.

  His first words, “Of surpassing beauty and in the bloom of youth,” were drenched in sarcasm. He flipped the pix back onto the table. When Prissi leaned forward to recover it, she spilled a drop of coffee on the tray. Dr. Baudgew sharply inhaled.

  “Sorry. I can be a little spasmotic.”

  The little man’s mouth looked as though he has eaten something tart.

  “Spasmotic?”

  Knowing that her welcome was wearing out faster than her knowledge was growing, Prissi pointed to the pix, “This is you, isn’t it?”

  The effete elf slightly nodded. Prissi touched the other faces that Pequod Jones had named. When she herself repeated the names, Baudgew agreed. With tingling fingertips, Prissi lightly touched the two faces of the couple holding hands, “Who are these two?”

  “Oh, my. Those are the twin wizards, Smart Glen Laureby and his smarter sidekick, Roan Winslow.”

  “I think she might be my…great aunt.”

  Baudgew had a half-smirk on his china doll lips as he leaned back and studied Prissi’s face.

  “Really? I don’t see the resemblance. Is your great aunt’s name Roan?’

  Prissi shook her head.

  “Was her maiden name Winslow?”

  Prissi was still considering that Nora was an anagram of Roan and didn’t really hear Baudgew’s question.

  “What?”

  The petulant homunculus repeated, “Winslow. Was her name Winslow?”

  “No. I don’ think so.”

  “Is your great aunt a too smart person?”

  Prissi, not understanding the little man’s animosity, ignored his comment. She tapped the pix and asked, “What did they do?”

  Baudgew paused for a second as he decided whether he wanted to be sidetracked.

  “Do? Why, science, of course. What else do really smart people do? We were all scientists. Except those two were just a little smarter and a little quicker scientists than the rest of us. We plodded. They bounded…until they got so far ahead of the pack, they got lost.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  “If you believe one of them to be a relative, I would be doing an egregious unkindness to say.”

  “No. I want to know. I do.”

  The shriveled pixie tugged his robe even tighter around him.

  “Thus spake Pandora.”

  “I do. Please.”

  “They were working one weekend and there was an unfortunate explosion and fire and two too smart people disappeared.”

  “Disappeared? Wasn’t that kind of hard to do…even back then?”

  “A euphemism. To protect youth’s innocence. They were in the explosion. A rather dramatic explosion. Given how large the explosion was and how fierce the fire that ensued, perhaps disappeared is not so much the euphemism.”

  Baudgew’s hands exploded from his silk cuffs.

  “Poof. Left just a belt buckle and a tooth or two. And memories…such fond memories.”

  Prissi looked closely at the picture again to see if she recognized her mother.

  “And where does Pandora live?’

  Prissi caught herself in time to edit her answer. The little man was setting off lots of her Africa-honed alarms.

  “In Connecticut. May I ask what you did at Centsurety?”

  “Why, of course. Asking questions has always been youth’s privilege. Do you in youth mean you, as in me, or as in all of us?”

  Baudgew wriggled in his robe at his cleverness. Prissi leaned down to the low table to pick up her cup. When she sat back up, using a trick she had learned to cope with certain Dutton boys, her body was several inches further away the from the dwarfish man.

  “All of you.”

  Baudgew twisted on the couch so that he could look at Prissi more directly as he coyly smiled, “We made things.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Oh, you know …interesting things.” He reached over to slide his hand down Prissi’s wing. “Did you know that wings used to be interesting? A long time ago. We were interested in wings…and things.”

  When Baudgew stroked her wing a second time, Prissi decided that it was time to go. She stood, thanked her host and put the pix back in her kanga. She paused for a second in thought before she suddenly reached down and, before her host could protest, scooped her cup and saucer and took them to the kitchen. A second later, Prissi was back in the living room and headed for the door, which Baudgew was just opening. Even though he groped her a third time as she was half-way out the door, she asked, “May I ask why you live in this neighborhood?”

  The old man raised a finger tip and theatrically wiped away a non-existent tear. “Though Cain, though able, I can’t leave Elba, thus able in Elba I remain.” His harsh little laugh and final touch of her feathers sent Prissi bolting through the door.

