Wings of Creation

by Brenda Cooper

  My abs hurt. My shoulders hurt.

  “Good!” Tsawo’s voice floated down from above. “Let go. Don’t feel the pain.”

  How did he know what I was thinking? Six. A little off. I listed right. Seven. I tried to correct, twisted to the left instead of the right.

  “Hold! Take your time.”

  My breath was too fast and I was too big to fly. I sank in the air, my feet almost dragging the ground. Eight, nine. Okay. That was better. Ten. Higher. I twisted right again, and sank fast. I lowered my legs. With a disgusted backwing, I let myself down, hard enough to jar my knees. I’d landed on one of the red lines of flowers, breaking stems.

  Tsawo landed right in front of me, the expression on his face as frustrated as I felt. To my disgust, a tear gathered in my right eye and insisted on falling down my cheek. I didn’t cry in front of people. I just didn’t. I felt another one gathering in the other eye, and lifted my wings up to hide my face, fumbling with the straps. At least I’d learned to free myself without falling down.

  By the time I finished and held my wings in my arms, my eyes were dry.

  To his credit, Tsawo didn’t mention the tears.

  It wasn’t like me to cry. Lopali wasn’t what I’d expected. Hell, I didn’t know what I’d expected. To fly. I wanted to fly so badly I could taste it. I couldn’t bring myself to say anything until I’d taken the gear back and hung it up on its peg for the day. One more lesson day gone, and I’d gotten—what?—six feet off the ground? Maybe ten.

  I stopped in the bathroom and washed my hands and face and brushed my hair, making sure I was in control before I went out to meet Tsawo. There was an hour before our afternoon nap, when I’d lie down and stare at the ceiling for an hour and he, presumably, slept. Fliers had unique weaknesses. I could run without a nap afterward, but they seemed to need to sleep to rebuild for the night. Once he’d skipped the nap and been slower than usual and his eyes had been red.

  I’d learned that this time between lessons and downtime was often good for talking to him. He was, after all, supposed to teach me some of Lopali’s culture.

  He was gracious when I caught up to him standing at the edge of the field, looking up at a group of human fliers like me, only better. They could keep up with their instructor. “You improved today.”

  Not really. Not nearly good enough. “I still think it would be easier to fly with wings like yours.”

  “You’re obsessed.”

  I hadn’t made any headway on this topic since the first time I’d broached it to him. And I still had my promise to Joseph, who was just as confusing and irritating as ever.

  Although this was only the fourth day of lessons, Tsawo and I had a bit of a routine now. We couldn’t, of course, take a walk, or a long run. He couldn’t do that any more than I could fly. So we sat on two rocks, side by side, him on the taller of them so he sat above me, his wings falling just behind my back. Up close, his feathers were a thousand faceted colors of black when the sun lit them, so pretty it was hard to drag my eyes from them. He’d taken to letting me start the conversation, so I asked him, “So what do fliers do when they aren’t flying?”

  “Sleep.”

  “Very funny. I mean for fun.”

  He grinned. “Well . . . we meditate.”

  “I said for fun.”

  “Some of us are artists. There’s an art building over at the university. Want to go there after our nap?”

  It was a serious request. He spent the afternoons teaching me about SoBright. “Maybe. But I don’t see . . . I don’t see . . . play. What do you do for fun?”

  He stood up and stretched, adjusted his wings, and then he sat back down. “When Marcus first asked me to teach you, I was willing to bet that you were supposed to act like a diplomat. I thought this was a job for you.”

  I laughed and shook my head. “They don’t want me near them. They’re all doing important work.” I probably shouldn’t talk like this. But I was way past frustrated with Marcus for always shunting me off, and Joseph for letting him. “See, we were all made for something, the way you’re made to fly. Chelo’s our leader, Joseph’s our creator, our pilot, and a bunch of other things. He can do almost anything. On a space ship, he’s in charge of us. Kayleen is like . . . she can do part of what Joseph does. I guess she’s his backup. Liam is like Chelo, only he’s a scientist, too. He came from a roamer band.”

