When We Have Wings

by Claire Corbett

  ‘What else?’ I said. ‘There must be other effects.’

  ‘Well, the whole thing is an effect,’ said Ruokonen. ‘It’s hard to tease out what is the main event and what is what you’d call a side effect. Preening your feathers every day, eating seven times a day, practising flying for at least an hour every day, maintaining a drug regime indefinitely? These are not side effects. These are what it is to be a flier. I said that some treatments fail. They fail at the point where the person has to alter their sense of themselves, of who they are. Physically everything is going well but the person can’t become a flier—they remain just someone with wings. You become a different person when you become a flier. Different things matter to you.’

  ‘Do different things matter enough that some turn Wild?’ I said.

  ‘That’s a myth,’ said Ruokonen, a shade too quickly for the casual tone she was aiming for. ‘Some fliers push the limits of their abilities. A few get lost or fall out of the sky and people claim they’ve turned Wild. It’s rubbish. Ignorant scaremongering.’

  ‘How can you know that for sure?’ I said. Typical doctor, with her arrogant refusal to discuss something awkward. Only when it was so obvious it couldn’t be denied any longer would the authorised version of reality catch up with what everyone knew.

  Ruokonen stood up. ‘I’ve put together a literature package for parents. Excuse me for a moment.’

  I checked my slick as she left the room. A message. Henryk. Checkd out SGB. NO bdy. No mre wld gse chse! MATE.

  Alright, Henryk, no need to shout. Great. No body. Trails on Luisa so far were ending in blanks. I could wait for Peri’s return, grill her on everything she knew about her friend. But I didn’t want to wait. Instead I sent a message to Wilson, the hikikomori, my old technician and my best hope of trying to crack Little Angels. I didn’t know if Luisa had got work through the agency but it was worth checking, and I needed more information and names from the agency anyway. I thought for a moment then sent Wilson a PS. Could he have a go at Eliseev’s systems while he was at it?

  I got up and went over to the bookcase against the internal far wall. A series of thick texts took up the first shelf. The Anatomy of Flight. Fliers: Some diseases and parasites. Inheriting the Wind: Papers from the 12th Annual Reykjavik Diomedea–MicroRNA/Corvid symposium on Flight. The Eye of the Hurricane: Ethics and values of Flight. DSM-XX-TR Casebook—Flier Supplement 2nd Edition: A learning companion to the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. Flight Specs: The journal of Flight specialities.

  I picked up the journal. ‘Validity of DSM-XX Subtypes for Flier-associated Disorders: Specific diagnostic criteria—general physician/ Flight specialist concordance’ read the title of the main article. I put the journal back. The technical literature was as impenetrable as I’d expected. These books were for show, except maybe the essays. Ruokonen would have anything remotely technical on slick and updated constantly. On the shelf below was a black book, silver letters along the spine. Seven Ravens: Rhymes and tales for modern children. I picked it up and flipped through the pages idly, until my attention was snagged by something familiar. Called ‘Bonaparte’, it was the rhyme Avis had started to sing. I read over the whole thing.

  Baby, baby, naughty baby,

  hush you squalling chick, I say.

  Peace this moment, peace, or maybe

  rough wild wings will pass this way.

  Baby, baby, he’s a giant,

  huge and ragged, heartless, wild.

  And he breakfasts, dines, rely on’t

  every day on naughty child.

  Baby, baby, if he hears you

  as he’s winging past this house,

  swooping down at once he’ll seize you

  just as hawk on little mouse.

  He will take you, higher, higher,

  o’er the icy clouds so tall.

  There he’ll drop you, little baby,

  you will fly before you fall.

  Well, that was brutal enough to be authentic. It must be based on something very old. I put the book back and wandered over to the transparent outside wall. I was becoming aware of the physical split between fliers and non-fliers. Our medical and scientific reality was different, our experience of the physical world radically different, but it had not occurred to me that they would have their own culture, their own stories, even their own ways of raising children. What sort of father could I be to Thomas when I couldn’t even share the most important element of his life? What protection and advice could I offer about a realm I would never experience?

