"A Fine Feathered Folly -- Chapter 1" by Steve (Greybird) Reed

Chapter One

He stood at the edge of a jagged cliff, watching the roiling lava of the massive volcano below. It poured heated gas of variegated colors into the thin atmosphere, rising swiftly toward the starry night above.

He thought: It would be thin, wouldn’t it, at this ... height? What a strange and beautiful turn of my life, that I can be here and that I can see it.

Reflected celestial light shone onto the light-coppery skin of his back, outlining the long hair that was bound together and framed his head. With closed eyes, he thought back to the adventures he had found in the recent past, where he had been, whom he had found to enrich his life. If there is a Great Spirit, he thought, it is benevolent, and I am a fortunate man.

He walked to the edge of the cliff and jumped.

As he drifted slowly downward, the massive grey wings sprouting from his back unfolded, to their full fifteen-foot span. The tissues within them drank in the heat from the gases, as well as an intricate web of energies that surrounded him, from stellar ions to radio broadcasts to the whispering remnants of the Big Bang. The superheated gases moved past his feathers as if they were light Summer breezes. A protective field diverted the gases from burning a single molecule on his body, or on the golden yellow breechcloth and boots that were his only clothing.

He flexed his wings into a gently curved foil shape in cross-section, and felt energy pulling him forward. He swooped down into a sharply pointed parabola, arcing over the volcanic fire at no more than fifty feet from its hellish heart, then rocketing upward toward the stars.

As he accelerated, over the following minute, to more than two-thirds the speed of light, he saw several bright balls of rock receding from him in the near distance. Let’s see, he thought ... yes, that’s Ganymede, and I can see the ice sheets on Europa. I’ll have to bring her with me, soon, so we can look for any animal life over there. Something closer to home, for once. Io has its rugged beauty, but a bit of greenery would be far more interesting.

The pulsing color of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot had diminished in intensity by half, by the time he heard a soft double-beep within his head. A soft voice followed. ::M’lord Silverbird?::

He turned one large track of his mental attention away from celestial navigation, and toward the telepathic plug in his ear. ::Milady Windrider, you must have just gotten up. How did you sleep?::

::Not nearly as well as I could have, without your wings around me. I’m fixing breakfast. We have a lovely Spring rain, almost a mist, it’s making the garden glow with life.::

::Well, dearest, I could use some greenery around me. It was all too arid on Vega Four, and the G’Krell starport lacks creature comforts in the middle of that desert.::

::Did the contract go well?::

::We have twice what we’d planned in credits. Even more, I think, stored in good will for later ventures of our people ... we’ll travel through the G’Krell territory, remember, or will in another 150 years, when we colonize Elysium in this timeline.::

::I’m still not used to thinking of the present and the future together like this. I wonder if it’ll ever become routine.::

::Hope it doesn’t. Life has become fascinating. Guiding freighters through an asteroid belt in a star system 26 light years away, for a civilization keeping itself under wraps from our own ... two years ago, would I have thought I’d be making money this way?::

::Not to mention being tech-subversive timeline-twisters on our own planet. I never thought I’d be this good at stealth operations.::

::Except when it comes to being in bed, Sue! I can see right through your schemes. Don’t know what the rest of our mission would do without ’em, though.::

::I could never hide anything from you, Jim. Shall I meet you in the Jet Stream? Three whole days, my love, and I miss you terribly.::

::Sounds good. I had a nice diversion taking a look at Io for a moment, but I’m pressing the translight pedal to the metal. I want to get home. Soon, Windy. I love you.::

::Soon, Silver.::

He took a deep and satisfied breath from his jaramana, the trans-dimensional portal in his chest that supplied him with oxygen, cellular energy, and communication links.

What did I do to deserve such a beautiful and intelligent creature? he thought. Let alone being able to talk to her across star systems.

He focused most of the threads of his attention on untwisting the piece of spacetime in front of him. Well, take that, Dr. Einstein, he thought, as he had so often before: There’s more in heaven, Earth, love, and warp travel than was dreamt of in your philosophy.

A shock wave of light and fury erupted from the leading edge of his wings, as he plunged into the spacetime warp that he had generated. He shaped the sinews in his back into the arrangement that would move him at 32 light years per hour.

Two minutes and several billion miles later, he erupted back into normal spacetime near the L5 point, with a crescent Moon at his heels. Within a few more seconds, he had arced into the atmosphere above North America, his wings soaking up the heat from air friction, and converting it into a shield from radar detection below.

As his wings urged him forward to follow a howling wind in the troposphere, he saw a copper-skinned, white-winged woman floating in it several miles ahead of him. He rushed to catch up to her. They embraced, kissed long and deeply, put their wings at a 90-degree angle to their backs, wrapped arms around each other’s waists, and dived side-by-side at Mach 5 toward a wooded corner of northern Minnesota.

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To be continued ...