Appalachian Spring
Tessa dreams of flight, and the stars -- anything but the quiet Virginia farm she calls home, raised alone by her father and her mother's silent, ever-present ghost. In her last year of high school, a derelict airplane serves as the catalyst for her to spread her wings.
Tessa dreams of flight, and the stars -- anything but the quiet Virginia farm she calls home, raised alone by her father and her mother's silent, ever-present ghost. In her last year of high school, a derelict airplane serves as the catalyst for her to spread her wings.
Well it's been a few months since I've posted a good, old fashioned fuzzy story! So here, have one for the weekend. A German Shepherd, a Border Collie, an old airplane and a fun challenge to overcome, hey! I hope you enjoy it :) A lot of thanks to
Released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. Share, modify, and redistribute -- as long as it's attributed and noncommercial, anything goes.
"Appalachian Spring," by Rob Baird
Tessa brushed a big, fat spider off the Warner Scarab's ignition wires, less out of any desire for maintenance than a vague sense that it didn't belong. Although, of course, it did: the spider had a good, defensible claim to its homestead there, in the wiring of a 125-horsepower seven-cylinder radial engine.
There, in the nose of a tattered old high-wing monoplane.
There, in the sunbeams of a dusty barn you could just barely see from County Road 7, if you squinted.
It was the domain of spiders, to be sure, but this one scrunched itself up and then wandered off to leave the German Shepherd in peace. Sometimes she didn't even know why she still came to the barn until she was already there and it came back to her that it was the only place she could be alone with her thoughts.
She was born to fly, destined for a life in the heavens like any bird or angel, but her wings had yet to come in. Tessa felt them sometimes, a gnawing itch at her shoulders where one day she knew they'd spring free. It was never stronger than in the barn.
So that was why she came. That, and nobody would bother her except the only people she wanted to be bothered by. Her father, Albert Maier-Kaplan, and her friend Kenny: it was his voice she now heard, calling softly from the side entrance. "Hey, Tess."
"Hey." She looked over her shoulder at him. "Dad told you I was here?"
Kenny shook his head, shut the door behind him, and made his way inside. "No. It doesn't take much to figure out where you go, though, does it?"
"I guess," she admitted.
The Border Collie thumped her shoulder affectionately, just a few inches over where her left wing was meant to go. "Any big ideas?"
What would the point of those be, though? She didn't say that, any more than she ever wondered aloud what her wings might look like when they finally emerged. Kenny was her best friend, and he would've understood, for sure. He understood about the airplane, for example.
Tessa's earliest memories were of the plane. It was nearly as decayed even back then, fourteen years earlier, when her mom set her on the pilot's seat and guided her paws to the control stick and pointed vaguely out the open barn door to the great, yawning, yearning Virginia sky to the east.
And she could see herself a few years older, old enough for the stories she listened to expectantly with her feet dangling out the cockpit hatch, while her mother leaned against it and told Tessa about great-great-great-aunt Amelia and the adventures she'd gotten up to in a Lockheed Vega just like this one.
Oh, well.
As it turned out, they weren't related to the Earharts, except by way of both being German Shepherds. And as it turned out, the sad derelict was not a Vega -- with its proud Wasp radial and its promise of records to be broken and frontiers to be challenged -- but an old Cessna A that had belonged to somebody who'd been dead a hundred years and Tessa's folks had just bought up the farm and everything on it and the plane was just that, just a thing on it.
Any big ideas? No, there was scarcely room for them amidst all the spiders. "None so far," Tessa told her friend.
He ran his fingers along the ignition wires. "What do you suppose it would take to get this flying again?"
Kenny was her oldest ally. He'd asked that question on the regular, every six months for as long as he'd known about her and the barn, which meant that she'd heard it almost twenty times now. That didn't matter, because he was asking about it a damned sight less than she asked herself.
"Oh, not that much," she said, as she always did. Even her mother had disagreed. Just an old relic we left behind for better things. Tessa didn't repeat that, but it was rote to say 'not that much'; an article of misplaced faith.
The Border Collie, who knew none of that, nodded. "We should," he said, as if he was reading from a script too.
She liked Kenny because they were cut from the same cloth. Kenny's parents were respectable citizens. They were part of the neighborhood association and kept a tidy garden, and Kenny's dad was an accountant and his mom was a teacher. He was supposed to go to law school.
Instead of being respectable, though, the two friends used to lie on their backs, watching the satellites cross overhead, and the starships -- if they were lucky, one of the resupplies coming up from Canaveral headed for the orbital yards. That, too, was a memory: one of the first pleasant ones, after the accident.
It was ten years ago, and they'd been watching the rockets go up. She had her mom's binoculars, which fit the younger shepherd's muzzle perfectly. Kenny had an open log book, and when she caught a stage igniting she'd call it out to him, and he'd tell her that it was the Hachinohe Maru, bound for Venus. The Clipper Altaic, one of the first Martian-flagged freighters on the way home.
The USS Merrimack, Captain Patterson at her helm, and --
"Sorry," Kenny had said, cutting himself off.
"About what?"
"Isn't that... I mean... wasn't that your mom's ship?"
Lieutenant Commander Maier, as the papers called it, a bit after describing her 24-year career and a bit before listing who all she was survived by. "Yes," Tessa said. "But so what? She belonged up there. So do I. So do you."
Kenny pushed himself onto his side, and looked at the shepherd girl. He could've patted her shoulder, and silently thought well, grief takes all forms like her teachers had. He could've told her that there was plenty to do on Earth, the way her father said. Instead he followed her gaze up to the stars, and lay back down. "Captain Patterson, commanding. Headed for the Grissom testing grounds, on a classified mission."
"Project Icarus, don't you suppose?"
Project Icarus, the Next-Generation Interstellar Propulsion Project, designed and built the engines that would power Earth's first manned deep-space mission. Nobody knew if the theory was even sound. The engines were highly experimental, particularly in the early stages. Sometimes they didn't start in sequence. Sometimes they didn't start at all. Sometimes they fired too powerfully.
Sometimes they exploded, and a prototype starship vanished in one cataclysmic flash.
No telescope, and certainly no mere binoculars, were powerful enough to resolve even the tiniest piece of what remained. Even still, for months afterward Tessa stared, searching in between the taunting stars until her eyes ached. Ten years later, and occasionally the urge still tugged at her.
