Brenda Cooper
Jenna sent me and Alicia to Li City to look for mods. I hoped something would distract her from her fascination with flying.
I should have known better.
“I want wings.” She squinted as she stared up at Tiala’s gold-and-red bird, Bell. Bell was a living thing, light and fast, with metal parts and the voice of an angel. At the moment she was silent, except the silk of her wings through the air. As Bell flew between silvery buildings, sunlight painted diamonds and stars on her feathers, so bright she was hard to look at but easy to follow.
Tiala probably watched us through the many cameras on the bird, but I tried to ignore that.
Bell was only one wonder among millions on Silver’s Home. Even though we’d been on the planet a few months now, the press of people and the constant hum of conversation assaulted me from all sides.
Alicia repeated, “I want wings.”
She didn’t want wings like Bell’s. She wanted wings big enough to carry her above her broken soul. “Why do you want to lose your ability to run? I’d be happy with a bird like Bell. Something to follow me around, let me put a camera on its neck so I can see anything I need to.”
“I’d rather fly than run.”
“That’s not nearly as useful.” But Alicia seldom listened to anyone. I’d worked all week to get her alone so I could convince her to choose a mod that would help us save our people in the war, and all she could say was she wanted to fly. I leaned down and whispered in her ear. “I’m happy enough to be a strongman, and you should be happy enough to be a pretty girl.”
She smiled, standing on tiptoe and looking around. “You sound old, Bryan. Jenna said we could pick any mod. I want wings.”
If I didn’t know she was designed to be our risk taker, I would have been shocked to see her so happy in this strange place that made me nervous. She dressed in almost nothing herself. Just a sleeveless blue shirt that barely covered her top and behind, and the shortest blue shorts under it I’d ever seen. I didn’t like that. It would not have been allowed on Fremont, and perhaps I was more a creature of that place than I wanted to be.
Alicia’s crystal data necklace glittered when we walked under lights, another sign of how much she’d taken to Silver’s Home.
“Jenna said wings take too long.” I searched the crowd for a flier, hoping to remind her how pained they looked on the ground. But we were nowhere near a flyspace, and there were only walking people on this street—tall ones, wide ones like me, women who’d chosen mods to make them desirable and showed them off by wearing almost nothing. “Besides, you wouldn’t fit in a spaceship with wings.”
“He’s right.” A woman’s voice from two inches behind my right ear. I startled and turned, tense and ready to defend Alicia. She looked about our age—maybe twenty or so—but here I bet she was two hundred. She had blonde hair and blue eyes as astonishing in color as Alicia’s violet ones, and she smelled like the grass plains from home in spring, when they were a sea of yellow and white flowers. She smiled at us—coy and innocent, even her eyes—before she stuck out her hand. “I’m Induan.”
“I’m Bryan.” I ignored her hand. “How’d you get there?”
She grinned and turned to Alicia. “Jenna sent me to look for you.”
“Figures.” Alicia glowered at her, and she, too ignored the outstretched hand. “Why not be a flier?”
Induan hesitated, and I imagined she was trying to find a way to answer Alicia’s question with something other than contempt for a failure to see the obvious.
Induan drew her pale hand back, and I felt a slight pang of regret that we were being so rude. She told Alicia, “Being a flier’s even harder than being a swimmer. Jenna suggested I try and keep you two out of trouble.”
I stiffened. Keeping Alicia safe was my job. It was hard work in this strange place full of hidden lies and hidden knives and beautiful women who appeared from thin air, but I loved my role. “How’d you sneak up on us?”
“I’m quiet.”
So she wasn’t going to tell me. “What does Jenna want?”
“She wants you to figure out what you want to become. You leave in a week.”
What I wanted to become? What I wanted to become? You couldn’t choose that at home. What you wanted to be inside, or what you wanted to learn. But you couldn’t change your body. But here? It was one of the secrets of this world, and it struck me silent.
On the first day after Joseph landed the silver ship New Making, Jenna told us these people changed rivers and islands. I had not taken the claim literally, but the words of this girl-woman made me re-evaluate Jenna’s statement.
Induan cocked her head at me, like the camp dogs used to, and wrinkled her brow.
I felt slow, but I finally forced a few words out. “Thanks. For finding us. I guess.”
Alicia glared at her, but at least she didn’t pop out with the word wings. Instead, she said, “How do we know what’s possible?”
Induan’s grin looked impish and full of secrets. She threaded through the sparse crowd. Bell followed the girl, banking tight golden circles above her head. Alicia and I glanced at each other, and then followed, Alicia practically skipping.
My attention kept snagging on new colors of hair and new shapes for eyes. Some people ignored me, some smiled, some looked wary. Many were lost inside their heads, walking around obstacles well enough, but gone into the data like a lover’s embrace. Wind Readers.
Here, on their home turf, the people of Silver’s Home appeared to be a race of distracted beauty.
