Flyers by Vonda N. McIntyre

Author:Vonda N. McIntyre [McIntyre, Vonda N.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Hugo nomination, sci-fi, Vonda N. McIntyre, Wings, alien, science fiction, sexuality, Nebula nomination, The Mountains of Sunset The Mountains of Dawn, sf
ISBN: 9781611382143
Publisher: Book View Cafe
Published: 2012-11-13T08:00:00+00:00

www.bookviewcafe.com

The Mountains of Sunset, the Mountains of Dawn

The smell from the ship’s animal room, at first tantalizing, grew to an overpowering strength. Years before, the odor of so many closely caged animals had sickened the old one, but now it urged on her slow hunger. When she was a youth, her hunger demanded satiation, but now even her interior responses were aging. The hunger merely ached.

Inside the animal room, three dimensions of cages stretched up the floor’s curvature, enclosing fat and lethargic animals that slept, unafraid. She lifted a young one by the back of its neck. Blinking, it hung in her hand; it would not respond in fear even when she extended her silver claws into its flesh. Its ancestors had run shrieking across the desert when the old one’s shadow passed over them, but fear and speed and the chemical reactions of terror had been bred out of these beasts. Their meat was tasteless.

“Good day.”

Startled, the old one turned. The youth’s habit of approaching silently from behind was annoying; it made her fancy that her hearing was failing as badly as her sight. Still, she felt a certain fondness for this child, who was not quite so weak as the others. The youth was beautiful: wide wings and delicate ears, large eyes and triangular face, soft body-covering of fur as short as fur can be, patterned in tan against the normal lustrous black. The abnormality occurred among the first ship-generation’s children. On the home world, any infant so changed would have been exposed, but on the sailship infanticide was seldom practiced. This the old one disapproved of, fearing a deterioration in her people, but she had grown used to the streaked and swirling fur pattern.

“I greet thee,” she said, “but I’m hungry. Go away before I make thee ill.”

“I’ve become accustomed to it,” the youth said.

The old one shrugged, leaned down, and slashed the animal’s throat with her sharp teeth. Warm blood spurted over her lips. As she swallowed it, she wished she were soaring and eating bits of warm meat from the fingers of a mate or a lover, feeding him in turn. Thus she, when still a youth and not yet “she,” had courted her eldermate; thus her youngermate had never been able to court her. Two generations of her kind had missed that experience, but she seemed to regret the loss more than they did. She dismembered and gutted the animal and crunched its bones for marrow and brains.

She glanced up. The youth watched, seeming fascinated yet revolted. She offered a shred of meat.

“No. Thank you.”

“Then eat thy meat cold, like the rest of them.”

“I’ll try it. Sometime.”

“Yes, of course,” the old one said. “And all our people will live on the lowest level and grow strong, and fly every day.”

“I fly. Almost every day.”

The old one smiled, half cynically, half with pity. “I would show thee what it is to fly,” she said. “Across deserts so hot the heat snatches thee, and over mountains

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