It was tugging at her the afternoon that Kenny asked about big ideas. She returned from the barn in the evening to find her uncle over for dinner -- checking in on her dad, like he did from time to time. The conversation would be quiet, as conversations were when they plucked at the scars of old tragedy.
With her mind still filled with thoughts of the antique airplane, the young shepherd wasn't in the mood. She excused herself from dinner and went up to her room. She turned the lights off; even without them she could find the stately, reassuringly heavy box in her closet.
The binoculars were so worn that none of the lettering could still be made out; Tessa hadn't needed to read the indicators for years, any more than she'd needed a light to guide her. She pushed open her bedroom window and scooted out onto the roof of the house.
The night was dark, and moonless. Until her eyes adapted she wouldn't even be able to see the gutter that marked the edge of the roof, and a twenty-foot drop to the driveway below. It didn't matter: her attention was elsewhere.
Tessa set the binoculars on the bridge of her muzzle, and peered straight up. Stars flooded in. The shepherd smiled to herself, and imagined herself among them.
The night sky never failed to amaze her, though despite her best attempts it had proven to be impossible to put into words. Maybe, she thought, you have to be the right type. And then it wasn't necessary to explain.
You had to be the kind of girl to stare up at the moons of Jupiter and feel the same shocked thrill that must certainly have overcome Galileo. Earth is not alone. Everything we've known before is wrong -- how utterly magnificent_!_
The kind of girl to fix her gaze on Polaris and feel the weathered railing of a pitching caravel under her paws. Bound west for unknown lands, with the deck heaving and no certainty other than the comfort of that tiny, stoic point of light.
She'd known by instinct that the stars told a story far more compelling than myths and constellations. Her finger held in the button that electrically stabilized the lens, and she peered at Saturn until it resolved in her eager vision into the blurry cross that hinted at its rings.
The sound of footsteps through the open window drew her away from the outer planets. She turned the binoculars off and looked over her shoulder until she could make out the figure in the darkness. "Hi, Curt. What's up?"
"Bert doesn't like you being on the roof," Curtiss said. He didn't sound like he meant it harshly.
"I know. Dad doesn't like a lot of things."
"He's just worried about you," her uncle said. He meant, though, that he was worried about what she might become, if the dreams curled up between her big shepherd ears were given a chance to break out. "So am I. Will this hold?" He pointed at the shingles.
"It better, right?"
Uncle Curtiss pulled himself through the study window, and took a seat next to her. "Feel the wind starting to change? Nice autumn breeze. Leaves'll start turning soon. It's gorgeous, really."
"I know."
"Coming in to this town on final approach is one of my favorite things about fall. It's one hell of a postcard from a mile up -- let alone a hundred. I talked to Miss Dyer the other day. She said somebody had been putting in a lot of time in the lab on those flight simulators."
"Dad doesn't know. He wouldn't understand," Tessa said. Not that he would've forbidden her from it -- but they would've had one of those capital-t Talks, where his voice got soft and his eyes darkened and she could see how much he still missed his wife.
He'd settled into life caretaking the farm. It had nice, bounded, well-kept fences, and the sky was at a comfortable distance. He didn't want to keep Tessa fenced, not exactly, but he wanted her to be happy that way, because the alternative...
Not that he put it in those words, nor that he ever would. "I haven't decided yet, but I think I could get in to the program at MIT. They have a starship track."
"You think it would have to be starships?"
"What else is space for?" she asked him. "I feel like sometimes... I'm the only one here who thinks that way. Mom and dad met when she was in training. You told me that story. But it's like... ever since, he's forgotten what it's like to have that kind of dream."
"Like I said, he's just worried about you. So am I."
"You?"
"Because of what I'm about to do," her uncle said. He bit the inside of his muzzle, and worried it; his whiskers flicked. "Part of me thinks I shouldn't, even."
"Shouldn't what?"
Uncle Curtiss leaned against the wall, and sighed heavily. "I don't think the engine failed."
"Huh?"
"My sister. I don't think her engine failed. I think it was a structural problem. It was in the minority report."
"There was a minority report?"
He nodded. "They suppressed it -- they said the evidence was inconclusive. And it was, so I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about that I knew Maggie better than anybody, and I knew that engine better than damn near anybody, and I'm saying the engine didn't fail."
"But the telemetry..."
"Also inconclusive. You could read it a dozen different ways. The last signature we had from the reporting station looked exactly like what I knew would happen on a successful firing. And the probes didn't pick anything up, but... so what? I had a good case that Inga's team misconfigured the tracking, anyway. It wasn't a politically correct answer. Nobody was willing to blame the ship program."
"ESA, right?" It had been a joint project: NASA designed the stardrive, but it was mounted to a hull of European design. The hull was proven, a modification of the ones they used on Martian transport runs, reliable and safe. The engine was not. "The designers didn't want their frame to be at fault?"
"And they were still alive. Your mom wasn't. NASA... well, it was an election year, and nobody wanted to make waves."
The next, unmanned, test had failed for unrelated reasons while the commission was still preparing its report, Curtiss said, and it was decided that they needed to find a way to end the project. And that was for the better: there were other stardrive programs, based on newer theories and more reliable machinery. "Like the one at Pasadena? Or the Japanese one at the Chitose reactor? Or AJAX at MIT?" That was the one she really wanted to be part of; the spiritual successor to Icarus.
Curtiss smiled. "Now you see why I shouldn't have told you?"
Because the difference between MIT and Pasadena and Chitose wasn't the point. The point was that he should've been there for her father, talking her down from the roof rather than scratching the itch at her shoulders where the wings were supposed to be.
In the morning, after they'd gone back inside and she promised Curt to stay off the roof for a few days, she woke to find that the itch hadn't gone away. Nothing seemed to soothe it. And while her mother might've written the Cessna off, the younger shepherd decided it was as good of a place as any to start.
It took the better part of a week for Tessa to find what she'd been looking for. When she handed her discovery to Kenny, the Border Collie looked more puzzled than anything else. They were standing in the barn, and she had her paws on her hips, waiting, watching him with a grin. "Well?"
"What's this?" He turned the picture back and forth, trying to see if there was any kind of motion or third dimension to it -- but the image was too old for that, just a thick piece of chemically treated paper. A photograph, in the parlance of the times.
"Found it in the town archives. It goes back all the way to 1948."
"It's crazy to think I'm holding something from the First World War," Kenny muttered. "Anyway, what about it?"
