Commando Bats (2 page)

My only mirror was in the tiny bathroom and shower annex. My
big, spacious room was filled wall-to-wall with books and artwork, lit by the
big skylight in the roof overhead, which was the reason I had rented the place
back in the 70s.

I put my hand over the controls of my chair, and once again
a kind of 3-D display overlaid itself on my retinas. I’d picked this chair
because it had a lift that brought me up standing, but it was an older
model — all I could get — and as I stared at the schematic, I began
to see where the makers had taken money-saving shortcuts.

If they had just . . . If I
could . . .

I can’t really explain it, except in terms of art. When I
compose a picture, the image and the means of building it are there in mind, a
cohesion somewhat like fitting together a jigsaw puzzle, in 3-D, all at once.
When I draw it, I have to reverse the process, fitting it together on the page
one bit at a time.

But this schematic? I had the cohesion in a flash, without
having to pull it apart to work it out on paper with pencil, chalks, and
acrylic. A shock ran through me, a frisson of excitement as the schematic
rippled into a new configuration and the hum changed under my hand, moving the
chair smoothly into the bathroom. With my hand still on the control panel, I
used my mind to alter the schematic so that the lift would bring me upright.

It worked.

I stared into the mirror. Looking back at me was the same sallow-olive
blob of a face that had looked back at me all my life, gradually sagged by time
and gravity, unnoticed until the stroke pulled down the right side of my mouth.
Plain brown hair, brown eyes — my Aunt Abby had said when I turned sixteen
that I got the worst of both sides of the family: Italian olive and Middle
Eastern saffron. Mix that with my granddad’s stolid Dutch farmer build, and the
result was roughly the shape and coloring of a potato. My saving grace in
school had been my drawing, wherein I could escape the dingy, boring everyday
tread of reality into flights of fantasy and magic.

I’d chosen escapism because it was fun, and finally a way to
earn bread and rent. But I didn’t believe any of it. The world was too dull and
predictable for surprises. All it was good for was horror, and that was largely
human-caused, except when nature opened a random can of whoop-ass.

So what kind of world was this? Hera and Athena? Olympian
gods? Powers?

“Come on, Nancy,” I slurred to my blob of a face, only the
left side of my mouth moving. “Reading science fiction and fantasy since you
were eight. You can handle this!”

I looked down at the chair, and issued a command: “Turn into
a hover chair.”

Nothing happened.

I put my hand over the control and impatiently tried to wish
the chair into flying. The electricity hummed fretfully, and a faint smell of
metallic burn hit my nose. I jerked my hand away from the control. Shut my
eyes. Carefully put my hand over the controls again, and once more saw the
schematic. Oh. I’d overloaded the wiring here . . .

Another, more subtle ripple of changes, and the lift lowered
with a quiet hum. It was a different hum, indicating a more efficient flow of
electrons.

Okay. Whatever I was doing seemed to adhere in some way to
the laws of physics.

Still keeping my hand over the controls, I used that mental
schematic to propel the chair back into the room, where I put in some time
doing chair dancing: back-and-forth, around, lift, turn, lower, slow. Fast. In
this way, I got a sense of how much stress the framework could take, and I also
discovered how much electricity I could move. Basically, it seemed to be the
limit of whatever power source I could tap into, as long as I didn’t let too
much friction or heat build up. I might not be able to write an equation to
save my life, but my nose could detect heat, and the hum would change to the
rough sound of angry bees.

I loved the idea of a flying chair, but a jet-chair would
mean mega-hot fires inches below my butt. Not practical!

Hovercraft use blowers to produce a large volume of air
below the hull that is slightly above atmospheric pressure. The pressure
difference between the higher pressure air below the hull and lower pressure
ambient air above it produces lift, but those things don’t get very far above
the ground. Could I really make this thing fly?

After testing the chair various ways, I figured out how to
get the electricity to lift it directly into the air without falling apart.
Two, three seconds I hovered an inch or two off the ground, then THUMP!

The framework jolted threateningly, and the battery, which
had been full when I got home, hit zero hard. Okay, I needed a sturdier
framework and a bigger schematic — a way to tap into more electrical
power.

