Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2013 (29 page)

I get my fingerprints scanned, and after a while I'm ushered into a big, crowded cell. I look around. Only about half the men here look like they're from the march. The others... my skin crawls and I try to keep my gaze down. Even so, I'm aware of everyone in that cell. My back is to the bars and I'm prepared to put up a fight if anyone tries to touch me... but I forget to watch what's going on in the next cell over.

A hand clamps down on my neck.

Out of instinct I throw an elbow and hear a satisfying grunt, but everyone in my cell has their eyes on me now. I try to glance over my shoulder without turning around.

"Shelley."

Elliot's in the cell behind me. Men get out of his way as he comes to stand close to me. "I've got your back," he says softly.

I nod. "Same."

The cops come in, they call out names, and one by one the marchers get to go home. Meanwhile more prisoners are brought in, most of them dangerous looking men. I don't want to be alone with them. I stare at the signal icon on my overlay. The menu slides open. The guy beside me starts puking. I fix my gaze on the option
Find Network.
I know it's stupid. I know I should just wait. And anyway, this cell is on a basement level, so there's no way I'll get a signal unless relays have been installed.

The icon turns green. I'm so relieved to be back in the world I close my eyes, forgetting to keep watch.

"Shelley?"

Lissa's talking to me. Her voice sounds taut, with a high edge to it.

"Shelley, where have you been? Baby, are you sleeping? Wake up. Come on, wake up and talk to me."

"Shelley!" Elliot says sharply, just as I feel the gravity of someone who's way too close. I jerk back against the bars while my eyes open onto a leering mouth framed in a red goatee.

"Fuck off," I warn him.

He laughs like he thinks I'm cute, but to my relief he turns around and walks away across the cell. Lissa's watching him too, because she can see through my eyes.

"Shelley, what's happened to you?"

I don't dare answer, but I look around, I look at my cellmates, until I hear her say,
"Oh my God."

Relief washes through me, because someone
knows,
and I'm not lost anymore. The cops could still come after me with their little signal detectors, find what I've got, and tear my eyes out, but at least someone knows.

"Were you drunk?" she asks, incredulous.

I want to scream at her.

Instead I turn around and look at Elliot in his glowing yellow vest. "You were at the War Machine rally," she says. "Shelley, look to the right if you were really there."

I turn my head right.

"You dickhead! I can't believe you went down there and didn't even tell me. You—oh fuck, never mind. I'm gonna call your dad. Look at your feet if I should call your dad."

I look at my feet.

"I love you, Shelley."

Her icon goes away.

I shut down the connection and close my eyes, sure now that it won't be long.

And I'm right.

"James Shelley!" a corn-syrup guard barks out.

I look at Elliot, still in the next cell. He gives me an encouraging smile. "Next party on Saturday. Come down."

I hear myself speaking. "Yeah," I tell him. "Okay."

It's 4:43 AM, and I'm sitting between my dad and my uncle in the backseat of a black sedan hired to take us home through Manhattan's streets. My face hurts and my lip is swollen. I think my teeth are loose.

My dad hasn't said much—he isn't used to me fucking up—and I've scared him. It's my uncle who's done all the talking. He's a criminal attorney, and people owe him favors, so I'm out with no charges officially filed.

"Right here," he tells the driver.

We pull up to the curb in front of his building. He opens the door and starts to get out, but he hesitates, looking back at me as if he's trying to figure out what's going on in my head. "Jimmy, you get it, right? The clowns we vote for make a lot of noise, but it's the people who own them who make the rules."

"Sure," I say mechanically. "I get it."

You have to know the rules," my dad adds in his harshest voice. "Don't be naïve, or you'll wind up like Anders."

My uncle's a little worried by what he sees in my eyes. "Jimmy, you understand the prosecutor has a solid case against you? The tags they dropped are indisputable. They put you at the location. Step out of line again, and I'm not going to be able to help you."

Like my dad, my uncle's a good man. I know he'll tell me the truth. "So these rules... one of them says that the police can be sent to stop citizens from marching on City Hall... because it'll look bad for the mayor?"

He cocks his head, like maybe it's a trick question. "Yes. Exactly."

I nod. I've been tagged, and I think those tags are going to mark me for a long, long time.

