When We Have Wings

by Claire Corbett

  By the time I arrived at the initial assembly point for SkyNation in the Botanic Gardens late on Friday afternoon, I was in an ambivalent mood, which deteriorated as I plunged into the crush of fliers crowding towards the entrance to the party. Fairies at the bottom of the Botanic Gardens, I thought as I was pushed up against a group of young women decked with ropes of pearls and jewels and nothing more. If I’d thought being peered at sidelong as a lunatic on the light rail on my way here was bad, I now realised things were only going to get worse; I stood out even more as a non-flier at SkyNation. Every time I turned my head I caught a sparkling angel or glowering hawk staring at me with hauteur or astonishment.

  I found myself in a queue behind a flier wearing a remarkable dress that belled out in a bubble of deep blue worked in a fret of gold lace below her waist. Below that billowed more lapis blue set with gold lions’ heads. Each lion gripped a golden ring in his jaws and through this ring looped a ribbon of cherry velvet. Below this golden eagles spread their wings. The dress narrowed towards the flier’s ankles and was bound with another strip of red velvet. The woman greeted another flier, who was costumed in a black V-neck sweater, black pants and black slippers. ‘It’s the Montgolfiers’ balloon,’ the woman explained, twirling this way and that as best she could in the press of the crowd. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m French too, chérie,’ said the girl. ‘Philippe Petit, greatest funambulist the world has ever seen. Naturally I couldn’t bring the pole; it’d put someone’s eye out in this crowd.’

  The girl turned around to reveal embroidered in white script where her black sweater was tied under her wings the words I don’t believe in God, but I believe in the god of the wire, the winds, the tower.

  ‘Cool,’ said balloon woman.

  A strolling mariachi band stopped opposite my queue and began to play.

  Behind me a troupe of scantily clad fliers fell against me from the pressure of the crowd. I turned as one of the girls began dusting me down, sweeping her hands over my shoulders and back. ‘Sorry,’ she laughed indifferently, turning back to her friends. I felt even more conspicuously alone and added to my anger was now a simmering arousal; my body tingled where the girl had negligently brushed her hands. I looked down to where the gold glitter she had perfunctorily tried to dust from me was smeared over my shirt and trousers. The girls, diffusing an aura of delicious powdery scent and tangy sweat, were dressed only in low-cut silky pink leotards edged in gold that swelled over their hips and ended at mid-thigh. Pink and gold feathers nodded on their heads, pink bands circled their wrists and soft pink boots reached halfway up their calves.

  I put my jacket over my shoulder and glanced at my SkyNation pass, which showed my position between the orangerie and the orchid atrium. Why were fliers enduring such an earthbound crush to gain admission to this apotheosis of Flight? Armed guards patrolled the line, checking our passes. Now it made sense: no-one would gatecrash this party.

  I’d expected to be subjected to particular scrutiny and I was. The guard stalking down our line stopped in front of me and inspected my pass minutely. Finally he raised his head and stared at me. ‘How did you get this?’

  My blood was starting to boil. I had as much right to be here as any fluttering fairy or angel. I drew myself up. ‘This pass was given to me by Halcyon Kohn, senior partner of Kohn Chesshyre Li,’ I snapped, raising my voice above the competition from the mariachi band.

  The guard glared at me, then decided disdain was the most face-saving reaction. He patted the air patronisingly. ‘Keep your hair on, sport,’ he hollered over the noise, handing me my pass.

  The line inched forwards and up onto a grassed terrace. I glowered at the fliers ahead of me, queued near a magnolia tree where I could see a reader past which they filed. Right now I hated fliers. It was all I could do to force myself to attend SkyNation and rub shoulders with them while they looked down on me. But the reason I had to go to SkyNation was the same reason I hated fliers. Everything I was doing this evening was for Thomas.

  Halley Kohn had promised that SkyNation was a laboratory and that one aspect of it was dedicated to working out how fliers and non-fliers could live together. Looking around me, I found this claim frankly unbelievable but I owed it to myself and Thomas to test this idea, to prove I could enter this alien world soon to be my son’s.