"Turn it around."
He tilted his head and peered at the old, faded scrawl. "Peter Cavanaugh. 'His... survey? Service! His service will provide express delivery of park... parcels. Packages, right'?"
"Right. Look at what's behind him."
"I can't. I tried, it's a 2D image, Tess." He tilted and waved it again, just to be sure. "We can't even reconstruct a 3D model, not without --"
"Kenny. Don't think like a Border Collie for once. Calm down. Look at what's behind him."
Kenny looked at the photograph. His eyes flicked from the smiling fox to what he was leaning against. And then he started glancing back and forth, between the paper and the airplane in the barn. "Really..."
"Really. Peter was in the First World War. He must've learned to fly on an actual Sopwith Camel, practically. During the cease-fire in the '20s, he flew JN-4s with the postal service. After the war ended, he started up again flying into the valley here. With this Cessna."
"That's really cool!"
She'd known he would appreciate it. "He died in 1981. His business closed up shop a few years earlier, I guess, but he was flying most of his life."
"Wow."
"This plane hasn't flown in over a century."
"That's incredible..."
"There aren't any flying model As anymore. I checked. Last one crashed in '66. Nobody else has gotten one airworthy."
"Or they haven't cared to," he pointed out.
She grinned. "My thought exactly. You realize what that means?"
Kenny looked from the image on the photograph to what remained in the barn. "A lot of work."
Nothing happened when she pulled on the control stick. As a girl, she'd assumed that she was doing something wrong; now, following the cabling that ran back to the elevators and ailerons, it was clear that none of them had moved since long, long before her birth.
Before they could even start, they needed to look at the skeleton. "Is it made of... wood?"
"The wings were, yep." The fabric yielded to her claws, falling away limply. Tessa leaned up, and took hold of the main spar in both paws. She couldn't quite manage a pull-up -- but close enough; it took her weight easily, even with both feet off the ground. "They made some later planes with struts for added support. Guess these didn't need 'em."
"Looks strong," Ken said, offhandedly. It didn't sound like much, but she grinned anyway. If he'd said that, it meant he was already thinking about it: thinking was sure to lead to doing. It didn't take long for him to be completely in his element, figuring out what they would need to keep going.
The wood of the two main spars was in decent shape. The ribs were a mixed bag, although the barn had kept them from the worst of the elements. Assessing this, after a period of arguing, she left to Kenny -- who would go through them in his meticulous fashion, one at a time.
By the middle of October, at least, they knew where they were at. "Six of the ribs need to be replaced. The rest are in decent shape."
"How strong is this, anyway?"
"Pretty strong. We don't actually know," he amended, and when she looked at him skeptically the collie laughed. "When Cessna first tested these spars, they couldn't get them to fail with the machinery they had. Imagine that! Wood is stronger than you think, Tess -- and this is in good condition. Everything's still trued, and the scope says they're within about... ninety-five percent of their normal parameters?" He checked his notes to make sure he'd recorded it all accurately.
"Look at you," Tessa teased him. "'Normal parameters'! You think you're an engineer, now, huh?"
"Look at you," the Border Collie teased right back. "You think you're gonna fly rockets."
"At least I know how to start small." She stuck out her tongue, and laughed when he rolled his eyes.
It had taken Ken the better part of a week to figure out how to use his rented equipment properly, with plenty of cursing and at least one electrical shock. Then he'd gotten into the rhythm of figuring out how to scan the material properly, centimeter by meticulous centimeter, and the collie was a man on a singular mission.
She worked on stripping the fuselage down to bare metal, and cleaning it up -- and on hauling a portable generator out to the barn, for light and heat as the nights grew chillier. There was only so much time they could spend: evenings, after school had let out, and weekends when their classmates were off at far less important projects.
With the last of finals over and school out for the holidays, they redoubled their efforts. Kenny learned to work the prototypers at the old machine shop in town and came back with replacement control surfaces, fitted to a millimeter's precision. Tessa dismantled the cabling and pulleys that linked them to the Cessna's control sticks.
In some ways, its antiquity was a blessing. The machine was too slow and uncomplicated to require a license -- Terra was so quiet anyway that nobody cared about any ship that couldn't make orbit. It only had a few simple instruments. There were no computers to try and understand.
In other ways it was maddening. The ribs of the wings were braced with a network of turnbuckles, and as soon as Kenny found out he could adjust them individually the Border Collie assigned himself the task of doing so. The engine frustrated them both, for petrol engines were impossible to service.
And too much of the machine appeared to have been assembled through brute force. Kenny bent down and helped her with the last connection between the rudder pedals and the rudder itself, and since they'd reverse-engineered how everything worked it was a delicate, profanity-filled task.
But they got it done. And then, by unspoken agreement, they got to their feet and stepped back to admire their work. It looked like a skeleton, with its internal organs on awkward display -- but so polished, and so precise, that it seemed closer to a functioning machine than it ever had before.
"Gotta figure out the engine," Kenny said. "And the fabric."
"But still," she insisted to him. Still.
The Border Collie laughed, and turned to reply; she put her arms around him in a tight hug. He hugged her right back, lean arms softened by a thick jacket.
And then he kissed her. It was a short kiss, unplanned and impulsive. It took them both by surprise -- he drew back, blinking in the same shock as she felt. "What was that?"
"Sorry," he muttered.
"I didn't mean you should apologize." She didn't actually know what she meant; her brain was still trying to catch up. "It was surprising."
"Just, uh. The moment. I mean... that," he clarified, and tilted his muzzle to the gleaming Cessna. They were still holding each other. "We did it, you know? Most of it, anyway."
For the moment, she didn't let go. "It is pretty cool. This wasn't so bad either. You should, uh. File that away for later, though."
"Oh?" he cocked his head. "You mean like when we're finished?"
"Yeah."
That evening, alone in bed, she would find herself wondering what he might've felt like without the jacket. Just his own bare arms, and hers. But that would come later; she didn't stop him when he pulled away.
Between the kiss and the milestone of their progress she was so chipper that her father noticed, at least, when she came in at the end of the day. "What are you working on out there?"
"Told you," she said. That was the truth: she had told him, over and over. "The old plane in the barn. We've got the control surfaces working again. Nice and smooth and everything."
At least her father wasn't the kind of person to tell her you'll never get it flying, even if he probably believed it. "You know I... I support you in a lot of things, Tessa. But don't you think, maybe, with college applications coming up..."
