Balloon

From CleanPosts

THE BALLOON

Hope was not startled when a beautiful woman appeared at the edge of the wooded slope next to her swing set. There was something familiar about her. The woman stopped there and smiled at Hope, with her lower body still hidden from view. She had gentle, almost fragile features, like a porce- lain doll, and her strawberry-blond hair fell almost to her shoulders in delicate waves. When the little girl smiled back, the woman walked the rest of the way up the hill.

"Hello Hope," she said in an Isle of Wight accent morphed by years of liv- ing abroad. "Do you remember me?"

"I don't think so. I'm not supposed to talk to strangers."

The woman extended an arm. "But your mother sent me to pick you up."

Hope shook her head. "It's not my mother's week until Sunday night."

"I know you love Victoria very much, Hope, but you really have three moth- ers. Did you know that?"

"Three mothers?"

She counted them off on her fingers. "First there is Victoria, who raised you. Next there is me, Lilith, who protects you. And finally there is your real mother Robyn Shy Bear. You do know who Round Robyn is, I am quite sure."

Hope's mouth made a big letter O. "Round Robyn is my mother?"

"Yes Hope, it's true! We mustn't forget that Victoria shall always be your mum. But I am the wife of Round Robyn. I have a wife and I am her wife. So you have three mums."

Hope dimpled her chin in dismay. "My real mother is a weirdo? Euuwwwghh!"

"Sugar, you don't know enough about it to say that to me. You are just a child."

Hope looked at the house. "I think I should tell Daddy you're here."

Lilith shook her head gently. "If you do that, he won't let me take you to see Round Robyn. And she has waited a very long time to see you. I was there when your story began. If not for me, you would not be. Would you like to hear that story?"

Hope nodded. "Am I really adopted?" All children eventually wondered that very thing, going back to the earliest days of the species.

"Yes Hope, you really are adopted. There is a good reason it had to be that way. Please take my hand and walk with me, and I will tell you every- thing."

This "abduction" could not be coerced in any way. If all went well, then Robyn herself would review Hope's memories of the next few days in a very intimate way that Hope and most other people could not even imagine. Robyn required that Hope be allowed to assert her own free will in this operation at every step. Anything less would utterly negate the point.

Hope came to her decision and took Lilith's hand, with only a second, final glance back at the house. She did worry that her father would soon miss her.

The fair woman was Lilith Gervasi, named after the Hebrew demon who killed infants and stole children at night. The significance of that was not lost on her as she led Hope on a secret way down to the Black River. In Round Robyn's world there was no such thing as a coincidence.

Thoughts of meeting her real mother led Hope to ask her new guide if she was going to meet any brothers or sisters.

"Robyn had another daughter named Joy, and she was special too, in her very own way."

"Will I meet her?"

"Oh, I'm very sorry Sugar, but Joy died two years ago." Lilith was careful to use the word 'died' and not 'passed away'. Robyn was disgusted by par- ents who poisoned the minds of their children with language about going somewhere after death, and Lilith, despite her Jewish beliefs, or perhaps reinforced by them, quite agreed.

"That's very sad."

"Don't be sad, Hope, your sister Joy had a very full and happy life. She had quite a good run of it, you see. Joy died at the age of eighty-nine."

At the precipice of the Green River Gorge they struck off to the west, fol- lowing a path along the the rim. Hope stopped from time to time to leave little "snowmen" made from stones along the trail, and Lilith pretended not to see them. She did, however, slow her pace so Hope would never be too far behind.

At one such stop Lilith shuddered with a sudden chill under the same pink and purple sky that Victoria had seen on the way to David's house. By now Hope had been missed, and Sheriff Vic would soon be looking for her.

As for Hope, she displayed not the slightest sign of fatigue.

One time the girl asked her, "Why do we have to go this way to see my Mom- mie?"

