Flight (23 page)

Prissi dropped down until she was less than
three meters above the sludgy canal. As she flew close to a
five-story brownstone with rotting wrought iron balconies, which
reminded Prissi of kids’ braces on the crooked French doors they
protected, the mypod squeaked like a mouse in a cat’s mouth. Prissi
passed the house, climbed, looped and dropped back down until she
was flying just above the lintels of the first floor windows. In
the dying light it looked like every window pane in 213 was missing
except for two on the fourth floor. The building listed toward the
sidewalk like an old bum staring at a coin in the gutter. A peeling
red door sat at the top of a set of shopworn granite steps. Using
the burned-out street lights, which tipped in every direction like
the candles on a week-old birthday cake, as a yardstick, Prissi
estimated that the first three steps of the stairs were
underwater.

The cautious girl was looping back to make a
third pass when something passed through the pinions on her right
wing. Panicked, she side-slipped and slammed into the headless
remains of a streetlight hidden in the murk. Her right shoulder
popped. She slid down the pole into the cold waist-high water
desperately fighting to keep the undersides of her wings dry. It
took almost no oil to keep a set of wings from flying. She started
to swear, but thought better of drawing even more attention to
herself. Her injured wing begged to be lowered, but Prissi knew
that if she gave in to that, it could take an hour of grooming
before she could fly again.

After swiveling her head to see if she could
see who had shot an arrow at her, Prissi began slogging her way
down the street to the nearest stoop. She tried to angle across an
open space but was stopped by a submerged wrought iron fence. She
changed direction and began hopping to keep her wings dry. By the
time she reached the nearest stoop, she was breathing heavily. She
half-flapped to knock the water from her wingtips, and used her
hands to squeegee water from her pant legs.

Prissi’s refuge was a five story brownstone
with missing windows and a smashed front door. As Prissi climbed
the front steps, she peered into the darkness behind the broken
door and wondered whether it was more likely that a ten kilo rat or
a sexually-starved criminally insane alcoholic would be coming out
to make her acquaintance. She took two steps closer to the opening,
listened, stared, and finally decided that it was probably safe.
She leaned against the building and took a dozen deep breaths. Her
whole body began to quiver as she considered how stupid she had
been. She took a Cran-slam from her kanga and drank the whole thing
in five gulps. Within a minute the glucose, oxygen-enriched drink
had stopped her shakes. She pushed her shoulder against the
building, but nothing happened. That setback did make her swear,
but she did so quietly. As she stepped back to get a running start
on a second attempt to relocate her wing, she heard a high-pitched
squeal. She leaned out over the edge of the stoop to see an
obviously cannibalized, graggy looking hydrocycle, with its right
pontoon nearly buried in the murky water, hurtling around the
corner from the Bowery end of the block. Prissi took two quick
steps and slammed herself against the building. The fire in her
shoulder burned twice as bright. The shoulder half-popped back in
and then stuck. The burning pain blistered sweat onto her forehead
and somersaulted her stomach.

She whispered, “Don’t puke.”

The cycle was less than a hundred meters away
and coming fast. A rooster tail of water being thrown high above
the rear paddle wheel intermittently caught a shard of light.
Prissi ignored the nearly paralyzing fear of what would happen if
she launched herself from the stoop and her wing failed her. The
two blue-jay winged men on the cycle shook their fists at her as
they veered her way. The one in the back, who was wearing some kind
of huge furry hat that made him look like a mythical beast with the
head of a buffalo and the body of a man, reached down. Prissi
hurled herself against the building again, and pushed off as hard
as she could. Her first flap was lopsided and she pitched toward
the water. With her second, her shoulder snapped back into place
and she gained a meter of height. As the cycle slid beneath her,
Prissi looked down to see buffalo man reaching up with a homemade
grappling hook. The hook caught her ankle. Prissi dropped a wing
and spun herself. Her ankle twisted out of the hook’s grasp. She
kicked backwards, flapped and was free.

