Wings of Creation

by Brenda Cooper

“Exactly.”

  We walked all the way through SoBright and left it again on the far side, continuing down a street full of buildings sized for fliers. Unlike the guest house, which felt like a regular place when the roof was closed, and had walls and windows on every side, these were open—just roofs over benches and tables.

  Marcus clearly knew where he was going. Ten or twelve airy buildings that only vaguely matched each other in style sprawled across a large and immaculately gardened campus. Benches and perches had been fit artfully into nooks and crannies, making outdoor study space that was full of fliers and wingless, some sitting alone and others in groups. A warm breeze carried the soft voices of people lost in conversation.

  Shadows blocked the sun for a breath, just before Matriana and Daniel landed in front of us. After greetings were exchanged, Marcus asked, “Is Chance here yet?”

  “In just a few moments.” She turned her gaze to me. “Are you ready?”

  “Yes.” Sure. For whatever. Why did Marcus always like to surprise me? I glanced at him. “We’re ready.”

  Kayleen cleared her throat. “Ready for what? Is this a school? Are your geneticists here?”

  Chelo grabbed her hand and squeezed it, stopping the flow of words.

  Daniel smiled. “Ready to start learning, and yes, this is the biggest university on Lopali, the School of Heaven’s Flight, and yes, our geneticists are here.”

  Kayleen grinned.

  Chelo pointed up into the sky, and I got my first glimpse of a flying regular human. The wings were smaller than a flier’s, and more rigid, and clearly made rather than grown. The sun glittered on slender sparkly stripes of bright white across a gray-blue just duller than the color of the sky. They stretched from just past the human’s fingers on each side, and swept back to tuck in near the hips. The legs had a second set of small winglike protrusions that looked like they might be used as much for stability as steering. It eventually became clear the wings carried a smallish and slender man. The whole contraption creaked, the wings flapping audibly and squeaking on the downbeat as he came within a few meters or so of us. He slowed, then, with a little hop, stopped on a patch of green grass in front of us.

  Marcus headed straight toward him, so I followed, curious.

  He looked young and healthy, like everyone else here, except his hair was a silver-gray that offset bright blue eyes and a wide, friendly smile. “Good to see you! I hear you’ve brought us a protégé”—he glanced at me—“and I’m betting this is him.”

  I nodded and stuck my hand out, then realized he didn’t have a free hand. “I’m Joseph.”

  “And I’m Dr. Chance.” He started peeling off the wings and handed one to me and one to Marcus. They were much more elegantly made up close than they’d seemed from a distance, with clever spars and a soft fabric. “Or just Chance.”

  The single wing I held weighed no more than a few ounces, and balanced easily a little off-center on a single finger. “You’re the geneticist?”

  “You were expecting a flier? No. I mean, yes I am, and I’m from Silver’s Home, too. I couldn’t stand the death rate, so I came here to help when Marcus asked.”

  We started back toward the others, who appeared to be entangled in one of Kayleen’s grand convoluted conversations. “So why do you need us?” I asked him.

  His cheeks reddened. “Well, I’m no maker, for one. Not even a basic Wind Reader. And I didn’t have access to all the secrets. But I know a few things, and between us all, we’ll puzzle it out.”

  Matriana laughed softly at something Chelo said, and then she and Daniel swept back up into the air. Marcus led the rest of us to a long room where Dr. Chance clipped all the parts of his flying gear together and stuck them on a hook next to three other pairs. We entered what must be one of the fliers’ classrooms. Partway across the floor, a rope ladder dangled from a lattice platform. Marcus held the rope for us so it wouldn’t sway too much as we climbed.

  The platform was only about twice as high as I was tall. Matriana and Daniel had flown in through the wide-open wall and they sat comfortably on two of many tall benches that surrounded a single square table. At their invitation, we scrambled up, and even with each of us taking a bench, the table was less than half full. While I felt like the table was the right height for my hands, my feet dangled over empty space, as if I were a child sitting in a grown-up’s spot.

  Chance got right down to business, plugging a data button into a clever reader built right into the table. Images shimmered to life, duplicated for each of us. A slightly see-through three-dimensional flier hung in the air in front of us, wings spread. “What do you see?” he asked.