Lilith squatted down on her haunches so she could look Hope directly in the eye and let her see the truth of her words. "There will be other people looking for you tonight and some of them are not very nice."

Hope's eyes went wide with surprise, and even a twinge of regret. She was certainly finished building trail markers.

Lilith didn't confuse Hope with the details of two feints involving two other children being performed this very night by Hunky in Miami and Mi- chelle in Sasebo, Japan. Not even the Bunners knew which child of the three was the real Hope.

"Why are they looking for me?" Hope asked.

There would never be any reason to lie to Hope, so Lilith spoke only truth to her. "Because you are the most important person in the world."

High above a wild stretch of the Green River far from any eyes a water pipeline was slung across the deep gorge, with a precarious wooden walkway slung beneath it to allow repairs to the pipe. It amounted to a footbridge across the river, but very few people knew it existed, even in the King County Water Authority. There was just enough light remaining for Lilith and Hope to use it to cross over to the south rim.

On the other side of the river was the remains of a gravel road, choked with weeds as the road slowly transformed into a footpath. A small con- crete shed with a locked and rusty metal door was there, but moss was be- ginning to crawl up the side of its walls. Lilith guessed that no one from the Water Authority had serviced the pipe here for at least five years.

The place was not entirely devoid of human evidence. A large pile of flat- tened beer cans attested to the onetime popularity of this site for par- ties, possibly kids from Green River High School judging from the graffiti on the water pipe and tool shed.

But even those signs were at least two years old, the freshest paint de- clared that the "Green River Class of '35 Roolz, Viewmont Droolz".

So here in this dark, forlorn cul-de-sac Lilith Gervasi uncurled a bedroll, a sleeping bag, and invited Hope to sit. They shared a large can of soup, the kind that heats itself up when you peel off the top. Hope did not get tired or sweat, but she did eat, and she did sleep. And most importantly, Lilith knew, for it was the essential heart of all her efforts and all of Robyn's designs, Hope did dream.

   * * * * * 

It was another flying dream. Hope was sitting on the back of a gentle drag- on. She had a diamond sword in her hand named Dragonthorn, and wherever she pointed the blade, the dragon would fly in that direction. And somehow she knew the dragon was named Demonstick. His leathery scales twisted un- der Hope as he moved his wings.

Riding along with Hope was her father, seated behind her, a and his name was Brogan, but at the same Hope remembered her real father was named Da- vid, and her real mother was named Victoria. The opposing concepts did not clash in Hope's mind at all. Dreams are just like that.

They flew along the edge of a large bay, and the entire coast was lined with a very high and long wall of stone. Sometimes the dragon flew low enough to the ground that Hope could see astonished looks on the faces of many people standing on the wall.

Then Hope would raise Dragonthorn straight up, and Demonstick would begin to labor with great flaps of his articulated wings to take them high into the white sky again.

When they were so high that Hope could not even see the people standing on the wall anymore, she stretched Dragonthorn straight out in front of her. Then Demonstick stopped flapping his wings to rest, and they coasted on a straight line for a while, dropping slowly back toward the ground again as they raced forward. Brogan and Hope all had to shout to be heard by each other over the wind of their passage, but Hope did not feel cold. It seemed like the land had been made for people to live in.

Then the wall turned a corner and ran across the land far from the bay, but the bay narrowed to the mouth of a wide and twisting river with many is- lands in it. A town passed under them on the left, and a flat, swampy land passed under them on the right. Hope's father-mother Brogan told her to steer the dragon up the river.

Later the river forked, with a branch running to the left and to the right. Brogan told Hope to steer Demonstick to the left, along the larger branch of water. After that, Hope looked down and saw a thick forest of trees on the banks of the river.

There was a calm little round pool of water down there among the trees, surrounded by wooden planks and a low mound of Earth.

Looking ahead, Hope could see the river was about to fork again, and she asked her father-mother which way to go. Left or right?

