After the End of the World (4)
He walked out of the small town on the trust path carrying is flight gear, Addidas shorts over orange lycra. A peregrine tattooed on his forehead its wings flexing as his forehead wrinkled from the effort of carrying the folded micro-glider, Printed on the back of his jacket another type of flying creature, his personal emblem and myth, half falcon and half man.
The other flyers were similarly dressed. Walkers and ground overs watching and moving aside as they passed. And then on the outskirts, a tram stopped in the middle of the street, high sided and narrow like ravines. But walking to the flying spaces was like nothing else that had ever happened, a stuttering ‘aaannnnnnnddddddddd’ preparing for a neo-religious experience, the worshipping of space and wind. As he finally left the towns boundaries they carved up the sun baked slope eventually peaching the edge of the cliff and the sea appeared, blue, white and green. Above the edges of the cliff flyers hanging and swooping like seagulls.
On the high point he and the others in the group began configuring the microgliders, carbon fibre struts slotting into place. Orange, blue and green plastic and nylon sheeting pulling taut over the frame, beginning to catch the wind. None of the flyers were speaking much any longer, the mixture of technical and gentle ribaldry had gone as they began to put them together. Too serious perhaps. A gentle rush to be the first off the cliff face.
“I suppose I believe in Krondratieff waves. We rest on the height of the wave of state, before beginning to fall through the crest into the trough.”
Orange plastic swooping and fluttering in the wind, stepping out from the cliffs edge, dropping down as the wind tried to push him against the cliff face. Gravity pulled him down and giving him airspeed. A ten metre drop and his airspeed increased and he swooped up above the lip of the cliff poised between gravity and the wind. Finally he smiled into the air. Relaxing in his competition with the seagulls, the other flyers and a peregrine high above, dancing in the wind stooping playfully down through the flock of gulls. Wondering at the silence of the machines.
