As the terrified mob raged around him, Leonardo found refuge in an alcove between two buildings and watched his Great Bird soar in great circles over the city. The sun was setting, and the high, thin cirrus clouds were stained deep red and purple. Leonardo prayed that Niccolo would have sense enough to fly westward, away from the city, where he could hope to land safely on open ground; but the boy was showing off and underestimated the capriciousness of the winds. He suddenly fell, as if dropped, toward the brick and stone below him. He shifted weight and swung his hips, trying desperately to recover. An updraft picked him up like a dust devil, and he soared skyward on heavenly breaths of warm air.
God's grace.
He seemed to be more cautious now, for he flew toward safer grounds to the west...but then he suddenly descended, falling, dropping behind the backshadowed buildings; and Leonardo could well imagine that the warm updraft that had lifted Niccolo had popped like a water bubble.
So did the boy fall through cool air, probably to his death.
Leonardo waited a beat, watching and waiting for the Great Bird to reappear. His heart was itself like a bird beating violently in his throat. Niccolo.... Prayers of supplication formed in his mind, as if of their own volition, as if Leonardo's thoughts were not his own, but belonged to some peasant from Vinci grasping at a rosary for truth and hope and redemption.
Those crowded around Leonardo could not guess that the angel had fallen...just that he had descended from the Empyrean heights to the man-made spires of Florence where the sun was blazing rainbows as it set; and Lorenzo emerged triumphantly. He stood alone on a porch so he could be seen by all and distracted the crowds with a haranguing speech that was certainly directed to the Archbishop.
Florence is invincible.
The greatest and most perfect city in the world.
Florence would conquer all its enemies.
As Lorenzo spoke, Leonardo saw, as if in a lucid dream, dark skies filled with his flying machines. He saw his hempen bombs falling through the air, setting the world below on fire. Indeed, with these machines Lorenzo could conquer the Papal States and Rome itself; could burn the Pope out of the Vatican and become more powerful than any of the Caesars.
An instant later Leonardo was running, navigating the maze of alleys and streets to reach Niccolo. Niccolo was all that mattered. If the boy was dead, certainly Lorenzo would not care. But Sandro...surely Sandro....
There was no time to worry about Sandro's loyalties.
The crowds thinned, and only once was Leonardo waylaid by street arabs who blocked his way. But when they saw that Leonardo was armed and wild and ready to draw blood, they let him pass; and he ran, blade in hand, as if he were being chased by wild beasts.
Empty streets, empty buildings, the distant thunder of the crowds constant as the roaring of the sea. All of Florence was behind Leonardo, who searched for Niccolo in what might have been ancient ruins but for the myriad telltale signs that life still flowed all about here, and soon would again. Alleyways became shadows, and there was a blue tinge to the air. Soon it would be dark. A few windows already glowed tallow yellow in the balconied apartments above him.
He would not easily find Niccolo here. The boy could have fallen anywhere; and in grief and desperation, Leonardo shouted his name. His voice echoed against the high building walls; someone answered in falsetto voce, followed by laughter. But then Leonardo heard horses galloping through the streets, heard men's voices calling to each other. Lorenzo's men? Pazzi? There was a shout, and Leonardo knew they had found what they were looking for. Frantic, he hurried toward the soldiers, but what would he do when he found Niccolo wrapped in the wreckage of the Great Bird? Tell a dying boy that he, Leonardo, couldn't fly his own invention because he was afraid?
I was trying to make it safe, Niccolo.
He found Lorenzo's Companions of the Night in a piazza surrounded by tenements. They carried torches, and at least twenty of the well-armed priests were on horseback. Their horses were fitted out in black, as if both horses and riders had come directly from Hell; one of the horses pulled a cart covered with canvass.
Leonardo could see torn fustian and taffeta and part of the Great Bird's rudder section hanging over the red and blue striped awning of a balcony. And there, on the ground below was the upper wing assembly, intact. Other bits of cloth slid along the ground like foolscap.
