Flight (27 page)

After the adults left, Prissi started to tell
her Nancy where she had been and what she had learned since leaving
home that morning, but Nancy said that she really wasn’t that
interested. Deciphering what had happened to a little company a
half-century before wasn’t what she wanted to do right then.
Instead, she suggested that she teach Prissi how to crochet.
Prissi, who wasn’t sure what crocheting was but was very sure that
it wasn’t pronounced the way Nancy was saying it, figured that she
owed her roomie enough for her NYPD help that she shouldn’t
argue.

A frustrated Prissi stayed for almost three
hours sitting in the Sloan’s immense media room on a high armless
couch that allowed her to drop her wings behind its back. After
they ate slivers of pepperoni peetsa, Nancy showed Prissi how to
twist and turn the yarn so that a piece of string became a piece of
cloth. Despite her initial dismissive attitude, Prissi found
herself more interested in the yarn being knotted than the yarn
being spun in an old 3-D vid starring Shiloh Voight playing in the
background.

It was almost ten before Prissi got up to
leave. Outside on the launch pad, the sky was so clear that she
could see a billion stars. Once she was in the air, with lights
both above and below her, she felt like she was flying inside a
magic tunnel. As she approached the GW, she dropped low until she
was flying just above the aquaphosphor lights of the ancient
bridge. Being drawn to the lights’ beauty made Prissi think of the
ancient Greek sailors drawn dangerously close by the singing of the
Sirens. Prissi’s snort carried for blocks. Not this one.
Admittedly, she was part bird and part woman, but her singing would
have sent any sailors tacking off in the opposite direction. As
fast as they could haul sail.

Prissi swept off the bridge and turned south.
The air above the West Side levee was much darker than over the GW.
She slowed her pace to give her eyes time to adjust. Looking ahead
Prissi saw that the air was almost completely empty of wingers. The
buildings hugging the levee began to seem ominous. The further
south she went, the emptier the city seemed. She sensed things at
the edge of her peripheral vision, but when she snapped her head
around, nothing was there. To feel safer, Prissi climbed a couple
of dozen meters higher, but despite the additional height, her
nerves stayed jittery. A klik later she dropped down until she was
flying at less than ten meters feet off the ground. Again, she felt
like something was shadowing her. She twisted her head around
again, saw nothing, turned back and screamed when she saw how close
she was to a blank brick wall that hovered alongside the levee.

“Josie Geezsaphat. Just fly.”

Prissi looked far down the levee and saw two
flight lights coming her way. Seeing those beams reassured her that
she wasn’t the only person flying over Manhattan that night. The
lights drew closer and, being northbound, began to climb to give
Prissi room to safely pass beneath. As the two passed overhead,
Prissi saw a flash of orange. She yelled, “High,” and the others
yelled back, “Sky.”

Prissi was still smiling at that brief
contact when a darkness grabbed her from above and drove her down
toward the levee. She managed to get her feet under her just as she
hit. She stumbled forward, had her balance for a second, was hit a
second time, and felt the levee’s concrete surface tear at the skin
on the heels of her hands as she skidded forward. When she was
knocked down a third time, her head smashed into the unforgiving
surface. Her body ground to a stop…except for her consciousness,
which flew away.

Two shadowy forms, like giant birds of prey,
dragged her deep into the shadows at the levee’s edge, then flapped
their orange wings in fierce excitement at they picked and tore at
her.

A Friend In Deed

While his body moved at the glacial pace
demanded by his disease, Al Burgey’s mind whirled. He had a hard
time fathoming what he had just done. Or, why. Especially, why.

After holding in his hand a piece of the
puzzle he had spent years trying to obtain, he had handed it back
along with his future. Was he trying to reclaim his soul at the
price of his body?

Knowing the long reach Dicky Baudgew had from
his over-decorated web, Burgey doubted that he or the girl had much
time before they would be dealing with that deadly little spider’s
attention. The girl had thrummed a thread and there would be hell
to pay.

The crippled geri shuffled around the house
collecting clothes, papers and pills. His heart beat rose. His
fingers became so frantic as they tried to cull what he might need
that they dropped as much as they gathered. As parts of his body
extended their betrayal, he asked himself unanswerable
questions.