"Neither," Brogan told her, "for there at the branching of the rivers Sa- bik and Armak is our destination: Atria, capital city of Alodra and the castle of Queen Firegem."

And when they were directly over it, Hope pointed the Dragonthorn straight down. Demonstick complied by diving on the city like a bird of prey.

   * * * * * 

In the morning Lilith and Hope reached a great bend of the Black River, a thumb of land that was the center and source of all the strangeness of this odd corner that Victoria called Gonorrhea Gulch. Even Lilith felt a little confused, as though she were walking inside a dream.

Long ago this bend of the river had been the site of a village of Original Inhabitants too small to be a tribe, but too large to be a clan. They called themselves simply The People. And here they had dug a perfectly circular pond, with a grassy mound that looped all the way around it.

Lilith took her blade and cut the remains of Hope's tattered yellow dress from her and laid it partly inside the water of the pond and partly on the ground along its edge. Then she pointed at her. Hope, take off your pan- ties and let them fall to the ground.

Why? Hope was not naturally body-shy but she had been socialized to some- thing akin to embarrassment at a request like this.

Because your mother wants the people who are looking for us to think that I was a bad man who hurt you and left you in the water. That will give us the time we need to get away from here.

Hope had quickly come to trust her Momma Lilith because Lilith immediately answered every question she had, without a hint of holding something back. Children were naturally talented at detecting lies. Hope accepted this answer, but she said, "Momma Vic is going to wonder why I didn't scratch the bad man."

Lilith looked at her. "Ah yes, you have a little surprise for bad men, don't you, Hope? Razor blades for fingernails, eh?"

Hope nodded and complied with the command to strip, and Lilith saw that Hope was absolutely blank between her legs, like a Barbie Doll. Hope her- self showed a few signs of being self-conscious, but it was only a thin layer, like a tradition she never fully bought into.

"I know why you're looking at me, Momma Lilith. I don't look like the oth- er girls down here. Or even like a boy."

"I played 'Doctor' when I was your age too, Hope," Lilith told her. Then she broke into a sudden smile, thinking of how it must have went, when Hope was revealed to possess no trace of labia. "I bet the boy was scared and ran away, didn't he?"

Hope nodded and smiled in return. She didn't tell Lilith that the other girl had run away too, or that she herself had run home crying, with many questions to ask Momma Vic. That was the crucial time last summer when Hope found out who and what she really was.

And when Hope's mind survived without entering a spiral of depression, when Hope emerged on the other side of that knowledge with greater strength, Lilith knew it was time to make her move.

So no genitalia for Hope at all. No front door, no back door, nothing to offer a molester. The scenario originally envisioned by Robyn seven years ago was that a child rapist killed Hope in a frustrated rage and cast her body into this pool to hide it. And if any searchers tried to dredge the pond (the surviving searchers, that is), there was another plan to deal with that.

To replace Hope's own clothing, Lilith gave Hope another garment, a camou- flaged man's shirt that came nearly to her knees, and so served as another dress. "You'll have to wear this, honey. By some oversight, they don't make camo for little girls."

"Where are we going, Momma Lilith?"

"Not far. Right up there, see? They call it Doll Hill these days. But not before."

"What did they call it before?"

"End Dome."

"End Dome? Why did they call it that?"

"Well, it's like a little round footstool here where the Cascade mountain range ends. End Dome, get it? And like many other things here in your backyard, Hope, it is wrapped up with a lot of history, and not much of that history was good."

   * * * * * 

So while the greater Puget Sound megasprawl was almost totally shut down and asleep on a dreary gray and cold Thanksgiving morning, little Hope Fel- ton and her guardian Lilith Gervasi ascended Doll Hill, formerly known as End Dome, and for both of them the climb was a joy.

On the lower slopes the underlying brush was suppressed by bark shed by cedar trees, which over many years had been compressed into a strange rub- bery surface that Hope dubbed Brown Land, framed by intricate staircases made of exposed tree roots. Even when she occasionally slipped and fell, there was little chance of injury in a forest that seemed to be fashioned like a giant trampoline.

