Flight

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Death Rattles and Riddles

  Even though it had been had been two years since Olewan had talked to Mortos, when she heard the pounding on the door she knew its cause. When Santos first grew sick, she and the leader of the centaurs had seen each other almost every day. But since the time that Santos, knowing that any help that Olewan might give to him would be only a palliative, went back into the Green to die, Mortos had come back to the Bury just a handful of times. Each time after that, his expressed purpose had been to report on Santos’ further decline, but his real purpose had been first to inveigle, then to petition, later to demand and, finally, to plead that Olewan use her science and skills to do what was necessary to prevent the extinction of his species.

  On those days when Mortos’ anger grew to where his hooves stomped the pitted concrete floors of the Bury and his long ebony tail flailed the walls of the anteroom of her laboratory, Olewan always offered the aging centsur an open face and sympathetic words. That apparently caring face, however, hid a cold closed heart.

  While Mortos talked of extinction of a species, Olewan anticipated the proper end of an aberration, the dark folly, a horrific hubristic experiment .

  When Olewan was Elena Howe and first learned what her husband, Joshua Fflowers, wanted to accomplish with his collection of young cutting edge scientists in his cutting edge facility, she had been more amused than horrified. The night Joshua told her that he had decided to call his new venture Centsurety because he was confident his people surely would be able both to develop centaurs and to add a century to a person’s life, she had laughed at his arrogance. Now, even more than a half-century later, she could remember how she had ridiculed him—why not dream bigger dreams: hippocampi and amphisbaena, and Minotaurs, Sirens and harpies? She had laced her sarcasm with near-hysterical laughter as she had asked why he was so eager to step outside the bounds of science, where he was treated as a god, into the role of God, where he assuredly would be treated as a fool, freak, felon, or all three.

  Her husband’s answer was the one that explorers had used from time immemorial, an answer that brooked neither doubt nor interference: If it could be done, it should and would be done. When Elena had shaken her head at the absolute folly, the unmitigated arrogance of what he was proposing, Joshua Fflowers had taken her hand, and, as he had done successfully so many times during the twenty years of their romance and marriage, begged that she help him just one more time. And, when, for the very first time, she had resisted his will, he had promised her that it would be his last request. He had promised that if she would use all of her great gifts to achieve his final dream, then anything he could give, he would give to her.

  Elena Howe had gripped the warm strong fingers of the remarkable and complicated man who was her husband, had looked into his mischievous brown eyes, which returned her stare without wavering, and had said, “I want your time and our baby.” One child, two, twelve, could be got from the eggs harvested from her womb before that organ had been removed because of a different kind of growth.

  She had asked, and her husband, lover, colleague, friend had answered. As the warmest smile split his face, Joshua Fflowers had said, “That, and more, my Elena.”

  To invent the centaurs, Elena, joined by Vartan Smarkzy, had worked, and wrestled and, finally, had discovered the master key. They took that key and linked it to seven minor keys other Centsurety teams had seduced from nature. Putting all their work together, the scientists had ended with a dozen embryos which Darwin would have been hard put to explain.

  Joshua Fflowers, who over those years had become a mix of Prussian ringmaster and dark cheerleader, was beyond joy. After a day, or many days, of doing the things he had to do for Cygnetics to continue to grow and to keep its status as the world’s most profitable business, he would roto out from Manhattan to Cold Spring Harbor, burst into the lab and stare at the twelve little worlds wherein his dreams grew. Stare and rejoice until the things in the jar died. There had been cycle after cycle of joy and grief as one generation of embryonic centaurs died and a next generation was grown.

  While one myth was being made real by Smarkzy and Elena, a far older, far more powerful myth was being pursued by Roan Winslow and Glen Laureby. After three years of false leads and blind alleys, they, too, had a breakthrough. A major, though seriously flawed, breakthrough. That breakthrough was so important that it was shared with no one but Joshua Fflowers.