  Montgolfier balloon woman passed the reader and was let onto a path like a stepless escalator spiralling up towards a platform high above us. The path was hard to see but as fliers travelled upwards it glowed pink, a streak against the sunset sky.

  My heart thudded. Philippe Petit was next. Almost my turn. What was I thinking? I didn’t want to rise into the sky. Pride had led me astray. I’d wanted to be special, encounter something no-one I knew had a hope of experiencing, especially Lily. Now I just wanted to go home. I was out of my league. But what about Thomas? Soon he’d be out of my league too.

  Would Thomas ever forgive me, once he found out the true cost of his wings? I’d given my permission in haste and was now repenting at leisure, while Tom’s treatments progressed. It had become clear to me that Dr Ruokonen had underplayed the effects of the treatments on fertility; an uncharitable person might even accuse her of lying. From Brilliant’s correspondence and in the records of meetings he’d held with researchers, doctors and even Origins representatives, it became plain the treatments had a devastating effect on fertility. These effects were catastrophic whenever germline engineering for Flight was attempted.

  The human project is over. Sure it is, you fat dangerous bastard. We don’t need you but we’ll see how far you get without us. While fliers were busy transforming themselves into another species, one that looked down on us, they were still relying on the rest of us to make sure they could reproduce.

  I’d recklessly allowed Thomas to begin the treatments without understanding the full picture. I might have robbed myself of ever having grandchildren. Too late, I’d tried to convince Lily and Richard of the dangers but they had waved my fears away; to them I was a dog in the manger. They knew what they were doing: Ruokonen had assured them the fertility problems would be fixed and that she knew many flier families with children. Worst of all, they understood, as did Ruokonen and I, that it was too late to stop the treatments. If I decided to deprive Thomas of wings and the promise of Flight, even though his every waking moment was consumed by the wonder of what was unfolding for him, then I’d better have a damn good reason, Lily informed me. Better than any I’d come up with so far.

  The crowd jostled me forward. It was time to leave the ground but the idea of spending the night in the sky with a crowd of fliers on sense-enhancing substances was alarming. Maybe I’d be found dead under a bush in the gardens with a broken neck and Zefiryn poisoning. Previous SkyNation events had claimed lives.

  On the other hand, there was Halley, who’d personally invited me, even if only to make up the numbers of non-fliers required by bureaucratic planning permission protocols. Also, I was curious to see Chesshyre unveil his great triumph.

  As I moved to the entrance of the escalator, I felt the blood drain from my face and I hoped I wouldn’t disgrace or even kill myself by blacking out on my ascent.

  Though it was still warm, I put my jacket on as I wanted to keep both my hands free. After slipping my pass into an inside pocket with my slick, I gripped the handrail and found myself drawn upwards by its movement, which skimmed me smoothly along the path. The first moments were the worst, but soon the distance to the ground became purely abstract. My mood lifted as I stared up into a sunset of thunderous, streaming beauty, rising into those violent colours, without anything between me and the sky.

  The path swept me up to the platform I’d seen from below. There, beaming at me, stood Halley.

  ‘Hello,’ I gasped, as she helped me off the path and onto the deck of the platform.

  ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘So pleased
you made it. A climber and a couple of my construction workers have bailed already. Sorry to bother you but could you look at this screen?’

  She held out her slick. I looked at it.

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘At least I’ve registered your attendance.’

  ‘You’re not registering everybody, I take it,’ I said. ‘Just non-fliers.’ Resentment rose in me again. I was now in a special category of person, one needing a quota.

  ‘Well, everyone has their passes,’ Halley said. ‘But yes, I actually have to prove a certain number of non-fliers turn up. Such a pain. Sorry, I don’t mean it like that. I’m glad you’re here. I really do want to know whether what we’ve done includes non-fliers, makes them comfortable, at least in some parts of SkyNation. I’ve worked hard on that though I will admit . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s not an aspect of my work that interests other fliers much, I’m sorry to say.’

