Authors: Brenda Cooper
“Truth doesn’t have anything to do with rumor. Myth often places beautiful women in the middle of war. You’re going down in history as the woman who started this war.”
I
t took six months and two more rushed transfers from ship to ship before our feet touched a planet. It was midmorning when the
Harbinger
, the ship we now rode, turned lazily in the sky, surprising my stomach, and sank tail down to land on a shimmery flat surface on Lopali.
Harbinger
was a squat round cargo ship with a ramp wide enough to send small ships through. I’d never landed, of course—we’d left Fremont and gone through three docking and releasing maneuvers.
Only now did I really feel in my bones that we were somewhere. Below us a small planet hung in space barely more blue than green, its five continents rounded like very big islands. Each pole had a round ice cap. As I watched Lopali grow in the viewscreen, I stroked the uneven surface of the belt the original Sasha, the girl from Fremont, had hand-knotted for me. She’d put a prayer for safety in every knot, and as I touched the belt, I remembered how earnest her face had been when she told me about her work. I’d worn it in the battle for Fremont, and I had been safe.
Lopali bulked bigger than Fremont by a factor of at least two, maybe more. As we made a full orbit above it, the dark side glowed with strings of lights over the land, so many I couldn’t imagine a person for each light, much less many people for each light, which is what Alicia promised I’d find. We landed on the edge of a small spaceport. Green fields stretched in neat squares toward a forest.
I closed my eyes, hoping for a place I wanted to be, a home, or at least a warm, friendly town.
I didn’t care how small the big ship and the big planet and the wide ramp made me feel. As soon as Marcus gave us the all-clear, I rushed down the ramp with Jherrel and Caro beside me. There were no people nearby—just the empty landing place and the empty field, and not far off, the forest. I squinted at it, looking for trees similar to twintrees or lace-leaves or even the tall and spiky pongaberry trees. These trees had wide branches and great tufts of leaves near the ends of the branches. It made me feel like a roamer again, like I should pull out a pad and pencils and make scientific drawings and notes. Maybe soon. In the meantime, nothing looked threatening. Best of all, there was ground under me and sky above me.
It had been two and a half years since I had felt either.
I started dancing.
At first, the children looked at me as if I’d lost my mind, but they got caught up in the kicking and swaying and twisting as soon as Liam joined us, the four of us stepping in time, jumping, breathless. Dancing joy, dancing the smells of dirt and trees, of flowers and sky and wind. While Lopali didn’t smell like Fremont, it also didn’t smell like grease and metal and sweat the way a space ship did. It smelled almost like heaven.
We’d been in so many versions of gravity across all the ships and years that it took a few moments for me to realize how light I felt here, and how much our dancing was like flying. Liam took one child in each arm and began turning circles with them both held close to his chest, all three of them laughing and smiling. Paloma came down and stood at the foot of the ramp, staring. She looked younger than she had when we left Fremont, but still older by decades than any of us. She smiled, and lifted a foot, then another, taking Caro from Liam and putting her on the ground and holding her hand. Liam did the same with Jherrel, so the four of them were a line, two tall and two short people bounding in low gravity so the children jumped twice their height.
Alicia came and stood beside me, her mouth open and an expression of pure delight on her face. “I never thought I’d get here,” she whispered.
“To a planet again?”
“No. Here. To the fliers.” She scanned the sky, turning her head this way and that. She stood on tiptoe, bouncing, laughing. She turned on her mod and flickered once and nearly disappeared, becoming the color of the ground, and then Induan turned hers off and appeared and I shook my head, bemused. What had gotten into Alicia about this place?
Induan had an impish look on her face. She walked toward the forest, and as soon as she’d gone even a few feet I could tell the trees were farther away than they had looked. I had been good with scale and distance at home, but here everything seemed a bit off.
Induan raised her arms above her head.