  With remarkable progress being made on his two dreams, Joshua Fflowers was so filled with largesse that he decided to give Elena an even better gift than the two she had wished for. On Elena’s forty-fifth birthday, Joshua Fflowers threw a party at the Centsurety lab. It was a perfect party for Elena—beer and hotdogs and hamburgers on a grill with music from the ancients—Meatloaf, Mayall, and Mayer. Fflowers made an effusive toast to Elena, the rose compass of his soul, while the partygoers toasted with small glasses before drinking the aquavit they contained. Late that night, Fflowers, although angered that Roan Winslow had already left and would miss the toast, gathered Smarkzy, Elena, and Laureby, together. He offered them small glasses of what he said was the rarest aquavit, the water of life, in the world, and toasted their genius.

  When the party was over, he whisked Elena away.

  Three days later Elena awoke to her gift—she was the first person in the world to be given wing transplants.

  As a result of Fflower’s gift, Elena’s two wishes, for a child and Fflower’s time, were never fulfilled. Repulsed at his arrogance—how could someone who said he loved her have her body cut and carved to fasten on a dead person’s wings—Elena plotted a fitting revenge.

  She would take what he valued most—she would take his dreams by destroying the centaur embryos, the Centsurety research and the laboratory that created them. She would take his future by substituting the clutch of her eggs stored in the Centsurety lab. Finally, she would take what he often said he valued most—herself, especially her brains, and disappear.

  Elena had no doubt that what she planned to do to Joshua Fflowers was more than justified, but, as she readied her plans, she realized that the consequences of her actions might not be permanent. She could kill the embryos, but as long as Smarkzy had knowledge of the processes, more centaurs could be created.

  When Elena talked to Vartan Smarkzy, she found him to be as horrified at what Joshua Fflowers had done to her as she was herself. Horrified, yes, but not quite ready to sacrifice his career and, given how megalomaniacal Fflowers was, perhaps, his life.

  To win Smarkzy over, Elena told him of the discovery made by Roan Winslow and Glen Laureby. While that definitely shifted Smarkzy’s thinking, it wasn’t until Fflowers announced that liquid they had toasted with on the night of her birthday was truly aquavit—the water of life, that Smarkzy became Elena’s ally. Standing before that small group of phenomenal scientists, Fflowers, the arrogant arbiter of their lives, told them how humbled he was by their intelligence, their creativity, and their persistence. Seeing them, their work, their results, had inspired him. Fflowers told them how he had taken the output of Winslow and Laureby’s research, linked it with human growth hormone, and, here he brought his fingers to his lips like a video chef, made a recipe for long life. It was his secret triumph. He had to admit to all of them. He was jealous of what they did. As Cygnetics had grown, he had had to spend more time in hyper-kinetic corporate offices and quiet banker lairs. He missed the excitement of the lab. He had wanted to prove to himself that he could still do science. Real science. Eye-popping, paradigm shifting, capital S, Science.

  He had tested this miraculous mixture, which had spilled from his unconscious, on mice, rabbits and dogs. The mice had lived almost twenty percent beyond their expected life expectancy…and he was sure the rabbits and dogs would do as well. They might think he had rushed things, but it was important to have the gift be ready for the birthday party. He apologized that he had not discovered the secret of everlasting life. No, nothing so grand. Just the much
more modest gift of probably twenty more years of this glorious thing life. He knew that he had taken three years of their lives in round-the-clock research. He was eternally grateful for what they had done. To repay them, he gave them back those years many fold.

  Olewan’s head shook back and forth as she recalled how happy, and apparently guileless, Joshua Fflowers had been while the recipients of his largess fought off panic.

  Olewan’s head continued to shake. The ironic thing was that their fears had been both on target and misplaced. Now, Olewan was almost twenty years beyond her expected lifespan. As was Fflowers. She knew from her last message from Glen Laureby that Smarkzy still lived. All of those who had unknowingly drunk Fflower’s elixir had lived longer than their peers, but she wondered how much gratitude they had for that extra score since it had been spent with twisted hands and feet and atrophied muscles. Longevity, like flight, had come at a price.

  Even while she was working on the first wing mutations, Elena Howe had worried at the price. Flying was freedom, but wings were slaves—to age and weight and disease. Flying was for the strong. Old people were not strong. The odds of a winger flying more than a hundred meters after their seventieth birthday were small. Given that the average life span of white Noramicans was approaching ninety, the reality was that most wingers could expect fifty or sixty years of flight and then twenty or more years of carrying around a set of useless and cumbersome appendages. Ornaments…momenti mori…momenti voli.