First things first. With all my piddly strength I hand-wheeled
the chair a yard to the plug, got it recharging, caught my breath and shifted
into my old trusty wheelchair. Then I took another deep breath and looked
around.

The sun was going down, and I hadn’t had anything to eat or
drink for hours. Even two-handed, I had never been much of a cook, and my
little corner kitchen was not conducive to complicated preparation even if I
had had the patience. Since the stroke, one of my landlords in the front house,
a professional chef, had taken it upon himself to prepare me a bunch of healthy
but delicious meals that I could zap.

As I picked out my favorite tilapia cooked in white wine,
onion and garlic, with brown rice, and yellow squash sprinkled with dill, I
thought, do I tell James and Kenneth? They’d been my landlords since the
hippies sold the place in the mid-80s. They were excellent landlords — it
was they who’d upgraded the place and fixed the leaky skylight, which I suspect
the hippies had installed during one of their many chemical explorations during
the drug-hazed seventies. They’d also had my shower redone so that I could get
in and out on my own. They were my substitute family, as my brother was
somewhere in Africa.

I wheeled into the yard, then stopped. If I started babbling
about Hera and powers, they’d think I’d gone round the bend, and if they asked
me to prove it . . . what then?

Yeah, what then?

Hera (or whoever she was; I still couldn’t get my mind
around Ancient Greek Goddess. Easier to believe she was an alien in that guise)
hadn’t said anything about secrecy. What she had said, was she wanted proof
that old women were wise. How wise was it to invent a flying wheelchair?

I knew a whole bunch of fellow wheelers who would give me a
big thumbs up on that one.

I began the turn when a familiar cheery caw caught me:
“Nancy!”

It was my neighbor, Twila Dewey.

“Where you going like a house on fire?”

Twila was ninety-two, and lived in the apartment over the
garage next-door. She often sat out on her balcony, and though she didn’t seem
to have a cell-phone, judging by the loud ring from her place, she didn’t need
one. She ought to be at the NSA giving them lessons on espionage, Kenneth had
said once.

“Plumbing,” I lied.

“Stay on it,” Twila advised. “Though I will say for those
two fellas, no slouches as landlords. Which is more than I can say for Mr.
Mingus across the street. Did you know he raised the rent on the Tolberts
again, just because they got a kitten? Two hundred simoleons for a kitten!
Imagine! Wonder what he’d charge if they got a horse?” She cackled at her own
wit.

The “ding” went off on the microwave. Saved by the bell! “My
food. Bye, Twila!” I called as I retreated.

Her cracked voice followed me. “Remember your PT, Nancy.
You’ll be walking in no time, just don’t slack off!”

I shut my door, and sat down to eat. Before I finished, my
cell rang.

