Wings of Creation (40 page)

He broke the calm. “What does it mean to you to be a flier?”

I didn’t know how to answer. It was something I’d wanted since I first saw a statue of a flier.

“Just say whatever comes to mind,” he prompted.

“It’s freedom. You’re so beautiful and so free. So calm.” When I paused, the other two remained silent until I spoke again. “When I was young, we lived on another planet, not one of the Five Worlds, and I was very different. People wanted me to be like them. They didn’t want me to run as fast as I could, or climb as high, or even be as strong. I got in trouble when I didn’t pretend to be the same as everybody else. They even tried to kill me for it.” I paused, sipping my tea, thinking. “But you don’t have to be the same as anyone. You are just . . . yourselves.”

Amalo’s mouth quirked into an ironic half-smile. “You can’t fly away from who you are. If you didn’t like people telling you to slow down, why would you like people telling you to fly?”

“No one is telling me to fly. In fact, most people are telling me not to. They say the risk is too big. But I want to fly. I’ve wanted to ever since I saw my first flier, and even more since I got here.”

“So pretend you have wings,” he said. “What would you do with them?”

“Fly.” I sipped the bottom dregs of the tea, which were more bitter than the top of the cup had been. I wasn’t convincing them. The looks on their faces told me that. I paused a moment, thinking. “When we first got here, I watched the fliers out of my window in the morning, as long as I could. Humans need flight, or at least I do. It’s the most beautiful state ever. As if all our evolution has been striving to become free of the ground.”

Marti spoke. “You can already fly.”

“It’s awkward and heavy, and I can’t even do it well.”

She gave a little half-smile at that, making me wonder if she knew how truly badly I did fly. “But you think you can transform with wings?”

I couldn’t let them see any doubt. “Of course I can.”

Amalo looked at Marti, and they shared something between them—unspoken. She nodded, briefly, and he spoke to her. “Marti. Can you share why you chose to become a flier?”

Oh. Wow. So she was a successful mod? From wingless human adult to flier? I looked more closely, but didn’t see anything to suggest she was less a true flier than Amalo or Tsawo or any of them. I couldn’t even see signs of the change in her face—her eyes were closer to the sides of her head, like other fliers, maybe a little less, but she had a flier face. Her bones seemed as fine as Amalo’s, and her chest large, like his.

For the first time, it dawned on me how much change I wanted. Everything would change. I might not know myself in a mirror.

But I wanted wings. I wanted blue wings in a hundred shades of blue, sky and river and summer-flower and near-violet. Marti looked directly at me, her gold eyes another change. I would keep my violet ones. She was waiting for me to say something. “Please, tell me why you changed.”

Her voice was very soft. “To fly is to be the soul of humanity.”

Huh? “That seems like something Mohami would say.”

Amalo’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t discount Mohami, who is the soul of human giving.”

Marti held up a hand. “There is balance in the world. The Keepers are necessary so that we can fly, and their equivalent exists in all humanity. We respect Mohami, who keeps our traditions alive. Our job is to display the beauty and the pain of all that humans strive for. The pain is in how we are made, and the beauty is in how we fly.”

“And that,” Amalo said, “is why it is so sacred when regular humans become one of us.”

Meaning it was more special to go from human to flier than to be born flier?

“Why?”

“Because if you succeed, the pain will mark you for life.”

No one had told me that. It made me want it more. My throat was so dry I could barely ask, “What do I have to do to become one of you? How do I ask?”

“Are you asking?” he asked me.

“Yes.”

“And someday we will answer.”

No. I wanted to know now. He was hard to read, but still felt like Marcus. He wouldn’t give me anything for free. He’d make me earn it. “How do you choose?”

His eyes and his facial features softened. “We will know.” He stood up. “But you aren’t my captive. I was merely called to find you and since I have, I have other business for now. Come with me, and I’ll take you to your friends.”

M
arcus hurried up steep stairs behind a door I’d never noticed and along a cold hallway that opened to rooms and offices. I suspected it was the area we’d glimpsed when we sat on the roof talking to Tsawo and Angeline. Kayleen hung limp in my arms, as much a rag doll as a human. Her face was completely white, her eyes closed, her head lolling so I held her the way one holds a baby, supporting her neck. Her feet banged against my thighs. Sasha trailed behind, whining softly.

