All these advances came at a price and the differences already so evident between the bodies and minds of those with good food, education, work and health care, and those without, were becoming permanent. As the power of the treatments you could buy increased, class divisions were entrenched into flesh and bone, cell and gene, and that gulf, the one my mother and father were so sure they could cross by sending me to St Ivo’s, was becoming unbridgeable.
Now this was where we stood—I had met Chesshyre with his wings, and even though we’d gone to the same school, the physical differences between us were so vast we trembled on the brink of division into two species. By the time we noticed the changes it was already too late, the plunge into the abyss taken while we thought we were hovering on the edge.
And who are the rest of us, us non-fliers? The five Rs, we’re called: Retarded, Retired, Religious, Rationed and Regional. In other words, anyone too poor or too old or too disabled for Flight. What these contemptuous words disguise is that we ordinary humans are still, by far, the majority. Too old means anyone over about twenty-five and too poor covers almost everyone else, including those from Rural and Regional Areas—RaRA-land, which is anywhere outside the City. Too disabled is anyone too fat or too stupid or suffering from any other condition contraindicated to handle the treatments and then to keep up the ferocious regimen of physical perfection needed to get you up into the sky and keep you from falling out of it screaming. Believe me, there is no equality of opportunity in the world of Flight.
And so I was one of the increasingly rare people who understood the religious objections of those who believe it’s wrong to tamper with the human germline. I have some sympathy with them but where do we draw the line? Almost everyone goes along with altering genes that cause major disease. Who wouldn’t, for their child’s sake?
Until now I never needed to worry about the modifications demanded by Flight because I couldn’t afford the treatments. If this job went well, I’d be able to pay some of the cost and Lily and Richard would cough up the rest. They couldn’t modify Tom without my consent. But I didn’t want to make this decision.
But what will Thomas say to me when he’s full-grown—that I denied him the great dream because of my own limitations, my own inability to accept this new world? My own father was not so selfish; I can still see him picking me up after one of the St Ivo’s games, can still see the realisation dawning painfully on his face that in his store-bought suit and his middle-management job and mid-market car he was as invisible to the other parents as I was to their sons. I saw him realise that while he’d thought he was part of the comfortable middle class and as good as anybody else, he’d made the mistake of setting foot in a world where that wasn’t true, where he could be snubbed. And he put up with it, for my sake, hoping I might even climb to a level he understood was closed to him. And Lily, smart Lily, she knows this and says to me this thing will happen, my son will move into a world I can never enter whatever I do, and I see the truth in that. But do I have to lose him so soon?
It was nearly five when Taj pulled into the laneway next to Ventura. Ray had already disappeared to wherever he hid himself at night. I needed to eat but Taj complained so insistently about being tampered with that I conducted a thorough electronic and physical scan.
‘There,’ I said, when I’d finally stood up, stretching out my aching back and knees, wiping my hands on a cloth. ‘There’s nothing, alright?’
Taj was silent. A car can’t sulk but Taj managed it.
‘Night, Taj. Stay shiny.’
I was starving and grabbed bread and cheese for myself. Usually I bought dinner from the local street sellers but I was impatient to get to work. The fear that anything I did would be futile tormented me. It’d probably been too late before I’d even received Chesshyre’s call. What time limit should I set before insisting Chesshyre contact the police? Forty-eight hours. I’d see where things stood on Tuesday night.
Where could Peri and Hugo be? If Peri had gone to ground in the City or, worse, in the squatter slums of Edge City, then there was no chance of finding her. The only hope lay in understanding why she’d run away and where she might go. Random searches through the City would lead nowhere except to despair.
Yet how to understand her when Avis and Chesshyre had trotted out two different views of Peri as unhinged, Avis calling her Wild, whatever that was, and Chesshyre hinting she was obsessed with him?
I set out water for Frisk, smiling as I pictured how thrilled Tom would be when he saw him. First thing tomorrow I’d have to buy food for the lion.