There was Bettina’s alto voice, her precise consonants. “Is
this Nancy? We’ve got to talk.”

~~~

We met at a coffee shop on PCH, as I don’t have a car. I
got there first, not having to deal with traffic or parking, which meant they
didn’t have to stand around awkwardly while I wrestled myself from my
half-charged scooter to walker to booth.

They arrived about thirty seconds apart. Bettina took over
with the brisk assurance of a veteran high school teacher — which it
turned out she was. Thirty-five years. She’d clearly decided to make the best
of this situation as she greeted us by name, told us the above, then asked what
we both do.

“Artist,” I said, leaving out the verb “was.”

That got a flicker of interest from Cecile, until Bettina
asked what medium, and if my work was on display anywhere. “On the science
fiction and fantasy shelves of bookstores” got a noncommittal expression from
Bettina, and from Cecile the faint, wrinkled upper lip of the grand lady
picking a dead spider out of her
foie
gras terrine périgourdine.

Bettina turned to Cecile.

“I never worked,” she said, that goose-egg of a diamond
flashing on her left hand.

By then I pretty much hated her, sitting there so poised in
her eight hundred dollar haircut, even more expensive clothes and matching bag
and shoes.

I bet she votes Republican, I thought with totally
non-bigoted charity, when Bettina said, “So what did you two do when you got
home? As near as I can figure, what I do is a plasma channel,” and seeing
incomprehension in Cecile and me, “where lightning and lasers intersect. I
shorted out every circuit in my house. In fact, I am pretty sure I took down
the entire block, and that was after I burned a hole through my kitchen wall,
cutting a chunk from the oak tree out front. My husband’s in Israel on a dig,
which is good. But I’m going to have to tell him something.”

“I think I can fix it,” I said. “Not the tree. The juice.”

My words slur. I sound drunk. People tend to look away when
I speak, so having two pairs of eyes skewer me caused my head to turtle into my
shoulders. I added wimpily, “I think.”

I explained in two sentences about my first experiments,
then, “On my way here. Waiting at a corner for a red. Touched the traffic light
pole. Schematic, local power grid. Found four burned out traffic lights. Fixed ’em.
At least, I think so. Didn’t actually see them.” I hadn’t talked so much in
weeks. My lips and jaw felt overworked.

Bettina said to Cecile, “So what did you learn? Or did you
try anything?”

Cecile’s perfectly lip-sticked mouth contracted again, and I
thought she was going to ignore Bettina altogether, when a cheerful young guy
with a shock of red hair bounced up. “May I take your order?”

We all ordered something we didn’t want — lemonade for me,
with a straw — and when he went away, Cecile glanced from Bettina, who was still
waiting, to me, to the big window looking out at the nighttime traffic, then
she said, “I destroyed my condominium.”

“What?”

“What?”

Cecile gave a shifty look at the other tables, whose
occupants clearly felt no interest whatsoever in three old women. After a long
pause, the wait-person reappeared with all our various liquids.

When he was gone, Cecile seemed to come to a decision. She
squared her elegant shoulders and said, “I am a walking cliché. Today my
husband of forty-two years informed me that he is feeling old and stale, and he
needs a fresh start.”

Bettina sat back, and all my annoyance zapped away, leaving
a pool of guilt sloshing inside me with the unwanted lemonade as Cecile said,
“What he meant was that I’m the old and stale part of his life. It seems he has
fallen in love.” She made air quotes. “He wouldn’t tell me her age, but made a
lot of promises about how he would take care of me — I would get my half of
everything — how much he appreciated my support and. . . .” Her voice went
husky and uneven. She caught herself up, and her smile turned bitter. “When I
tell you that he is bald, fat, and looks his age — four years older than I am — then I feel I am justified in wondering if this May and December romance is
really May and Money. Our money.”

She picked up her coffee spoon, poured in a delicate dollop
of soy milk, and stirred the spoon around and around as she said, “I guess I
should have seen it coming. I wondered why he bought a sports car, when he
would never let our sons drive it. Went on a diet, for the first time in his
life. Stopped going to church — he had more cases to review — he said
he was at the courthouse — and all those late nights.” She paused, then
burst out, “I can just see her twining his tie around her finger like some
Fanny Dashwood in Prada, and I will end up with nothing.”

She paused, as if she didn’t expect the black woman and the
half-zombified geek to understand the Jane Austen reference (or maybe it was
Prada?), and I got annoyed with her all over again.

Bettina said dryly, “I’ve been teaching
Sense and Sensibility
to high school honors students for thirty
years.”

“And I’ve seen the movies,” I said. “That includes the one
about Prada.”

Cecile gave me a funny look, and I felt a pulse of guilt for
my leaden irony, then she whirled that spoon faster in the cup, scrape, scrape,
scrape. “We married the week I graduated from USC. I’ve never had a job. If he
takes everything to give it to her . . .” Scrape, scrape,
scrape. Then she said so low I almost didn’t hear her, “I don’t know what to
do.”

“First thing you do, girl,” Bettina stated, “is get your own
lawyer. Do not let him sweet-talk you into using one of his friends.”

Cecile looked startled. “I —” She reddened. “Jack
Pennington is an old family friend. We and the Penningtons are godparents to
each others’ children, and attended all their weddings. Ralph suggested I use
him, and I thought, at least he’d keep it discreet . . .” She
trailed off as Bettina rolled her eyes. “What?” Cecile asked, looking wary, her
tone affronted.

“If everybody in your world isn’t already gossiping, then I
will eat that spoon you keep swishing around. The wife is always the last to
know.”