Marcus took us to a well-lit room with bright overhanging lights and chairs on each side of a soft bed. I lay Kayleen on the blue coverlet, which would match her bright eyes if she opened them. When she opened them. I picked up her hand to lay it over the coverlet, her fingers limp and almost cold. Marcus brought me a lightweight tan blanket from a closet and helped me tuck it around her. Worry lines surrounded his eyes. His every movement seemed so controlled he must have been seething.

We’d spent an hour or more trying to revive her in the room, retracing paths of data, holding her, talking to her. Nothing had changed her condition at all. Here, she simply had more room and looked more comfortable in the bed but, in a way, sicker. I sat beside her and ran my fingers across her fragile face. “Stay with her,” Marcus said. “I have to go find Stark. I’ll also look for other things to try. She may just—wake up.”

He didn’t sound hopeful.

“We can’t leave with her like this, can we? She’s lost in the data here. If we take her away from her
self
, the part of her that’s lost, then how can she ever return? Should we even have moved her away from your shielded network?”

He put a hand on my shoulder, squeezing gently. “I’m sorry Joseph.” His voice had none of its usual confidence or humor. “It was a hard thing we three did. It may have had a cost.”

I needed to hear it. “Meaning?”

“She may never find her way back. She was never as strong as you.”

“Then I’ll find her.”

“You’ve already tried. We both tried. It’s not safe here—you’ll be like a candle in the Lopali data.”

I’d be a fire. I was going to try again. What more could go wrong, anyway? After all, people seemed to know where we were. Mercenaries were coming. Half our group had been captured. I wasn’t going to be too afraid to save Kayleen. But I needed to start. Maybe for her, maybe for me, but I needed Marcus gone in the worst way. I nodded at him, hoping he’d interpret that as acquiescence. “Good luck.”

He stood up and left, his shoulders slumped. A long time ago, he’d had a reputation for keeping his students from being wind-burned. He should have been looking out for her more. I should have, too. In our abandon and joy, in our power, we might have killed her. If so, this was the second time I’d killed in power.

It couldn’t be. Not Kayleen.

As soon as he left, Sasha came over and licked my hand, clearly responding to my sad determination. I patted her head and then kissed her wet, cold nose. “Go on, girl, go lie down.”

She went to the corner and curled up in it, nose on paws, giving a soft doggie sigh that suggested discontent. I curled up next to Kayleen, under the blanket, close enough for her to feel my body heat. Best to start with the physical and go back into the data if that didn’t succeed. Kayleen and I were one family. I held her hand in mine, and with my free hand, I stroked her face. I whispered her name, talked to her. “Kayleen. Our best flier. Remember being in the air on the way here, doing loops and laughing, watching me struggle on below
you. Remember your little girl, who needs you and me to keep her safe. Caro needs her mom. Chelo will need you, too. She is so serious, she needs your silly questions and she needs to be needed, the way you need her. Come back to us. You are part of Liam’s band. Who will he lead if you don’t come back? Paloma loves you, came all the way here and left her home to keep being your mom.” Who else? “Bryan loves watching you climb, you and your big feet. Jenna will have lost a daughter—you know we’re like her family, too. She saved us on Fremont, more than we ever knew. Over and over. I learned some of that when we flew all the way home from Fremont the first time, when she was still one-eyed Jenna.” I paused. I was rambling. Like Kayleen rambled. “I love you. Come back for me.”

There was no change.

I repeated it all, twice over, using different words but saying the same thing—we loved her and we needed her and she needed us. She couldn’t die, couldn’t stay lost.

If she heard it, she showed no physical signs at all.

The opposite.

Her fingers grew colder, even the ones I cupped in my own hand. They should have warmed to my touch. Her breathing stayed even but slowed. It felt like I cuddled close around a ghost, as if all that made Kayleen herself had fled.