I sat up late into the night running searches on Peri Almond. Very little turned up but the Little Angels information checked out. She was indeed from a coastal hamlet, a town called Pandanus about six hours’ drive away. So far the girl wasn’t leaving much of an electronic trail, at least not on databases that I could enter. That can be a real problem with the very young, especially kids from RaRA-land. One odd thing: except for her there were no Almonds in Pandanus. So who had she lived with? Where was she from originally? Did she have family somewhere else?
Frisk sprang onto my lap. I shoved him off. He crouched and leapt back onto me. Thou huntest me as a fierce lion: and again thou shewest thyself marvellous upon me. I put one arm around Frisk as I began running the Chesshyre security footage on my desk slick. They’d only given me about ninety minutes of it; obviously they didn’t want me seeing more than they judged was necessary. After a few minutes of watching a static shot of the ledge in front of their door, I fastforwarded until an hour’s worth of images had sped by, unchanging except for clouds. Then the door opened and out stepped a young girl with a baby strapped to her chest. I slowed the images to normal speed. The baby’s face was turned away from me, nuzzled into the girl. But what stopped my breath was her wings. Peri had wings? They hadn’t even mentioned this to me. Why? I checked the image of Peri in the photo from Little Angels. In that picture she’d had no wings. I looked at the most recent photo, the one of Peri holding Hugo. She was out of focus, her wings just a dark blur behind her; no wonder I hadn’t registered what they were. Out of focus, that would be right. Hugo was what mattered; Peri was not important to whoever took the shot.
In the unblinking gaze of the security camera, a tense, white-faced girl with a baby stepped to the edge of the cliff and dropped out of sight. According to the time code, it was two thirty-seven on Saturday afternoon.
Peri was a flier!
This changed everything.
This changed everything.
Weird that Chesshyre seemed unaware of the importance of this, had not even mentioned it to me. Why?
I looked back at the shot of Peri from Little Angels. Definitely no wings. Of course not. Coming from Pandanus, she couldn’t have had wings. She was nobody, from nowhere, and nobodies do not have wings. She must have got them while working for Chesshyre. Could this have any relevance to Hugo’s disappearance? But what did it mean?
I ran searches that had not occurred to me before. There she was, a member of one of the Flight Gyms, a fancy outfit calling itself the Blue Air Group. I whistled. Man, was it expensive. I’d never looked at how much Flight Gyms cost before but the hourly rate was shocking. Little Tom’s treatments were looking more remote by the minute. No wonder the girl had nothing, not so much as a bottle of cheap scent, in her room. With no access to medical records, but going by her membership of the gym, I had to assume she’d made her transition to Flight just under a year ago. Most interestingly, her membership had not yet run out. So, she really had fled on impulse, as the disorder of her bedroom suggested.
I started another new search. For the transition to Flight you need doctors. And not just any doctors—serious, heavyweight medical expertise. Which doctors would have overseen this process for Peri? Peter and Avis and maybe little Hugo too would have to see a family doctor who knew about fliers. Might Peri have seen the same one?
I could have kicked myself for not doing more snooping at Chesshyre’s; I might have been able to find out that sort of detail. I put together a list of names from my search. After all, there were not so many of these fancy new doctors.
Already it was past midnight. Often I lost track of time while doing database searches. I stood up, stretched, thinking I should call Chesshyre, tell him to turn the case over to the police. My job was impossible. If Peri had wings, she could be anywhere. I thought of Chesshyre describing the ruin of Peri’s life if she were charged. Well, perhaps I could still help her and Hugo. Give it till Tuesday night, like I’d said.
I ran the few seconds of footage of Peri over and over till my eyes began to close in weariness. Was she angry, frightened? Watching that slight, vulnerable figure, the gentle way she settled the baby, stroking his head, seeing her anxious face, it was hard to believe her motives could be cruel or greedy. Why are you doing this? I asked the screen as over and over she shut the door, stepped off the cliff, vanished. Again and again, disappearing from my sight, my understanding.