Several inquisitore huddled over an unconscious figure.
Niccolo.
Beside himself with grief, Leonardo rushed headlong into the piazza; but before he could get halfway across the court, he was intercepted by a dozen Dominican soldiers. "I am Leonardo da Vinci," he shouted, but that seemed to mean nothing to them. These young Wolves of the Church were ready to hack him to pieces for the sheer pleasure of feeling the heft of their swords.
"Do not harm him," shouted a familiar voice.
Sandro Botticelli.
He was dressed in the thick, black garb of the inquisitore. "What are you doing here, Leonardo? You're a bit late." Anger and sarcasm was evident in his voice.
But Leonardo was concerned only with Niccolo, for two brawnyinquisitore were lifting him into the cart. He pushed past Sandro and mindless of consequences pulled one of the soldiers out of the way to see the boy. Leonardo winced as he looked at the boy's smashed skull and bruised body—arms and legs broken, extended at wrong angles—and turned away in relief.
This was not Niccolo; he had never seen this boy before.
"Niccolo is with Lorenzo," Sandro said, standing beside Leonardo. "Lorenzo considered allowing Niccolo to fly your machine, for the boy knows almost as much about it as you."
"Has he flown the Great Bird?"
After a pause, Sandro said, "Yes...but against Lorenzo's wishes. That's probably what saved his life." Sandro gazed at the boy in the cart, who was now covered with the torn wings of the Great Bird, which, in turn, was covered with canvass. "When Lorenzo discovered what Niccolo had done, he would not allow him near any of your flying machines, except to help train this boy, Giorgio, who was in his service. A nice boy, may God take his soul."
"Then Niccolo is safe?" Leonardo asked.
"Yes, the holy fathers are watching over him."
"You mean these cutthroats?"
"Watch how you speak, Leonardo. Lorenzo kept Niccolo safe for you, out of love for you. And how have you repaid him...by being a traitor?"
"Don't ever say that to me, even in jest."
"I'm not jesting, Leonardo. You've failed Lorenzo...and your country, failed them out of fear. Even a child such as Niccolo could see that."
"Is that what you think?"
Sandro didn't reply.
"Is that what Niccolo told you?"
"Yes."
Leonardo would not argue, for the stab of truth unnerved him, even now. "And you, why are you here?"
"Because Lorenzo trusts me. As far as Florence and the Archbishop is concerned, the angel flew and caused fire to rain from Heaven. And is in Heaven now as we speak." He shrugged and nodded to the inquisitore, who mounted their horses.
"So now you command the Companions of the Night instead of the divine power of the painter," Leonardo said, the bitterness evident in his voice. "Perhaps we are on different sides now, Little Bottle."
"I'm on the side of Florence," Sandro said. "And against her enemies. You care only for your inventions."
"And my friends," Leonardo said quietly, pointedly.
"Perhaps for Niccolo, perhaps a little for me; but more for yourself."
"How many of my flying machines does Lorenzo have now?" Leonardo asked, but Sandro turned away from him and rode behind the cart that carried the corpse of the angel and the broken bits of the Great Bird. Once again, Leonardo felt the numbing, rubbery sensation of great fatigue, as if he had turned into an old man, as if all his work, now finished, had come to nothing. He wished only to be rid of it all: his inventions, his pain and guilt. He could not bear even to be in Florence, the place he loved above all others. T
here was no place for him now.
And his new soaring machine.
He knew what he would do.
Leonardo could be seen as a shadow moving inside his canvass-covered makeshift workshop, which was brightly lit by several water lamps and a small fire. Other shadows passed across the vellum-covered windows of the surrounding buildings like mirages in the Florentine night. Much of the city was dark, for few could afford tallow and oil.
But Leonardo's tented workshop was brighter than most, for he was methodically burning his notes and papers, his diagrams and sketches of his new soaring machine. After the notebooks were curling ash and smoke rising through a single vent in the canvass, he burned his box-shaped models of wood and cloth: kites and flying machines of various design; and then, at the last, he smashed his partially completed soaring machine...smashed the spars and rudder, smashed the box-like wings, tore away the webbing and fustian, which burned like hemp in the crackling fire.