I kissed Kayleen’s cheek, another chaste kiss, and then I closed my eyes and matched my breathing to her thin, slow breaths. A hard choice, my body didn’t want to slow that much, but I craved resonance with her.

I released myself into the data, starting by picking it up thread by thread, feed by feed. Unshielded, the fliers and Keeper’s raw data still threatened to carry me off in bells and calm. To resist, I kept Kayleen’s face in my memory, and the feel of her energy signature. Everyone felt like themselves in data; since the first time I met Kayleen here, deep in the Fremont data, I’d been able to find her, in all of the sources and flavors of data we’d shared at home and on the ships between here and there.

But now I couldn’t feel her.

Maybe I needed to find sim-Paula, except she grew inside Marcus’s shielding. She would be hidden. So deeper, wider. Maybe I needed to
hold the Lopali data and let it make and be space for me the way I’d held so much data inside of Marcus’s shield.

Marcus would warn me away from that. His voice was an echo in my head, something that might as well be real, edged with caution.

Kayleen’s sweet energy was stronger.

I opened more, and more.

And more.

I held all of the myriad data coming in and out of the cave. I held the data from the vineyard; planting times and wines and varieties, sales figures. I held the data from the weather control systems, cruder than ours on Silver’s Home, but they could be; Lopali had been made for control. The mandala of peaceful data about the rivers and streams and wild things that Kayleen had found. The transportation grid. The fair in Oshai. The Keepers, all connected one to another to keep the planet.

I tried to stay careful, to sift the world of data in a way that set off no alarms.

I tasted a few other people I didn’t know as I went. I’d known there were other Wind Readers here, but it was not like Silver’s Home and built by us, not changed by the minute by varying classes of Wind Readers from student to master. Except for me and Marcus and Kayleen and Caro, there were probably no more than twenty or thirty who lived here. More at the spaceports, of course. A few hundred on the whole planet.

And then, I felt a Wind Reader I recognized. Slow. Thrashing. It felt like Kayleen but not; too different to be her. Since she was strong and wild and unshielded and lost, it took time for me to be sure.

Caro.

Looking for her mom.

You don’t come near someone in data the way you do it physically, it’s a sharing of the signature ways we process and think, and a recognition of the thoughts we have. Only Kayleen thinks in the randomly bubbly way she does. Marcus was always sure of himself. And Caro had a baby stubbornness she was showing right now, bulling her way through information by accepting and rejecting stream after stream of data. She didn’t have the capacity or the control to do much more, but seeing her strength I wished harder than ever I’d had time to spend with her.

I felt immensely proud of her.

Perhaps, if I couldn’t find Kayleen, her daughter could.

I inched near Caro, going slow until I felt her recognize me.

She wanted reassurance. I did my best, but the only real comfort either of us needed required finding Kayleen. It took a while to settle Caro, to find a rhythm we could use together. She was still so unformed I had to fold her in myself, guide her, but hold her loose enough that she was following her own senses in the data. Concepts and questions she had no words for came and went through her mind, unformed but amazing. Either she was a special child, or all children were more special than I had ever known.

My niece was a marvelous little person.

How had she gotten here?

It didn’t matter. The search—our search now—mattered. My physical link to Kayleen’s body, our matched breath, told me how thin and insubstantial she had become. We were running out of time.

What if we stopped moving and tried to bring Kayleen to us?

Caro. Think about your mommy.

Okay.

Feel her. Talk to her in the data.

How?

Like you’re talking to me. Send her your love.

I am.

There was nothing coming back. I couldn’t tell Caro to try harder—she was trying as hard as she could. If we lost her mom, I couldn’t let it be her fault. I joined her in calling, doing the triple duty of watching over Caro, calling for Kayleen, and looking for anything new in the data that said we had been discovered. It felt more like we were an ember in the data than that we were fire, but even an ember warmed. And Caro had none of the shielding I did, none of mine and Marcus’s and Kayleen’s skill at looking like the data we were in, appearing to be a part of it instead of something foreign.

Her call for Kayleen echoed through the Lopali nets. A plaintive sweet voice that saddened and called to action at once. It couldn’t be going unnoticed.