Why would he not fight back with every weapon
against such a horrible death? But, could he live two hundred more
years of a life mired in guilt? Even if it was the right thing to
do to give the girl back her crystal, why had he given up his own?
He had sold his soul for more life, but, suddenly, when longer life
was put into his hand, he had refused. Was he insane? Senile? Or a
late-blooming saint?

As Burgey haphazardly filled the large
suitcase on top of his bed, his mind reviewed his sins.

It had started with a fall. A misreading of
gravity’s rules. A thirteen stitch gash to his forearm. A somewhat
larger wound to his head. A much much larger wound to his sense of
self. His first thought was that he was becoming fragile. Frail.
But the tests said otherwise. He was in the beginning stages of
ALS. With the latest treatments, it would take time, but over the
course of five or ten years, every muscle in his body would die. He
wouldn’t die. Just his body. His mind would continue to work as
well as if ever had.

As Burgey contemplated the horror of his
future, he began to think about the crystal that had lain hidden in
its little preserve for so long. His prodigious mind considered how
his disease might be cured or curtailed if his piece of the
longevity puzzle could be reunited with the other two. He came to
the conclusion, a result based as much in fear-driven hope as
science, that if all three parts of Trinity could be brought back
together, both his mind and his body might be able to continue on
its interesting way for a very long time.

As had been true sixty years before when
Trinity—Nora Winslow, Elena Howe and he, Glen Laureby—first
discovered how they could triple the lifespan of an individual,
deciding the best way to gather up that ancient, dangerous and
purposefully scattered knowledge took time.

He knew that if he went to Elena Howe and
asked for her piece of the puzzle, having only his own in hand, she
wouldn’t give it to him. But, if he were to come to her in
possession of two crystals, then she might be willing to add the
third, especially if she herself were feeling as unacceptably
mortal as he was. Consequently, he decided that he needed to get
Roan’s piece first. He did not delude himself that achieving that
goal would be easy. First, he didn’t know where she was. Since Roan
had never quite trusted him when he was Glen Laureby, he doubted
that she would be immediately won over by his reincarnation as Al
Burgey.

As the sick geri struggled to pile papers
into the suitcase, he thought how correct Roan was to have doubted
him. Before they were lovers, he had tried to steal some of her
research. While they were lovers, he had had an affair with Elena
Howe. And sixty years after they had last seen one another, he had
been responsible for her death.

Whether as Glen Laureby, or his reincarnation
as Al Burgey, the man who was throwing handfuls of socks and
underwear into his suitcase had always been smart. Indeed,
Laureby/Burgey was so smart that he occasionally didn’t know what
limitations there were on his intelligence. That is what had
happened in Africa three years ago as well as in Cold Spring Harbor
more than a half century before.

After the fiasco Fflowers had caused by using
Trinity’s longevity research before it had been perfected, Glen
Laureby had known that he had to get free of the megalomaniac. His
plan was to leave and take Roan Winslow with him, but before
Laureby could decide where to go, Roan had happened onto a new
approach to solve the problems with the old longevity formulation.
With that discovery, a complicated weaving of prions with a
person’s DNA, Laureby’s plans changed. Rather than just leaving, he
had the idea of taking the discovery with them. Tripling a life
span would lead to even greater riches than giving the world wings;
however Roan convinced Laureby that taking what Fflowers would
consider his own would greatly shorten their own life spans.

Laureby felt stalemated until Fflowers gave
Elena wings. Laureby saw that prideful act as an opening. He
nurtured Elena’s anger and comforted her beyond just words. When
Roan discovered that her gallant was not so gallant, things came to
a head.

The disaffected members of Trinity, while not
trusting each other, found that their hatred and fear of Joshua
Fflowers bound them together. It was Laureby who came up with the
idea of faking the deaths of Roan and himself. It was Elena who had
the idea that if she took the Etruscan embryos Fflowers might be so
afraid of the political consequences that he would let her go. It
was Roan who decided that the best way to protect herself from
Fflowers’ wrath, if he happened to see through their ruse, as well
as keep Trinity bound to itself, was to split up the longevity
solution among the three of them. To reassemble the prion-extended
DNA of the longevity solution it would be necessary to reconnect
the information etched within the three crystals.