  The creeped-out Prissi stood on the cratered sidewalk outside Baudgew’s home for ten minutes hoping that she would meet someone from his building. He was such a bizarre little man that she was sure his neighbors would have lots of stories. She was prepared to wait even longer, but a group of four boys, dressed in reds and treads crossed the street to be on her side. After being attacked twice the day before, Prissi didn’t wait. Two hops, four flaps and she was out of reach. The shortest boy shook his fist and yelled something. It was Arabic, but the phrase wasn’t familiar to her. She dipped a wing as she yelled, “Not today, zurga.”

  Her small tormentor darted sideways to the gutter looking for something to throw at his taunter, but Prissi was beyond range before he found anything suitable. The urchin threw the half-bottle anyway. He laughed when it exploded in the street, and his friends laughed too, but Prissi was sure that their laughter was directed at him.

  Prissi leveled off when she got to one hundred meters. She was confused. She was sure the woman in the picture was her mother. The fact that Roan was an anagram of Nora seemed important. But, Baudgew said that she was dead. As she flew cross-town she thought of going back to the NYPD to see what she might find out about Roan Winslow and Glen Laureby…and Richard Baudgew, but as she swerved south onto Lenox Avenue, she decided that before she did that, she needed to clear her head. It was a beautiful day for flying. At 96th Street, at the top of Central Park, she turned west toward the Hudson. When she got to the river, she turned back south, but only for a few blocks. On a sudden whim she banked west again and began flying across the river.

  As soon as she was over the water, Prissi had to fight the urge to breathe fast and fly faster. From the licensing course all wingers took, Prissi knew all about aerohydrarophobia; however she had never felt its symptoms before. But, the after-effects of nearly crashing from exhaustion the day before, and the fact that she had dislocated her wing less than two hours before, made her nervous. The fear came from thinking that she had no place to land. As soon as she started having that thought, landing was exactly what her body felt compelled to do. Despite her trepidations, Prissi was not so hinky that she was willing to fly another eighty blocks north so she could cross above the George Washington Bridge. The winger calmed herself by reciting the statistics which showed that it was much more dangerous to fly in bad weather or at night than to fly over water.

  Prissi tipped her head up so that she could stare at the palisades far in front of her rather than at the brown and white waters of the Hudson churning beneath. To distract herself, the teener imagined what she might find at her destination. After her second
standoff with her father, the frustrated girl had gone to her room and ogled every scrap of information she had. One of those scraps was Al Burgey, the name on the two letters she had found among her mother’s things. An A. Burgey lived in Verona, New Jersey. Beyond a couple of lines in his letters, there was no evidence that he was a scientist, but Prissi didn’t care. An Al Burgey knew her mother. An A. Burgey lived in Verona, so that was where Prissi was going.

  As soon as Prissi was clear of the river, she landed, caught her breath, and keyed Burgey’s address into the mypod’s flight planner. According to the itinerary, it would take her just over an hour to get to Burgey’s house. Prissi closed her eyes and tried to gauge whether she could fly to Verona and still have enough energy to get back home. Her best answer was maybe. She dug into her kanga and found a semi-smashed Zzolt-a-bar. She gobbled it, brushed the sticky crumbs from her face, used her tongue like a spatula to work the greasy not-quite-strawberry flavored scum from the back of her teeth, and flapped back into the air.

  An hour later, as she looked down from one hundred meters, Prissi thought Verona looked quite a bit like of Waterville. The newly green tops of mature maples and oaks lined both sides of the narrow streets. The houses, mostly large and mostly old, sat back from the streets. The only indication that the wealth and serenity of the small town might be less than what it appeared was the four burned-out houses Prissi saw as she flew over.

  House-burnings, HBs, had been a common method of grass-roots social change during the Ticklish Situation of 2038. Usually the HBs were set by poor walkers against rich wingers or by radical fundas against their ecoist counterparts. In both instances, the fact that the destruction was by fire was considered to have importance. In the previous five years, as evidence of world cooling grew and more people doubted their science, and the ecoists started to lose power, houses began to burn again.

  When she got close, the winger’s Prissi’s mypod squeaked and its arrows began their sequential flashing.