  I glanced at the very real fliers sitting across from us. “The wings are bigger than the body. They might be heavier.”

  He nodded. “Wings and body usually weigh about the same. What else do you see?”

  “The muscles are different. Longer and more . . . I don’t know? Streamlined.”

  “Like a bird’s would be,” Chelo mentioned. “Look at the hands and feet. The feet are long like Kayleen’s. The fingers and toes aren’t claws, but they’re thinner than ours.”

  “Their bones must be light,” Kayleen added.

  The pictures changed to show a cutaway of the flier’s bones, including the wing bones. The structural components of the body seemed to be in the usual places, but finer and longer, the bones hollow. “Because the bones are so much thinner, and the muscles designed not to bulk, fliers seldom walk far. They aren’t designed to carry their own weight for long.”

  “So that’s why the fliers I saw on Silver’s Home seemed to be in pain?”

  Chance shook his head. “Those are different yet again. Much stronger people were made for Lopali. If Matriana tried to walk on Silver’s Home in normal gravity, she would crumple.”

  Chelo spoke up, her voice tightly controlled. “So someone decides before the flier child is born if it will live here or not?”

  Matriana answered her. “A flier designed for Silver’s Home can live here. But we cannot live there and walk the normal streets. We would be confined forever to the domed cities.”

  Kayleen followed one of her typical tangents. “But if you could decide yourself, for your own babies, what would you choose? Would you make any at all for Silver’s Home, or would you make them all for here?”

  Matriana and Daniel looked puzzled. He answered. “We’d live here. This is our home.”

  “How are flier babies born now?” I asked

  Daniel frowned. “Normal women bear them. They get paid to do it. Then the babies are changed across the next few months.”

  Chance picked up the answer. “Nanotechnology thins the bones, teaches the muscles to grow longer, and changes the shoulders, essentially adding a shelf for the wings. It’s structural engineering that’s as much nanotechnology as genetics, although it does change the underlying biology. But not like Wind Reading, which can be passed from parent to child. The mod for fliers is very painful.” A bitter anger boiled lightly under his words, and showed in his eyes. “The infant fliers-to-be are drugged so they forget the pain of growing wings. Many die.”

  Kayleen grimaced. “So why do it at all? If it kills so easily, why make fliers? And worse, why let kids try it? They haven’t chosen.”

  Chance nodded, his face softening, but his words were matter-of-fact. “The death rate for infants is far lower than adults.”

  She shivered. “It seems . . . wrong.”

  “It is wrong,” Chelo snapped.

  The table fell silent. Chance’s fingers did a short dance over the data-button reader, and in front of us, the fliers flew. They morphed from the simplistic holograms we had been looking at to the beautiful beings that had taken our breath away, from sketch to real video, to men and women riding on air, smiles filling their faces. After we’d all watched for a few moments, Matriana echoed Alicia’s words from this morning, “Because to be us is the most beautiful thing in the universe.”

  “Exce
pt that most of your babies die.”

  True sadness swept across her eyes for a moment, as pure as the joy on the faces of the tiny video fliers doing loops above the table in front of us. She grit her teeth, her pretty smile forced. “That’s why we’re trying to change things. We want to have children who are already partway there—made that way, in utero. We could never birth wings, but maybe we can get a head start, slow down the mortality rate.”

  But they would still do it. I understood the confusion and disgust in Chelo’s eyes.

  “Can you?” I had to be blunt. “Do you have the right body parts?”

  Matriana sighed. This close, her skin had a papery-thin quality that glowed health and strength, contrasting deeply to the sadness in her eyes. “We’re sterile. Perhaps our children or our children’s children will not be barren.”

  Chance leaned forward like he wanted to add something, and I saw what looked like a physical effort to hold his tongue.

  This might take months or years. We didn’t have months or years, not with the war.

  Chelo’s lips thinned, and she stiffened, maybe at the coldness of Matriana’s statement.

  Daniel must have seen it, since he took her hand. “We’re used to suffering. If we suffer now, we may be able to change enough of ourselves that we can have babies able to fly here.”