"I've already applied," she said. "CalTech and MIT. And Boulder, for a safety, 'cause at least the particle physics program is a feeder. It's a state school."
"What about Chicago? I thought you were going to apply to the mathematics program at Chicago." Her father wasn't the kind of dog to raise his voice, and it made it difficult sometimes to tell whether he was angry, or disappointed, or...
"I thought about it. But NASA hasn't taken anybody from Chicago since '79, so I figured it wasn't worth spending the money on the application."
He looked at her for a long, long spell, and said nothing. He was more subdued than usual over the next few days; on the one that happened to be Christmas morning she was mildly perplexed to find him waiting for her in the living room, holding out a sealed box for her to take.
"What is this?" They'd never celebrated any holidays in particular and she had no idea what to expect. The box wasn't all that heavy, despite the size. She slit the tape with her claw and opened the folds.
The first thing she saw was the word States, written in flowing script. The paper was behind glass, in a frame far newer than the certificate.
The President of the United States of America awards this Congressional Space Medal of Honor to Margaret J Maier. The words below were smaller, and Tessa realized that she had never actually seen them in person before.
Lieutenant Commander Maier distinguished herself in 24 years of dedicated service to the Nation, expanding the frontiers of knowledge and discovery, including her command of Icarus Project NPM-4. Her commitment to the principle that Earth, cradle of mankind, is only the first step in an eternal journey of exploration is a credit to her, her family and her country.
"I thought..." Tessa lifted the frame, carefully; beneath it she caught sight of ribbons, and glinting metal. "I thought you gave these up."
Her father tried to shake his head, and only managed a gentle twitch. "I couldn't. I couldn't give anything up. Your uncle asked if I was going to change my name back. So did my dad, but the way Curt asked it..." He swallowed heavily. "And with the guilt, and..."
"Guilt?"
The old shepherd swallowed again, and pressed the box closed so that he didn't have to look at it. "I might as well tell you. I... I loved your mom, Tessa. When we met, and she was so... wild, and different. She thought she could do anything. I was a math TA for one of the classes they put her in..."
Tessa waited for him to tell the rest of the story. About how she'd asked him for help on a particular calculus problem. How it had turned out to be for a bet she'd made with one of the other test pilots about whether a motorcycle could beat their training planes to 50 feet of altitude, courtesy of the ramp at the end of NAS Armstrong's runway.
How they'd won, and her dad's name had gotten back to the administrators as a coconspirator. How she'd made it up to him by offering to go on a date. How it ended up back on the motorcycle, showing him how she'd done it.
By now her daughter had heard the story over and over; she knew it by heart. Just like her recollections of the cockpit, and the barn. Her mother was a series of memories, frozen in amber or trapped behind glass, and they never changed.
But he didn't repeat the anecdote. "After you were born, things were a little different. We didn't... fight. Or I didn't fight, at least. But it could be tense. I thought she was reckless. Too reckless, with you and all. In the end she decided on the desk job, and we bought this place, and it lasted six months before she went back. And after... after..." He gestured weakly at the closed box.
"The accident."
"I begged her not to go. She told me that somebody had to have a backbone, and it was going to be her. People said I changed. And I got too, uh. Safe." His speech became more halting. "They said I wanted to hide here. As though something broke, and I went out to pasture like an old horse. You think that."
"Not exactly."
"I heard you tell Curt that. That I loved your mom for being so free-spirited, and after she died I forgot that. I didn't forget. I hated her."
Tessa's ears flattened, and she drew back a few inches. "What?"
"For leaving you. Leaving me. And this -- you know. This." He pointed back to the box. This time it was sharp. Accusing. "This myth. No, not like that -- I don't mean it's a lie. I mean that she became a legend. Your mother was a hero, Tessa. I know it. There's a line, on the medal. She was a credit to her family. Every..."
He was taking shaky, deep breaths. They'd never been a physically affectionate family, and it seemed that she remembered picking that up from her mother, but she leaned forward and reached out a paw, setting it on his shoulder. "Dad?"
"Every time you were at a ballgame, or you brought home a report card... you remember that time you refused to take the state standardized test? I had to pick you up from the principal's office."
He'd asked what the problem was, and the shepherd girl had answered in a five-minute speech, perfectly articulate, condemning the test itself. Her diatribe was punctuated by examples: live calculations of quadratic equations, and references to the history of Greece and to electron bonding. I guess we can make an exception, this once, the principal said.
"She would've loved that. But she didn't get to see it. She won't get to see you go to college. Or move into your own place. Or get married. None of it. Every time I think of everything she left us alone for, I think about her being a credit to her family. I hated her for that. And for the guilt about hating her. And that box. I would trade that whole box if she could be here to listen to you go on about that fucking airplane."
Tessa didn't know what to say. Or do. She'd never seen her father like that.
"There wasn't anything to bury. For a long time I thought that was the worst part. Then. Then... I learned the worst part is that I know she'd tell you to go to MIT. If she were here. If she was a ghost. Of course there's no such thing, but I know that one day, you're going to say 'mom would've wanted it' and you'll be right and I... I'll..."
She slid across the sofa and hugged her father, as the older shepherd finally broke down. His paws bunched up tightly in his lap, and his shoulders hitched in the gasps that broke his muted sobbing.
And he went on, softly, as though he had no choice. "I'll hate her all over again. It isn't that I don't want you to go, it's that I want her to be here so she can be as proud of you as I am and she won't be and... God, I miss her."
"It's okay. Dad, it's okay. I don't blame you."
"I know, but..."
"I miss her too. Everybody said I was really her daughter, you know?"
"You are," her dad admitted, with a sad smile.
"After she died, for like... well, until the end of that summer... I pretended she was still around and I could talk to her."
"I know. I heard you a couple times."
"I was seven years old. But I knew it was pretend. If you're proud of me... you know, dad, she wasn't here. I have my memories, but... she didn't raise me. You did. If I turned out okay, it's because of you."
His voice softened to a whisper. "You turned out okay."
"You said it, dad. There's no such thing as ghosts. Just us. We did okay."
She kept her father company through the rest of the tense holidays, and they didn't speak further of either past or future. When school started again, in January, she finally had a chance to collect her thoughts.
"Was he right?" she asked Kenny at lunch one day -- out of the blue. "Was dad right to blame mom for leaving us?"