  Old thoughts were moving through a mind that was as old and twisted as the legs that slowly crab-walked up the long ramp that lead to the entrance of the Bury. Olewan knew, as she knew many things without knowing how she knew them, that it would be Mortos at the door. An impatient hoof banged loudly off the steel frame and then again, even louder.

  Olewan opened the door to an old man dressed in a raggedy jacket with a small injured bird roughly held in his arms. He held the girl out like an offering.

  In a guttural voice that was more at ease with consonants than vowels, the centaur said, “From your species. Get good care.”

  Olewan, whose heart had not been touched in years, reached out a knot of fingers to smooth a small patch of bent and broken feathers. Suddenly, the old woman was as rigid as Lot’s wife.

  “Where did you find her?”

  “In tree by bay. Sky dark. Heard noise, loud. Took time. No noise. Then, breathing. Rasp.”

  The hoary centaur stared hard at Olewan.

  “Know that sound. Santos. Merkos.”

  The old woman had been so overcome by the girl’s face that she hadn’t focused on her injuries. Once aware of all the harm, and despite her hobbled legs, Olewan darted back from the doorway with the jerky speed of a frightened crab.

  “Here, quick, bring her in.”

  Mortos brought his hooves to the very edge of the threshold, then, to Olewan’s dismay, he bent forward and gently laid the broken girl on the concrete floor.

  “No, stop. What are you doing?”

  “Freak, monster…non-species…not worthy of your…normal…home.”

  The centaur whirled about and his hooves sounded like spring thunder as he galloped away.

  Olewan bent over the girl whose chest was jerking about as if she were sobbing. The crone touched the girl’s face in awe, before she scuttled down the long ill-lit hallway croaking, “Boy. Boy! Quick. I want you.”

  It was hours later. Olewan, her shape resembling a bag of dirty laundry, was slumped down in a chair laboriously making her way through an exhausted, twitching snore-filled sleep. Prissi’s sleep was deeper, drug deep. Her body was still except for the erratic rise and fall of her chest, which emitted a discordant mix of rasps, wheezes, and sharp clicks. The third person in the operatory, a seventeen year old not quite feral boy, was hyper-alert. He stood immobile over the ancient hospital bed and took in the sights, sounds and smells of the wounded girl. After many minutes, the hands which had been hanging at his sides came to life. With the stealth of a hunting cat, they slowly, smoothly and sinuously moved toward Prissi. Two fingers on his left hand, fingers with broken nails and scabbed skin, touched the blue-sheened skin just above where an IV line punctured the girl’s wrist. His fingertips moved to touch the girl’s own cracked and chipped nails. They gathered and smoothed a small hank of gritty hair. A minute later, the boy moved to the foot of the bed so that he could stare at the girl’s face straight on. His breathing and his body calmed until he was as still as when he watched in the woods. He never had imagined that what he now was seeing would look like it did. After a time, a noise, neither growl nor purr and not quite a keen threndled from his chest. Minutes after the noise began, the teener started as if he had been shocked. He fled the dim room, raced down the darkened hallway and burst into the darker night.

  From the air, certainly, and even from ground level an observant visitor would think the Green’s snarl of brush, vine, shrub and struggling trees was impenetrable. In fact, that was only mostly true. The all-devouring fire of The Ticklish Situation had left thousands of square miles of fertilized earth as inviting of creation as a blank canvas. The warming of the world’s waters and air had added its welcome. Less than a dozen years after the fire, the land around the Bury had formed dense green mats broken only by the encroaching waters, buckled roads and parking lots, and the steel, stone and concrete skeletons of the burned out buildings of what once had been Brookhaven National Laboratory. Within a quarter century, when seen from the air, there looked to be nothing on Long Island east of Huntington but the green of jungle and the silver, greens and browns of the insidious waters. All that had been made by man, including the scientific sprawl of Brookhaven had been destroyed and, as if in shame, blanketed by nature.