  Prissi slowed her speed as she flew ten meters above the smooth pavement of Oakstaff Street. Burgey’s house was an ancient mongrel with two eyelash gables jutting out over a low-walled porch. The house was painted a sallow yellow with black shutters. From her perspective, Prissi thought the overall effect was of a toothless geri having a snit. When she walked up the undulating brick walk, the teener was surprised to see, given the HBs close-by, a wooden door with a large oval of etched glass. No steel door, no bars, no slide screen, not even a safety screen. The lack of caution on the owner’s part caused Prissi to stop dead on the first step of the porch. She had already dealt with one weird person; she wasn’t sure that she wanted to make it two on the same day. She considered, half-turned, re-considered, then, turned back and hurried up the steps to ring the doorbell before she changed her mind.

  A tall cadaverous man with a tomahawk nose, rheumy eyes and tendrils of silver hair floating like seaweed over the large reefs of his ears, bent forward, stopped for a moment, as if nonplussed, then, offered a lipless smile before asking, “Yes?”

  Prissi was sure that the man standing before her was older than her father, yet, he had the voice of a young man.

  “Mr. Burgey?”

  When he gave his head a slight shake, an empty bag of skin beneath his chin wriggled.

  “Burgey. The accent is on the first syllable, and the g is hard.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Please, don’t be. How could you know?” He paused for a second before continuing sotto voce, “How, indeed?”

  When Prissi told him her name, his smile widened and the wrinkles in his cheeks expanded like an accordion drawing air.

  “You knew my mother?”

  “Yes, yes I did.”

  “And, you know she’s dead?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so.”

  “How did you know?”

  Burgey waved his hands.

  After waiting for more and receiving nothing but a cluck, Prissi launched into telling the sickly-looking geri about her school project studying blind alleys in science. She ended by asking, “Did you ever hear of a company called Centsurety?”

  It was very apparent that that was not the question that he was expecting. His short narrow eyebrows shifted from accent grave to accent aigu.

  “Would you like to…?”

  Before he finished his question, Prissi had answered it with her most confident smile and a tactical retreat. Instead of starting to go inside, she took a step back, flared her wings, dropped them over the railing and leaned her butt against the railing’s peeling paint.

  After Burgey had watched the teener’s retreat with amused eyes he asked, “Why are you interested in something from so long ago?”

  Prissi’s first thought was to invent for Burgey, who was looking incredibly birdlike, with his small bright eyes and sharp nose, details about…a lost uncle. Instead, for reasons she couldn’t explain, she decided to trust this slightly frightening man with the truth.

  She explained how she first had become interested in Centsurety and how her interest had grown and shifted when she found the pix that showed a woman that looked like her mother. Did he know if her mother worked there? Had her mother been married before? Was her name ever Winslow? Someone named Roan Winslow, who looked a lot like her mother, supposedly had died in an explosion. What did he know about that? Did he remember much about a man named Glen Laureby and what he was doing, the kind of science he was doing? Did he have any pix from that time? Or, any articles, or records?

  When she began to ask another question, Burgey held up a hand, a hand with fingers thin as pencils and as gnarled as twigs, a hand that reminded Prissi of the hands of Dr. Smarkzy and Joshua Fflowers. The old man kept the hand up, as if to ward off any more questions, even as he disappeared into the house.

  While she waited, Prissi became so agitated that her butt started bouncing on the railing. Her excitement waned however, when, rather than returning with a box or worn leather flash screen, as she had imagined, Burgey re-emerged with a tattered red cloak covering his wings. He drew one of the faded, gray plastic perches close to Prissi, flared his wings and perched.

  “May I see the picture…do you mind if I date myself by calling it a picture?”

  Prissi pulled the pix from her kanga. She pointed, “This is the woman who looks like my mother, but Dr. Baudgew tells me that she can’t possibly be my mother because she died in an explosion.”

  “Baudgew?”

  “Yes, I just came from seeing him. He said this woman is dead.”

  Al Burgey took the paper from Prissi’s finger and studied it for a long moment before handing it back.

  “Sleeping dogs stir. Of which some may have a vicious bite. I wish that you might have come to see me before seeing Dr. Baudgew. He’s not a nice man. Do you know I believe that I may have a picture taken on the same day?”

  “Could I see it?”

  As soon as she blurted out her wish, Prissi’s eyes were drawn to the darkness behind the front door. With everything that had happened over the last day, she figured that her luck gauge must be close to empty. Al Burgey’s lipless mouth twitched in the smallest of smiles.

  “Wary, are we?” he tutted as he moved his head back and forth in a way that reminded Prissi of a metronome.