"I don't think he was wrong," the Border Collie said diplomatically. "It wasn't exactly responsible."
"We're not exactly responsible either." She pointed to his lunch tray, and the extra helping of french fries he'd sweet-talked from the server. "Your parents are responsible. My dad's responsible. He's so responsible he hasn't left town in five years."
Ken chafed at his parents, too, but he took the example in stride. "There's a difference. If your dad was as reckless as your mom..."
He was careful not to go too far, though. Too far and she'd wind up living out her own life as a farm caretaker. Too far and she might have to clip her wings before they even came in.
Instead, he explained his plans for replacing the Cessna's engine. An electric motor of equivalent power would be easy enough to retrofit, he claimed; they could build most of the equipment in to match the look of the radial pistons. At a quick glance, nobody would even be able to tell the difference.
It was a strange attention to detail, but she trusted him because the alternative was thinking about responsibility. He worked on the parts, and as winter wore itself out and they waited for spring the pair took care of the last details -- like the painted fabric cover, which neatly fitted to the skeleton, and fine-tuning all the wiring.
The plane had been 'done,' which was to say the last thing they had to do was test it, for a week when the mailman's truck hummed its way up the path to their house and Tessa's father sought her out, holding a letter up in his paw. "You got something."
She took it from him nervously. "That's a thick envelope." She took a deep breath, and pulled it open. It was harder than she'd expected to keep going.
Her father laughed once, gently. "You want me to read it?"
"Maybe. Yeah. Yeah," she decided, and handed the envelope over.
"Alright. Dear --" He froze, and she saw his muzzle tighten. He blinked a few times, too heavily, and started again. "Dear Tessa Kaplan. On behalf of the Admissions Committee, it is my pleasure and great honor to offer you admission to the MIT Class of 2097. As this century draws to a close, you stood out as one of the most talented, promising stars to dawn in the next. We... Well. It goes on, but they didn't bury the lede. Congratulations."
"Thanks," Tessa managed, at the feeling of a great weight lifting from her shoulders.
"Will you accept?"
"I think so."
Her father set the letter gently down on the table, and opened his arms. "Come here," he said, and when they embraced he gripped her tightly. "You probably should. You'd like Cambridge. We should visit before summer, though. It gets muggy."
"Like here?"
He let her go, patting her shoulder a final time. "Good point. You're lucky they delivered this letter, with that name."
"When I submitted the application, I didn't want them to be biased. I wanted to earn it on my own terms. Kenny... he said I was passing up a big advantage, and I was going to change it. But after... you know, after we... talked? I decided I was right the first time."
He tried to laugh, though it came off forced. "It would've been a big advantage."
"I had others."
Her father tensed again, and looked away. "Ah, Tessa..."
"I'm serious. I know it. Apparently they know it, too. Or they will -- you'll have to come visit. Kenny will be there, too; he's going to Harvard."
"I guess I will have to... maybe..."
She grinned. "I mean, it was an awful lot of work just to get you to leave Virginia for a bit."
The other shepherd smiled, too. "Actually, I'd come to the opposite conclusion. I think it's time to sell this place. Sometimes it's too quiet already. With you gone, I'm going to go crazy."
"You could move into town, then..."
"Maybe. I was thinking Austin, though. I miss cities, Tessa, I really do. And it would be easier for Curt to visit."
"You'd go back to teaching?"
He nodded. "Yeah."
In a way this, the thought of her father back in a classroom, was almost as big a victory as the letter had been. He needed to get away from the farm and its history just as much as she did.
But it put a bit of urgency on the rest of her plans. She found the keys for the tractor and spent that afternoon clearing out a long, straight path in front of the barn; the tractor's battery was nearly empty by the time she was satisfied.
Her father, having settled down to dinner, got up from the table and watched her replace the keys. "Out working?"
"Mowing, yes."
"Why?"
"If you're moving, and I'm moving, I should take the Cessna out for a spin. The field in front of the barn used to be a grass strip -- didn't you wonder why it's so flat?"
"Not especially. I'm not much of a farmer, I guess."
"I know!" She hugged him, and pulled back before he could respond. "And now you don't have to be."
"Like you don't have to fly that old museum piece?"
"I do," she said.
He knew her too well to try any of the standard arguments. You don't have a license. It wasn't needed in that weight and speed class. You don't know if it will work. She did. You've never flown before. There was a first time for everything. Instead, with his ears flat, he asked a question. "Why?"
"I have to."
The old shepherd kept his ears lowered, choosing his words carefully. "You know, uh... your mom wanted to get rid of it. Figured we'd put the barn to use somehow and..."
"I know. I know she did."
"You do?"
She nodded. "We used to play on it, and she'd tell me stories and stuff. Once I asked about getting it flying and she said it wouldn't fly. She called it a relic we'd left behind for better things."
"Was she right?"
"Not mechanically. It works. I don't see a relic, I see... I see something that was state-of-the-art once, and it's been in that barn for a hundred years waiting to fly again, dad. Stuck there like everybody forgot..."
"Everybody except you?"
"Yes. And Kenny. I'm not doing this for mom. This is for me. And this farm. And you, too, even if you don't know it yet."
He was listening, at least; her father always listened. "You know I can't stop you. I don't know that I even have the willpower to try."
"You want to?"
The old shepherd's eyes left her, searching his own brain for an answer and coming up short. "I don't know. But I know that I can't... I can't watch. Is that alright, Tessa?"
She nodded. "Of course."
"Will you try at least to get a good night's sleep?"
But she woke up before the dawn, heart already racing. Her father was still asleep. She left him to that, tugging on her boots and running up the path to the barn until she was panting, and the cool spring air stabbed at her lungs.
There was already a light on inside. When she opened the door, she found Kenny leaning into the cockpit, checking over the instruments. "G'morning," he told her without turning around.
"Up early, huh?"
"I couldn't sleep either." He pulled himself free, and looked at her with a grin. "Wanted to look at the wiring one last time. It's good."
"We're ready?"
"Think so." The collie stepped away, and gestured at the open hatch. "Hop in."
Tessa didn't have to be told twice. She pulled herself into the cockpit like she had so many times before -- like it was her throne by birthright. It might as well have been. Soon, she thought. Just a few hours.
Ken walked slowly around to the front, and held one of his instruments up to the propeller shaft. Most of him had disappeared; all she could see was the tip of his wagging tail. And then he returned to her field of view, and gave her a thumbs-up. "Try it."