Back in my room, with the dawn light seeping in through the windows, I think about the people who make the rules—who decide which laws get passed and which wars get fought, who pick the industries and the technologies we're allowed to have and the ones we can't touch—and I wonder who those people are. As I send my whole long video to Elliot Weber, War Machine journalist, I wonder if I'm about to find out.

Karl Bunker's work has appeared in
F&SF, Interzone, Cosmos, The Year's Best Science Fiction,
and elsewhere. He has worked as a software developer, jeweler, musical instrument maker, sculptor, and mechanical technician, but currently earns a living with pseudonymous writings in nonSF genres. Information about Karl, who lives in a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts, with his wife and sundry pets and wildlife, can be found at
www.karlbunker.com.
Karl's first story for us examines moral complexities that cannot be escaped by soaring on...

It was just carelessness. I'd gotten into the wake turbulence of an old jetliner that was still low after taking off from Lagos. The wingtip vortices off of those old buckets can trail behind them for fifty or a hundred kilometers, and... well, I was careless.

So I tumbled and spun and twisted, and generally had a bad time of it, and then I fell. By the time I was wings-up and facedown again, I didn't have much altitude left and the ground was rushing up to greet me. My wings had folded in tight during my tumble, and at the speed I was falling I'd rip my sternum open if I tried to unfurl them too quickly. So I went easy, feathering open slowly. I turned into the wind, trying to translate my downward momentum into forward. I furled out more and more, listening to the fibers that held my chest together go snap, snap, snap.

But it was working; I was falling slower. There was a treeless valley to my right, so I teased out a banking turn in that direction. I skimmed over the crest of a low hill, glancing down to watch the ground blur past me with two meters to spare. Then I looked up again—too late.

There was a building straight ahead of me, and all I had time to do was close my eyes. I hit the thatched roof and ripped through it with a whooshing, crunching sound. Then there was another fraction of a second of blind freefall, and then my hands and chest and stomach hit a hard-packed dirt floor and I skidded to a stop.

I was lying inside a low building. There were broken lengths of wood and piles of straw scattered around me, underneath me, on top of me. I took a slow breath, then began looking at my body, moving as little as possible. There was a long ragged gash across my shoulder and partway down my right breast, but it was already closing. My left leg was worse, with both bones below the knee broken, the tibia piercing the
skin and the fabric of my unitard. That seemed to be it for body damage. I turned my head carefully and looked back at my wings. "Shit!" I yelled. The main spar of both wings was snapped just before the elbow joint, the bloody carbon fibers extending like brush bristles from the broken ends.

I lay still for a while, just breathing. Then I sat up and grabbed my left shin above and below the break. I shut off all pain and deadened the muscles, and then started pulling and twisting. After a few attempts I got the broken ends of the bone lined up. I clamped both hands over the break and held, counting out 120 elephants. Somewhere around ninety my nerve-shutoff timed out and pain came roaring back, and I groaned and whimpered and sniffled.

When I was done counting, and a while after that, I opened my eyes again. I was lying on my side and there was an old woman looming over me. Black-skinned and deeply wrinkled, her mouth was open in what might have been a smile, showing several missing teeth. She said something in a language I didn't understand, then in thickly accented English: "An anchel, yes? We have a little girl-child anchel fallen from heaven, eh?" She laughed, then straightened up and walked away, kicking aside a pile of straw as she went to a door and left.

I looked around at the building I was in. It seemed to be a small barn, with a hayloft and unglazed windows on all four walls. Beyond those walls, I was in the dead center of nowhere. I didn't know where I was to within two hundred kilometers, and wouldn't until I hit the Niger River sometime in the next day or so, where the beacon buoys would tell me whether to head upstream or down.

The door swung open again and two people came through it: The old woman and a young man. The woman spoke in her unknown language to the man, pointed at me, then at the hole in the roof. She laughed her thin, dry laugh. The man walked up to me and bent over at the waist, examining me. Belatedly, I thought to check the front of my unitard to see if my breasts were showing. Not that there's much to look at there, but some cultures are touchy about that sort of thing. He systematically looked me over: legs, torso, arms, face, and finally the broken wings that sprouted from my back. Then he spoke, his accent not as thick as the old woman's. "How bad you are hurt?" he said.