The trees began to rise. Or some of the great bunches of leaves rose from the branches. They spread out in the air, becoming wings, spiraling up with powerful slow beats, like the great blaze fliers from home. As they rose one by one, all of the leaves became fliers. Behind them, a circle of empty perches gave lie to the idea that we were surrounded by forest. As they came closer, I could see that they were much larger than the birds at home, and at least as graceful. Light poured onto them and illuminated bright colors and flashing sparkles as the evening sun caught their wings. Greens and golds, whites, even a pale lavender. Two had wings so black they’d have become lost in a night sky.
And then they were above us, at least twenty of them, silent and so very beautiful.
I had never seen such grace.
Human bodies hung suspended between the great wings, each one thin and long. They wore tight-fitting clothes that left their legs and arms free. Their shoulders seemed to be two sets: forward shoulders that hunched more than ours and that attached to long arms, and a second set of shoulders, or perhaps a very different back, mounded up behind their slender necks and attached to the great wings. Wide torsos tapered to slim waists and hips, and long slender legs. Everything about the shape of their bodies looked designed to hold their wings. Some wore colored shoes to match the tight-fitting clothes, and a few had tied strings with beads or shells or bits of metal on them to the toes, so they glittered behind and below them.
They kept some distance, so it was impossible to see their facial expressions or what their wings were made of.
Invisible, Alicia clutched my arm so tight her nails dug furrows in the soft skin of my inner arm. I pulled away. She flickered into herself, openmouthed and staring. Transfixed. Paloma had gathered Caro into her arms, and they pointed up together. Liam and Jherrel stood hand in hand, openmouthed.
Induan dropped her arms and came and stood by Alicia.
The others walked quickly down the ramp, Marcus in the lead, Kayleen beside him. Then Ming, Tiala, and Jenna. I didn’t see Joseph, Bryan, or Dianne. Everyone else was soon at our side. Marcus’s eyes narrowed in worry. He watched the fliers carefully, his gaze flicking from one to the other, bouncing on his toes. It felt like I was standing beside a paw-cat, the feline strength of the man again clear and dangerous.
As if Marcus’s arrival triggered a change, a flier with silver, white, and gold wings spiraled down closer to the ground. The others flew up and hung off a little ways, beating their wings slowly, almost hovering.
As the single flier neared us, tiny round breasts gave her gender away. This close, her wings more closely resembled bird’s wings than I had thought, complete with bones in the front and feathers hanging from them. Amid the feathers, various decorations streamed in the wind. Beads and metal glinted in the flier’s hair, which was a mass of braids held back from her face by a strip of black leather that contrasted with her golden hair.
The flier threw back her head and gave a great hard beat with her wings, sending warm air in a strong puff that momentarily lifted the loose edges of my hair. She landed with a hop, and her wings tilted a bit forward, her shoulders slumping to take the weight of them in this new position. She moved toward us, nearly as awkward on the ground as she had been graceful in the air. The other fliers stayed in the same slightly stilted formation.
“Hello Matriana,” Marcus said, leaning in and giving her a gentle hug, as careful of her wings as if they were glass instead of feathers.
Matriana wore a long thin sheath strapped to one side. She had a water flask and a few other items I couldn’t identify strapped to the
other. I hadn’t noticed them as she flew, so perhaps they had been situated on her back then. She reached into the long sheath and withdrew a shimmering silver feather with a gold tip. It matched her wings.
She handed the feather to Marcus, who took it gingerly by the quill, raised it to his forehead, and only then slid it into a similar sheath belted to his leg. It seemed to be made to hold the feather. Clearly, he had been expecting the gift, for he simply said, “Thank you.”
She looked around, as if checking on each of us. Her eyes lingered longest on Liam, comparing his features to the children’s. Her gaze flicked back to Marcus. “Where is this strong Joseph?”
“He is on the ship. I will be glad to introduce you.”
She narrowed her eyes and glanced at the
Harbinger
, as if counting the painful steps between here and there. I had the sense she was used to giving orders, and held back, wanting something. When she nodded her head, the gesture implied quiet power, like Hunter wielded on Fremont. “I will meet Joseph and the rest of your group in town this evening. We will offer a feast.”
“Our quarters?” Marcus asked.
“The gold guest house has been unlocked for you.”
“Thank you.”
