Flight (26 page)

Over the ensuing decades, Dicky spent his
money, but hoarded his anger. His once broad ranging mind shrunk
into the narrow focus of the obsessed until he was left with little
more than wishes. Impossible wishes.

Finally, despair had freed Dicky of those
wishes. He had feasted on ash. Bitter ash. Until, whatever force
ran the universe, a force that seemed to revel in irony, sent, with
no warning, a girl to knock on his door. Suddenly, poor Dicky
Baudgew thought that he might have a second chance to make a wish
come true. The problem for Dicky was to understand just what
opportunity Fate had thrown his way and how best to use it.

There could be no doubt that the girl who had
just graced his humble abode was flesh of Elena Howe’s flesh. She
was too much a twin of Elena to be a granddaughter and too young to
be a daughter. The girl was definitely a puzzle.

Oh, how Dicky Baudgew loved a puzzle. He’d
made his mark solving them. When he was very young, he had spent
lots of summer days twisting Rubik Cubes and their cousins, setting
up chess problems and playing puter games. As a teenager, anagrams
and quadratic and chemical equations kept him busy. In college and
medical school, he had been entranced with the limitless cryptic
messages DNA liked to write using its limited AGTC alphabet.

After medical school Dicky interned as an
endocrinologist; however he soon found the puzzle of getting people
and their conflicting egos to work successfully within an
organization to be much more intriguing than why their organs
failed.

Dicky had started work at Cygnetics as a
project manager for one aspect of feather patterning; however
within a year, the high productivity and low turnover in his group
had drawn the attention of Joshua Fflowers. Dicky had bounced his
way up the organization fast enough to make lots of enemies—some
angry, but most, and wisely so, fearful. When Fflowers’ manic
hubris led him to start Centsurety, he picked Dicky Baudgew to be
his main puzzle-solver.

Dicky was an inspired choice because Dicky so
loved a puzzle and Centsurety certainly was that. He had to find
enough sincere and dedicated and, most importantly, closed-mouthed
scientists to do the front of the house work on delayed fledging,
while putting together two teams of brilliant renegades to do the
back of the house work that Joshua Fflowers really wanted done.

The loyal Dicky had done everything from lab
design—cutting edge facilities with a physical layout that
encouraged cross-talk and synergy(at least at the front of the
house)—to talent scouting to walking the well-lighted halls of
B-crats getting the necessary permits to allow Fflowers to play God
using Dicky’s hires as his angels.

Everything had gone swimmingly. The
spotlighted front of the lab made minor progress on the exquisitely
complicated process of delayed fledging. In the shadowy back of the
lab, the Fallen Angel, Elena Howe and the Ugly Elf, Vartan Smarkzy,
and their pup-filled wolf pack made astounding progress in solving
the Greek problem. In the shadows beyond the shadows, the Twin
Wizards, Glen Laureby and Roan Winslow, struggled and slipped and
struggled and gained to solve the age-old old age question.
Flitting between all three groups was Joshua Fflowers, the Mad
Hatted Midas, with his chef’s toque, sticking his fingers in every
pasty, pudding and pie. Thus poked Zarathustra.

Then, in a way that ridiculously mimicked the
dramatic traverse of a Greek tragedy, everything came together for
one shining moment before plunging into disaster.

Fflowers, fallen from Olympus, escaped some
of Fate’s revenge. But, to pay for that undeserved mercy, a
sacrifice to the governmental gods must to be made. Just like in a
myth much younger than the Greeks, the lupine Dicky Baudgew donned
the sheepskin and went to his doom.

Dicky’s doom included taking a large chunk of
Flower’s fortune and going to Macao for a year, then spending two
more in Beijing, four in Kuala Lumpur, before completing his
penance, if not his rehabilitation, in Montreal. He returned to a
quiet and ineffectual life in Manhattan. By the time Dicky was back
home, quite a bit of his fortune had been transmuted into
things—silk and ivory, jade, rice paper, nacre, alabaster, gold and
porcelain things—and other pleasures and arts of a more transitory
nature.