Finally I dragged myself to bed. My trousers rustled as I pulled them off. The papers I’d found in the pillowcase. Each piece of paper was a short handwritten letter. I settled into bed and leafed through them.
Dear Hugo,
I wrote these for you because I wanted you to know how it was when you were very little. Because you can’t remember it yourself. And I was the one who was there with you. Who saw you and listened to you and knew how you were.
Dear Hugo,
I was sitting with you, looking out over the sea. A purple mist came down around us. You pushed yourself up and you flung your arm out, pointing. As if to say, Look, isn’t it beautiful. Look!
Dear Hugo,
A flock of parrots, black wings outstretched, flew overhead, screeching. You looked up. Awk! you said. Awk! Your first word.
There were others. I read them all several times but I was so tired my eyes kept closing as I tried to analyse Peri’s words.
Chesshyre was clearly not stupid, but like so many rich people he seemed blind to the real world. He and Avis had let a winged girl care for their baby—mostly by herself, probably—while they pursued their own careers. A girl alone in the world, subject to who knows what secret fears. Assuming Peter’s cover story wasn’t the whole truth, was it possible she’d been threatened by a rival of Chesshyre’s? She would’ve been easy to intimidate in their isolated house above the sea. If she was motivated by bitterness over curdled love then we had a real problem. If she wasn’t actually crazy, if she was even now coming to her senses, realising in horror the seriousness of her crime, then Chesshyre had done the right thing by calling me. The important thing in that case was to get to her, make her see that it was safe to return Hugo. Then her actions would shrink from something potentially monstrous to not much more than an extended outing with the baby she cared for. How I hoped that would turn out to be the case.
‘Look at the stars,’ Peri said, glancing down at baby Hugo. ‘See, we can steer by them.’ No way she’d risk flying on a cloudy night. Still too much the beginner for that. She tightened her grip on Hugo. She liked to fly with her arms by her sides, as if she surfed the sky, diving into it. ‘What you do with your arms,’ Havoc, her instructor at Flight Gym, used to say, ‘it’s very characteristic. How comfortable are you in the air? Do you throw yourself into it?’ Now she flew with her arms around Hugo, keeping him warm. Wonderful that he slept, snuggled into the sling, so used to the feel of her, the smell of her, he could sleep anywhere, as long as he was with her.
Ahead and low on the horizon a pattern of stars fell into place. A spike of happiness pierced Peri’s anxiety. Havoc had told her she now had bird navigational abilities infused into her brain but she’d never believed she’d be able to use them. Feared she was one of the ones who’d never really get it. Too old for Flight. Not smart enough, not strong enough. But she was navigating, without understanding how, in spite of her lack of faith. Somewhere near here was the Platform. But how to find it in the dark? Still, she had to rest and they wouldn’t think to look for her here. Not yet. Peter probably didn’t even remember leaving out the PostCard of this place. Coming here was a gamble but surely the danger of sudden late-summer storms would keep everyone else away at this time of year?
Peri wheeled higher. It should be exhilarating, flying through the night over the waves. The power of Flight itself forced a rhythm into her breath, her heart, calming her from her impulsive escape from Peter’s.
Rough salt wind streamed into her: Breathe in, wings up, breathe out, wings down.
Something was flying through the sea below her, but its progress, mirroring hers above, was more splendid, triggering storms of phosphorescence, black water exploding into aquamarine tracers. A whole school of something big was whisking the sea into luminous froth, blue bolts scattering light through the dark.
Ahead shone a solitary white light. That must be it.
There was something else. A glow. Peri’s belly cramped. Her flight muscles were tiring. Did the light mean someone was there, or no-one? People did not fly out to the Platform on their own. It was a long-haul Flight, a place for parties. It had been built for SkyNation by Peter’s firm, which designed the environments for all the SkyNations. This one had proved so popular that it had been allowed to remain, drifting slowly, unanchored to the sea floor. For SkyNation guests, the challenge of finding it had been part of the event. When fliers wanted to visit it they checked its position on the satellite link and then used their navigational abilities, as Peri had, to find it.