  Chelo stared back at him.

  “If we accept the pain of changing ourselves, then we’ll be free of the tyranny of the guild who makes us. We will make ourselves. That will be better.”

  Chelo pulled her hand back. “So why don’t all the fliers want this fixed?”

  It was Matriana’s moment to look cloudy. “Who have you been talking to?”

  “Dianne and I met a flier on the way back from a walk this morning.” She looked pale at the memory. “A man with wings black as night and a small feather hanging on a choker around his neck. He wouldn’t give me his name. He said we should be careful and not go far from home. I couldn’t tell if he was warning me about him, or about Dianne—since she’s from Islas—or about Seeyan, a Keeper we met, or something else, but I’m very clear that he was delivering a warning.”

  Matriana’s eyes darkened. “Tsawo.”

  The flier who had taken Alicia off this morning. Surely Marcus had vetted him. She would be okay. Still, I felt chilled. I hadn’t liked him, and neither had Sasha. “Tell me about Tsawo,” I said.

  Daniel started. “He’s young, and drunk on the idea of change. Unlike us,” he waved a hand at himself and Matriana, “he thinks Lopali can function on its own. But even if we do manage to free ourselves of the Wingmakers, we won’t be free of the need for trade. There will be seekers coming here, and we will go out. Many of our young get influenced by people at the edges of society. He’ll calm down in time.”

  Matriana shook her head. “If we’re lucky.” She looked at Marcus. “Surely you understand that not everyone who comes here wishes us well. Wingmakers and Islans and others all want a piece of what we have, but they don’t understand what it takes to get it. They try to buy their own souls. Or the souls of our young.”

  Daniel answered her, “They’ve all grown out of it so far. Give him time.”

  Matriana glanced at Chance. “He’s young and wants power. He’s probably been influenced badly. Many humans here are rich—they get that way because we need so much.” A slight bitterness edged her voice. “Some like to pretend they can influence us with money or baubles or promises. Some like to tell our young that things must remain the same, that without our pain we could not be so beautiful and strong, so spiritual.” She glanced at Daniel, who took her hand and let her go on. “A convenient myth, and attractive to young people, who like to suffer.”

  Daniel said, “Others give them treats from Silver’s Home. Like special mods, or promises of babies, or even just piles of credits, which we don’t need. We have wealth in common, but some people think they need it for themselves.”

  Matriana interrupted again. “The humans want to make us small, like them. They think they can tempt us with pretties.”

  So she didn’t see fliers as humans? I tried to recall Tsawo’s clothes in my head. He hadn’t been overly decorated. Less than usual. After meeting him, I felt certain he wasn’t driven by greed.

  Something else was bothering me. “Does he have a reason to keep us from succeeding?”

  Chelo asked, “Is it the Court?”

  Matriana and Marcus both looked surprised. Daniel asked, “What have you heard?”

  Chelo shook her head. “Just that the Court of the Five Worlds may not be friendly to you.”

  I made a mental note to ask her where she was doing her research.

  Daniel put a hand on her forearm, his long fingers wrapping all the way around the slender part above her wrist. “That is another fear that has few grounds. Some say if we change, then the rights we have today will be gone.”

  That would set Chelo off. It was what the Town Council had tried to do to us years ago.

  Daniel continued. “It’s just propaganda. It means nothing.” He shook his head, as if fussing at a three-year-old’s failure to pick up its toys. “Tsawo will come out of this.”

  Marcus sat back and asked the most important question. “Tsawo is teaching one of ours to fly. Is she safe?”

  Chance said, “Yes. He’s a little full of himself, but he won’t hurt anyone.”

  Maybe he wouldn’t have to hurt anyone. Alicia could be easily misled. I addressed Matriana. “Do you know what Tsawo wants in particular?”

  She shook her head. “I heard he doesn’t want a war.”

  “Neither do we!” Chelo blurted out.

  “He says we have to stay neutral—that Islas and Silver’s Home will balance each other to peace if we don’t join either of them.”

  “Is that true?” Chelo asked.