At another point higher up, Hope found her self in a small shady field of baby pine cones, a clean surface she could roll in and even pretend to swim.

Lilith led her up the western flank of End Dome on an unmarked track she had practiced several times and committed firmly to memory. This Hope- smuggling operation was years in the planning.

Presently they were come to the summit, some sevem hundred feet over the rim of the Green River Gorge and a thousand feet above the river itself, but views were screened by the gray leafless branches of many maples and alders.

There was a large concrete slab here and the remains of a giant stone fire- place and chimney. Lilith told Hope these were the ruins of the End Dome Temple which had been razed to the foundation by the American government in the years shortly following World War II. Lilith held living memory of that time, one of only a handful of people who could still validly make that claim, but to Hope the War was just boring stuff she had to memorize from school books.

Much of the slab was covered with a stack of thin black fabric folded in many layers. A half-dozen large metal tanks were sitting nearby, painted to blend in with the trees. These were so heavy they had to be craned off a flatbed deuce-and-a-half when this material was recently put in place by Hunky and a handful of other trusted allies who were relatively new to the WDF, untainted by the Bunners.

Also lying about were hoses and wires and various packages of every size. And there was a big lump under all the fabric that would later reveal it- self to be a small snub-nosed plane with stubby folded wings. It was a craft only large enough for a single pilot with a little girl sitting on her lap.

Immediately, Lilith set about conducting an inventory of all her supplies to make sure everything she needed was present. All of these preparations were deemed necessary because if Lilith tried to take Hope off the planet in Exiler Sidekick, the lander belonging to her nephilim allies patiently waiting in orbit above, their life-expectancy after getting airborne would be measured in mere minutes.

When Hope asked her Momma Lilith what all this stuff was for, Lilith said, "You like balloons, don't you, Hope? Well, this will be the biggest bal- loon you ever saw in your life, and it will carry us to your real mother tonight."

   * * * * * 

Round Robyn used to call the whole Black River Gorge area "Booger Holler". Early Thanksgiving night the good folks of Booger Holler watched their po- lice procedurals and hospital dramas and went to bed at ten o'clock. The rest of the population of Booger Holler was split evenly between a good old-fashioned, hellfire-and-brimstone big tent revival in Franklin or play- ing pull-tabs and drinking Bucky Beer at the "Y" Tavern in Black Diamond.

Lilith was a virtual zombie from a week's worth of sleep deficit, but she knew she would be able to throughly catch up during the upcoming balloon ascent. By nine PM the balloon was erect and completely inflated with hy- drogen. It was a silvery bulb 180 feet tall that poked dangerously high above the alders and maples bristling the summit of End Dome, but it had been too dark for anyone to see it for three hours.

The living space of the mini-shuttle hanging under the balloon was about as roomy as a coffin. This balloon-drop trick had never been tried before, but Robyn had assured Lilith years ago that the math was perfectly sound. She was confident enough to risk the lives of Hope and Lilith in the at- tempt.

The Bunners who definitely were searching for Hope (with bad intent), and Sheriff Vic, who might be searching for Hope (with good intent) would be completely taken off-guard by this move, but the debris Lilith left behind on the hilltop would eventually be discovered, probably in the morning.

Lilith felt a twinge of regret that it was not possible to advise Vic and David Felton of this move beforehand. She could only let them know what happened well after the deed was done. Stealing Hope and the Artifact was going to bring long-stewing to a head and cast the entire Femina Caelestis organization into a state of open civil war.

It was also very likely that Vic or some of her deputies would be hurt or even killed by the numberless dangers lurking around in every corner of these dark woods. That, too, could not be helped.

Around ten when Lilith finally cut the mooring lines and went aloft with Hope sitting on her lap as a rather light burden, Lilith thought they prob- ably looked just like a small cloud on radar.