  However, for those intrepid enough to crawl under its green covers to seek out the jungle’s secrets, they would have found a warren of paths—actually, more tunnels than paths. These dark lush corridors came in many sizes. Some were small enough to deny entry to weasels; others were big enough that the largest animals in the woods—deer, black bear, man, horse and man-horse—could make their way.

  The boy, who called himself Fair, ran out of the Bury’s entrance and into a small courtyard concealed under a canopy of growth that hid it as well as the scores of shells of what once had been the central campus of the laboratory. Despite the almost complete lack of light under the thick mat of trees, the boy lengthened his stride. At the edge of the clearing, his legs skipped, darted, stuttered, and then lunged, like a rabbit, as he entered the jungle. Once inside the tunnel, his arms forced aside the hungry little hands of the kudzu as his hands held back the switches of forsythia eager to punish. His head bounced and ducked like a dervish in ecstasy as he avoided the low limbs of oak, ash, horse chestnut, willow, maple, river birch and pecan trees.

  The boy, much more comfortable now that he was in the thick dark and thicker brush, gracefully fled down the tunnel until, ten minutes after leaving the injured girl, he suddenly jumped sideways through a nearly invisible break, scrabbled down an embankment and came to rest with wet eyes and ragged breath along the edge of a small stream. The gently flowing water, no more than a few meters across, was gleaming argent from the hovering moon shining down through a small break in the canopy.

  Fair dried his eyes with a quick wipe of his hands. Slowing his breathing took longer. Finally though, the ache in his chest and the burning at the back of his throat faded. He twisted a pinch of flesh below his chin as if it were a stopcock which would let the tumbling thoughts which filled his mind drain. After ten minutes, the boy was able to sit perfectly still within the small grotto of vines. He sat, watched and waited.

  In minutes, or hours—with an empty mind he had no way of knowing—the boy heard a slow rhythmic sound, like a lazy man sweeping, drift across the water. More sweeping. A rest. More sweeping. A longer rest. A small, not-to-be-denied smile appeared on Fair’s face. More sweeping and, then, a small black bear, blacker than the woods from which it emerged, crouched
at the top of the opposite bank.

  The bear half-stood, and, as if being polite to an old woman or honored guest, bobbed its head before hunching back down.

  Knowing this particular yearling, Fair was biting his lips to hold back laughter. The bear, too, seemed to know what was coming. It took two tentative steps forward and moaned in anguish as it began an uncontrolled slide into the water.

  As its body was engulfed by the stream, the bear screamed at the injustice of being born a smooth-soled clawless mutant. Next, it snorted at the folly of its rage. Finally, it chortled with the pleasure of cavorting in the water. The bear smacked the stream with its pacific palms. Fair shared a moment of the bear’s pleasure until the thought that always came—how long could anything without weapons survive in the world—filled his mind. The boy held onto that thought as he watched the bear struggle to pull itself out of the stream and make its way back up the bank.

  After all sounds of the bear had drifted away like autumn fog, Fair stood in a pool of moonlight and looked at both sides of his hands before he kneeling down and leaning over the stream to study the pale doppelganger staring up at him. He looked for a long time.

  The golden snakes of a rising sun were writhing their way through the heavy brush before Fair pushed his way back into the Bury. He quietly padded along the hall to where the girl was.

  Olewan was still sleeping, seemingly little changed except for a thumbprint of drool shining upon her chin. The girl, though, had changed. Her face, her breaths, the color of her skin all looked worse than before. As the boy stared at her, a tingling ran down his arms and out to the tips of his fingers. His breaths—short and broken—began to mimic those of the girl.

  The tatter-clothed boy spun around, took two steps and yanked on the old woman’s threadbare sweater. When Olewan’s eyes snapped open, they were bright blue and as happy as a child’s.

  “Quick, quick, something’s wrong.”

  The boy tugged Olewan’s arm twice more. Using Fair’s impatiently offered hand as support, the stiff-jointed geri managed to get on her feet. However, when the old woman required another second to find her balance, the impatient boy tugged a third time and Olewan lost her balance. Luckily, when she fell, it was back into the safety of the warm nest she had just left. When Fair offered his hand again, the old woman knocked it aside with a vicious swipe. The boy retreated a step before he turned back to the dying girl. The ancient scientist squirmed her body to the edge of the chair and pushed herself to her feet.

