Theories of Flight

3

They finally let him in, and a harassed woman on the reception desk told him where to find Madeleine. There was a wide-screen TV bolted to the wall of the foyer, and it happened to be showing a small black sphere—the silver wire tracks didn’t show up well—floating without visible means of support. There was a commotion going on in the background, and a voice cut through the noise: “Past’ zabej!”

It appeared that the kid with the camera phone had been syndicated.

Petrovitch looked up at the ward names and started down the corridor. His boots squeaked loudly on the lino floor, contrasting with the soft-footed urgency of the hospital staff, all passing him at a trot.

A MEA militiaman, body armor thrown over one shoulder, rifle over the other, limped toward him. They were about to pass each other: Petrovitch moved to the left and readied a respectful nod, but the man stepped the same way. Three more switches from one side of the corridor to the other weren’t an accident.

A palm jutted out and shoved Petrovitch backward. The man with spiky blond hair snarled from deep inside his throat.

Petrovitch didn’t have time for this. “Mudak,” he said and tried to go around the man. For his troubles, he got pushed again, hard, against the corridor wall. His spine jarred against a door frame, and the hand on his chest attempted to pin him there.

“What’s your problem?” Petrovitch jammed his glasses up his nose and eyeballed the soldier. The tab over the man’s pocket read Andersson with two esses, and he had corporal’s stripes on his arm.

“You are,” said Andersson, “fucking civilians. We’re bleeding…”

“I’ve given already.”

“… bleeding every day, to keep you safe from the Outies.” He leaned in and shouted full in Petrovitch’s face, spittle flying. “You’re not worth it. None of you. Especially a coward who expects his wife to go out and fight while he sits on his arse.”

Andersson’s armor slipped forward off his shoulder. In the momentary distraction, Petrovitch brought his knee up hard, stepped sideways and reached for the corporal’s belt. He snagged a loop and pulled hard, slamming the crown of Andersson’s bowed head against the door.

“Let’s get one thing absolutely straight.” Petrovitch wasn’t even breathing hard, while Andersson was lying on the floor, clutching himself and whimpering. “I will not be making a complaint about this, today or ever. Everyone’s allowed to make a stupid mistake now and then, and this is your turn. But if you so much as lay a finger on me again, I will break it off and ram it so far up your zhopu, you’ll need to swallow a pair of scissors to keep the nail trimmed. Got that?”

The man on the ground swallowed against the pain. “You don’t deserve her.”

“I make a point of telling her that every morning, but she seems happy enough to keep me around.” Petrovitch snorted. “If I offer to help you up, would you take it?”

“Go to hell.”

“Lie there and count your yajtza, then.” He batted at his coat and walked away. He had an audience of two green-overalled nurses and a technician. He inclined his head as he passed them. “Enjoy the show?”

The technician did a double-take. “Hey. Aren’t you that…?”

“That what?”

“On the news. Just now. The flying thing.”

“Yeah. Look,” he said, “can one of you point me to the Minor Injuries Unit?”

“Turn right at the end of this corridor,” said the tech. “But you’re, like…”

“Like really smart? I know.” He started to walk away.

“Famous. I was going to say famous.”

“Oh, I hope not.” He waved his hand in dismissal and finally found the sign telling him which way to go.

There were double doors with glass inserts, which he peered through. He could see her, sitting in the waiting room, her hands in her lap, fingers flicking through her rosary beads. Her eyes were closed, her lips barely moving. Piled next to her was her armor, folded neatly with her helmet on top. There was a gelatinous green pool of leaking impact gel collecting on the floor beneath.

Her hair had started to grow on the previously shaved front and sides of her head. She kept threatening to cut the plait off that extended from her nape to her waist, but he’d once offered the opinion that he quite liked it and, so far, it had been spared.

He pushed against one of the doors and slipped in, sitting down next to her in an identical plastic chair. Her battlesmock was open. When he leaned forward, he could see the purple bruising above the scoop of her vest top.

“Hey, Sam,” she said without opening her eyes.

“Hey,” he said. “You okay?”

“Greenstick fracture of the seventh rib, left side. Could have been worse.” The rosary beads kept clicking.

Petrovitch nodded. “There’s a shortage of perfect breasts in this world. It would be a pity to damage yours.”

“Don’t make me laugh, Sam. It hurts.”

“But you do have per—”

“Sam.” She opened one eye, then the other. She gave him a sad smile and gathered up her beads. “Can we go home?”

“Yeah. Maddy, what else?”

“What else what?”

He put his elbows on his knees. “You’ve been shot before. You’ve never called for me.”

She tried to take a deep breath, and winced halfway through. Her hands trembled, and Petrovitch put his own hand over hers.

“It can wait,” he said. “When you’re ready.”

“It…” she said, and she was crying, and hating herself for doing so, and crying all the more because of that. “Oh.”

Petrovitch just about managed to reach around her broad shoulders. She slumped against him, her cheek resting on his head. He felt her shudder and gasp for a while, then fall still.

Finally, she said, “I saw my mother today.”

Petrovitch blinked. “Your mother?”

“It was her. She actually looked sober.”

“Where was this?”

“Gospel Oak. North of there has been declared an Outzone, and the railway is now the front line. We were told to hold it.”

“Did you?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

“She was the one who shot me.”

“Chyort. That shouldn’t happen.”

“There’s a school, right next door to the station. A group of Outies came across the tracks and got into the building. We went in after them. Firefight, short range, all ducking through doorways and hiding behind furniture. Except this was a primary school, and tables built for five-year-olds don’t give me much cover.”

“And one of the Outies was your mother.” Petrovitch frowned. “How could that happen? I thought she was Inzone.”