  Marcus and Daniel both frowned, and Matriana said, “It’s much more complex than that.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Daniel said. “Tsawo won’t decide the course of this war.”

  Marcus glanced at Chelo and me, and I swallowed hard. Neither would we!

  Daniel repeated himself. “He won’t hurt anyone.”

  Matriana shook her head, clearly not quite agreeing. I wondered if they were a couple or just coleaders. They sounded like they’d been married for decades.

  I glanced at Marcus. “I want to go find her.”

  Marcus took a deep breath and sat up straight. “We have work to do. Tsawo’s not supposed to bring her back until the end of the day. I asked him to start teaching her to fly, and to show her around town. He might even bring her by here.”

  For the hundredth time, I wished Alicia were a Wind Reader so I could just reach out and talk to her. Except Marcus hadn’t really forbidden the two of us to talk, he’d just told us to shield. Kayleen was on my right, so I squeezed her hand, and opened a bit, calling to her. What do you think? I want to find her!

  Through the crack that let me speak to Kayleen I heard bells and the rise and fall of breezes and the music of waterfalls. Kayleen was beside me, floating in the dip and sway, her energy and mine running close, breathing together. I looked absently for tools to help me find Alicia. Nothing. Instead, I heard the universe breathing. I didn’t want that—I wanted something to grab onto, something to follow logically. Something I understood, but anything concrete seemed far away, wrapped in gauze. Bells rang inside me, and a low drumbeat matched my heart. I began to distinguish the voices of other instruments: a flute, a harp—

  Clap!

  My eyes flicked open to find Marcus about to bring his hands together again just in front of my face. “Mmmmmm . . . okay. Okay. Sorry.” I glanced at Kayleen, who had slumped over her arms on the table with a beatific smile on her face. Marcus clapped again, near her ear, and she smiled wider. I tried to tug her into a sitting position, but with no purchase for my feet I didn’t have enough leverage. She felt as if all the muscles in her body had simply slacked. “Kayleen!” I called sharp
ly, and then again, “Kayleen!”

  Nothing.

  I shook her shoulder and Chelo, on her other side, shook her, too, also calling her name.

  She coughed and blinked. As she opened her eyes she looked like someone who had nearly drowned, as if part of her was still far away in some other place.

  “Shield!” Marcus demanded, his face sour. “Move. Climb up and down the ladder. Put yourselves all the way back into the physical.”

  He didn’t let us stop until we’d each gone up and down eight times, swaying, working at it, with no one to hold the rope ladder anchored like he had held it for us on the way up.

  When I finally settled back down on the oversized bench, Chelo’s smile was tense with worry, and I sensed a brother/sister row coming if we ever figured out how to be alone again.

  Marcus looked over at us, and I realized he’d gone from mad to trying hard not to laugh. But he apparently didn’t want to talk about it. He raised an eyebrow and then spoke to Chance. “Go ahead. There’s more to show them.”

  Matriana interrupted. “We’ll be going. But we’ll check in on you every day.” She and Daniel stood on the two far corners of the platform, bent their knees sharply, and then sprang up in unison. Clearly they’d practiced this, as their powerful wing beats synchronized exactly until they were up and out through the wide-open wall, heading toward SoBright.

  We spent three hours learning the finer details of flier anatomy and history. The light had faded into the orange-gold of early dusk when Chance suddenly stood up. “Gotta get home before dark. Bye! You can demonstrate what you learned tomorrow!” He popped the data button out, stuck it in his pocket, and scrambled down the ladder, leaving us all gaping a bit. Marcus whispered, “Watch,” and in two or three minutes he was winging away from us, the odd thin material of his wings reflecting the dusky light like red-gold fire.

  Finally, I could go find Alicia.

  I kept trying to hurry. Marcus stopped along the way to chat with fliers, who all wanted introductions to us. After ten introductions I stopped even bothering to try and remember names, although in a few cases the wing-patterns of various fliers looked so unique or so bright I thought I’d remember those, at least. Twice, black wings caught my eye, but one pair belonged to a woman with long black hair and another to a redheaded man with a rich laugh that carried across the lawn.