The plan had worked. Winslow and Laureby had
died in an explosion and gone off to start new lives. Elena had
taken the embryos and left a letter explaining what would happen if
Fflowers came after her. For sixty years, a balance had been
maintained.

Until Al Burgey fell and cut his arm.

It had taken Burgey more than a year and much
more money than he could have imagined to find Roan. Over the years
he had received the occasional communication from her. Usually, she
would write as a fellow scientist. What did he think about this or
that line of inquiry? It was not until his hirelings had managed to
backtrack from a post office box in Bratislava through Teheran,
Haifa, Monaco, and a half-dozen other dead ends and cut-outs, that
Laureby realized how great Roan’s distrust of him was. The trail
had gone dead until he chanced upon a small news item that led him
to believe that East Africa might be a good place to focus the
search. It took more money and time to follow up the rumors about
some unusual guinea hens. It had taken even more time and more
money to find that Roan Winslow had become Nora Elieson.

Burgey developed a plan based on pity. He
would go to Africa and convince Roan to give up her part of the
puzzle. After all, he had been her colleague, friend, lover and
fellow conspirator. She might not trust him, but she certainly
wouldn’t allow him to die in the way that was ordained. She would
listen. She would understand.

When Al Burgey arrived in Bujumbura, he found
that Nora Elieson wasn’t there.

He had hired a roto, tracked her to the
village where she had been staying only to find that she had left
that morning. When he finally caught up with his old colleague,
Laureby found she was not as understanding as he had assumed. She
wanted no part of his plan. When she wouldn’t agree to give him
what he had come for, Burgey threatened to harm her or her
family.

That had been a mistake he would long
regret.

Elieson had tried to get away. In her
attempt, by accident or choice, she had careened off the road to
her death.

Guilt and remorse over his former lover’s
death effectively ended Burgey’s quest. He returned to Noramica and
the slow, maddening drama of his disease.

After awhile Allen Burgey came to believe
that he had accepted his fate. In a strange way, he saw the
progress of the ALS as penance for his former lover’s death.
However, at that moment when he took from the girl Roan Winslow’s
portion of the DNA sequence, Burgey’s fist had closed tight and did
not want to reopen.

Even now, as he threw shirts into the
suitcase, he was monumentally ambivalent. One moment he would feel
an unconquerable urge to track down Prissi Langue and snatch back
what should be his. A second later would come a surge of serenity
welling from the idea that he might obtain forgiveness from helping
her.

In the end, as the complicated Glen
Laureby/Allan Burgey waited for the Wingcab to take him to his
hidey-hole, he did both. He left Prissi Langue clues that would
take her someplace where she might be safe, but that also would
provide him an opportunity to take back what he craved.

Adding Insight to Injury

Throb, throb, spike. The pain in her wing
joint cadged and cajoled. Throb, spike, throb. The pain played a
child’s tune inside her skin. Throb, throb, spike. Even though the
simple song was insistent, it still took Prissi several moments
before she was willing to come back from the warm, quiet place
where she had hidden. Throb, throb, spike. Finally, some part of
Prissi’s beleaguered brain realized that the spiky note came when
she took a breath.

Prissi pushed open her eyes to see…nothing.
She closed her lids, then, opened them again. Nothing. Fighting
panic, Prissi turned her aching head and was relieved to see the
pale glow of moonlight on the cracked concrete of the levee’s aged
surface. When she turned, the pain’s tune changed. No, that was
wrong. The tune remained the same. It was the tempo that
changed.

Prissi ignored the toddler’s music as she
carefully drew her knees beneath her so she could back up enough to
bring her wing down from where it had been wedged against the wall
of the levee. The pain of that effort shot what was left of her
Vegantopian lunch and her peetsa dinner with Nancy out her mouth
and through her nose. To Prissi, her whimper sounded like a
kitten’s cry. She stayed on her knees as she carefully backed away
from the splatter she had just made. She drew out her breath until
the needling pain subsided