  Ruokonen returned and handed me a small slick. ‘You will want to look at this if you’re serious about your little boy having the treatments.’

  ‘Thank you for your time.’ As if I hadn’t paid for it. But ye are forgers of lies, ye are all physicians of no value. Thanks for that, Job.

  Ruokonen was already speaking to someone else on her slick. ‘Yes, yes,’ she said. ‘I told you, I’ve already scheduled time for that. Yes, I’ll be giving evidence to the authority. I’m unlikely to forget a meeting with the minister. Well, reassure Dr Summerscale I’ll be there.’

  I paused on my way out. ‘Dr Ruokonen, do you have children?’

  Ruokonen’s face was impassive. ‘No.’

  ‘What is Aquila non captat muscas?’

  ‘An eagle does not try to catch flies, Mr Fowler. It means—’

  ‘Yes,’ I broke in. ‘I understand what it means. Don’t sweat the small stuff. It all looks big from where I’m standing.’

  ‘Look,’ Ruokonen said, softening, ‘I don’t envy you having to decide. I do understand—well, not understand, but I do sympathise. It must be hard.’

  ‘Was it worth it? For you?’

  ‘I think the answer to that is obvious.’ She shook her wings. A gleam of rose flickered.

  ‘I guess,’ I said. It didn’t help. I could ask every flier in the world and it wouldn’t help.

  I clambered down the tree, my head spinning. Ruokonen had been right. The information had not made things clearer. As I walked through the meadow, I looked up at the sky, a sky now brassy with late-morning summer light. The sun had beaten the smaller meadow- dwellers into submission and the grass lay silent. A magpie zoomed overhead, out of the oak branches and off across the City.

  Hast thou with him spread out the sky, which is strong and as a molten looking-glass . . . Doth the hawk fly by thy wisdom? . . . Doth the eagle mount up at thy command? Not exactly. But we gave ourselves wings, we mounted up at our own command. By our wisdom? Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? The how-many-dollars-does-it-take question that Flight is these days. One topic we hadn’t discussed and yet it was the most critical: how much does it cost?

  How much does it cost?

  Does anyone know the answer?

  And yet, I could see Thomas, flying above the clouds. Soaring in the warm air above the desert. Skimming over the sea. My little boy, lost to me forever. As he would be anyway. But how could I bear for him to become another creature altogether, with another creature’s genes inserted between him and me? Not just another creature, a whole different order, class, of life. My real question now was not what could Thomas do, it was what would he be? Finally, though, the only difference was which choice would make him happier. No way to know that. No way ever to know.

  As I walked towards the nearest station Thien called me.

  ‘Yes?’ I said, dodging a bike zooming past me with two live banana trees tied on the back.

  ‘Do you want the good news or the bad news?’ she said.

  ‘Hit me with it.’

  ‘I’m very sorry but we can’t resurrect Taj. We can refit the AI so the car can navigate but we can’t retrieve Taj’s history and personality profile.’

  ‘What?’ I was shocked. It hadn’t crossed m
y mind they wouldn’t be able to resuscitate Taj. Taj, gone forever. Taj, who, I now realised, was the closest thing to a partner I’d had since setting up on my own.

  ‘We’ve run diagnostics on your car,’ Thien continued. ‘I’m guessing you didn’t know about the redback hitching a ride.’

  ‘Jesus wept, Thien.’ A redback was one of the newest tracking devices on the market. ‘I checked it out before I left the City.’

  ‘I know, it’s a bitch, eh? Don’t blame yourself. These bastards read inert, like dirt or a dead insect to the kind of tests you can run. We spend a fortune keeping up with this kind of shit. We only bother ’cause of the government and security service contracts we get. The beauty of it is, when you plunged Taj into the creek you buggered it up. This has cost someone a pretty penny.’ Thien’s voice brightened. ‘Someone must think you’re important.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Great. Was there good news in there? Must have missed it.’

