The Wind Spindle, Part 1Kallo glided through the clear Martian sky, looking for a devil to ride into space. She opened her arms wide, catching an updraft, gliding higher to her favorite altitude. Five kilometers up, the air pressure was just low enough to give a spaciousness in her chest that was like euphoria. She guided her eye camera over the landscape of Mars below, fromcentral Grid Tower carved into Citadel Cliff to the mosaic of pearlescent ice-glass windows of the basalt cave cities of Dxi.
She dropped her left wing and barrel rolled twice, correcting her glide to get another shot of the landscape on this bright morning. One hundred kilometers to the west of the oxblood-colored cliffs on the buff canyon floor, herds of ironwool sheep meandered along the trench steppes south of New Khan. The yurts and hogans of Kinlani were obscured now by the misty circles of the central atmospheric processors (the villagers called them CAPS) spewing the moist mix of nitrogen and O2 over the little communities, creating the bumpy pillow of air up here.
“How was that? Good live shot?” She said into her comm.
“Perfect, Puffin. Interworld will love it for an intro. I'll send it,” her father's voice replied.
“I'm going to take a break, Daddy.”
“You're opening the exhibition.”
Kallo sighed. “The dancers haven't started yet. I'll just be a minute.”
“The transmission starts in five. And don't you try to-“
Kallo ticked her left shoulder, muting her comm. He hated that. But she had one errand before the show.
She tucked her arms tight to her sides and pulled her legs together in a dive. Cliff walls striped with desert varnish zipped by as she pitched into Olivine Canyon. She pulled her legs forward and apart; her ironsilk wings and legwing, which pulled taught between her legs, caught the thin Mars air but would never have been enough on their own to slow her to landing speed. She tensed the muscles in her forearms, causing her skin to pull on the silk anchor patches embroidered into her epidermis.
She felt the soft jerk as the air caught thousands of silk microfeathers emerging from the suit. She rolled her right shoulder, releasing the tail, which plumed and rippled behind her as she brought her arms high and back in a sudden braking posture. Her small chute deployed; she touched down on Olivine Mesa. The chute and tail chased her, rolling and folding themselves into tight packs on the back of the suit as she ran with an awkward, pigeon-toed lope. Kallo's ankles had never been strong and she had never been gainful on foot. She slowed next to the cliff edge and plopped down, legs crossed.
Her mask, eye shield and hood slid back, releasing her coarse shrub of short black hair. The dry, cold sting of true atmo instantly dried the sweat on the bridge of her wide, flat nose and her delicate upper lip. She rubbed her hooded eyes with the back of her gloved hand, blinking them quickly in a flicker of silver irises.
She laughed as a dozen crows circled and began landing around her.
“You are so slow!” She pulled a package from her belt, sifting crumbs of pinion cookies made with yucca honey and cactus figs. She scattered the crumbs, which tumbled along the sandstone in the canyon breeze, but kept a large one in her palm.
“Goat, come here.”
A small crow with grizzled feathers bristling on the back of his head suggesting horns and one tarnished iris hopped onto her arm. Goat was descended at least one hundred generations ago from the most recent adapted crows, but he already showed a sign of mutation: he had only the one mercurial, radiation-reflecting eye and even that was deteriorating. Kallo's mother had designed the self-updating adapted gene code, but crows mutated very quickly. The imperfection made her feel closer to Goat and to her mother,plus her father knew nothing about her secret friendships, which gave her deep satisfaction. She stroked the black bird's ruffled head, and then offered the cookie fragment in her hand.
“Got a show today, Goat,” she said. “So wish me good winds. I'm looking for the right devil today.”
“You're that spinner,” said a soft voice behind her. Kallo jumped. She had never seen another person up here on the mesa.
The old woman's face was deeply creased and red-brown, her hair tied at the back of her head in a mound under her sheepskin hood and compressed by her cheap glass and leather goggles. Tendrils of white escaped and fluttered around her face. The laser brand on her cheek, logo of the long gone Iron Sheep Corporation, had been burned so deeply into her double-thick skin that it must have been too risky to cut it out. The poor old thing didn't even have adapted skin. Kallo had a moment of pity for the everlasting mark, mixed with revulsion at the idea of skin that never sluffed. She was so old!