  I saw two non-fliers, young women, huddled in a corner of the platform. I nodded at them. ‘Climbers?’

  Halley glanced across. ‘One is. Other’s a trapeze artist. She’ll become a flier herself before too long. You can see they won’t lack for company tonight.’

  It was true. A circle of four or five male fliers was already forming around them.

  ‘Male fliers seem to like non-fliers,’ I commented.

  Halley cast me a very sharp look. ‘Some do. They have their reasons, as I think you know only too well.’

  The view from where I was standing was spectacular. I could see the whole of SkyNation laid out before me, with its fluorescing colours, its spotlights and islands of light, its musicians and dancers, hovering over the City like a vast, brilliant spaceship.

  ‘I like your outfit,’ said Halley.

  ‘Yours is breathtaking,’ I said. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Once upon a time there was an airline called Singapore Airlines,’ said Halley. ‘This sarong kebaya was one of their air hostess uniforms.’

  ‘They couldn’t have worn them quite like that.’

  ‘No,’ smiled Halley. ‘Not quite.’

  For as I peered at Halley more closely I saw she was wearing nothing at all, except brief underpants. From more than a few centimetres away she looked dressed, her body swathed in the illusion of a long-sleeved jacket tight across her hips above a split skirt falling almost to her ankles, both jacket and skirt elaborately figured with intricate paisley leaves and branches and flowers of magenta, orange, blue, white and black on a Chinese red background.

  ‘I was going to wear a copy of the actual uniform,’ said Halley, ‘but it was too restricting. So I had the colours applied to my skin instead.’

  ‘You look amazing,’ I said, enjoying the paradox of being able to look at the swell of her breasts and the muscled curves of her hips and legs and bottom without being able to see much more than if she were covered by cloth instead of these shimmering pigments.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Fabulous party,’ said a flier in passing to Halley, who nodded and smiled.

  I looked around the platform, which of course had no parapet and was large enough to hold about fifty fliers. Twenty or so were milling around, greeting each other and then flying away. Up here, the crowd of jostling fliers posed a real danger. If one of them was pushed off the platform they could just flutter back up but I’d have to keep my wits about me. I turned back to Halley. The party must have started for her hours ago—her eyes were shining with more joy than was strictly natural—but I could see she was still plugged in to the world around her. Perhaps these new drugs were designed to keep fliers focused enough on physical reality so they wouldn’t fall out of the sky.

  Halley extended one wing along the small of my back. ‘Let me show you around,’ she said. ‘Even though some of this will be inaccessible to you, there’s still more to see and do than you’ll ever be able to explore, even if you stayed for the full three days.’

  I could hear the pride in Halley’s voice; she wanted to show me this temporary wonder of the world she’d helped create, wanted to know whether I could appreciate it as a non-flier, the way she intended. She placed a purple gel into my palm. ‘You need to take this to really enjoy it.’

  ‘What is it?’ Jeez, Fowler, do you have to sound quite so uptight?

  Halley smiled. ‘Zefiryn. Oh dear, you should see the look on your face. Been listening to the horror stories, have you? This is half the dose fliers take. You’ll be fine.’

  More fliers came up to congratulate Halley on SkyNation.

  I swallowed the tablet. I hadn’t come to SkyNation to stay safe.

  What happened next I can only describe as if an eagle looked out through my eyes. I removed my aviator glasses and stashed them inside my jacket. My eyes felt as if they’d become telescopes with someone else adjusting the focus. I could see individual hailstones fall from inland clouds, each drop of ice backlit by the sinking sun. I could see each ripple in the waves below, each rivet on the great grey bridge, the grain in the fabric of sails on the boats tacking across the harbour. At first I was dizzy, disoriented. How on earth was I going to make my way around safely when I was staggering drunk on the glory of such godlike seeing? Surely I would fall as my focus zoomed wildly from the miniature to the grand overview. ‘Breathe,’ said Halley. ‘You’ll get it under control.’