  It hadn’t occurred to me Chesshyre would take me up, to the top of his tower, but he’d insisted. My stomach plummeted as the lift zoomed skywards. End Mixed Zone, flashed the display panel as we rose, still accelerating. What the hell does that mean? I was about to demand, when I gasped. The floor beneath my feet had winked into transparency. Now I could see nothing but a soaring panorama over the City through the walls and below my feet. Cold sweat trickled from my armpits and my breathing came shallow and rapid.

  I checked Hugo’s position again, as I had every few minutes since the signal began transmitting; Peri and Hugo were still heading south. This reassured me against the uneasiness triggered by the Raptor last night and now the knowledge I’d been followed. Still hadn’t heard from Janeane, though.

  ‘Ah,’ said the investor, a flier who had joined Chesshyre and me uninvited at the base of Cloud City, ‘I’m looking forward to going up on that prow.’

  A message. Wilson, saying he should have some results for me later that night. He wouldn’t try to enter Little Angels’ or Eliseev’s systems until after hours.

  Aspire to Cloud City, the display panel prompted. The life you evolved to enjoy. It streamed images of the stratospheric swirl of the central tower with a prow jutting from the top, cleaving fluffy white clouds the way a ship breasts heavy seas. When finished, this prow would boast a forest with waterfalls in freefall over the edge, down the buttress reinforcing the prow for hundreds of metres. About a third of the way down the central spire what looked like the top of a cloud forest broadened out from the spire into a filigreed canopy over the City.

  ‘We’ve entered the section of the tower that will rotate,’ Chesshyre remarked to the investor.

  ‘Rotate?’ I said. The lift began to slow.

  ‘The tower is like a shattered, mechanical whorl of an opening flower, a practical shape because the structure’s mass diminishes as it rises. This distribution of mass makes the structure more stable, as does the prow with its buttress. From above the cloud canopy two-thirds up, however, the top section will rotate three-sixty degrees every ninety minutes.’

  The lift stopped. The doors opened onto blue air. The investor bounded out first and Chesshyre followed into that nothingness. As if that weren’t bad enough, the display in the lift announced: 250th floor. Restricted Zone. Fliers only.

  Chesshyre turned and raised his eyebrows as I hung back. ‘Come on,’ he said, smiling slightly. He shivered his wings right down to the tips, a deep shudder of what seemed like irritation that made all his feathers shift in a papery rustle. The shiver released a wave of the peppery sandalwood smell I associated with Chesshyre. The more time I spent with fliers, the more I saw they had a whole other language, an array of winged gestures, from the massive stretch of unfolded wings to the subtlest quiver. This language was one of the many things that made fliers so alien to us normal humans. ‘It’s perfectly safe.’

  Safe! What was safe about being dragged to the top of Ches- shyre’s little dovecote, a kilometre above the earth?

  Gingerly, I crept out of the lift. To my horror I found myself in the open, no roof above me, no parapet between me and the edge of the building.

  Ahead of us stretched the field of the prow, broad at its base, near where we stood, and narrowing to a sharp point in the distance. Its surface, unornamented as yet with the forest and waterfalls promised by the lift display, waved green and silver in the breeze.

  ‘This way,’ said Chesshyre and, unbelievably, he climbed down a shallow flight of steps onto the prow and began crossing its broad surface, the investor ahead of him beating a glossy path through the shining grasses as if through water. The weirdness of walking over an alpine meadow in the sky was heady. Grasses interleaved with meadow flowers rustled at my knee and released a musky-sweet scent as I crushed them underfoot. The grasses flowed up to the edge of the prow, which fell away on every side, undercut as steeply as the curved hull of a ship.

  Directly ahead of me, rising up beyond the sharp end of the prow, a thunderhead exploded silently, white and grey billows puffing outwards and upwards so fast I felt I was being swept upwards myself and the rush poured through me, a stream of exhilaration and motion sickness.

  ‘I’m going to test out your house thermal generator,’ the investor called to Chesshyre.

  As the prow narrowed I slowed. That shining thunderhead was about to unleash extreme weather onto this unprotected field. ‘Mr Chesshyre,’ I called. As he turned, the investor leapt off the prow and was blown back over our heads.

  ‘This is not the weather to be testing a thermal generator,’ Chesshyre muttered.

