But no matter how difficult, even disappointing, the reality of flying might be compared to his childhood conception of it, in overcoming all of that he would show what he was made of.
And that was just in this life. In the next one, perhaps it would enable him to achieve other goals. To right old wrongs and discharge old obligations.
So he had fixed up Maeve’s rig. He had loved Maeve in spite of, and even because of, certain aspects of her personality—her basic approach to life—that were manifested in every detail of the flying system she had caused to be built at the circus school. It was whimsical, ad hoc, patched together, willfully perverse, down to the level of the choice of fasteners used to hold it together and the stitching on the harness. This was a sacred artifact, not something he could simply hand off to a minion, and so C-plus had spent a year taking it apart himself, the ostrich plumes and the beadwork, the macramé, the Zuni textiles and jury-rigged intravenous plumbing, and he had put all of that stuff behind glass in a kind of museum or shrine in the corner of the new space—an old hangar at Boeing Field, formerly used for maintenance of private jets, now empty most of the time since most of that work was being performed al fresco, or even while in flight, by purpose-built robots.
All of the mechanical stuff he redid from scratch. The new harness was made just for him, with smart pads that would prevent him from getting bedsores even if he lived in it for weeks. The servos that made it zoom and veer about were beefier and yet more responsive. He added big fans that would blow wind over him when he dreamed of going into a steep power dive or soaring on a thermal.
While the engineers worked on all that, he researched the hell out of the pharmaceutical side. A lot had been learned since Maeve had started in on this. Some of the drugs she’d used to soften up her brain now seemed dangerously wrong. Some were merely useless, others had become mainstays. He tried to take enough of the right ones to give the effects he wanted while not losing the parts of his brain he needed to do his job—running a significant part of ALISS.
Not needed for ALISS were parts of his cerebellum involved in motor control and visual processing. This made it more and more awkward, as time passed and he got closer to death, to extricate himself from the device. He slept in it, dreaming of flight, hallucinating the afterlife. In the morning he opened his eyes to photons coming not from the sun, but from a rig that pretty convincingly simulated it.
“Why are you doing this to yourself?” Zula asked him.
She was far below, standing on a patch of grass—a mountain meadow that in reality was a green paint square on the hangar’s concrete floor. Her voice was raised over the roar of the fans, currently simulating a thermal. Corvallis banked in the updraft. Which was to say that he thought of trimming his wings in a certain way, and it happened: the thing on his head read his mind, the simulator calculated the effects of the movement and made it so, feeding control signals to the servos that tightened some cables while loosening others, to the fans that made the wind, to the infrared panels that simulated the warmth of sunlight, and to the audiovisual simulation running in his headgear. He wheeled to bring Zula into view, pulled up, dove, flared, perched on a branch (actually a steel pipe mounted above the green paint square). Now he was looking at her sidelong from just a few meters away. The fans shut down, creating a silence in which he could hear his engineers applauding and hooting at how neatly he’d executed the move.
“You have huge fans in both senses of the term,” Zula observed.
“That is actually an intentional part of how it all works—it’s why Maeve built hers in a circus school,” C-plus said. “It is supposed to be convincing on every level, right? Well, what does it mean for a thing to be convincing? Qualia are only part of it. I get those from the visuals, the movement, the air currents. But it turns out that we are wired for intersubjectivity. Our perception of reality is as much social as it is personal. Why are we disturbed by