"I—I'm all right. My leg was... But it will heal." I realized that he was in fact almost a boy, possibly still in his teens. He was tall and very thin and dressed in blue jean shorts and a T-shirt. "My name is Amy," I said. "I'm flying in the Kitaroharo Race—do you know it?"

The young man looked up, through the hole in the roof to the sky beyond. "Yes," he said slowly. "The flyer races. They give you wings and you fly; sometimes you race. I have heard of this—seen videos." Suddenly he dropped to his knees. He bent his head, looking closely at my leg in the dim light. "Are you sure is okay? There is much blood."

"Yes, it will be fine." I peeled up the soggy leg of my unitard to reassure him. The pain had subsided to a dull throb by now.

With one finger he traced a path in the air, close to my skin but not touching it, following the line of the scar that showed where the bone had come through. It was a swollen, light-colored streak against the darker ash-gray of my skin. He withdrew his hand, closing his fingers. "You fix yourself? Of course—you have healing nanos, yes? Good. Very good." He stood up again. "Dabir is me—is my name," he said, touching his chest. He smiled, his teeth bright in the gloom. His face was beautiful, with wide, innocent eyes, high cheekbones, and a long nose that flared at the nostrils. "I am please to meet you, Amy." The smile flashed again and he waved vaguely in the direction of the door he had come through. "Our connection is dead right now, but I can go to the village, to the computers there. Shall I call to Lagos maybe? Or you have family I should call? People who come get you?"

"No!" I blurted. "If you do that they'll take me out of the race, and I won't qualify for the Asiatics this season. I can't win this race now, probably can't even place in the top ten, but the time limit for finishing is still six days away. I can make it to Casablanca by then—" I twisted around to look at where my wings were broken, the upper parts of the spars dangling limply, "if I can repair my wings fast enough."

"You can fix your wings yourself?" Dabir asked. "Like your leg?"

"Not quite. They need to be splinted until they self-repair, and I can't reach them to do that. I'll need help."

Dabir went around behind me and crouched down again. A moment later he made a soft grunting sound. "You are bleeding," he said. "The broken part of the wings—it bleeds."

"Yes. They're a part of me, connected to my blood supply. But it's okay; they'll only bleed a little, and it doesn't hurt." This wasn't entirely true; I could feel the two breaks in the main spars, especially when the broken ends flexed, and while it wasn't anything like the pain in my leg had been, it was damned unpleasant.

He came around in front of me again and squatted. He looked at me, meeting my eyes for a moment and then shyly looking away. He was sitting with his knees up and his forearms resting on them. His hands were long and delicate-looking, with tapering fingers. "Okay," he said. "If you can explain to me how to make this splint, I will try to do it."

Over the next hour or so, Dabir found four suitable pieces of wood and some heavy string. He got squeamish when I told him he'd have to punch a row of holes through the wing membrane so he could wrap the string around the spar and the two pieces of splint, but after some hesitation he did it. By the time he was finished my neck was stiff from craning to look around behind me to watch what he was doing. "Thank you," I said when he was finally done. "That's great. By tomorrow this time they should be strong enough to fly."

"That soon?" Dabir shook his head, smiling. "Is amazing."

As I rubbed the ache out of my neck I realized I was thirsty, hungry, and exhausted. The day had taken a lot out of me. "Could I have some water?" I said.

"Oh!" Dabir practically leapt to his feet, and then flinched, something in his leg or hip hurting him. His hands were covered with my blood, some of it dried and some still wet. "I am sorry," he said. "I should have brought you water sooner. And food." He left, walking quickly and with a limp. Crouching down to work on my wings must have aggravated something in his leg. A few moments later he was back with a big mug full of water, which he handed to me before hurrying away again.

This time he was gone for several minutes, and when he came back he had a plate of food. There were boiled greens and some kind of meat with a thick sauce. He held the plate out to me with one hand and a fork with the other.

"Oh, you didn't have to do that, Dabir. There's no need, really. I can eat anything. My nanos can digest cellulose—grass, raw leaves, anything. You don't have to give me your..." I stopped, feeling stupid. As I'd been speaking, Dabir's hand and the plate it was holding drifted down and toward his side, until it looked like all the plate's contents were about to spill onto the ground.

"You do not want?" he said.

