“If you would come to fullness you must stop reaching and manifest a more basic spirit.”
“By dancing in two circles?”
“Another facet of the Many Ways. Not ours, but a Way.”
“I have my own way.”
“This world can best be understood as an insane asylum. Not an asylum for the mind, no. For the soul. Only the flawed remain here. Are still here.”
“I have my reaching out to do here. Out between the bloody bars, if that’s the way—”
“That is nothing. You must try to escape and transcend the cage.”
Nigel began to speak rapidly and the old man waved away his points.
“No,” he said. “That is nothing. Nothing.”
Rubbish, Nigel thought. Utter rubbish, what that dried prune of a man had said.
So thinking, he dipped a wing.
The airfoil caught and he felt a tug, pressure. Up he went, the momentary image of that dreadful Immanence bloke fading as quickly as it had come (odd, to think of it here, now) and the wind sang through the struts.
“How is it, Nigel?” Alexandria’s voice came in his ears.
“Incredible,” he said into his throat mike. He peered down at the spinning earth—which the instructor had warned him against, but what in hell was the point, really, if you couldn’t do that?—and saw her, an orange speck.
“Can you hold the spiral?” she called.
“Bit tough on the arms,” he grunted.
“The instructor says to relax into the harness.” “Right. I’m trying. Oops—” He lurched. The glider bit into a surge of wind and climbed sharply. The invisible funnel of air, warm as it swept in from the Pacific, lofted him further up his lazy spiral. The wind rose like a transparent fountain here on the coast, where breezes moving landward struck first the steep hills and then the westward wall of Arcosoleri, the kilometer-high city of cubes and apses. Nigel glanced at the glittering windows of the Arc as he swooped nearer it, judging the distance. He still had a safe margin of distance from the pinkish concrete face. The circling tunnel of air held him in check.
Below, the turning world.
Purple-ripe clouds mottled the arc of the sea’s horizon, showers of rain like skirts beneath them. And here, Nigel, banking and rising, felt a sensation like a swoosh of breath leaving him as his spirit lifted free of this spiraling body and joined the air. He shook himself. It was as though he had stopped struggling, stopped trying to swim through mud. The scooping wind moaned at the slit in his face mask and he tilted his wings to rise higher, Icarus re-born as he left behind everything below him. It was all in the past now, he hoped—Alexandria was recovering, the Snark was on its way. A pure blind joy possessed him. The unacknowledged fear that had gripped him at the beginning of the flight now fell away like a weight and he felt smooth and sleek, birdlike, darting in these high winds. Corkscrewing up, up from the enveloping earth. Soundless happiness. Mortality seeped out of him, froze in the chill high air and fell to shatter with a crystal tinkling on the California below. He turned in a slow circle, carving Earth’s skin of air, glinting ocean waves below waving at him randomly. A wing foil flapped, then straightened. Icarus. Wax wings. Do not go softly into this good sky. Soaring. The spinning Earth a basket below. The twin dots of Shirley and Alexandria like pins on a map
coins in his lap
Yes.
He lofted free.
They stayed overnight in a luxury suite of the Arc, rather than catch a bus southward to Los Angeles. Shirley dialed a holo and Nigel lay back in their room’s center pit, letting the delicious ache that came from exercise seep through him.
“Do you really think NASA will approve of your taking a chance like that?” Shirley said.
“Ummm? Flying a one-man glider, you mean?” Nigel shrugged. “Whacking lot they can do now.”
“I thought you were supposed to check with them on anything dangerous.”
“Piss on ’em and leave ’em for dead.” Nigel sighed noisily and watched quick splashes of color flick, jewel-like, across the inside of his eyelids.
“You don’t feel boxed in by what they’ll think?” “Hardly.”
“Then you wouldn’t mind signing an endorsement of a People’s Referendum?”
Nigel opened his eyes lazily. The holo abstract was a seething vision two meters above the pit, like an oozing ruby in oil. “What for?”
“To prohibit sale of LHS foods.”
“LHS?” Nigel frowned. A signer of a People’s Referendum Call guaranteed that he would help pay for the cost of having a nationwide vote on the issue in question, if it was turned down by the voters.
“Left-Handed Sugars. You know. We digest only sugars with a right-handed spiral molecule in them.”
“That’s what natural sugars are—right-handed.”
“Yes. Only now they’re making left-handed ones to use in food, so the body doesn’t turn them into fat. It’s a kind of diet food.”
“So what?”
“Well, it’s an insult to other countries to have that happening. When people are starving, I mean, almost everywhere. Will you sign, Nigel?”
He tilted his head back and studied the seamed concrete vault above them. Someone had once asked him to sign a Referendum Call against this Arc, even while it was becoming obvious that the first one, Arcosanti, was already an enormous success. It was still growing faster than Phoenix, which lay sixty klicks to the south of it, and yet wasted no space or energy on transportation systems. Everyone who lived inside it was within a fifteen-minute walk of work, play, entertainment, shopping. It had the urban complexity without the Losangelization, the separation from nature. But somebody had opposed it, for reasons now forgotten.
He sighed. “Think not.”
Her “Oh?” was carefully put.