  “See, look, something’s wrong.”

  “Mmmmm. Yes, it is. Dislocated wing, broken leg, intestinal bleeding, probably her pancreas—and a concussion—if not more. Very wrong.”

  A frightened Fair barked, “Do something.”

  “I have. The bones are set.”

  “The bleeding?”

  “Patience.”

  The boy yelled, “No! Not patience. Fix bleeding!”

  The hag shook her head.

  “Fix her,” the frantic boy directed.

  “I’m not a doctor.”

  Fair’s arms flew up in the air like a marionette’s.

  “You fix snake, raccoon, squirrel, bear, woodman.”

  The teener flung his arms wide at the large room, a combination laboratory, operatory, dispensary and morgue. “You save a life. Take bird wing. Fix. Take squirrel heart out. Fix. Save things that should die. Kill things that could live. Basement god. Now, here,” Fair stabbed his finger at the twitching form on the bed, “Fix.”

  Viper fast, Olewan’s twisted hand darted out and slapped the crying boy’s face.

  “Go. Go! You know nothing. Nothing of life and even less of death.”

  Shocked by his mother’s slap, Fair ran from the room. After he was gone, a mumblng, finger-fidgeting Olewan stood over the girl.

  How had such a mirror of her genes come to be dying before her eyes?

  Even with her age and ills, her porous mind and trickster memory, Olewan had no doubt that she was looking at her daughter. The moment she had seen the girl in Mortos’ arms, she had known what she was seeing.

  What she didn’t know was what to do.

  Should she try to save this strange atavism from a distant past? Whom or what would she be saving? Who grew this? Joshua Fflowers? Someone else from the Centsurety group? Baudgew? Smarkzy? A stranger? Who had stolen her eggs? Winslow? Laureby? Was the girl here by chance or was she an astounding pawn in a chess game suspended for a half-century? Was this broken form here to test her skills and science, assassinate her heart, bring her old age comfort, test her deepest, most hopeless beliefs, or was she here with no intentions, a random act of immeasurable consequence?

  When Elena Howe first secretly colonized the ruins of Brookhaven it was with a half-dozen zealous young scientists fleeing from both the criminal consequences of their work at Centsurety as well as the unknowable wrath of Joshua Fflowers. They had brought some of their science with them. With what they could scavenge from the scores of undamaged underground labs, and with the help of friends left behind, they were able to feed and shelter themselves and forestall boredom. For a time. At the end of the first year, deciding that there must be better forms of exile, two scientists left. A year later, when the weight of isolation exceeded that of fear, another disappeared.

  Each time someone left, the difficulty of living among those remaining grew. Within a dozen years Elena was alone. In the first of the alone years, Elena had enjoyed the solitude. It was more than a small pleasure to hear no complaints about the monotony of the food. There were no arguments about the meager lab supplies. There was none of the energy-sapping Donner Party politics of a small group of people living under duress.

  After the last of the party had slipped away, too shamed or chagrined, or, most likely, angry to say goodbye, Elena had taken a deep sigh of relief that had lasted most of a year. She had emptied her mind of decades of decisions and compromises, stress and sympathy. She emptied her mind and filled her pockets with rocks, leaves, buds and flowers as she wandered the woods around her. She spent time with Mortos, Portos and the other centaurs whom she had rarely seen since they had been released into the woods four years after their release from their gestation jars.

  The herd in those days was still healthy and, mostly, happy. Mortos and Elena would rest in a shadowy haven. While the centaur flicked insects away from his birth-giver with his long, black curried tail, they would talk about the world about them. When they first began their talks, each had difficulty making the other understand. As is true with any insular group, be it prep school or mountain tribe, the centaurs’ language had diverged from what they had first taken into the woods. It wasn’t just the sounds—diphthongs, occlusions and plosives—that had changed. Those years engulfed in wood and water, surrounded by a thousand greens, had evolved a language different from the one used by someone who had spent those years filled with the microscopy of her research and social relations.