Originally, the airplane had burned petrochemicals, and the furthest right dial was a switch that allowed its operator to select an appropriate fuel tank. Kenny had rewired it to manage the batteries instead. Tessa checked to make sure the throttle was at its idle, took a deep breath, and flipped the switch one notch from 'off' to 'test.' At first there was nothing -- then a rising electronic whine, a gentle vibration...
And the sight of the propeller moving, tracing a slow arc.
"Good sign..."
Kenny nodded. "By my calculations, if we got the weight of the propeller right, we should be managing twenty RPM at idle." He kept glancing between the display of his instrument and the propeller. "And this says... twenty. Dead even! Not bad."
She turned the engine off, waited for the propeller to stop, and hopped from the cockpit to pounce into her friend. "Not bad? Kenny, this is it!"
"Is it?" He'd just barely caught her, and was struggling to keep his balance. "I guess it is."
"Almost." Tessa got her feet beneath her again, and tried to calm herself. "We should wait until the light is better."
"Maybe a couple of hours? According to the reports, we should have good flying weather for most of the day."
"Couple of hours, sure," she said with a nod -- partly feeling it was all she could bear. They could occupy it, anyhow; there were checklists to revisit, and bolts to check for the tenth time.
But the energy bubbling in the shepherd's body would not be satisfied by that, she knew. Not until she was flying -- and they were so close! Her wings had almost sprouted: she fairly ached with it. Ken felt it, too. If not his own wings, then he could feel the electric tension that thrummed through her and tingled in her fur.
He was close enough to, after all. When he opened his mouth to ask about it, she shook her head. "Wings -- but later. Kenny -- Kenny, do you remember before Christmas, when we kissed and I said to file it away for later?"
"Of course."
"I was kidding."
"About which part?"
She laughed, still giddy, and tugged him closer. "You didn't have to wait."
Knowing it wasn't as if either of them were really regretful, Ken slurped his tongue over her nose. "Well, we were busy."
True. And conscious of the lost time, and the impatient morning, she pressed her lips to his. For a moment the electric tension quieted. It clung to the pair, as she savored the warmth of his mouth and the pressure of his fingers in her hair. It twitched her ears, and threw her tail into a frenzied wag.
It broke free and arced in a humming current that filled her friend, too. When they tried to pull apart, he barely managed a single second before his muzzle locked once more against hers. This time his tongue followed, sliding into her mouth, hot and sweet and insistent.
The world was blurring. Colors bled and ran together. She felt herself moving, or being moved. The fuselage was at her back. Steadying her. Solid. One of them growled. Him? Her?
Her. It had been her, because Kenny let her go, panting softly. "You okay?" She nodded and he kissed her again. Deeply, firmly, but with a little less urgency now that they'd gotten it out of the way. It let her make sense of the colors: the red of the wing above them; the black and white of his fur. The deep blue sky through the hazy windows.
"Morning," Tessa murmured into his lips.
Her friend paused, his eyes darkening. He nodded. "Figure we don't have time before the flight?"
"Figure we better. Not waiting again."
Ken snickered, lifting her shirt up to feel his way along the shepherd's spine. His grin deepened at the way she twitched. "How far were you thinking?"
He had to know, she figured. She lived on the farm, not in town with the rest of them, and her social circle was mostly remote. And figuring that, she hoped it wouldn't sound too awkward. "At this point, I was hoping I could take care of a couple firsts today..."
The collie's grin softened into a smile that disappeared behind the gentle kiss that followed. He didn't challenge her; didn't ask her to repeat it or cock his head in that teasing way he sometimes had. Just kissed her, and let his paw gently nudge her away from the plane.
They'd hauled a foam mat out in November, tossing a couple old woolen blankets on it to give Ken a place to sleep for a few hours rather than having to trek through the winter chill back to his house. She hadn't tried it herself, but when he guided her down and onto it she went willingly.
It was comfortable enough, at least. It would serve. There were other distractions. She still had her shirt on. Ken's paw was under it, pulling it up and off her -- for a moment she was blind, with the shirt bunched over her head, and when she could see again the dog was looking at her with his head cocked and his ears perked.
The best he could, anyhow, as a collie. It looked a little silly. "'Sup?" she asked.
"Just... god, you're cute."
"Am not," she protested.
Ken laughed, and bent down until their noses were level. "Oh, you are." She wanted to protest again, but by the time she could his paw was pressed into the fur of her side and he was kissing her again. And when he pulled away, just a few seconds later, it didn't seem worth it.
He was still grinning when his muzzle buried itself in her neck. He nipped at her collarbone and nuzzled down her chest. His tongue darted out to graze her nipple -- then to drag slowly over it. Tessa squeaked, and then whimpered, and then moaned.
Somehow everything he did was stoking her higher. He switched to her other breast, lapping until the fur was damp and the bare flesh was all hard and pert and sensitive to the touch. He nosed down, filling the thick fur of her chest with his pleased, mumbled growls.
His paws roamed over her sides and his muzzle skimmed over her navel and with every new squeeze and nuzzle and lick she felt the kindling desire come closer and closer to flashover. It was so dizzying, so distracting that it took her a few seconds to notice that he hadn't stopped moving.
He'd slid between her legs. His muzzle rested just above her crotch. His eyes were dancing. "What are you..."
She saw his muzzle turn in a grin. "Taking the time to savor this."
She opened her mouth to ask what he meant by that and a hot, wet pressure sent a jolt through her that turned the question into a gasped oath. She could feel the wash of his breath, and then his tongue bathed her again.
Tessa dropped her head back and let the quiet moan escape. True to his word he took his time, lapping softly. His head dipped, and he worked his way smoothly from the bottom of her sex upwards -- tasting her, caressing her with the silk of his tongue that glided effortlessly and left a tingling anticipation in its wake.
Then it spread deeper; he pressed his muzzle to her wet, open lips in a loving kiss and slipped his tongue into her folds. Broad, soft, heat wormed its way into the shepherd's core until her back arched with it and her teeth gritted in a tense groan.
She felt her hips starting to tremble and quiver, and the Border Collie's paw pressing down to keep her steady. He had to know -- he was going faster, working his tongue in quick, hungry strokes.
The buzzing pressure grew irresistible. As if his eager lapping was wearing away a dam, heedless of the surge behind it. Like the shepherdess was a laden bridge, groaning under tension instead of delight. Her sharp gasps had the hiss of a lit fuse.