As if Leonardo could burn his ideas from his thoughts.
Yet he could not help but feel that the rising smoke was the very stuff of his ideas and invention. And he was spreading them for all to inhale like poisonous phantasms.
Lorenzo already had Leonardo's flying machines.
More children would die....
He burned his drawings and paintings, his portraits and madonnas and varnished visions of fear, then left makeshift studio like a sleepwalker heading back to his bed; and the glue and fustian and broken spars ignited, glowing like coals, then burst, exploded, shot like fireworks or silent hempen bombs until the canvass was ablaze. Leonardo was far away by then and couldn't hear the shouts of Andrea and Francesco and the apprentices as they rushed to put out the fire.
Niccolo found Leonardo standing upon the same mountain where Tista had fallen to his death. His face and shirt streaked with soot and ash, Leonardo stared down into the misty valley below. There was the Palazzo Vecchio, and the dome of the Duomo reflecting the early morning sun...and beyond, created out of the white dressing of the mist itself, was his memory cathedral. Leonardo gazed at it...into it. He relived once again Tista's flight into death and saw the paintings he had burned; indeed, he looked into Hell, into the future where he glimpsed the dark skies filled with Lorenzo's soaring machines, raining death from the skies, the winged devices that Leonardo would no longer claim as his own. He wished he had never dreamed of the Great Bird. But now it was too late for anything but regret.
What was done could not be undone.
"Maestro!" Niccolo shouted, pulling Leonardo away from the cliff edge, as if he, Leonardo, had been about to launch himself without wings or harness into the fog. As perhaps he was.
"Everyone has been frantic with worry for you," Niccolo said, as if he was out of breath.
"I should not think I would have been missed."
Niccolo snorted, which reminded Leonardo that he was still a child, no matter how grown up he behaved and had come to look. "You nearly set Maestro Verrocchio's bottega on fire."
"Surely my lamps would extinguish themselves when out of oil, and the fire was properly vented. I myself—"
"Neighbors saved the bottega," Niccolo said, as if impatient to get on to other subjects. "They alerted everyone."
"Then there was no damage?" Leonardo asked.
"Just black marks on the walls."
"Good," Leonardo said, and he walked away from Niccolo, who followed after him. Ahead was a thick bank of mist the color of ash, a wall that might have been a sheer drop, but behind which in reality were fields and trees.
"I knew I would find you here," Niccolo said.
"And how did you know that, Nicco?"
The boy shrugged.
"You must go back to the bottega," Leonardo said.
"I'll go back with you, Maestro."
"I'm not going back." The morning mist was all around them; it seemed to be boiling up from the very ground. There would be rain today and heavy skies.
"Where are you going?"
Leonardo shrugged.
"But you've left everything behind." After a beat, Niccolo said, "I'm going with you."
"No, young ser."
"But what will I do?"
Leonardo smiled. "I would guess that you'll stay with Maestro Verrochio until Lorenzo invites you to be his guest. But you must promise me you'll never fly any of his machines."
Niccolo promised; of course, Leonardo knew that the boy would do as he wished. "I did not believe you were afraid, Maestro."
"Of course not, Nicco."
"I shall walk with you a little way."
"No."
Leonardo left Niccolo behind, as if he could leave the past for a new, innocent future. As if he had never invented bombs and machines that could fly. As if, but for his paintings, he had never existed at all.
Niccolo called to him...then his voice faded away, and was gone.
Soon the rain stopped and the fog lifted, and Leonardo looked up at the red tinged sky.
Perhaps in hope.
Perhaps in fear.
GEORGE ZEBROWSKI
George Zebrowski (born December 28, 1945) is a science fiction author and editor who has written and edited a number of books, and is a former editor of The Bulletin of the Science Fiction Writers of America. He lives with author Pamela Sargent, with whom he has co-written a number of novels, including Star Trek novels.