Peri flew lower over the sea, grateful for the lift from the slopes of the small waves. The bright light resolved into three separate lights, triangulating the landing area of the Platform. She circled, braking, and beat her wings to cushion her landing. She stumbled, righted herself, grateful that the landing area was covered in the new soft-fall developed especially for fliers. Hugo woke and began to whimper. The whimpers ran together; he was tuning himself up. Soon he would cry and she could not risk that.
Peri found a sheltered bench away from the landing area and hummed a familiar song softly under her breath as she cleaned and changed Hugo. There was nowhere to put the soiled padding so, guiltily, she buried it under loose stones next to the bench.
Peri settled herself. Hugo’s feet flexed with tension, waiting, then relaxed as her milk flowed. Before Hugo, Peri hadn’t known that babies expressed themselves with their whole bodies, their feet just as eloquent as their hands and faces.
‘They’ll think I’ve stolen you, Hugo. But I haven’t. I just couldn’t leave you. I said I’d never leave you.’ She wondered at her own resolve, her determination to do whatever was necessary, a steely will she’d seen in other fliers. At what she’d done to get these wings. The price had been higher than she could have imagined. Did she know herself at all? The problem was that she loved this child in a way she’d never bargained for, in a way she had not known was possible.
This unexpected love had wrecked everything.
Gradually Peri’s breathing slowed a little. Her heart still pounded from the exertion of her flight and from her fear of discovery. She listened, hard. All she could hear was the wash of the sea against the Platform. At the edges the water sloshed right over the top of the seawall. The middle of the Platform rose to a flat summit, as if the whole Platform were a low, level-topped hill. The hill itself cast the glow.
Peri knew the place a little, from the PostCard Peter had left when he and Avis had flown out here for last summer’s SkyNation. They’d left her and Hugo alone in the house for three days. They were always going away. Fashion shows, conferences, site visits. Hugo was fine alone with her. He’d had plenty of time to get used to it.
Hugo pulled away from her breast. He was still sleepy and pushed at his eyes with his fist. Peri kissed the little hand and tucked him tightly in
to the sling. Hugo’s eyes began to close as he snuggled against the warmth of her skin and feathers. ‘My poor little man,’ she whispered in his ear.
Time to scout the Platform. The islet appeared deserted but she had to make sure. Peri darted up the hill as fast and as silently as she could, straining her ears for the sound of voices, steps, feathers rustling, the sweep of wings through air.
The glow grew stronger ahead of Peri, among the trees and flowers. There were no buildings. As she drew closer, Peri saw the grass, the trees, the flowers, were not lit up by external lights but gave off their own radiance. Leaf and flower, bark and branch, were outlined with light, rimed with fire.
Of course. Peter himself used plants like these in his garden. They’d been around for a while but were only now becoming less expensive, he’d said. Squid genes. That was it. Squid and jellyfish genes gave this luminescence. The best solar lighting, Peter had said, because you can’t make a more efficient solar collector than a leaf anyway. You use the plant itself as a light.
Peri walked through the dark and the suspended, shifting light, frightened of herself and what she’d done, drawn on by the marvels of this artificial island, its trees spangled green and silver, their light swinging in the breeze from the sea. Showers of purple sparks tossed in the wind and radiance was thrown up from the grass. Neon-green moss furred trunks and branches with creases of light. Bowers and groves and terraces were lit by hanging flowers of blue and gold. It was exquisite.
Peri stopped, appalled. It hit her that she hadn’t run away at all. I’ve run straight to Peter! This is his place. He designed it. I’m walking into his mind—the most beautiful part of it.
The beauty of the Platform underlined the fact she’d lost everything but Hugo. This world, the world of the Katon-Chesshyres, of Flight, was now closed to her. She’d had an insecure footing, her position had been low, but she’d loved it; it was so far beyond anything she had known growing up in Pandanus and now it was over. She had no doubt Peter would hunt her down. He won’t forgive what I’ve done. He’ll take you back, Hugo.
When We Have Wings Page 5