He raised up, pushing his tongue against her clit. And the built-up tension snapped in a rush of silky pleasure, rippling in waves from her squirming hips and tearing from her muzzle in a helpless, throaty growl.
The collie stayed with her through it, keeping his muzzle close and lapping at her pussy until just before she thought she might scream -- then he was gone, and a final surge crashed through her and left her flat and panting in the well-mussed blankets.
"Tess?" she heard him ask.
"I... need... a moment." Or a time machine, so she could go back and ride it out again. And again. But for now everything was a bit raw. Not in a bad way, exactly -- like somehow he'd stripped her down to bare metal. She knew how the Cessna felt.
Kenny grinned, and stroked her fur with the back of his paw. "Sure," he told her. Of course he understood. While the shepherd tried to remember how to move again, how her body worked, he stayed put.
At last she coaxed her muscles to respond enough so she could get her arm behind him, pulling the dog down until his thick, plush fur pressed into hers and she was looking right into his eyes.
"Hey, Tess," he murmured.
"Ken."
"Yeah?"
She bit her lip, trying to imagine how the words would sound. Why bother? "Get your pants off so you can fuck me."
It must not've sounded too silly. He growled playfully, licked her nose, and rocked back on his knees before getting up to undo his belt. She watched him with some interest. The zipper opened, and his jeans fell away. His white finger disappeared behind the fabric of his briefs, carefully working them off.
Health class had been academic. The reality was rather different. The soft fur of the Border Collie's sheath was drawn back, bunched at the base of a stiff, shiny-pink erection. Her first thought was not one of curiosity but admiration. He looked comfortably thick, not imposing, and her gaze wandered up to where the tip came to a notched point, glistening wetly.
Admiration gave way to anticipation as he settled back down atop her. His legs were warm between her own. His fur tickled. Kenny rested on one arm, looking down at the shepherdess. Briefly she felt his other paw brush her thigh. Then smooth heat, too hard and slick to be his fingers, nudged her.
She sucked her breath in, and let it out in a helpless, nervous laugh.
"Tess?"
"Just. Just realized. You know everybody's figured we were doing this the whole time."
"Probably."
"Better not stop now."
He kissed her nose. Then his muscles tensed, and as he slowly arched she felt him sink between her soft lips and inside her. The nerves vanished in an instant. Nothing to be nervous about. Just solid, comforting heat, and the stretching, yielding pleasure of being filled.
Their hips met and he stopped, kissing her again. The dog was still for a moment and she thought he might've found some reservation she lacked -- but then she saw how his ears were back, and the desire softening his sharp features. She hugged him, pulling the collie close.
He pulled back, drawing back out of the shepherdess, and for a second time she had the chance to dwell on the way he felt sliding all nice and warm and deep into her.
As he settled into a rhythm of slow thrusts his ears finally came back forward and his movements steadied. They were even, and smooth: fluid strokes that nudged a rising warmth into Tessa with each revolution. She grasped at him; his back arched and flexed under her paws.
Faster. Tessa thought it, and her grip tightened impulsively. Claws dug in. Kenny groaned, shuddering at the touch. But his tempo built -- she could sense the energy growing in his taut, sinewy body. The slow, rocking pistoning shifted in degrees until he was starting to growl and thrust wildly.
She drew her legs around him, enveloping him, hugging him against her. With the delirious heat of his swift pace came an odd sense of control, of her own power over the collie as he bucked in her close embrace. Tessa whispered his name -- then she moaned it, feeling his rhythm break and his hard gasps for breath next to her ear.
His length was swelling thicker. She'd known it would happen -- or been told it -- or heard rumors. But not what it meant: a thick bulge stuffing into her, sliding with a lurching squelch to bury itself all the way inside. A tense, tugging pressure when he tried to pull out. A feral snarl from the collie when he couldn't.
He drove himself into her with a last few erratic, powerful humps that pressed their bodies together, lifting her hips up as his knot stretched her. She heard herself cry out with the keen, exquisitely, uniquely canine pleasure when it took her. And she clenched down in spasms on the collie's shaft, intensely aware of every thick inch of it.
Perfectly, intimately aware. Kenny jolted, with a growling bark she'd never heard from him before. Muscles straining, he pushed in deep. His length throbbed in her tight folds, and if she'd wondered what followed a moment later a gush of liquid heat took the last of any doubt away.
The strong splashes stoked her own peak and she rode it out beneath him, clinging to the Border Collie. His hips hitched in needy little jerks, and his growl deepened into hoarse, urgent grunts as he came in her and Tessa felt the spreading warmth of his seed slowly fill her up.
When he relaxed, settling onto her, his body was a nice, comforting weight. She didn't really want it to end: the first few times he shifted, and opened his muzzle to speak, she hugged him gently until he gave up. Finally she relented, and he rewarded her by giving her ear a lick. "Doing okay, Tess?"
"Am I ever," she sighed. In point of fact she wondered if she might not be slightly sore, later, but later there would be other things to take her mind off it and right now it was far more important to focus on the collie in her arms. "You?"
He nosed at her ear softly. "Yeah."
"I always figured you were going to be the one. I guess I wasn't your first, though, huh?" Quiet. She hugged him. "Not judging, Ken. I know you had girlfriends and stuff."
"A couple," he admitted. "It wasn't really like that with us, you know?"
Tessa nodded. There hadn't really been a word for what they were, and she'd never felt she was missing any measure of his affection. "No, not really. Maybe if I'd been less focused on school. Do you mind?"
"Mind what? That we never dated?"
"Yeah."
He pushed himself up so he could look into her eyes. "We rebuilt that airplane just 'cause we wanted to, and you're asking me if I'd rather have you wear my damned class ring?"
The shepherd laughed happily. "So we're on the same page. Alright."
"We'll always be something," he said, and settled down next to her. "No matter what. I wasn't ever going to go to space with you either."
That was a fair point, but not worth belaboring. She dragged her claws into his fur and listened to his breathing catch. "I got a letter from MIT yesterday. Haven't heard from the others, but... I think I'll take it."
"You'll have fun," Ken said. "They will, too, as soon as they figure out how to catch up with you. Starship engineering?"
"Well, AJAX is the fast track to the academy. I've thought about other programs, maybe. They're working on HAND with the people at CERN, and that could be some really breakthrough stuff."