The hydrocycle whined as it made a sharp
turn, but it was too late. It slammed into the submerged fence.
Both men were thrown and the riderless machine began an erratic
course down the street. Prissi, absolutely sky high on adrenaline,
was swerveingback toward the men with the idea of taunting them,
when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw a shadow, something
blue and white, point something at her. She beat her right wing up
and down to turn sharply, then, pounded both as she climbed toward
the top of the buildings. Something whizzed past her. Without
thought she mashed her wings toward the bruised sky as the arrow
arced higher before falling back into the water. In eight beats
Prissi was high enough that she could pass over the tops of the
buildings on the north side of the street. Flapping as fast as she
could, praying that she wouldn’t hit a wire or clothes line, Prissi
skimmed north over the wrecked tops of Mudtown’s furzy homes toward
the lights and safety of her home.

As Prissi flew she wondered at the blue and
white splotch she had seen. Jack’s wings were blue and white…and
there was an arrow in the code he had left. A shiver, like a cold
snake, slithered from Prissi’s head all the way to her feet.

That night, Prissi had to wait until after
eight before her father came home. She had a thousand questions for
him, and even started to show him the things she had found in the
library, but he cut her off. He had work to do and he had already
told her to find a different hobby. If she didn’t want to listen to
him, if she wasn’t willing to be responsible for the freedom he had
given her, if she didn’t appreciate all of the sacrifices he was
making to send her to Dutton, then he would take her back to
Africa, where, at least, he would be happier.

Enmity and Amity

Just after eight the next morning, Prissi was
in the air and flying north along the East River levee. Although it
was Friday and only just past rush hour, the city seemed sadly
empty. Very few wingers were along the river or flying across from
Queens. The ten meter flame jutting from the building’s rubble made
the old United Nations memorial look, as it always did to Prissi,
like a gas well being flared off. North of Fiftieth Street, Prissi
veered out over the river and split the distance between Manhattan
and Roosevelt Island. She swept under the remnants of the
Queensboro Bridge. The sun over her right shoulder warmed her right
wing, which was feeling good. A balmy wind blowing out of the
southwest lifted her wings. She climbed just past fifty meters,
pulled her knees up to her chest and soared. As she approached 90th
Street, orange helibuoys at thirty and sixty meters pushed her
farther out from the island and away from the site of where the
members of the Ghost Brigade of Darfur had exploded three bombs in
an attempt to breach the levee and flood the Upper East Side. A
half-dozen E-cops, three wingers and three walkers, followed her
flight with their weapons held at half rest.

Spiceville, the area between 138th and 149th
Streets, from river to river was home or hovel to a great number of
immigrants and foreign students who went to Columbia International
University. Many of the dilapidated buildings that crowded against
one another were owned by foreign governments. From a law passed
back in 2068 that was intended to pay homage to, but also diffuse,
the growing nationalism of many Middle East, Far East and African
countries, certain buildings, owned by foreign governments, were
afforded a sovereignty equal to that of an embassy. One unintended
consequence of the Harmony Act was that those sovereign buildings
were not subject to city or state building regulations or codes.
When aspiring nations were dragged back into the Fifth World by
war, disease, or, most often, corruption, their sovereign buildings
were left to rot. As Prissi flew a tightening spiral over the
motley neighborhood, she studied the rooftop tent cities and
networks of eight and ten story buildings lashed together with
ratlines, rope and wood bridges, and metal ladders. On 141st
Street, she saw where a lattice of narrow steel beams connected the
roof of one brownstone to another across the street. Most of the
platform was covered in sheets of badboard while the shacks and
sheds, hunched close together like huddled beggars, were
constructed of re-used re-side. Even as high as she was, Prissi
could smell heavily spiced grilled meat and the fetid sweetness of
rotting garbage.