  The language barriers were difficult, but could be, and were, hurdled. Mortos helped Elena to see the physical world at a level she had never seen before. She was used to looking at the world one cell or DNA strand at a time. Mortos helped Elena to pull her perceptions back from the eyepiece to really look around. Some of the best moments of Elena’s life, moments equal to if not exceeding the excitement of the day-nights and night-days when she and Fflowers had unraveled the secrets of fledging, had come while riding atop Mortos broad shining back as he trotted down unending green tunnels. The undulation of the centaur’s back, the humidity, and, especially, the aqueous green light as the sun fought its way through the tangle, would give Elena the sensation she was back snorkeling off Grand Turk Island where she had vacationed as a child.

  The conversations had grown longer and the friendship between Elena and Mortos had grown deeper over the years. She was as comfortable in the Green as he came to be in the Bury. Carefully comfortable—because there was as much that could go wrong in the Green for someone with Elena’s c
oncrete and subway origins as there was danger in the smooth-tiled narrow corridors of the Bury for the hard-hoofed centaur. The fact that Elena had created Mortos and his brothers became less important as the years passed. All was good until Santos became sick. Santos’ sickness awakened the herd to the fact that sickness was the precursor of death and death was the precursor of extinction…if something wasn’t done.

  Olewan remembered the conversations Smarkzy, Fflowers and she had had sitting atop the counters of the lab at the end of another all-night session. What aspects of their origins would the centaurs mimic? Would they be as wise as horses or as dumb as men? To which diseases would they be vulnerable? Cancer or colic? Would their lifespan be more equine or human? How would their senses manifest?

  At the time of the centaurs’ genesis, Elena had been both fascinated and horrified by what she and Smarkzy were doing. But, it wasn’t until after the Fflowers’ birthday gift of unwanted wings, a time when it seemed like a viable generation of centaur embryos finally was growing, that Elena had to make a decision.

  As Winslow, Laureby and Elena Howe made plans to destroy the laboratory and the knowledge that had been acquired, they had argued about what to do with the forms living in their glass worlds. In her desire for revenge, Elena had called them monsters and wanted them destroyed, but Roan Winslow and Laureby both had insisted that the human part was transcendent and must be saved. To win their cooperation, Elena compromised. Her thought had been to save the centaurs until the others were gone before doing what needed to be done. However, once the brood had been transferred to the Bury, once Laureby and Winslow had disappeared, and once a two-faced Smarkzy had weaseled his way back into Fflowers’ good graces, Elena had been mystified by her inability to open the incubators to end the twisted life within. The bitter, childless scientist had been blind-sided at how quickly and deeply a maternal instinct had grown.

  During the remaining months of gestation, Elena closely monitored the fetuses’ development. Despite the harsh conditions the small demoralized group was working under as it tried to figure out a new way to live, Elena would take as much as an hour a day to do no more than stare at the creatures forming in the low-light of their improvised environment.

  When the centaurs were developed enough to survive on their own, it had been Elena who had lived with them for two years in a dormitory setting filled with nippled bottles and nests of dried grass.

  With their round, bald, big-eyed heads and long gangly legs, the infant centaurs had been endearing. However, at six months they weighed almost two hundred pounds and were anything but cute. Even with the accelerated growth of the torso and head, they were bizarre looking. The heads were adult-size, but they had the moon-faced look of a three-year old child. That lost-in-space face topped a ten year old’s torso which emerged from a colt’s broadening back and increasingly powerful legs.

  It was at this point that that the care Elena gave to the centaurs transmuted from a mother’s to a warder’s. She held down her growing horror and disgust with a sense of duty—duty rigorously defined and rigorously executed. That duty was kept until the centaurs could survive by themselves in the Green. After that, Elena banished the centaurs from her thoughts…until all of the other things that held her thoughts disappeared and she was alone. It was not until then that she thought to go to the Green and see how her husband’s experiment continued.

  First, she had been surprised and, then, engaged. Until Santos had become sick. After that, Elena isolated herself until she could not bear another monologue. To relieve the tedium of self, in imitation of a bored God creating Adam and Eve, Elena made Fair from one of her eggs and a seed left by one of those who had run away so many years before. That experiment, too soon and too like God’s, had been a disappointment.