  Tsawo had turned his face toward me and seemed to be listening really closely.

  So I continued. “Bryan is our strongman. Our protector.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Tell me what a protector is for you.”

  It went like this a lot. He was supposed to be teaching me about fliers, but he often asked me questions. Last time, it was all about Joseph’s abilities. “If I answer you, will you answer a question for me?”

  He sighed. “Maybe.”

  “Why not?”

  “All right.” He sounded wary.

  “Thanks.” I didn’t want to push him, so I gave him as complete an answer as I knew how to. “Well, Bryan looks out for us. He’s always watchful. He’s a worrier. Like, my opposite. I’m a risk-taker, so sometimes I don’t think as hard as I should about something. Bryan often watches a situation and thinks about it. Sometimes he just does stuff. When he knows what to do. He also makes us work and stay strong. Even when we were little kids, way back on Fremont, he’d do that.” I smiled at the memory. “I used to look forward to coming to town twice a year so I could finally see people like me. I only saw him a few times a year then, but he always watched for me. Once he and Liam helped me escape after someone locked me up.”

  He blinked at me. “People locked you up? Why?”

  “They didn’t like me. I was different. They didn’t like me the most, but Bryan used to get beat up, too. Only Liam really had it easy.” I left it there, not wanting to go into our whole history. Tsawo wasn’t exactly a stranger, but some of it still seemed pretty personal.

  He looked across the field. Even though we were far away from where I’d fallen, I could see the short, ugly break in the flowers where I’d stepped on them. They’d be fixed tonight; a Keeper would come through and clean up all the lines, cutting away the dead flowers. Not just the ones that I stepped on, the flowers that were through blooming and the leaves that had gone brown at the edges, too.

  We were silent together for a few moments. I’d learned he liked that. Silence.

  After a while he asked, “As protector, does Bryan make the decisions for you?”

  I shook my head. “He thinks too slow. And he gets mad too easy. That’s why Chelo and Liam mostly run things, except here it’s really Marcus.”

  He must have heard the bitterness in my voice since the next thing he said was, “And you don’t like that?”

  “Sometimes Chelo hesitates. And Marcus doesn’t like me.”

  He didn’t answer that. Maybe he couldn’t; Marcus had hired him. “I’m telling you all about us. What about you? If you don’t have any fun, what do you do?” I remembered the first feast, when Induan and I were invisible. “What do fliers fight about?”

  He held up a hand. “That’s three questions. I promised I’d answer one question.” He tried to look serious, but one side of his mouth quirked up. “So think about the question you want to ask.”

  Okay. The rock was getting hard, so I stood up and walked around, pacing in front of him. What did fliers fight about? But I wasn’t sure he’d give me a complete answer. But would he answer anything? I really wanted to know if he had a girlfriend, but he was always so careful to keep his distance I was willing to bet it wouldn’t matter even if he didn’t. What did we need to know?

  I stood in front of him, pondering, making a bit of a show of it. At first he didn’t look like he liked the way I was playing with him, but after a few minutes he lost his ability to keep a straight face, and burst out laughing.

  “See? Fliers can have fun.”

  “There’s not much time for that. And it’s nap
time. What’s your question?”

  “Chelo told me that you told her you’re a protector. What did you mean by that?”

  By the way he sighed, I could tell he was hoping for a different question. But I knew he’d answer. I stood as quietly as I could, waiting. Fliers valued quiet and patience. I had to count to ten over and over in my head to keep looking patient.

  “All right. This is going to take some education. It’s a longer answer than you bargained for. Are you sure you don’t want to change your question?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “All right. Well, at least sit back down.”

  I did. On the grass, at his feet. The sun was almost directly overhead, so his shadow and my shadow pooled around us, barely touching.

  “Tell me what you understand about how fliers fit into the Five Worlds, so I know where to start.”

  “Well, you’re the only humans that can fly. People come from all over to learn from you. Marcus thinks whatever side of the war you come down on will win.” I hesitated. “I saw the first flier. A statue of her. The artist made her very beautiful.”