During the endless planning sessions seven years ago Robyn told her, "The Pacifica Air Provincial Guard has velocity discriminators so they don't scramble F-27's every time a flock of birds goes by. Good thing it'll be a nighttime ascent, Lil. Otherwise, by the time you get up into the jet stream and out over the Great American Desert you will have started a dozen UFO religions."

So safely in the air, and with her equipment set to give alarm if anything went wrong, Lilith drifted off to the first good long sleep she had ob- tained in a week.

As the balloon quietly rose into the night and drifted east with the pre- vailing winds, Hope watched the muted red, green, and yellow lights dancing randomly on the flight control board and fell asleep. And once having fallen asleep, she did dream.

And this dream was about the future.

In her dream Hope was deader than dead, killed by the fiery breath of the same Dragon she flew in the other dream. Dragonthorn was in pieces at her side as her body lay there smoking. And there was a princess who was dead too, and also the husband of a queen was dead with them, except that he was not called a king, but the royal consort.

And Hope's dream-father Brogan picked up the broken pieces of the diamond sword and gave them to her mother Victoria Felton, who was alive and safe. After that, Hope was alive again, and somehow she became her own mother Vic, and she found herself holding the diamond sword. And Hope knew what it was like to be a boy and a girl at the same time.

And Brogan said, "The Dragonthorn will never control Demonstick again, the spell of its making is broken. The blade is shattered and it can never be remade. But Vic really is a virgin. In the hands of Vic it can still kill Demonstick, if a new spell can be woven into it by one of the gods."

But the god El had departed forever when his temple was destroyed long ago, and the god Binah had been missing for seven years. No one believed the bad god Belial would help them, as many believed he was the one behind the plot to unmake the Dragonthorn and steal Demonstick. That left only the gods Chokhmah, incarnate in the person of Ariel, and Bat-El, incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ.

And the widow queen said, "But consider this, all of you! Demonstick is the last dragon left alive in the Land We Know. When he dies, so too dies any hope of an afterlife for anyone now living in our world, according to scriptures. No second life in the higher Land will await any of us, only the timeless nothingness that also preceded our birth."

And some of the royals withdrew, and departed the presence of the queen, because no matter how noble its main purpose, they would not aid in a quest that would nullify the promise of the gods to all the people of a new and better life in a higher world. "For we still have the hope of a second life to comfort us, even were Demonstick to set fire to every home in the Land We Know, and took the first life of every one of us."

The ones who remained began to make preparations to journey to the temple of Chokhmah in the far east of the queen's land, where they would ask Ariel to help them, but even as the party of royals made ready to mount their horses, urgent news came that the temple of Chokhmah had been captured by enemy forces who invaded south across their common border with many sol- diers, aided by vicious fire attacks from the air made by Demonstick.

Hearing of that attack, the remaining noble lords and ladies resolved all the more firmly to end Demonstick's reign of terror, even at the cost of their own afterlife. But it seemed to be an impossible quest: Hope was asked to journey to the Pool of Bat-El, and become a slayer of dragons.

   * * * * * 

Most of Lilith and Hope's waiting time had been spent sleeping, as the gi- ant balloon crawled up through the last few thousand feet to the required drop altitude. Lilith awoke at the whine of an incoming anti-satellite missile with its guidance radar locked on, which also woke the child up.

"What is it, Momma Lilith?" "The bad people found us, and I think they want to kill us."

Obviously the Bunners calculated that Hope's brain would survive the explo- sion and crash like the black box in a passenger aircraft, and they could sift the debris on the ground afterwards.

Dawn was about to break. At 100,000 feet they were so high they had an awesome, orbit-like view that was eerily still, quite unlike the usual rushing cloudscapes seen from a ship in space.

"I'm still sleepy, Momma Lilith."

"Well, Hope, this part right here will certainly wake you up!" Lilith pulled a red lever.