“She was, is.” She shook her head. “Maybe they recruit as they go. I don’t know. But we still got to face each other down the length of a corridor. For the first time in five years. I assumed she’d drunk herself to death, yet there she was, larger than life, pointing a gun at me. And I dropped my weapon. I dropped my weapon and shouted ‘Don’t shoot!’ ”

“I take it she shot you.”

“The first put me on my back. I tried to get up, get my visor out of the way, so she could see who it was. She walked over to me and shot me twice more. There would have been a fourth to the head, but then the rest of my squad turned up, and she ran.”

“Pizdets.”

She sighed. “Haven’t told you the best bit yet. I was screaming ‘Mom, it’s me, Maddy’ over and over—and she had to have heard me, she was standing over me with a pistol pointed at my heart—and she still pulled the trigger. So yes, pizdets just about covers it.”

He squeezed her closer. They sat like that for a while.

“There’s a poem,” he said. “The one about your parents, how they…”

“I know it.”

“It’s true, though. They do.” Petrovitch held out his left hand and examined his ring finger. “Probably a good job we didn’t invite her to the wedding.”

She snorted. “You’re a bad man.”

“The very worst. Come on, babochka, let’s get you back to sunny Clapham.”

Madeleine disentangled herself and gathered up her dripping armor. Petrovitch took the full-face helmet by the chin-strap and let it dangle. She caught him looking at her.

“I’ll be okay,” she said. “Just, you know.”

“Yeah.” He opened the door with his foot and held it as she struggled through. “I should be carrying that.”

“It’d be easier wearing it, except that it’s pretty much unwearable. It’s only going as far as the front gate. MEA can pick it up if they want it, or just bin it.”

They turned the corner and walked down the long corridor to reception.

“Do you know a guy called Andersson?” Petrovitch asked as they past the dented door.

“Jan Andersson? He’s just been transferred in. Tall, Norwegian.”

“Yeah, that’s him. Is he all right?”

“He was in here with me. He tripped over something, hurt his knee. They stuck a needle in him and told him to go home.” Madeleine looked askance at him. “That’s not what you mean, is it?”

“No: he picked a fight with me, right about here.”

“What? In the hospital?”

“The self-defense lessons paid off.” He shrugged, and she stopped, which forced him to stop too.

“Sam? What did you do?”

“Apparently, I sit at my desk scratching my arse while my woman goes out to fight the barbarians. It seems to offend him. So much so, he tried to push me backward through a wall.”

She didn’t know what to either say or do, so Petrovitch took up the slack in the conversation.

“You’ve not mentioned him before, so I was just wondering how he got so concerned about our domestic arrangements.”

“He. What?” Both words were pronounced separately, indignantly.

“I kind of guessed as much. I’ll leave him to you, shall I?”

“How. Dare. He.”

“Maddy, people are going to figure that now you’re not a nun, they can get in your pants.”

“But. I’m. Married!”

“They probably also figure I’m not going to be much competition, either.” Petrovitch shrugged again. “You’re going to have to get used to the attention. I’m going to have to get used to it. We’ll manage.”

Her face, previously white with pain and fatigue, had colored up. “How can you be so calm? How can you just stand there and be so matter of fact?”

“Because in the four months we’ve been married, you haven’t got ugly. I know you’re a mass of neuroses and insecurities about your looks, but you turn heads when you walk down the street—and it’s not because people think you’re a freak. I know that when they see me next to you, they’re saying ‘How the huy did a pidaras like him end up with a woman like that?’ And…” He turned away. “I wake up every morning and wonder that myself.”

Madeleine’s shoulders, tense before, slowly slumped down. “Sam,” she started. Something distracted her, and Petrovitch looked round to see the technician from earlier.

“What?” he said.

“Can I,” she said hesitantly, glancing between him and Madeleine, “can I have your autograph?” She brought her hands from behind her back. There was a pen in one, a spiral-bound notebook in the other.

Petrovitch raised his eyes at the ceiling. “You really picked your moment,” he said. Then he relented, took the biro and scrawled his name at a slant across the page. He tacked on the zero potential Schrödinger, and a smiley face. When he handed it back, she almost curtsied to him before running back up the corridor, notebook clutched like it was first prize.

“Sam?”

He held her helmet to his chest and flexed his fingers against its cold ceramic surface. “It’s not important.”

“What’s not important?”

He started for the exit again, and this time forced her to follow. She repeated her question to the back of his head.

“I didn’t want to mention it. You know: yeah, so what if your long-lost mother just tried to kill you? I don’t care how upset you are because I made gravity today.” He slid his glasses up his nose and tightened his lips. “I’m not like that. Not anymore.”

The news was still playing on the wall in the foyer. He’d overtaken both Florida and Paris, and coverage was pretty much universal. One side of the screen was the loop from the camera phone. The other was a scientist he vaguely recognized talking animatedly about how the future had changed irrevocably.

Madeleine trailed after him, and she stumbled as she saw her husband declare to the world just what he thought of Stanford University.

“That’s you.”

He went back for her, took her arm and guided her outside. “You get to see me all the time.”

She tried to re-enter the foyer. “You were on the news.”

“Yes. And in twelve hours, they’ll have forgotten all about me.”

“But shouldn’t you be, I don’t know, somewhere else?” She looked over her shoulder to catch a glimpse of the rapidly shifting images. “You did it. You made it work.”

“You called me. I came.” Petrovitch clenched his jaw, then forcibly relaxed it. “I thought that was the deal. No matter what we were doing, if one of us wanted the other, they’d come. No questions, no ‘I’m a little bit busy right now.’ That was what we promised each other. Or have I got it completely wrong? Probably better I know now than find out later.”

She dropped the armor and enfolded him in her arms, pressing him against her and not letting him go, even though it had to be hurting her.

“Thank you,” she said.

Petrovitch could hear the beat of her heart, strong and steady. “That’s okay,” he mumbled.