Zebrowski won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1999 for his novel Brute Orbits. Three of his short stories, "Heathen God," "The Eichmann Variations," and "Wound the Wind," have been nominated for the Nebula Award, and "The Idea Trap" was nominated for the Theodore Sturgeon Award.
The Word Sweep, by George Zebrowski
The words on the floor were as thick as leaves when Felix arrived at the party. At five past eleven, the room should have been silent.
"Quiet!" he shouted, unable to hold back.
The word formed in the air and floated to the floor at his feet. A deaf couple in the corner continued talking with their hands. Everyone was looking at him, and he felt his stomach tighten. He should have motioned for silence instead of speaking.
A small woman with large brown eyes came up to him and handed him a drink. He sipped. Vodka. It was her way of saying, yeah, we know you've got a lousy job policing the yak ration. Pooping parties for a living can't be fun, you poor bastard. We know.
Heads nodded to show approval of the woman's gesture.
Felix tried to smile, feeling ashamed for losing control. Then he turned and went out again into the cool October night.
At the end of the block, the compactor was waiting for the sweeps to clean out the corner house. He was glad that he did not have to work in the inner city, where control was always slipping, where the babbling often buried entire neighborhoods to a depth of four or five feet.
He took a deep breath. Watching out for five suburban blocks was not so bad, especially when his beat changed once a month. He couldn't grow too friendly with the homeowners.
The tension in his gut lessened. At least this party had not given him any trouble. He could see that the guests had tried to be sedate, speaking as little as possible during the evening, priding themselves on their ability to hold words and liquor. He had not seen any babblers sitting on a pile of verbiage. This was a good block, much better than last month's section.
A dog ran by in the empty street. Felix noted the muzzle. No problem there.
He started a slow walk home, passing the compactor as it turned on its light and started silently down the next block. Two streets down, he turned to avoid going through the district square, where they were still cleaning up after the political rally.
There was a message for him on the phone screen:
Let's ration together after
you get home. I'll save
mine. Love, June
The words angered him, bringing back the tension in his stomach. He cleared the screen, resenting the message because it ruined the calming effect of his long wa
lk home.
He went into the bedroom and lay down. When he tried, he could almost remember the time when words did not materialize. He must have been four or five when it happened for the first time. He remembered wafer-thin objects, letters joined together in as many differing styles as there were speakers.
At first it had been a novelty, then a perpetual snowstorm. Cities had to clean up after a daily disaster, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, trucking the words to incinerators and landfills. The words would burn only at high temperatures, and even then they would give off a toxic gas which had to be contained. There had been a government project to find a use for the gas, but it took too much energy for the burning to make it worthwhile; later the gas was found to be useless.
Psychiatric treatment came to a halt, then shifted to computer printout and nonverbal therapies. Movies had gone back to silent and subtitled versions; only the very rich could afford to truck away the refuse after each talkie showing. Opera was performed in mime and music-only reductions....
Felix opened his eyes and sat up in the darkness. Somewhere far away, a deviant was running through the streets. He could just barely hear the screaming, but it was loud enough to remind him of the time he had been a deviant.
Unable to control himself, he had almost buried himself in words one night, under a giant elm tree near the edge of town. The words had poured out of him as if they were trying to outnumber the stars, while he had held his stomach and screamed obscenities.
Bruno Black, who had been fully grown before the world had changed, had explained it to him later. It had been the silence, the prolonged, thought-filled silence that had broken his control, as it had broken the resolve of countless others. The need to speak had come uncontrollably into him one day, ridding him of cogency, sweeping through him like a wind, bestowing the freedom of babble, taking away wit and limit, making his mouth into a river, out of which words had flowed like wars ... in the end a wonderful nonsense had cleansed his brain.
Now, as he listened to the distant deviant howling in the night, he again felt the trial of terse expression; the jungle was growing in around him, threatening to wipe away all his control when he fell asleep, enticing him with pleasures stronger than the silence....
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 73