  He didn’t react to that. He just asked another question. “What’s our relationship with Silver’s Home?”

  “They made you. You need them to make more of you.”

  “All right. You get the basics. So here is the rest. A lot of people love us, and many people want to be us. That’s because they want the peace we’ve made here. They . . . romanticize our lives. But they don’t understand our lives at all. They don’t know the hard choices, or how many strings others try to pull on us. We do have some freedom, but it’s very hard to keep.” He stood up and stretched his wings again. “They want things from us. Feathers. Peace. Songs and ceremonies. A place to come to get away from their own lives. They never get to stay here—we send them all back.”

  “Really? All?”

  “Almost all.”

  “But you let some try to become fliers.”

  “You’re obsessed.”

  He was right. “So what do fliers need to be protected from?”

  “From giving away so much of ourselves that there’s nothing left.” He watched me carefully.

  “We all worked hard to help the people on Fremont. We were stronger and braver and smarter and faster. Jenna—Jenna used to have one eye and one arm, and she was the best hunter of Fremont. But they tried to kill her.”

  His answering smile was soft. “So then you understand that we need to be protected from others. But why do you think we need to be protected from ourselves?”

  “So you don’t kill them all?”

  He nodded.

  14

  CHELO: CARO AND THE WIND

  After five days here, we’d starting finding patterns. At the moment, Kayleen snored quietly beside me. Something in the way the data flows worked here was soothing to her, and she’d actually started sleeping through the night again, and looked happy. Maybe too happy, and maybe that wasn’t a better problem. She didn’t feel like herself.

  Caro and Jherrel stirred in their small bed against the wall, and I looked forward to them waking. Even with all the mysteries on Lopali, I loved being bound to a ball of life instead of held inside a metal shell. The children liked it, too, except that they pined for the little robots, which had followed them around on the ships.

  Alicia’s voice carried from downstairs as she said good-bye to Ming and Bryan, who were up early with Liam, getting ready for a trip to Oshai. The door closed, undoubtedly after letting Alicia and Induan out into the wild to be our invisible spies. I worried about her, but I worried more and more about us as time passed here.

  Kayleen rolled over and blinked sleepy eyes at me. “Good morning.”

  “Yes.” The door above us opened and closed as Joseph left his room.

  “Ah . . .” Kayleen whispered. “I predicted immediate emergence. The two who used to be never separated always get up at different times now. How long do you think it will be before they want separate rooms?”

  I shook my head. “I hope forever. There was a time I wished they weren’t together, but not anymore.”

  “Why not? She’s a distraction for him. There’s not just six of us for you to save now, sweetheart. There’s millions, and maybe we’d be all right if she faded into them. She might be happier.”

  I hoped she meant millions of people like us, and not millions for me to save. I put a finger over her lips. “We six. We have to stay together.”

  She stared up at the ceiling. “I know you think that.”

  I sighed. “Besides, if he loses her, it will break his heart.”

  “I know.”

  “We’ll figure it out. We’re family.”

  As if to prove my point, Caro leapt up on top of us, giggling wildly. “I didn’t even hear you,” I teased her, although I had.

  “Get up!” Her hair had grown into long dark curls as wild as Kayleen’s and her eyes had settled into Kayleen’s blue. Her long toes dug into my side. “Famished.”

  I grinned at her. “It’s not always a good thing for kids to learn more words.”

  “Yes it is,” Caro stated.

  As I predicted, Paloma and Seeyan immediately took to each other. Paloma took a deep breath the moment she walked inside the door, her eyes sweeping across the tied bunches of drying pastel-colored herbs. Seeyan had a full head of height on Paloma, and she frowned down at Paloma’s gray hair, reaching a hand out to touch it curiously, and then running fingers across the spiderweb of wrinkles at the edges of Paloma’s eyes. “Why do they let you get old?”

