He must still have been dizzy from the spinning, because as soon as he jumped he knew that he had pushed too hard with his feet and that his aim had been bad. He was going to pass right over the thing instead of landing low down on its side. He was high enough for his mother to see him, but she was still watching the others.
He grabbed at the padded upper edge of the cabinet as it floated past below him, but could not hold onto it, and all that happened was that he started himself turning end over end again. The netting was farther below him than it had been during the earlier jumps he had tried, and he was traveling farther across it before it began curving up to meet him. But then he saw that instead of landing on the netting he was going to come down on a flat, white box that was projecting above it.
He hit the top and one side with his feet, the impact making the box explode slowly into flat, white fragments. He saw then that it was made from thick layers of light, stiff plastic, bigger sheets of the same stuff that was used as packing for the other children’s games. The sheets had been held together with strips of white tape to cover a panel that had a vision screen and colored buttons on it. Most of the plastic sheets were being held together by the tape but a few of them had been knocked loose and were drifting away.
His mother chose that moment to look in his direction again.
“1 told you to play close to me,” she called, “What are you doing?”
“N-Nothing,” he said loudly.
“Wana,” she went on. “Be a good girl and jump over there and see what he’s doing, then bring him back here. It’s time for the picnic.”
The loosened sheets of white plastic were drifting away from the vision screen. He would have to replace them before Wana arrived because she might ask questions about them loudly enough for their mother to overhear and begin scolding him. He grabbed the edge of the nearest sheet in both hands and brought it down quickly toward the screen, but something funny happened. The plastic sheet seemed to be pushing against something invisible that could only be the air. The pressure rolled him backward slowly until he bounced into the netting and had to grab it with one hand to keep from floating away. Laughing, and with all thought of tidying up the area leaving his mind, he tried it again.
This time he slid one foot under the net and pressed the sole of the other one down on top of it so that a thick strand was held between them to keep him from drifting away, then he began flapping his sheet up and down. He discovered that whenever he moved the sheet downward in front of him he was pushed backwards and he could feel his lower foot pulling against the netting, and when he lifted it upward his upper foot was pressed gently against the netting instead of trying to leave it. Feeling confused, he looked at his brothers playing above him and the memory of Danal’s words to him when he had been flapping his arms up and down like the big bird came back to him.
You can’t fly, he had said, because your hands aren’t wide enough.
But if he tried it with a sheet of plastic in each hand he felt sure that they would be plenty wide enough.
“What are you doing?” said Wana, who had arrived unnoticed behind him.
“Shush, don’t let mother hear you,” he said without looking around at her. “I’m trying to fly like a bird, but it isn’t working right.”
“Birds are supposed to fly straight,” she said in a very loud whisper, “not go up and down like that. Can I play, too?”
“Yes,” he said. “The bits of plastic are over there. But what am I doing wrong?”
When he tried to fly straight and level, pushing down with the plastic wings the way the big bird in the education game had done, it made his head and shoulders come up while his legs stayed where they were; and when he lifted the wings, that made him nose-dive into the netting. He tried to fly straight upward by putting his wings together above his head and sweeping them outward and down to the sides of his knees. That caused him to rise quickly but when he swept his wings up again he moved back against the net again.
Then by accident, but mostly because he was losing patience with the whole stupid business, he twisted his wrists sideways during the upsweep and found that he kept on moving upward. He tried other things, and found that when he stretched the wings out flat from his sides without flapping them, he slowed almost to a stop. Holding only one wing steady when he was moving made him turn slowly in that direction.
“Wana, look!” he said, forgetting to whisper in his excitement. “When you push down against the air you go up, and if you turn the sheets sideways so they slide through the air edge-on, you don’t move back at all and you’re ready for another push down…”
“Like this?” said Wana, who had been watching him closely. She laughed and called, “Danal, Cawn. Look, I’m flying like a bird. Wheeee!”
The two big sheets of plastic were making her tiny body look even smaller, and the quick, excited movements of her shorter arms were pushing her along faster than he was able to go. In her eagerness she was sometimes forgetting to turn the sheets completely edge-on during the up-sweeps so that she was wobbling all over the place, but already she was nearly halfway up to where the boys were playing.
“Yes,” he said. “But don’t move your arms so fast. You look like the pictures of the little fat birds. Try to fly like the big, slow one.
“Like this,” he added, flying after her.
His mother began scolding him as soon as she saw them moving away from the netting, but by that time Danal and Cawn were shouting questions at Wana and himself so loudly that he was able to pretend not to hear her. The boys wanted to know where they had found the plastic sheets and how they were able to fly like that? Wana reached them first, but flew helplessly past and fluttered all over the place as she tried to slow down and go back to them. He watched her for a moment, trying to understand the things she was doing wrong, then he used his wings to raise his head and chest so that his legs swung around until he was moving backward. When he started flying in the new direction it surprised him how easy it was to slow to a stop close to where the boys were hanging motionless and watching him without speaking.
“That, that was neat.…” Danal began. But the few minutes of silence had allowed their mother’s voice to be heard and they had no excuse for ignoring her.
“Mom, there’s no problem,” Danal went on. “He won’t hurt himself, or us. Honestly, he’s doing just fine. Cawn, grab my other hand and bend your knees until your feet are flat against mine, then let go and push hard. We have to get back to the net and get some wings of our own.…”
“Wait,” he said, hoping that he wasn’t going to do something stupid again. “It would take a longer time for both of you to get down to the net and crawl over to the plastic sheets. Maybe, maybe if you held onto my legs I could fly you down fester.”
“Right,” said Danal without hesitation. “Cawn, grab his other leg.”
He felt his body begin a slow, twisting spin as their hard fingers tightened in a double grip around his ankles and he was afraid that he would not be able to control himself. But when he started flying again, sweeping the wings from high above his head and sideways to his knees, the weight of the boys dragging behind seemed to stabilize him. By spilling the air from one wing or the other, he was able to turn until he was heading toward the area of netting containing the plastic sheets.
“That’s very good,” said Danal.
“No it isn’t,” said Cawn. “We’re not moving.”
“We’re moving, but slowly,” said Danal. In the show-offy words he used when he was trying to sound grown-up like their father, he went on, “He has the inertia of tliree bodies instead of one to overcome. Watch the way he twists his wrists before the up-sweep, and remember how he does it. We’re moving faster now…