What would they be like if we fought them? What weapons were they carrying that I couldn’t see? If Marcus’s warning was correct, when we got back home we might have to fight people with magic made of nanotech and flesh, the way the bird Bell was both.
And all I had now was flesh, stronger and faster than anyone on Fremont, but weaker than many people here. Maybe weaker than all of them.
At home, I’d been the strongest person on the planet.
Induan turned a corner around a tall grey-and-smoke colored building. I started wondering what kind of weapons she had, or what she could change into with a push of a button. And then I turned the corner and forgot to worry about her, since my mouth gaped open and my feet stopped so suddenly that a tall thin man with a six-legged cat on his shoulder bumped into me. “Sorry,” he mumbled, and flowed around me, the cat’s ringed tail twitching.
A smoke-colored arch hung between buildings, ten man-heights or so tall. Below it, translucent figures of humans, or parts of humans sometimes, floated in the air. They had extra muscles in their backs, webbed feet, knives for fingernails, hairy pelts like on an animal, and more. And—of course—there were wings. Although not, I thought, as beautiful as the one Alicia wanted. These were more like contraptions. Mechanical rather than flesh.
A faint smell like burned twintree fruit bothered me. The air felt damp and tingly under the signs, the way it feels just before rain.
“Welcome…” Induan twirled her hand in a small flourish and Bell rose higher as if in response, flying right through a sign for a shop that apparently sold extra arms. “…to the Street of All Designs.”
“How do they do that?” Alicia asked.
“Which one?”
“Making all the pictures in the air.”
“Oh.” Induan wrinkled her nose. “There’s water and the barest bit of power and...I don’t remember. Some other elements they put into the microclimate here that lets them show the images in three dimensions.” She blew on the bottom of a foot hanging just above her head, and the image shimmered and winked, then stabilized. “There’s other places like this, but visible ads are banned on the main streets.”
The man with the cat was already halfway down the street, just walking, apparently immune to the strange forms bobbing above him. “There are other places to get mods?”
Induan let us look around but kept us moving. “Well, sure. But not nearby. There’s always specialty shops. But you don’t have permission for beta mods. What do you need to do?”
Keep my family from dying here or back home. “I need to be…strong. And lethal.”
“Well, you look strong already. So, shouldn’t you choose something that will surprise?” She pointed up. “Like cameras in the back of your head?”
“I don’t want to look different.”
Alicia laughed. “A camera would help you see differently.” She grinned. “Or you could just get better eyes.”
I shivered and blinked, queasy at the idea of trading a part of me for a different part. “Give me a minute to look around, okay?”
Induan looked at me quizzically. “Can you? Do you have an interface?”
“I can see.”
Alicia took Induan’s hand. My risk-taker, bonding in moments. “Give him a little time. He’ll decide if we don’t push him.”
So now I felt stupid, and vulnerable. And backward. For the first time in my life I wasn’t the oddest being on the planet. I wasn’t even close. So why did I want to go back home so badly?
“Come on,” Alicia said, “Let’s look for me. I’m glad I’m here, even if Bryan isn’t.”
The shards of glass in her words drove me to turn away from her so she couldn’t see how they stung. I’d never turned away from her before, but now she wanted to impress this total stranger.
I paced under the advertisements, staring at each one from as many angles as I could. Every choice looked wrong. I didn’t want prehensile toes; my shoes wouldn’t fit. Or legs that were obviously much stronger, but so bulky they wouldn’t feel right. All the mods that would look right on a strongman like me would make me even bigger, or even stronger, or give me extra arms. But what would I do with extra arms when I didn’t need then to shoot extra weapons I already didn’t have?
There wasn’t anything I could imagine doing to myself.
I started looking around for Induan and Alicia by checking near the wings, although I knew they were an impossibility. I didn’t see them walking through the various weapons displays, which was a different kind of relief. Alicia had big, fast anger in her. Big, fast everything emotional, really, but I didn’t want to worry about her with a weapon. They weren’t anywhere near the mods designed to make women beautiful, but of course they did not need those things.
I finally spotted a brief flash of light on Bell’s wings, and Alicia, standing below her, under moving advertisements for fins and gills. Induan was nowhere to be seen, but Alicia was a vision. She stood poised and curious, like she belonged here. Her bare legs gleamed. I swallowed and walked up to her, waited for her to notice me. When she turned her violet gaze toward me, she looked light and happy. Curious. And a little like she was bursting with something to tell me. But she asked me first. “Did you find one?”
“You can have mine. You can have two, if you want two.”
The shape of her face told me she was about to say yes, but them she stopped. “No. You take one. You want to go save us all on Fremont, and if you die because I stole your mod from you, I’ll never forgive myself.”
“I’m giving it. You’re not stealing it.”
“Jenna wants us to each get one.”
“Since when do you do what she says?”
She stopped dead for a moment, and took in a breath and let it out and took in another one. “This is big. And… what if we never get back?”
“I can’t. Everything looks like I wouldn’t be myself.”
She pursed her lips. “But we’re already different. We’ve always been different.”