  The prow pointed eastwards and I could see past the thunderhead all the way over the City to the sea. I twisted my neck to watch the wind streaming the anvil of the thunderhead high above us into the west, where, through the incomplete top floor behind me, I could see a broken view of the low rampart of mountains rising up from the plain. To the north and south stretched more City suburbs and the gleaming coastline. Shafts of sunlight broke here and there through the swift-moving cloud and the wind set up a low harmonic moan over the plain and through the tower. The investor was now a dot arrowing west- wards and down. Was he coming back or simply vanishing in that abrupt way unique to fliers?

  ‘Strange,’ Chesshyre said as he came up to me. ‘I can’t even imagine what it’s like out there.’ He indicated the horizon, his hand describing a precise, graceful arc, an architect’s gesture delineating space, that sketched the coastline receding from us.

  He was talking about RaRA-land, which was more unimaginable to him than outer space. Perhaps it was just as well. He didn’t understand the danger Peri and Hugo faced in such hostile country. Still, I could hardly blame him for that; I hadn’t seen it myself until I was sitting in the Naxos Cafe.

  ‘You’ll see why we’re here in a minute,’ said Chesshyre and stalked alongside me through his sky-high savannah like the winged predator he was.

  I edged towards the prow’s end, taking comfort from Ches- shyre’s solid presence beside me. The bulk of his wings shielded me from the wind.

  Finally we reached the point of the prow, its edges barely half a metre away from me on either side. Ahead of us jutted a sliver, like the bowsprit projecting from a ship, and at the end of this glimmered a clear shape that seemed no more than an interruption of the light. I squinted, trying to make out the borders of this structure. It shifted slightly in the wind. Without hesitation Chesshyre stepped onto the bowsprit. He turned to face me, waiting. If he expected me to use that as a bridge he could think again.

  Chesshyre could not be serious, bringing me here. It was not safe, and even when it was finished it would never be safe for the likes of me.

  The bridge laid down its narrow course over the dizzying drop, lacking sides or handrails. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I can’t go up there.’

  A brief smile illuminated Chesshyre’s face. ‘Yes, you can. The
re’s something you must see.’ He stood, his wings partly unfurled for balance, and held out his hand to me.

  Now I was in a quandary. I did not want to take his hand, to be led like a small child. Every time I entered the world of fliers, whether riding the flying fox, climbing Ruokonen’s tree or, now, panicking at the beginning of this pathway, I was swept, for good or ill, back into childhood, with its wondrous possibilities, its abrupt terrors.

  Chesshyre waited, his hand outstretched, his blue feathers ruffling in the wind. I couldn’t back away now; for one thing, I couldn’t make it down to the ground by myself as I’d noticed the lift was security-keyed to Chesshyre by his voice. The moment I’d entered that bloody lift I’d unwittingly put myself in Chesshyre’s power.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Chesshyre said. His voice was calm, even slightly mocking, but now there was a forced, steely quality to his composure. He was becoming impatient with me. I was sweating, my skin cold and waxy. ‘In the unlikely event you were to fall, I’m strong enough to catch you.’

  Jesus wept, what was this—a thinly veiled threat? Did he do this kind of thing for fun? Oh, yes, I could imagine Chesshyre out on the town for the night, finding some poor girl, bringing her up here, forcing her to yield. She’d be like jelly in his arms, and she’d see the same cold amusement in his eyes I was seeing now.

  All at once I was certain it was something he was perfectly capable of doing. Horribly, for a moment, I could understand exactly why it would be such an intense pleasure for him; a demonstration of his command, not only over his own powerful body and Flight skills but over the life of one of us lower creatures, non-fliers. And in his own space, a space that he’d created.

  I swallowed hard, stepped onto the bridge, and took Chesshyre’s hand. His palm was dry and as his hand closed around mine the heat of his flesh sent a shock through me. That overclocked metabolism. Would Thomas be that warm? The bridge reared up at weird angles as my knees melted. Wisps of cloud blew under our feet, over our heads. Without Chesshyre’s grasp I would fall.