Prissi keyed her mypod for a PS report. The
public service screen scrolled up, identified the area, and
reported that the neighborhood was red level for crimes against
property but just a blue for crimes against persons—although
females were seventy percent of the victims. Of those, only twelve
percent were wingers. Prissi knew that it wasn’t that the area was
kind to wingers, but rather, that most wingers were smart enough
not to come to the neighborhood. It was because of that dearth of
wingers that, Prissi had to fly two blocks west of where she wanted
to be before she found a spot where she thought she could safely
land without catching a wing on a clothes line or sliding on a
smear of garbage. Despite her caution the teener’s left leg slid
out from her as it landed on something as dark as the pavement but
much slicker. She threw out her right wing to catch herself and
managed to keep from falling backward onto her head, but at the
expense of hearing a loud pop in her wing joint.

“Hieronymus freeieekin Bosch. Not again.
Heaving Zeusus.”

The pain was so sharp that Prissi bent
forward to vomit onto the street to try to rid herself of it.

After brushing her lips clean, she hobbled
over to the sidewalk and limped along until she came to a narrow
unfenced space between two buildings. She looked all around before
she scuttled three steps deep into the dark space, took a deep
breath and slammed herself against the moldy wall of the building
on her right.

She hit the wall so hard, her head snapped
sideways, but nothing else happened. She screamed something that if
heard at Dutton would have put her on Skru Kru for 6 hours. She
shook her head violently, sucked down as much air as she could hold
and slammed into the wall a second time.

The same pop, the same exquisite pain, the
same puke, although not as much, and her wing was relocated.

In the ten months since she had first flown,
Prissi had dislocated her wings seven times—every time on the
right. She had considered telling her father so that he could put
in an insurance claim, but she thought that as she got a little
older, the ball at the end of the humerus would expand enough to
better fit the socket. Anyway, she always told herself, a
dislocated wing was better than lockwing.

Prissi favored her wing as she walked back
toward the river and Richard Baudgew’s apartment.

In the picnic pix, the man she was going to
see was looking at the camera with a pair of XXUV sunglasses in one
hand, as if he had just taken them off for the photographer, and a
dark drink in the other. He was a tiny man, by far the shortest man
in the group, shorter even than two of the women. Below the swirl
of brown hair that fell across his forehead, his eyes were so
deep-set that it was hard to tell what color they were. The
eyebrows were dark and curved in a way that reminded Prissi of a
wooly caterpillar. His nose was as small and dainty as his
bow-shaped mouth. His chin was as small and smooth as a chicken
egg. From her experience with a couple of her teachers at Dutton,
Prissi guessed from the pix that Baudgew had been in his early
thirties and smart, cynical, sexless and very funny in a cruel
way.

The building, whose armor doors and elevator
were broken, was a prime example of the Afro-mask architectural
Renascence which had permeated the area in the 2040s. Prissi
climbed to the fifth, and top floor, and rang the briz. A minute
later, safe behind its slide screen, a shadowed face with bright
bird eyes stared at Prissi. The apartment dweller’s breath caught
so sharply that his, “Yes?” became two long syllables.

Brightening her smile as much as she could,
Prissi said, “Hello, my name is Priscilla…Prissi.”

Baudgew’s nose twitched as if he had gotten a
whiff of tainted fish.

“I assume the doors are broken again?”

When Prissi nodded, he asked, “Are you
selling something…sweet?”

“No, no sweets. No selling. I’m hoping you
can help me with a school project. I have a question about a pix I
found.”

When the old gnome stayed quiet, Prissi
continued, “From a long time ago.”

She pulled the pix from her kanga and held it
up to the slide screen.

Baudgew’s response was a pendulum swing from
a moment’s pleasure to a cold distancing.

“Where did you get that?”

Remembering that what Pequod Jones had
allowed her to see what forbidden to the public, Prissi stammered,
“I…a…a friend found it…somewhere. I’m writing a paper about blind
alleys in science.”

Prissi steeled herself, “Could I come
in?”

The old man’s head tipped ten degrees to the
left and then to the right, like a parakeet on its perch, as he
studied Prissi through the hardened glass. He stared at her with no
more embarrassment than if she were a mannequin in a dress store.
Finally, she heard four quick clicks and the door slowly
opened.