“That’s not the same as wanting to be different from myself.”
She leaned over and gave me a quick, hard hug. “It’ll be okay. You’ll still be yourself.”
“How will I know?” I felt pressed toward a future that frightened me more than being beat up by gangs of jealous teenagers back home.
Induan’s voice came from right behind me again. “You are always yourself, even if you change.”
I twitched and turned. She was close, way too close. She couldn’t have just casually walked in. I sounded angry even to my own ears, a shade too loud for this quiet place. “Where did you come from?”
She didn’t take a step back. Her voice was quiet as she said, “I’ve been right here.”
I took a step toward her.
I didn’t mean her any harm, and I wouldn’t have hurt her. But she wasn’t there.
Maybe a blur, at best, and then she was gone. I drew in a breath and straightened up. There were a few other people shopping for new parts, no one close. They didn’t seem to have noticed Induan popping in and out of the world. But maybe people popped in an out of reality around here all the time. Maybe she was only a little less a hologram than the advertisements all around us. I turned toward Alicia, who had her slender fingers over her mouth and looked like she could barely keep from doubling over with laughter.
Induan had included Alicia in her secret, whatever it was.
All my life, I’d wondered why people could be so cruel, but we had never been cruel to each other. Never. Never been anything but supportive. It felt like being taunted by the original humans back home. No, it didn’t. It was worse. I ducked and started walking away, a touch of anger starting to curl up the back of my neck.
I walked out of the Street of All Designs, turned the corner, and found a space with a sky hanging above me instead of humans even stranger than me. The scrap of sky comforted me. The blue was brighter than home, but only a little. It still reminded me of Fremont.
How had it happened that I had come to this place? Even though years had passed, I had slept them away in a cold dreamless drawer in the New Making. When I awoke, the same cuts and bruises I’d taken when the Fremont toughs beat me up had been red and purple and real. And then healed, almost like magic, so all I felt now was tightness in my skin where the deepest cuts had been.
I couldn’t walk safely while looking up, so I made myself look ahead and walk through strangers until I found a tree in this place of buildings. I leaned against a building, alien like all the rest in size and material, but I kept it at my back and watched the tree and the sky above the tree.
They found me, of course. The building at my back kept Induan from sneaking up, but it didn’t keep Bell from circling above my head, trilling. The two women walked side by side, heads bent together and chattering like old friends even though they had just met. They were nearly the same size and shape, although opposite in color, Alicia dark and Induan light. Shadow and light.
Alicia saw me first. Her face softened when she did, and she quickened her step.
The fist of anger gripping my insides lightened a bit at that, and I tried to smile for her.
Before they said anything, they stood right next to each other in front of me, and Alicia said, “Take Induan’s hand.”
I did. It was warm. Flesh. Even a bit sweaty. I no longer doubted a human stood physically in front of me. She blinked, and smiled, and suddenly looked a bit shy.
Induan took her hand away and Alicia said, “Watch.”
Induan smeared for an eyeblink, and then she was gone. The space where she had been was so empty that people walked behind it, and I saw them.
“Squint,” the air said, using Induan’s voice.
Shaking, I did as she said. It didn’t matter.
Then it did.
The first sight I caught of her was a leftover dot of red against the clear sky after a man with a flowing red shirt walked by. It took another breath to notice a smear of green near the ground. “I can’t really see her even when I know she’s there.”
Induan touched me and a piece of my arm disappeared under her hand. I flinched as far into the cold building at my back as I could, and couldn’t stop myself from saying, “No, please, no,” before I plunged my hand back at her, making myself accept the invisibility and know my arm was still whole. She took my hand, holding it, a force alone as far as the eye could tell.
Then she let go and smeared into visible again.
Alicia never stopped watching me. She had the sense to let me get my breath before she said, “That’s the one I picked. Induan is a strategist, and she thinks it’s the best one for an unknown situation.”
Better than wings? But I didn’t dare say it out loud.
“So you can still have one. You don’t have to give me yours.”
Two pretty girls with the will to become invisible stared at me, patient. But no matter how patient, I had to answer. I had set off this morning to pick a mod. I had been looking for a new weapon, not to become something else. Not to change myself.
I looked past Alicia and Induan, at the tall and thin men and women walking one by one or in groups. They could change themselves. They had. If nothing else, they were all beautiful, even in their strangeness. There was no age here, no infirmity. My eye went to a pair of fliers, the first I’d seen today. They did hobble. But in spite of the pain that shone through the tight lines of their mouths and the careful way they walked, they looked transcendent. Their wings glittered in the light.
Perhaps I needed to find a way to see changing myself as a gift. To see it as becoming. “Maybe you two can help me choose.”
Indian and Alicia both nodded, and Induan smiled graciously.
I was going to have to outgrow our backward home to live here. “Thanks.”
As we walked back toward The Street of All Designs, I leaned over to Alicia and whispered, “Maybe when we come back you can choose wings.”