And with that she turned, crouched low, and with a single powerful wingbeat, she launched herself into the air. As soon as she joined the other fliers, they turned and flew together in a formation that reminded me of wild birds flocking across the Grass Plains.
Although my feet didn’t want to dance anymore, my shoulders itched to understand the weight and heft of wings.
I
watched on a viewscreen as the fliers rose up in a burst of power and color and left our party standing on the ground, staring up at them. The angle of the cameras made them seem small and insignificant against the vastness of the remade moon. I couldn’t see well enough to make out their expressions, but Chelo bounced Caro on her hips, and Kayleen and Paloma had their heads bent near each other in conversation. Ming walked beside Marcus, looking up, though the fliers were almost invisible now.
It was tough to make out much of Lopali from the spaceport. We were surrounded by cargo ships here, but Dianne had already mentioned that other spaceports catered more to human passengers. Beyond the sterile garden of ships, the careful shapes of fields cut up the land, and beyond that, trees, and here and there the sparkling blue of streams. The largest road headed east, which must be toward the city.
Dianne and Bryan sat on either side of me. Dianne stared at the screen as if she daren’t miss any nuance, and Bryan sat as still, except that he flicked his nails in and out almost absentmindedly. I watched them, not wanting him to slice my flesh by accident. A strategist, a strongman, and a maker. Marcus hadn’t said it, but surely if he trusted the fliers completely, he wouldn’t have left us three behind.
As soon as they returned, Marcus drew us all together into a meeting. We were passengers rather than pilots on the
Harbinger
, so there were no gleaming meeting rooms full of viewscreen walls available
to us. The
Harbinger
was sparse and utilitarian, but it did have a single big oval room designed for gaming and working out, and we gathered in the mismatched and comfortable chairs there, surrounded by video screens and weights and machines. The edges of the room hosted an indoor running track and, on the walls, a pull-gym for low-gravity workouts.
We settled, the children sticking close to Chelo and Paloma, Liam sitting beside Kayleen, an arm across her shoulder, whispering in her ear. At my side, Alicia kicked her feet and twisted her hands in her lap.
Marcus sat on a black bench, his legs splayed out on either side of it. “We’ve about a half hour before we need to leave. Questions?”
“What was the feather about?” Chelo asked.
“Flier’s feathers can be very valuable. We could buy passage home for all of us on a comfortable ship with the one Matriana gave me, because it’s a pinion feather—one of the long ones at the end of the wings. Those molt once every few years at most. They’ve got a reputation for bringing luck.”
Paloma looked intrigued. “Do they?”
I thought Marcus was going to burst out laughing, but he just said, “It’s not been proven. The longest flier feathers are a valuable trade good everywhere, including Islas.”
He hadn’t said no about the luck. Interesting.
Alicia started pacing the edges of the group, holding her arms in, watching Marcus primarily, but also everyone else who knew about Lopali: Jenna and Tiala, Ming and Dianne.
Ming lifted a beautiful, shapely arm and waited for Marcus to nod before asking, “What did she want us to have luck in?”
He smiled. “Give a prize to the dancer. She wants us to help her people have babies.”
I knew what he meant, but Chelo looked puzzled. “What?”
Marcus answered her. “We know how to make fliers . . . the Wingmakers from Silver’s Home designed them for Lopali. Years ago. A subset of the Wingmakers, the Moon Men, made Lopali. Fliers can only have babies when the Wingmakers make them. Every year a ship comes with babies, only it’s never as many as are wanted. It’s not even close.”
“Why can’t the fliers have, or at least make, their own children?” Paloma asked.
Marcus stood up and walked around as he answered her. “They’re sterile, so they can’t have children. The processes that make them are owned, and secret. The fliers have beauty, and power, and by now a history. Lopali is almost five hundred standard years old—that’s almost as old as the civilization on Islas, and older than Joy Heaven or Paradise. The fliers have been living here for almost four hundred years. The Moon Men are long gone now. Those that could, turned into fliers or died trying. That’s what they hired the Wingmakers for—they were something else then, too, and took the name after they failed here.”