“Doc, you're a good woman.”
“Don't let it get around.”
1300 Hours
Friday 8 December, 2062
University of Toronto Main Campus
Toronto, Ontario
Ellie and I eat our hot dogs crouched on a cement bench, leaning forward to let the excess sauerkraut drip between our knees. She makes little pleased noises as she chews; the enjoyment's contagious. I'm still failing utterly to hate her.
Leah and Patty catch up with us before we finish and Leah stands there looking petulant until I buy hot dogs for the girls as well. All three of us chase the frankfurters with a handful of assorted supplements: miscellaneous things a normal person shouldn't swallow, but the nanotech needs for self-repair and maintenance on our wetwiring.
“Thank you, Master Warrant,” Patricia says with that careful courtesy. She's got a manner of studying the grown-ups around her as if reading them like books — anticipating their expectations. She's awfully self-conscious for a kid. I wonder if somebody hits her. “Can we talk about the drills later?”
“Stiff. It's Friday!” Leah throws her napkin at Patty and takes off; the older girl catches the wadded paper with a dart of her hand I find eerily familiar and lights out after my goddaughter smooth as a hare. They race across the winter lawns, shrieking and scaring the freshmen, and I'm amazed to realize that neither one of them is that much younger than the college kids. Patty can't quite catch Leah, but it's mostly because Leah hasn't quite gone from coltish to painfully self-conscious yet, and Patty isn't digging in the way a kid would. Still, the break in her quiet intensity makes me smile. She's a good kid, even if her granddad's a son of a bitch.
“Eagles?” I ask when they trot back, Leah grinning and Patty blushing either from exertion or from embarrassment.
Leah grins wider as she corrects me. “Raptors, Aunt Jenny.”
And they say you can't ever go home.
It's a rehab facility, not an aviary, but two hallways are open to the public with a half-dozen big birds in various stages of rehabilitation on each. The whole place smells scrubbed, and the red-curtained amphitheater has maybe twenty people in it for a capacity of four hundred. It's not hard to get seats in the front row. Judging by the graffiti dug into the foldup desk attached to my chair, it doubles as a classroom. Woody hates fluids. My metal fingers trace letters graven into the faux-wood surface, and I grin. Fluid dynamics, I presume, but the next one puzzles: Johanna my whohometer spins only for you.
I suppose it's the sentiment that counts. I lean over and whisper in Doc's ear, because the presenter hasn't come out yet and the girls are still passing notes on their hips while Ellie and I pretend we don't notice. “This sort of thing always makes me wish I'd gone to college.”
She glances at me, surprised. “You didn't?”
“Noncom,” I answer. “I never finished high school. Got a correspondence diploma.”
“But—” She starts, and seems to realize how condescending she was about to sound. “You must be very well read.”
“My mother home-schooled us girls. And — oh.” The woman who walks out onto the stage is stocky, rounded: powerful shoulders and the broad cheeks, high forehead and vanishing nose that tell me she's native, probably Inuit. She smiles at us out of a bright black squint, and the enormous golden eagle on her gauntleted fist turns its head to stare each of us in the eye.
“Oh,” Elspeth says in turn, and the giggling girls fall silent. “That's the biggest thing I've ever seen.”
It isn't, of course. But I know what she means. The biologist or whatever she is claims center stage, looks around at the few of us gathered, and calmly reaches up and turns off her collar mike. “Just as well,” she says. “She hates the amplification. This is Athena. She's an endagered species, a Tibetan golden eagle, one of the largest eagles in existence. She's here because the University of Toronto raptor rehab program is the most successful in the world, and there are only about twelve of these beauties left. I'm Dr. Carla Entwhistle, by the way.” A self-deprecating grin that I barely notice, because I'm not just looking at the bird.
I'm looking at her wing, tuning Dr. Entwhistle out as she runs through the program and its successes. She taps the bird's tailfeathers, though, and as the eagle opens her wings I see quite clearly what I had glimpsed under her feathers.
Pins in her flesh, some lightweight alloy stark against the russet of her feathers, and a sort of — clamp — that must be holding shattered bones in place until they heal to the metal appliance that makes up wrist joint and the leading edge of her wing. Her eyes fix mine — angry, golden as her name — as Dr. Entwhistle tells us that her ancestors were captured and trained to kill wolves in the Himalayan mountains that were her home. That this eagle — Athena — will fly again. Will be released to the wild, and impregnated before she goes with DNA recovered from a member of her threatened species who did not make it. “Even in the highest corner of the world,” Entwhistle says, a line I can tell she's rehearsed in front of the mirror, “these eagles are being painted out of existence by man.”
While Entwhistle tells us that the technology used to repair this eagle's devastated wing was, like most veterinary orthopedy, derived from human appliances, my metal hand curls in my lap and I fight the urge to reach into my breast pocket and pull out the eagle feather, bright with beads. I turn my head and say, very soft, to Patty Valens, “How did you girls hear about this?”
“Papa Fred told me,” she whispers back, eyes on the eagle.
Oh, of course. You'd think I'd be able to smell a setup by now. Valens meant for me to see this, of course. It's a demonstration, and a message.
I know where the technology to give that eagle back the sky came from. And I watch her, curious and in command on the biologist's gauntlet, wearing leather jesses but not impressed by her bonds, and I wonder: what the hell could have broken that wing? We can save her. Cyborg-eagle, she'll fly again. Fly on wings of metal and lanceolate feathers, feathers gilded by the sun. Indomitable. Holy. Bloody. Literally bloody, but unbowed.
Patty watched Casey lean back in her chair as Dr. Entwhistle took the golden eagle backstage and returned with another bird, a snowy owl whose injuries and reconstruction were much less extensive. Patty scooted out of the way, upholstery squeaking against her jeans, as Leah reached across her to tug Casey's sleeve. “Aunt Jenny?” Very low, but it carried.
Casey shot Leah a look. Leah dropped her voice. “Has Dad ever taken you up to see the eagles at my grandpa's house?”
“I didn't know there were any.” They leaned together across Patty, dark head bent toward blond, and Patty swallowed.
“I'll make him,” Leah said with a grin. “In spring when they have babies. I got divebombed once; it was scary. We should bring you, too, Ellie.” Leah leaned even farther around Casey to catch Dr. Dunsany's eye.
Patty didn't think Leah, looking away again as she spoke, could have caught the smile that curved only the left half of Casey's face. “How is your grandpère going to feel about being descended upon by a full house of people?”
“He'll love it,” Leah answered confidently, the two years between them rendering her completely oblivious to whatever it was that Patty heard shading Casey's voice.
Dr. Dunsany lowered her voice, too, and whispered. “How old is Gabe's dad?”
“Mideighties,” Jenny said dryly. “Conservative type.”
A slightly hysterical giggle. “I'm sure we'll all get along just fine.”