"Nah. You..." The Border Collie rolled until he could stretch his arm out, pointing straight at the high rafters of the barn. "You were meant to be up there, not steering a cyclotron."
"I keep coming back to that." She pulled his arm down, draping it over her. "What about you? Still going to Harvard?"
"Don't think so, no."
"You got in, I'm sure..."
"I got in," he confirmed to her prompting. "But working with you these last couple of months, I realized I didn't want to become a lawyer. Some of the most interesting, fun stuff I've done has been in this barn."
Tessa bit the collie's floppy ear lightly. "Has it, then?"
"Well." He chuckled, and gave an apologetic shrug. "That. But the metalwork, and machining the replacement ribs, and figuring out how to make the control surfaces. You know I designed them from scratch, right? The guy who runs the shop says I have a gift."
"How are your parents taking it?"
Kenny chuckled again. "Dad isn't happy. Mom, though... mom tried to bargain with me. Her friend has a prototyping studio in LA. She said if I take an internship there, they won't disown me. And the studio liked the concepts I sent, so..."
It wasn't particularly easy to imagine the Border Collie at a drafting table, sketching up new computers or toothbrushes or whatever -- but then, it also hadn't been easy to imagine him in a suit at a law firm in New York City. "That's really cool, actually."
"Not respectable, but..."
"Overrated," she said. Progress did not come from respectability. Progress came from taking risks. And from practice: she made Kenny promise that they'd repeat the experiment that afternoon, and he laughed and licked her nose.
It was another twenty minutes until he managed to pull out, leaving her gasping with a fresh burst in stimulation while he grabbed a clean rag from their stockpile and tossed it over to her.
She cleaned herself up as best she could, and didn't mind the rest. There was work to be done, after all. Through the windows the morning had turned golden.
It's time.
They leaned on the door, until it started to give way with a great, ponderous groan. They pulled it all the way open, on those ancient hinges, until the way was clear to either side of the airplane's stout wings.
Kenny turned, and she saw his head tilt. She followed the direction he was looking in, over the short-mown field to the figure making his way towards the open barn. Holding her paw up, bidding her friend to stay in place, she jogged out to meet the man.
"Hey," her father said.
"Hey. I'm kind of surprised -- I thought you weren't going to watch."
He kept walking, and she fell in at his side. "I wasn't. But when I woke up this morning I couldn't get what you said out of my mind."
"About the plane? Needing to fly?"
Her father stopped at the edge of the field, nudging the grass with the toe of his boot. "Looks nicer than it has in years," he said, and then kept going. "No. You said that if I was proud of what you, I should remember that we've always been in this together. Can't let you down now, can I?"
"I meant it," she told him.
"I know." He stopped, and jammed his left paw into the pocket of his coat. When he pulled it out, a scarf came with it.
"What's that?"
"Belonged to your mom. You can take it with you to Cambridge. Until then..." He wrapped it about his wrist, leaving a few feet free, and held his arm as high as he could. His eyes scanned it, although for a time they seemed to seeing far beyond the rippling garment.
"Dad?"
"Light wind from the east," he said. "Steady. Good flying weather, today."
"It is," she agreed, and then she hugged him as hard as she could. "Kenny and I will test the plane out, and then we can take you up, how's that?"
"I'll hold you to it. Best get a move on."
She left him standing there, watching, and sprinted back to the barn. Ken was waiting, leaning against the fuselage next to the open door that beckoned to her. The collie was grinning. Tessa grinned back, and paused for one last look that nearly overwhelmed her.
Light had flooded in, drenching every corner of the barn. It draped itself in glowing gold sparks that raced along the shiny crimson body of the old Cessna, clean and new as the day it had first flown. It danced in the polished chrome of the engine, and teased the morning from its own reflection in flawless glass windows.
Time. Finally.
She hopped into the pilot's seat and worked the control stick through its full range of motion, waiting for Ken to give a nod of approval. "Coming?" she asked -- realizing then that she'd never actually proposed it, only assumed her friend would join her.
But he did, of course. "Wouldn't miss it." The other dog bent down to remove the bricks that chocked the Cessna's wheels, and then joined her in the cabin. He pulled the door closed, and twisted the latch to lock it in place. "Let's do this."
Tessa turned the power switch from 'off' to 'test' to 'full,' and licked her muzzle at the reassuring hum of the motor driving the heavy steel propeller. The RPMs started to climb, for the first time in a hundred years. Let's do this, indeed.
It would not quite be like the simulators; the Cessna AW was far simpler, and also far more real. Yet none of that mattered. She was born to fly, sure as any winged creature. Her paw slowly advanced the throttle lever, and they began to move.
The red bird shook off decades of its confinement without a second complaint, gliding past the open door to the field beyond. Tessa glanced about her and caught Kenny's eye. He nodded. She pushed the throttle as far as it would go. The engine leapt at once to energetic life.
Two hundred feet on and the Cessna had broken into a gallop, a cloud-hungry sprint for the edge of the sloping grass strip. Her father was still holding his arm aloft -- she waved to him, and caught his salute as they past and the humming propeller whipped the scarf into a whirling dance.
The nose dropped, leveling off towards the horizon as they continued to pick up speed. "Forty-five knots," Ken called out. "Fifty. Sixty."
Tessa gently pulled back on the stick in her paw. It drew taut on the cable. At the Cessna's horizontal stabilizer, the elevators lifted. And as if by her will alone, plane and pilot tugged themselves aloft, and free.
It was done. Hill and tree and meadow alike fell away beneath them, and the craft climbed effortlessly even after she reduced the engine's power. A soft bank dropped its left wing, and for a time, while they spiraled ever higher, Tessa observed the world as a circling hawk did.
Earth and sky parted cleanly into their own spheres. Above was dark, deep blue, brightening to the east in clouds shot through with pink and orange and saffron. Below, spring unfolded itself in lush green, filigreed by the white of cherry blossoms along the banks of a twisting river.
Between them both soared a tiny scarlet cross, balanced perfectly as though it was the axis on which the world turned and would always turn. Light danced along its glittering frame and scattered, at once timid and inexorably drawn to the machine's boldness.
And at its helm, fully aware of it all, Tessa took one glorious, long moment to feel her wings spread out, and the mile of rushing air beneath them. Then she laughed, and opened the throttle wide, and raced the spreading light of dawn west to the horizon.