I held my hands out for the plate and the silverware. "Yes, I do," I said. "Thank you. It's very kind of you."

Once I started eating, I could barely shovel the food into my mouth fast enough. Dabir sat cross-legged—as I was sitting—on the dirt floor a few feet away from me. He wasn't watching me eat, but wasn't not watching either.

"What is this building?" I asked, partly to force myself to slow down my gobbling and partly just for something to say.

"A barn for goats we used to have," he said. He made a loose-jointed wave of his arm that seemed to indicate more than just the building. "We had many goats. Then they all get a disease, last year. They all die."

"Ah, that's too bad," I mumbled, staring down at my plate. I was trying to decide if the meat underneath the tamarind sauce was real or a synthetic, maybe from a UN-Aid rations pack. I went on eating.

A minute later the old woman came in, carrying another plate of food like mine, but with less meat. She handed it to Dabir, grinning her gap-toothed smile at some secret joke. She glanced at me, croaked a few dry, laughing words at Dabir in their language, grinned some more, and then went away. Dabir avoided my eyes after she was gone, and began to eat, deftly plucking food from his plate with his long, thin fingers.

I looked down at my own hands, at my charcoal-gray skin. I wondered if he thought I was born with skin this color, thought it had anything to do with race.

"My grandmother likes you," Dabir said after a little while. "She calls you our little wounded angel."

"That's what she called me when she found me," I said. "'A little girl-child angel, fallen from heaven' she said." I paused. "Does she really think...?"

He looked at me with a smile that made me feel like the idiot I was. "No, is only a joke," he said. "Most strangers she doesn't like very much." His smile grew into a soft chuckle. "But you know, most strangers don't fall out of the sky and land in our barn."

I looked up at the roof of the barn. I'd broken through some of the timbers that supported the thatching, and about a third of the roof was slumping inward precariously. "I'm sorry about the damage," I said. "Before I leave, give me your information and I'll send money to you for repairs."

He made a dismissive motion with his head. "Damage doesn't matter. There are no goats now."

"But you'll be getting more, won't you?"

"Tell me about flying," he said. "What is it like?"

"It's... pretty much what you would expect." I got to my feet as I spoke, stretching myself out straight, testing my weight on the newly repaired bones of my left leg. I took a few tentative steps, looking behind me at my wings to make sure Dabir's splints were holding. Luckily the peaked roof of the barn was tall enough that I didn't have to worry about the elbows of my wings hitting anything. "You're up high, you look down, it's quiet, it's cold and windy, it's wet when you fly into a cloud..." I glanced at Dabir, feeling awkward. I didn't talk about the feeling of the wings pulling at the air, catching it, clutching at it like it was some huge living thing carrying me on its back, the feeling of inhuman strength in my wings, the roaring, screaming, blazing intoxication of it all, burning through me with every flight, every liftoff, like a drug.

I stared down hard at the ground. When I looked at Dabir a moment ago I'd noticed for the first time that he had a long, ragged scar along the outside of his right leg, starting at the knee and stretching down halfway to his ankle. The skin was rough and puckered, the two sides of the gash misaligned; the wound must not have even been sutured, much less nano-healed.

"I'd like to walk around outside, if I may," I said.

"Of course!" He bounced to his feet and walked with me to the door. With both of us standing, I barely came up to his shoulder. "You are small—tiny!" he laughed down at me. "But you are not so young as you look, yes? I mean, not a girl, like my grandmother thought at first."

"No, Dabir, not so young as I look." Moving carefully, I bent low to angle my folded wings through the doorway ahead of me. I thought of my friend Nila, and the party
she'd thrown for me to celebrate my new wings. She'd had every door and doorway in her home modified into a gothic arch with a peak three meters high, so I could walk from room to room without bending over. And the next day, the party over, she'd had them all changed back.

Outside, the sun was getting low. Ahead of us was a sprawling field of some kind of crop: meter-high stalks of something dry and yellowing, with lots of bare dirt between each plant. To the right, not far away, was a tiny, unpainted wooden house with a flat roof of corrugated metal. It was crudely built, like the barn, but beyond that there was something about it that screamed of poverty and misery and ugliness. Looking at it made me feel hollowed out inside, and when I suddenly realized that Dabir might invite me in there, the thought terrified me.