All of the things which Dicky Baudgew had
brought back him from his exile still surrounded him as he sat
scratching his face. Dusty now, and rarely noticed, the things gave
their owner much less comfort than they once had. A deteriorating
body and unrequited revenge had shouldered them aside like a hungry
piglet its littermates on the way to milk and mother.

Dicky looked around his apartment and then
out a black-streaked window. New Harlem, once the choicest address
in Manhattan, had become Spicetown, a hell-hole of poverty and a
stewpot of people. Dicky sat, scratched and pondered how he was
rich with objects, but so very poor with satisfaction…except, now,
for his little puzzle.

Dicky Baudgew surely loved a puzzle.

The tiny geri let his head drop back against
the oily spot it had made over the decades on his favorite deerskin
suede chair. His hands dropped down to his neck. He picked at the
sparsely bristled thin folds of skin and hummed a long forgotten
song.

Fflowers, like Lear, the faltering king.
Elena—the abdicated queen. The girl—a pawn. A few more pawns, a
less than shining knight or two and…and, an interesting puzzle was
born.

The ancient scratched and thought of what to
do and whom to use as the morning sun wheedled its way through the
once very good, but now very faded, Braunswig & Fils
curtains.

The sun was in the west and Baudgew had a
tremor in his hands, which he couldn’t decide came from hunger or
excitement, before he decided that the very first step was to
determine just what the girl was. Why did she look like Elena
Fflowers, but think that Roan Winslow might be her great aunt? That
thought knocked Dicky out of his chair. He had so enjoyed being
clever with the girl that he had not thought to get her mother’s
name. How could he not have asked? That was minor, but stupid.
Dicky took a pinch of skin on his arm. Stupid people didn’t solve
puzzles and people who didn’t solve puzzles needed to be punished.
Dicky squeezed until tears ran from his eyes.

After he got his breath back, Dicky pushed
himself up from the stained chair to ogle a name and make a
call.

As he waited for the man and his science to
arrive, Dicky thought hard about the girl who had passed his
portal. Was she a clever, or, a lucky girl? Was she a clone of
Elena Fflowers, a suppressed X embryo, or an exceedingly rare
accident of genetic fate? What would the best answer be? Surely, at
first glance, a clone, essence of Elena, would be the most
valuable. The rumors were that Joshua Fflowers was fading fast. How
Dicky would like to dangle that bauble before his enemy’s failing
eyes. What could be more painful to a man facing his mortality than
to be briefly teased with the physical form he once had loved, or
more accurately, idolized since Dicky wasn’t sure Joshua Fflowers
had ever loved anything in all the world during his long life.

Dicky thought and scratched.

But the taste of revenge, despite how sweet,
could not linger.

He already had taken the first step. The next
in the puzzle was to compare the DNA of Elena and the girl. The
girl’s DNA was easy. The man, when he arrived, would sample the lip
and handle of the cup shel had used. Finding Elena’s DNA would be
more difficult. It might still be on record at Cygnetics, although
that was not very likely. However, if it were there, getting
something out of that bee-hive shouldn’t be too difficult.
Alternatively, the Juvenal Institute, which had done her
transplant, would definitely have it; however there would not be
many fissures in the firewalls of that august edifice.

Unfortunately, Dicky Baudgew’s thinking had
to take a turn.

Less than five hours after the guileless girl
had announced herself at his door, Dicky heard from the tech doing
the work on the tea cup that there was no DNA to be found. The cup
had been wiped clean. Dicky didn’t know if she was lucky, but the
girl appeared to be clever. Dicky abhorred clever girls…of any
age.

Dicky had always told himself that when one
door closed, another must open. He would get what he needed. The
tracker he had planted in her feathers as she left his apartment
would insure that. It would just take a little longer. Dicky made
another call. Afterwards, the little man paid his dues.

For being stupid a second time, Dicky’s sense
of justice demanded he pinch the skin on the back of his knee with
the tweezers he usually used on his eyebrows. After cleaning up the
blood from that bit of retributive drudgery, Dicky made himself a
cup of adreno tea, sat, pondered, and scratched and scratched and
pondered and scratched and pondered until his cheeks leaked lymph
like a tapped maple tree.

