James Van Pelt - Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille

His class turned away obediently and filed onto the narrow stairway with its protective handrails. William watched them leave. I can give you nothing, he thought. He knew that for the next twenty minutes, their earphones would direct their attention to the rock formations, to the pinion pine that clung precariously to tiny outcroppings, to the vistas beyond, and when they reached the next rest stop, where he was supposed to speak again, that the DT would recognize he was not there and fill in with something appropriate. The class wouldn’t know that he was supposed to accompany them the whole way. They’d never miss him.

Jonas, the last student, vanished down the trail, and William remained, leaning against the cool sandstone rock he’d lectured to them from. Within a minute, he heard the footsteps of the next group coming down the path, so he climbed over the low restraining fence and hurried out of sight up the canyon rim.

Within fifty yards of where he’d left the path, his earphone chirped, and an official sounding voice warned him that he was violating park rules and must return to the marked trail. William pulled the earphone out and placed it on top of his DT. His hand seemed strangely empty without it; a breath of air cooled the sweat in his ear. Then he continued walking the rim.

He thought about Leslie Franklin. They’d talked every morning for the last forty-four years, but they’d never met. She’d married twice during the years. He’d attended the ceremonies electronically. He’d consoled her when the first marriage fell apart, and then when her second husband passed away. They exchanged gifts on Christmas and birthdays. They’d co-authored papers together. He wondered what she smelled like. He wondered what it would have been like to have touched her hair.

In places, the rock slope fell gradually down in a confusion of crevices and boulders. He could see the deep fall in the gaps between them. In other places, long tables of rock, broken sharply away told him where the edge was. Further up canyon, some of them protruded beyond the cliff wall, so if he stood at the precipice, he might actually be dozens of feet over the drop already, with nothing between him and a thousand foot plummet except the lip of stone that supported him. He walked as close to the edge as he could; at times letting the edge of his shoe overlap, not really paying attention, feeling no vertigo, but his right hand waved airily over the nothingness beyond.

He blinked slowly, still walking, so for two or three steps at a time, he couldn’t see where he was going, but the breeze brushed his face, and he felt an almost bat-like sense of where he was, as if he was flying on the edge, not walking. Sand scrunched. Branches creaked. Leaves rustled. Real air! Real sand! Contact! he thought, and he pictured a stride into wind, into real stone.

William stopped and faced the canyon. He closed his eyes. Sunlight pressed warmly on his face. Stone rested solidly beneath his heels, and he could feel the naked pull of the canyon in his chest. He let the breeze sway him back and forth. This is good, he thought. This is real and proper. Tears rolled off his cheeks, but he didn’t feel sad right now, he felt better than he’d been all day.

After a while, feeling very centered, a long, long reach away from his class and the DTs and forty-four years of teaching, he looked where he faced. A dozen feet away, balanced on an updraft and as still as the rocks around him, a raven floated in the air. William stared back. Nothing moved, and for a spooky, surreal second, William thought that he’d slipped out of time; the world had stopped and he was the ghost in the eternal and unchanging now. Then the raven cocked its head from one side to the other seeming to examine him with shiny, black glass eyes.

Then it dropped a wing and glided swiftly away.

Leslie had said that she didn’t want to learn anything that she couldn’t learn by being there. And he wondered if she had meant by that that she wanted to learn the things that couldn’t be tested, measured or described. How do you evaluate seeing the raven? How do you teach it?

The tears began to dry on his cheeks, pulling at the skin, and he realized where he stood, toes suspended over the rocks far below. He stepped back.

“You’re not supposed to be there, are you?” a voice asked.

William didn’t turn immediately. He tried to hold onto the feeling that possessed him, but the immediacy of the question drove it back. Not completely. He could still sense it, a tinge of connection. Real world. Real lessons. Real learning.

He turned. Jonas stood beside a clump of sage, his serious face inscrutable. “This is off limits,” he said.

William sighed and pressed his hands into the small of his back. The muscles there ached suddenly, and it took a concentrated effort to make them relax.

“You’re not supposed to be here either,” said William.

“I know. What were you doing?”

In the canyon, William saw the raven, now just a black dot sliding along a cliff wall. “Well,” he said, “I’m not sure.” He thought about all the things he could say to the boy, all the things the DT had told him about learning style and modes of instruction, and he decided just to answer the question. “I think I was thinking about who I am.”

“Really?” said Jonas. He approached the edge and sat down, his feet dangling over the precipice. “What did you learn?”

“I don’t know yet.”

Jonas seemed to absorb that for a moment. The floor of the canyon spread out beneath their feet. William let his heels bounce off the unyeilding wall. In DT conferences, William always answered questions quickly, or formulated advice for his students even as the student spoke so there would be no wasted time, but here, with Jonas on the edge of a cliff, he didn’t want to speak. He had nothing to say.

Finally, as if to fill the silence, Jonas said, “Did you see that crow?”

“Crows have fan shaped tails.” William scrunched his fingertips against the rock. Gritty bits rolled beneath them, and he knew that if he sat there forever and kept rubbing his fingers back and forth in the same spot, he’d eventually wear away grooves in the stone. He would leave a mark. “That bird’s tail was like a wedge. It was a raven.”

“Oh,” said Jonas. “I didn’t know.”

They talked for a half hour more. Cloud shadows moved across the floor of the canyon. Swifts dove by, cutting the air with abrupt rips. William’s legs grew cold against the stone, but he felt no urge to move.

Finally, an angry voice called from behind them, “Hey! You two are way out of bounds. What do you think you’re up to?” It was a park ranger.

Jonas said, “This is my teacher. He was teaching me something.”

William nodded.

The problem with running full reality skin shell rentals is that everyone wants to try the vices. You’d think with so many other ways to get the experience of visiting remote archeological sites that booting into a rental wouldn’t hold much attraction, but there are kinds for every kind, as they say, so we keep a stock of fully functioning skin shells. It’s supposed to make the experience more “authentic,” whatever that means, but the real draw, as I said, is the vice.

As one of the curators, I’m booted into a shell semi-permanently, of course. Hands, face, feet, hair, teeth: the whole package. When I’m not interpreting the data the ancients left behind, I run tours and help customers orient themselves to the new equipment. Bipedal locomotion, for example, takes some time to master, and binocular vision with the eyes on top of the organism can also be confusing. Why the feet have to be so far from the sensing organs is beyond me, but that’s the way this species worked. No wonder there aren’t any of them around any more.