Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(86)

“China.”

Draped across my arms, Isobel was nothing but a lot of bones and heat. I carried her up the steps to Alexander’s building and pressed for entry. The entryphone crackled but no one spoke. “Hello?” I said. After a moment the locks went back.

Look into the atrium of a West London building at night and everything is the same as it is in the day. Only the reception staff are missing, and that makes less difference than you would think. The contract furniture keeps working. The PX keeps working. The fax comes alive suddenly as you watch, with a query from Zurich, Singapore, LA. The air conditioning keeps on working. Someone has watered the plants, and they keep working too, making chlorophyll from the overhead lights. Paper curls out of the fax and stops. You can watch for as long as you like: nothing else will happen and no one will come. The air will be cool and warm at the same time, and you will be able to see your own reflection, very faintly in the treated glass.

“China.”

Upstairs it was a floor of open-plan offices—health finance—and then a floor of consulting rooms. Up here the lights were off, and you could no longer hear the light traffic on Queensborough Road. It was two fifty in the morning. I got into the consulting rooms and then Alexander’s office, and walked up and down with Isobel in my arms, calling: “Alexander?” No one came. “Alexander?” Someone had let us in. “Alexander!”

Among the stuff on his desk was a brochure for the clinic. “. . . modern ‘magic wand,’” I read. “Brand-new proteins.” I swept everything off onto the floor and tried to make Isobel comfortable by folding my coat under her head.

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly, but not to me. It was part of some conversation I couldn’t hear. She kept rolling onto her side and retching over the edge of the desk, then laughing. I had picked up the phone and was working on an outside line when Alexander came in from the corridor. He had lost weight. He looked vague and empty, as if we had woken him out of a deep sleep. You can tear people like him apart like a piece of paper, but it doesn’t change anything.

“Press nine,” he advised me. “Then call an ambulance.” He glanced down at Isobel. He said: “It would have been better to take her straight to a hospital.”

I put the phone down. “I fucked up a perfectly good car to get here,” I said.

He kept looking puzzledly at me and then out of the window at the BMW, half up on the pavement with smoke coming out of it.

I said: “That’s a Hartge H27-24.”

I said: “I could have afforded something in better taste, but I just haven’t got any.”

“I know you,” he said. “You’ve done work for me.”

I stared at him. He was right.

I had been moving things about for him since the old Astra van days; since before Stratford. And if I was just a contract to him, he was just some writing on a job sheet to me. He was the price of a Hartge BMW with racing suspension and 17-inch wheels.

“But you did this,” I reminded him.

I got him by the back of the neck and made him look closely at Isobel. Then I pushed him against the wall and stood away from him. I told him evenly: “I’m fucking glad I didn’t kill you when I wanted to.” I said: “Put her back together.”

He lifted his hands. “I can’t,” he said.

“Put her back together.”

“This is only an office,” he said. “She would have to go to Miami.”

I pointed to the telephone. I said: “Arrange it. Get her there.” He examined her briefly.

“She was dying anyway,” he said. “The immune system work alone would have killed her. We did far more than we would normally do on a client. Most of it was illegal. It would be illegal to do most of it to a laboratory rat. Didn’t she tell you that?”

I said: “Get her there and put her back together again.”

“I can make her human again,” he offered. “I can cure her.”

I said: “She didn’t fucking want to be human.”

“I know,” he said.

He looked down at his desk; his hands. He whispered: “‘Help me to fly. Help me to fly!’“

“Fuck off,” I said.

“I loved her too, you know. But I couldn’t make her understand that she could never have what she wanted. In the end she was just too demanding: effectively, she asked us to kill her.”

I didn’t want to know why he had let me have her back. I didn’t want to compare inadequacies with him. I said: “I don’t want to hear this.”

He shrugged. “She’ll die if we try it again,” he said emptily. “You’ve got no idea how these things work.”

“Put her back together.”

You tell me what else I could have said.

Here at the Alexander Clinic, we use the modern “magic wand” of molecular biology to insert avian chromosomes into human skin cells. Nurtured in the clinic’s vats, the follicles of this new skin produce feathers instead of hair. It grafts beautifully. Brand-new proteins speed acceptance. But in case of difficulties, we remake the immune system: aim it at infections of opportunity; fire it like a laser.

Our client chooses any kind of feather, from pinion to down, in any combination. She is as free to look at the sparrow as the bower bird or macaw. Feathers of any size or colour! But the real triumph is elsewhere— Designer hormones trigger the “brown fat” mechanism. Our client becomes as light and as hot to the touch as a female hawk. Then metabolically induced calcium shortages hollow the bones. She can be handled only with great care. And the dreams of flight! Engineered endorphins released during sexual arousal simulate the sidesweep, swoop, and mad fall of mating flight, the frantically beating heart, long sight. Sometimes the touch of her own feathers will be enough.