  Paloma smiled gently. “Where we came from,” she made a gesture that included me and her, “people die of old age. At home, they don’t like the ways you stay young.” She shrugged. “I’m old. Almost everyone on almost every ship has offered me some way to fix it, but it’s just me and I don’t see any reason to fix it yet. Maybe I will when my bones start to hurt.”

  Seeyan still looked confused. “You’re lucky it’s your choice, although I don’t understand it.”

  It was Paloma’s turn to look confused. Nevertheless, exactly as I’d expected, she pointed to the herbs hanging from the ceiling above the sink. “Can you tell me about those?”

  Seeyan started a detailed description, and they became immediately lost in conversation. I took Jherrel and Caro, walking away from the town. I didn’t want the kids trampling Seeyan’s carefully kept places, but I needed to find them someplace to run. Marcus warned us to run and lift weights daily so we didn’t become soft in the slight gravity. Luckily the kids were enamored of being able to jump so high and happy to go outside.

  Following Seeyan’s direction, we found a path directly behind Seeyan’s house. A small forest gave way to grassy ground, which in turn led to a large perch-tree fence and, eventually, to croplands. The fields were well-tended, but naggingly wrong. The warm soft winds and steady sunshine had convinced my body it was late spring or early summer. Even though most of the food here didn’t match what we grew on Fremont, I had been close enough to farming in my childhood chores to notice these fields randomly changing from newly planted to just harvested. No seasons?

  The ring of perch-trees that surrounded the spaceport sprouted beyond the fields like a fence.

  “See ships?” Jherrel asked.

  I eyed the distance. Just what I’d wanted. “It will be a long walk.”

  He nodded, with all the seriousness a three-year-old can muster. “Okay.”

  His barely older sister observed, “We can’t walk across the crops.”

  “There’s a road.” He pointed and, sure enough, there was at least a visible space between rows of crops. “We can run.”

  “If you get tired, I’m not carrying you.”

  “We won’t get tired,” they said in unison. And they wouldn’t, unless they wanted attention. Our genetics had bred true physically. They ran fast and climbed well—Jherrel the faster runner, and Caro, with outsize feet like Kayleen’s, the better climber.

&n
bsp; I followed them, the pace easy for me even though their little cheeks reddened. Halfway across I called a halt for breath. I pretended to pant as hard as they did. “Sure you want to go all the way?”

  “Follow the fliers,” Jherrel said, pointing up.

  “I like the purple one,” Caro proclaimed. “And the yellow one.”

  Sure enough, a set of seven fliers flew straight and fast overhead, directly toward the spaceport. I squinted, pretty sure that one was the blonde with the pale purple wings who had been so happy to get away on the feast day.

  “Race you!” Jherrel called my attention back closer to the ground.

  I let him beat me to the perch-trees by two strides, and Caro caught up with us before we’d got our breath back. “Let’s look together,” I suggested.

  Jherrel took off, running toward the one opening in the thick line of perch-trees that we could see from here. I grabbed Caro up and took off, racing after him. With Caro’s weight in my arms it was tough to catch up. Even with short legs he was a good sprinter, and had time to catch his breath. So we ended up getting to the opening all together. It turned out to be a wide road meant to carry cargo between the spaceport and SoBright. We stopped just at the line of perch-trees, both breathing hard this time, just as a warning bell went up and a stern voice demanded, “Clear the area.”

  Fliers rose from whatever they were doing and fluttered into the air, and I finally understood the perch-trees’ purpose here. It was far enough away that the fliers who worked the spaceport—or others, like Matriana when we came in—could safely watch ships arrive and depart. So we had come at a perfect time. Jherrel would like this: he loved ships as much as his uncle Joseph.

  After forty or so fliers found perches all the way around the spaceport, the bells rang again. Two more fliers popped out from behind a ship and headed for the trees. A safety bell? A last-minute notice?

  After the two fliers landed gracefully, I glanced back at the spaceport. Was something coming down or going up? There was no movement, and I couldn’t see anything in the sky. In front of us, the flat, hard surface looked like a game board of dark- and light-colored squares, and every few squares, a ship rested. “How many ships do you count?” I asked the children.