The moment of release was like topping out on a nineteen mile high roller coaster, an eye-bugging moment of feeling her stomach contract and try to fold itself back out through her throat. Lilith always quickly got used to it but she could never pin down the precise moment and she had no idea what it felt like to Hope.

When Lilith threw a series of switches the macro motor fired, running quickly up to a manageable three gees. It would have been three point two gees but they were falling as well, and the Earth's gravity wasn't there to be one leg of the vector solution for total force.

The advantage of a balloon-aided launch was that all the thrust was applied horizontally. All the fuel was spent towards getting to orbit and none was wasted in a "pitch program." A nineteen mile drop offered just enough time to get up to speed.

At twelve seconds they broke Mach One after falling a half mile and the thin atmosphere begin hissing against the shuttle. The air was not quite thick enough for the control surfaces to work well so Lilith was busy fir- ing the mono-propellant side thrusters with the joystick, keeping the shut- tle level along the flight path as the burn continued.

They reached Mach Three at thirty-five seconds, altitude 79,800 feet, ten nautical miles downrange from the drop point. Now Lilith was continuously reconfiguring the stubby wings as their velocity increased, but they were getting very little lift at this point.

Lift finally started to happen at Mach Five when they bounced off the stratosphere at 46,000 feet, just a hair above the normal hypersonic routes between New York and Sydney. It was only fifty-eight seconds now but they were already twenty-seven nautical miles down range.

The sun popped over the horizon suddenly, dazzling both of them. It seemed to climbed into the sky with otherworldly speed.

Back up to 73,000 feet they crossed Mach Eight at the ninety-three second mark and were seventy nautical miles down range. The little wings were glowing orange-hot as they functioned as heat sinks for the entire shuttle but they were high enough now that all that waste heat was just about to come back inside. Very little air was out there to create more heat by friction, nor to carry any heat away.

So Lilith jettisoned the useless wings with explosive bolts. The wings were soon left spinning in the air far behind them.

The ride grew much quieter and they just started piling on more speed and altitude. At four minutes and thirty-eight seconds after beginning the balloon drop and six hundred twenty nautical miles downrange Lilith cut the macro engine off and checked her orbital elements.

It was a little sloppy but they had made it, an acceptable 94 X 136 mile low earth orbit, good for two or three revs before atmospheric drag pulled them down again. Hope had endured it with some sign of distress, but now she was remarkably calm considering what had just happened.

"And that, darling Hope, is what your real mother likes to call the 'E' ticket ride."

They were both weightless now, but Hope didn't even realize it yet, because she was still strapped tightly against Lilith's body.

Lilith spent the next few hours checking out their shuttle and slowly catching up with the Imperial frigate Exiler in a lower and faster orbit. A link was established and she received instructions from Captain Barakiel on the rendezvous.

It wasn't all just Lilith. Exiler was maneuvering too.

At length, Lilith and Hope were looking at the much larger ship hanging out there with a background of white puffy cloud tops and the deep blue Indian Ocean rolling smoothly along under them under the westering sun. The Brit- ish coral atoll of Diego Garcia scooted by down there far below, looking for all the world like a human footprint with little vegetated hills for toes that used to be islands. There was no more lagoon, the draining of the ocean through the wormhole to Venus had left the center of "D-Gar" high and dry.

A final short burn on Lilith's main rocket brought them to a relatively stationary posture only a mile away from Exiler and on the exact same or- bit. The rest of the distance would be a walk in the park. The only tricky part would be the actual joining to Exiler Sidekick, which was slung under the frigate between the six side engines.

Hope could probably survive a short crossing in vacuum, but Lilith brought no vacsuit. Fortunately, preparations had been made for that little detail as well.

"Now unless I'm very much mistaken," Lilith said to Hope in her adorable, soft, uniquely shifted English accent that often made her wife Robyn forget what she was doing and demand a sexual response, "that is the very last time you will ever set foot on Earth."