Fly By Night Fate

Standing out on Oakstaff Street, Prissi
decided that she should be cautious and fly the northern route
home. But before she had flown a dozen kliks, her shoulder was
hurting so badly that she knew she couldn’t make it straight home.
After circling twice, she landed on the ubiquitous green roof of a
Vegantopia. Dozens of seggies were parked by the front door. After
getting her bearings and a PS report, which came up bland, Prissi
flared her wings and dropped to the ground.

Inside, the winger found the usual lay-out. A
long row of herbaria and aquaria separated the counter from the
dining room. The counter had chairs near the door and perches at
the far end. Most of the counter seats were occupied by
bored-looking pre-fleds sucking down banana soys and sporking up
glute-not desserts. As she walked past them, Prissi gave those
staring at her the “you’re invisible” look she usually reserved for
Waterville townies.

A red-haired walker, whose eyes were
considerably smaller than several of the excrescences galaxied
across his forehead, listed the day’s soups in a low drone that
reminded Prissi more of a horsefly caught between window pane and
screen than human speech. Prissi guessed at a couple of syllables
and ordered a pomelo and squash potage with a hi-fi muffin and a
quadralatte. Prissi rubbed the outline of the crystal around her
neck and pondered what had happened at Burgey’s house. It was
obvious that the crystals were more than just pieces of jewelry.
But what could they be? While she waited for her food, Prissi put
both pieces on the counter and studied them. They seemed to be no
more than spiraled pieces of fractured glass. They reminded Prissi
of the crazed glaze of some raku pottery. Were the crystals,
despite their large size, some how precious? Diamonds? Africa still
was the home of diamonds. Had her mother found something like the
Hope Diamond? Prissi snorted. Was she holding some kind of new
world altering material?

Hearing a clink, Prissi looked down the
counter. Before the boy got within three meters of her, Prissi knew
that he was going to slop soup onto the counter. Dropping both
crystals in her kanga, she leaned back on her perch in
anticipation, then, smiled smugly when a chunk of squash and some
viscous orange fluid made its escape.

The boy muttered something and Prissi
guessed, “That’s okay,” was an appropriate response. The soup was
decent, but the muffin was so thick and dry with spelt and bits of
healthy chaff, and so oddly tasting from the extra baking soda
needed to lift it enough to call it a muffin, that it took Prissi
some real work and a lot of latte to get it down her throat.

By the time she was half-way through her
litert of coffee, Prissi knew that she could fly to Montana on one
wing. Riding her feeling of invincibility, she pulled her special
pen from her kanga, grabbed a clean lapkin and wrote, “Bigger tip:
Wash your face with Zit-o-zilch and
E-NUN-CI-ATE.
” She
weighted the message down with a twenty eurollar coin left from her
change, flared her wings for the pre-fleds and sashayed toward the
door.

Back in the air, the rejuvenated teener felt
so much better, she considered flying directly home. But, a smarter
part of her knew that her bravura was more caffeine than strength
and that to be safe, she needed to take the long way home. She
started north toward the GW Bridge, but soon could feel herself
getting so hypo-glyked from all the caffeine running through her
that, after a couple of kliks, she landed on the roof of a school
and called Nasty Nancy.

”Hi, it’s me.”

“Sounds just like you.”

“I’m in NJ totally discharged. Any chance I
could flop and flap with you?”

“Sure.”

“Do you need to ask your folks?’

“You forget I am an only child.”

“Just for a couple of hours.”

Nancy Sloan’s parents lived in a ten-room
penthouse apartment on the western edge of Fort Lee. The
glass-walled cavernous living room ran the width of north side of
the building. At the east end of the room, one could see the GW
Bridge dimly glowing in the waning daylight. To the north the
writhing brown snake of the Hudson chewed away at its banks while
far to the west the double urban auras of Newton and Screwton
pulsed.

Prissi looked out at the nearly empty skies
and remembered a previous visit to the Sloans when she had watched
flock after flock of wingers sweeping past to their homes in the
outer suburbs. As she took in the view, Iaocomo and Emerald Sloan,
who owned a generic pharmaceutical company that specialized in STD
remedies for Fourth and Fifth World countries, came out to say
hello, then went back to their office, which Prissi remembered as
being almost big as her father’s apartment.