Ким Робинсон - Pacific Edge

“I can see that. So… What’re you gonna do this afternoon?”

She hesitated. “I was thinking of going flying, actually. Work some of this out of my system.”

“Ah.”

She looked over at him. “Want to join me?”

Kevin’s heart tocked at the back of his throat. His inclination was to say “Sure!” and he always followed his inclinations; thus it was a measure of his interest that he managed to say, “If you really feel like company? I know that sometimes I just like to get off by myself….”

“Ah, well. I wouldn’t mind the company. Might help.”

“Usually does,” Kevin said automatically, not paying attention to what he was saying, or how it failed to match with what he had just said before. He could feel his heart. He grinned. “Hey, that was a hell of a play you made there.”

At a glider port on Fairhaven they untied the Sanchezs’ two-person flyer, a Northrop Condor, and after hooking it to the take-off sling they strapped themselves in and clipped their feet into the pedals. Ramona freed the craft and with a jerk they were off, pedaling like mad. Ramona pulled back on the flaps, the sling uncoupled, they shot up like a pebble from a slingshot; then caught the breeze and rushed higher, like a kite pulled into the wind by an enthusiastic runner.

“Yow!” Kevin cried, and Ramona said, “Pedal harder!” and they both pumped away, leaning back and pushing the little plane up with every stroke. The huge prop whirred before them, but two-seaters were not quite as efficient as one-seaters; the extra muscle did not quite make up for the extra weight, and they had to grind at the tandem pedals as if racing to get the craft up to two hundred feet, where the afternoon sea breeze lifted them dizzily. Even a two-seater weighed less than thirty pounds, and gusts of the wind could toss them like a shuttlecock.

Ramona turned them into this breeze with a gull’s swoop. The feel of it, the feel of flying! They relaxed the pace, settled into a long distance rhythm, swooped around the sky over Orange County. Hard work; it was one of the weird glories of their time, that the highest technologies were producing artifacts that demanded more intense physical labor than ever before—as in the case of human-powered flight, which required extreme effort from even the best endurance athletes. But once possible, who could resist it?

Not Ramona Sanchez; she pedaled along, smiling with contentment. She flew a lot. Often while working on roofs, absorbed in the labor, imagining the shape of the finished home and the lives it would contain, Kevin would hear a voice from above, and looking up he would see her in her little Hughes Dragonfly, making a cyclist’s whirr and waving down like a sweaty air spirit. Now she said, “Let’s go to Newport and take a look at the waves.”

And so they soared and dipped in the onshore wind, like their condor namesake. From time to time Kevin glanced at Ramona’s legs, working in tandem next to his. Her thighs were longer than his, her quads bigger and better defined: two hard muscles atop each leg, barely coming together in time to fit under the kneecap. They made her thighs look squared-off on top, an effect nicely balanced by long rounded curves beneath. And calf muscles out of an anatomical chart. The texture of her skin was very smooth, barely dusted by fine silky hair….

Kevin shook his head, surprised by the dreamlike intensity of his vision, by how well he could see her. He glanced down at the Newport Freeway, crowded as usual. From above, the bike lanes were a motley collection of helmets, backs, and pumping legs, over spidery lines of metal and rubber. The cars’ tracks gleamed like bands of silver embedded in the concrete, and cars hummed along them, blue roof red roof blue roof.

As they cut curves in the air Kevin saw buildings he had worked on at one time or another: a house reflecting sunlight from canopies of cloudgel and thermocrete; a garage renovated to a cottage; warehouses, offices, a bell tower, a pond house…. His work, tucked here and there in the trees. It was fun to see it, to point it out, to remember the challenge of the task met and dealt with, for better or worse.

Ramona laughed. “It must be nice to see your whole resumé like this.”

“Yeah,” he said, suddenly embarrassed. He had been rattling on.

She was looking at him.

Tall eucalyptus windbreaks cut the land into giant rectangles, as if the basin were a quilt of homes, orchards, green and yellow crops. Kevin’s lungs filled with wind, he was buoyant at the sight of so much land, and all of it so familiar to him. The onshore breeze grew stronger over Costa Mesa, and they lofted toward the Irvine Hills. The big interchange of the San Diego and Newport freeways looked like a concrete pretzel. Beyond it there was a lot of water, reflecting the sunlight like scraps of mirror thrown on the land: streams, fish ponds, reservoirs, the marsh of Upper Newport Bay. It was low tide, and a lot of gray tidal flats were revealed, surrounded by reeds and clumps of trees. They could smell the salt stink of them on the wind, even up where they were. Thousands of ducks and geese bobbed on the water, making a beautiful speckled pattern.

“Migration again,” Ramona said pensively. “Time for change.”

“Headed north.”

“The clouds are coming in faster than I thought they would.” She pointed toward Newport Beach. The afternoon onshore wind was bringing in low ocean clouds, as often happened in spring. The Torrey pines loved it, but it was no fun to fly in.

“Well, what with the council meeting it won’t do me any harm to get back a little early,” Kevin said.

Ramona shifted the controls and they made a wide turn over Irvine. The mirrored glass boxes in the industrial parks glinted in the sun like children’s blocks, green and blue and copper. Kevin glanced at Ramona and saw she was blinking rapidly. Crying? Ah—he’d mentioned the council meeting. Damn! And they’d been having such fun! He was an idiot. Impulsively he touched the back of her hand, where it rested on the control stick. “Sorry,” he said. “I forgot.”

“Oh,” she said, voice unsteady. “I know.”

“So…” Kevin wanted to ask what had happened.

She grimaced at him, intending it to be a comic expression. “It’s been pretty upsetting.”

“I can imagine. You were together a long time.”

“Fifteen years!” she said. “Nearly half my life!” She struck the stick angrily, and the Condor dipped left. Kevin winced.

“Maybe it was too long,” she said. “I mean too long with nothing happening. And neither of us had any other partners before we got together.”

Kevin almost brought up their talk over the encyclopedia in sixth grade, but decided not to. Perhaps as an example of a previous relationship it was not particularly robust.

“High school sweethearts,” Ramona exclaimed. “It is a bad idea, just like everyone says. You have a lot of history together, sure, but you don’t really know if the other person is the best partner you could have. And then one of you gets interested in finding out!” She slammed the frame above the controls, making Kevin and the plane jump.

“Uh huh,” he said. She was angry about it, that was clear. And it was great that she was letting it out like this, telling Kevin what she felt. If only she wouldn’t emphasize her points with those hard blows to the frame, so close to the controls.

Also there was hardly any resistance in his pedals. They were turning the same chain together, and she was pumping away furiously, more than enough for both of them. And they were shuddering through little sideslips every time she pounded a point home. Kevin swallowed, determined not to interrupt her thoughts with mundane worries.