  “Not trustworthy, am I?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just nervous. Ever since I started looking into this I’ve been having trouble. Like I’ve stirred something up that I shouldn’t have.”

  “I believe you may have. Did you find anything else interesting among your mother’s things besides my letters to her?”

  “No, just some pix, your letters to her and the notebook.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “No, nothing.”

  “That may be for the best.”

  “Except for a piece of jewelry.”

  “Hmmm. Can you describe it?”

  Prissi brightened, “I’m wearing it.”

  “May I see it?”
/>   Prissi hesitated for a second before reaching under her vest and lifting the spiral crystal over her head. The ancient hand darted forward and opened just enough that she could drop it in. Burgey brought the bright object close to his brighter eyes and studied it. When Prissi tentatively stuck her hand out for the crystal, Burgey’s hand closed tight. Holding the bauble in his crippled fist, he brought his hand to his lips and tapped them before he asked, “Did you show this to Dr. Baudgew?”

  “No. I didn’t even mention my mother. He was too graggy. I didn’t trust him.”

  “Are you sure that he couldn’t have seen it around your neck?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t see how.”

  Burgey closed his eyes and cocked his head in a way that reminded Prissi of people at a Brahms’ concert. When his head finally straightened, Burgey pointed a finger at Prissi.

  “Have you seen the newz? Joshua Fflowers is dying.”

  The geri’s words shot Prissi off the railing.

  “How can that be? I just saw him a couple of days ago. It’s how all of this got started.”

  “His body is not accepting what his mind conjured. Something many of us have endured.”

  The ancient man looked at his crippled hands before raising the one closed over the crystal to his ear as if he were trying to hear something. The effulgent eyes clouded over. Finally, Burgey’s head nodded as if in affirmation of a decision he had made. When he eased himself off his perch, it took a second for him to get his balance. Noting Prissi’s concern, he said bitterly, “A tetch of ALS. Wait.”

  “But, my….”

  “Wait!”

  Prissi was surprised by how commanding the old man’s voice was. He slowly turned and disappeared into the gloom behind the door. In the ten minutes that he was gone, Prissi input a couple of options into her mypod for getting home. She could fly straight across the Hudson, or she could fly north, shadow the George Washington Bridge, and fly back south along the west edge of the city. The first option was much shorter; the second much safer.

  Just about the time Prissi thought that the geri wasn’t coming back, Al Burgey pushed his way out the door. Prissi was confounded to see that one of Burgey’s gnarled hands held a small beaded bag, red and black and seemingly identical to the one Prissi had found in her mother’s tote. Burgey tipped his palm to offer it to Prissi. She opened the bag and freed its contents. A crystal fell into her hand. Prissi frowned. When she looked up, the geri opened his other hand and said, “Here is yours.”

  At first glance, the crystals were twins.

  “Take it. Just be careful. Very careful, as, now, unfortunately, must I. You may be putting a key into a treasure chest, but, more likely, you are sticking your hand in a bee’s best. I shouldn’t be doing this, but with Joshua Fflowers dying, this might be the right time.”

  “But what is it? What’s going on? What kind of bee’s nest? What…”

  The old man slowly shook his head.

  “Trinity.”

  He started to say something more, then, stopped. Finally, he just said, “Stars align.”

  “Stars benign.”

  Burgey shook his head again, “Or, all too often, malign.”

  Even though Prissi had no idea what was going on and had a dozen questions she wanted to ask, she slowly dropped her crystal over her neck. She looked at the one Burgey had just given her, Rather than chancing having the two of them around her neck bang against one another, she started to put it back into the beaded bag, but the old man reached out, snatched the bag from her, and slipped it into his pocket.

  “Something to hold secrets.”

  Prissi dropped the second crystal into her kanga and tapped her chest, “You have even more?”

  “I’m an old man. All old men have secrets. Secrets and memories…treasures and curses…but mostly great regrets.”

  Prissi tried again, “What secrets? What treasures? What’s going on?”

  “Be very careful. Be very smart…but not too smart. Go! Go, now!”

  Feeling more emotion than she wanted to feel, Prissi nodded sharply and said, “Thank you so much.”

  “We’ll see.”

  When Prissi leaned forward with the thought to shake his hand, Burgey jerked back so quickly, he fell against the door.

  “Go. Go. Before I change my mind.”

  And, even though she had no idea of what had just happened, Prissi went.