  As I struggled to master my surging vertigo, I became aware that my hearing was also heightened. Laughter and music sifted down from the clouds; wind whistled through the feathers of the fliers and clanked the rigging on the sailing boats as they whooshed through the water so far below.

  Abruptly it was as if a switch had been thrown in my brain which now directed my enhanced perceptions more seamlessly. Exultation overwhelmed me. If a sparrow stirred in a park suburbs away its presence could not escape me. The remaining fog of my bad mood fell away. My resentments and fears were remote, shadows moving high over a mountain far away. They would all keep for another time.

  Now I was calm. Even if I died, so what? I would experience the sky.

  ‘Now you’re ready, I think,’ said Halley. She folded her wing and took my arm. ‘See how walkways branch away from this platform? You’ll have to use them to explore SkyNation. The rest of us can fly to any part of SkyNation but we also need these walkways and other places to rest.’

  Halley guided me to one of the semi-transparent walkways stretching up and away from the platform like gridded catwalks or narrow swaying suspension bridges complete with handrails. Gingerly, I tested my weight. The walkway gave a little but held; it was strong and flexible and I had to grip the handrails tight. In the gathering dusk, the coloured light pulsing along the edges of these walkways and handrails strengthened. The one under my hand winked green. How could I walk along these threads in the air with no fear, in fact with a mounting euphoria? I assumed that was also an effect of the Zefiryn.

  Halley and I climbed high above the platform and she paused, sweeping her arm around, indicating one plane of SkyNation below where we stood. ‘See down there?’ she said. ‘From this height you can see the main level of SkyNation, though there are other environments above and below that. Can you see how it’s a map of the City on a one-to-one scale? Those bright lines of green and blue and gold are ropes of riverlaminate outlining the contours of the harbour, its bays and beaches, below. We’ve copied the harbour islands with aerial rooms; some of them look like clouds and others we’ve set up as ethereal res- taurants and bars. There are nests to sleep in too; they’re those nets down there suspended from the riverlaminate. They’re padded with cushions; you can sleep in them or listen to music while you look down to the harbour. And see those pools of what looks like water?’

  ‘Fantastic,’ I said. ‘You’ve got towers of cloud too, right above the real towers they’re mimicking. Not really cloud, though, is it?’

&
nbsp; ‘No,’ said Halley. ‘Except for those faux-cloud towers, all of it, all the nets and catwalks and bars and other structures, is anchored by the riverlaminate lines and those join up and finally anchor to the City towers below, which stand around the edges of SkyNation. Most of the space we’re using for the party lies directly above the harbour. That means that there’s lots of open space for people to fly in.’

  Halley showed me how the edges of the catwalks were colour-coded; the colour flickered from green, which denoted safety for non-fliers, to yellow, which demanded extra caution, to red for areas that were strictly fliers-only. A security or first-aid patrol of fliers in fluoro yellow-edged jackets flashed past us and vanished into the gloom below.

  Every moment that Halley guided me through this new world that extended around me in three dimensions, my confidence soared. No diver descending into the ocean, no acrobat flying on a trapeze, could traverse such vaults of vertical space as those I now explored. My rising euphoria was probably my enemy up here but I couldn’t help enjoying it. I was high on Zefiryn and adrenaline, no doubt about it. High and getting higher all the time. I must be feeling the carefree exuberance of the fliers, able to tumble so easily into the air with no fear of falling.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ said Halley, smiling; I realised I was grinning like a loon. Here I was, Zeke Fowler, ex-cop and trusted investigator, completely off my face on Zefiryn. My senses were still intensifying their perceptive power. I could effortlessly follow the threads of music from each band and smell the smoky spices of the food in each bar, restaurant and stall throughout the whole of SkyNation.

  Across the other side of the harbour from where Halley and I stood, something remarkable was emerging. At first it looked like just another one of the cloud towers, but as dusk deepened and the tower was correspondingly more brightly lit I could see the structure was a castle, complete with moat, crenellated parapets and a cloister, yet it was airy, with great blue holes of night and stars torn into its cloudy substance.