The woman was swinging a long spindle and feeding a large fluff of ivory wool onto it, churning yarn without a glance at her hands. “But spinning isn't everything,” she said.
Kallo had seen herders on the steppes and workers in the silk labs hand spinning since she could remember. So many people just stood around on the ground all the time, making yarn and other stupid things and meditating on Spider Woman. Kallo was instantly bored by the woman and wanted her to go away.
“How long have you been twelve years old?” the woman asked.
“Ten years,” Kallo's voice was leaden with resentment. “You can read all about it on the grid.”
Same questions every time. People could just read about her on all the grid fan pages. Why did they always want to make her listen to their morbid curiosity when they met her? It was just one reason Kallo hated most people.
Goat bounced over to the old woman and flapped his wings twice, raising himself to the level of her shoulder and settling there. Jealousy kicked under Kallo's breastbone. She wanted to call him back.
“So you are a made, but still you’re a child of fate.”
Kallo glared. “Everyone knows my mother made me. I'm her design. But I'm her child, and my father’s.” she snapped. She waited for more insulting questions, but the woman did not ask the usual ones after that. Instead she said,
“Your mother gave you a Greek name. Do you know about the Fates?”
Kallo scanned the pale grey sky. She opened her mouth wide and sucked air through her mouth and nose at the same time, tasting very faint juniper ash and burnt mutton grease from a miner's lunch fire(they were not supposed to burn above ground)and iron ore. That mine was 40 kilometers away to the southeast, which was also the source of the prevailing winds. She gazed at the distant, feather-fine cirrus clouds. A dust devil could get pulled up very high in the atmosphere today. This thought made her heart race.
“The Fates are three goddesses,” the old woman lifted her goggles and placed them on her forehead, blinking rapidly as her Earth eyes met the merciless, dry cold. “One goddess spins the wool, the next measures, and the last one cuts. You are young and still spinning. But one day you must measure, make decisions. And one day you must decide to let go of something. One day you must make a cut.”
Kallo stood, with only a slight stumble. “Kid stories. My Daddy raised me on science, not things that never even happened. Why are you up here?”
“I came to tell you. One of the Blue Flint Boys is going to break his ax today.”
Kallo scowled. The Blue Flint Boys? That's what they called the Pleiades in Kinlani. Was that supposed to mean some kind of radiation event? She snorted. Her daddy knew everything about space weather. If something was coming, he would already know it.
“Why don't you go jump off, grandmother?”
“My name is Dohna.” Dohna covered her eyes again with her goggles and resumed her craft. Her thick knuckles danced as the yarn whipped, piling onto the spindle even as it bobbed and swayed in the gusty winds. Kallo turned away, looking to the sky.
Not many air molecules up there, she thought. But she longed to get high enough to see the curve of the world dissolving into space, to see the sky going black. Riding a devil all the way up, if she could hold her breath long enough, gain enough velocity on the initial jump this time...
Gote jumped from Dohna's shoulder and glided to Kallo's. He cawed and hopped down her arm.
“Daddy says I'll pass out before I get to see the black,” she whispered to him, turning her back once more on Dohna. “But I’m going to make it. I just need the right devil. Well, it’s show time!” She puckered her lips. Goat met them with his beak, spread his wings, and leaped into the restless air.
Kallo gave herself a shake. The flight suit shifted in some places, rotated slightly in others, and clung to her child's form as the network of integrated microbots in the suit's armature readjusted to her posture. The dull grey triple ironsilk fabric stretched and tucked a million tiny pleats, drawing into an exact fit over her skin. She ticked her chin down, making her eye shield and membrane-thin atmo mask close again over her face, and checked the readout on the inside of the mask. All the components of the suit were on line and show-ready, including her chutes and cocoon ballute, wings, spoilers, tail and legwing.
But she couldn't go like this. The default setting of reflective gray made her virtually invisible in fight.
“Orange!” said Kallo, and the suit blushed brighter and brighter, stopping at a blinding orange with dancing gold designs that changed direction every few seconds, scrolling across the fabric like ripples on water.
Kallo ran seven steps, leaped, pushed off the ground with her hands and flipped once, twice, twisted, thrust her wings wide and just missed Dohna, her toes brushing past the old woman's face as she dove and caught the downdraft from Olivine Mesa, swooping out of the canyon.
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