Nebula Awards Showcase 2012 by John Kessel, James Patrick Kelly Page A

straight down, and even odder to think that the city we were inside was speeding across that invisible landscape at hundreds of kilometers an hour. There was only the laziest feeling of motion, as the city drifted slowly through the ever-changing canyons of clouds.
     
    “Watch out for wind shear,” she said. “It can take you out of sight of the city pretty quickly, if you let it. Ride the conveyor back if you get tired.”
     
    “The conveyor?”
     
    “Horizontal-axis vortices. They roll from west to east and east to west. Choose the right altitude, and they’ll take you wherever you want to go.”
     
    Now that she’d told me, I could see the kayakers surfing the wind shear, rising upward and skimming across the sky on invisible wheels of air.
     
    “Have fun,” she said. She helped me into the gondola, tightened my straps, looked at the gas pressure meter, checked the purge valve on the emergency oxygen supply, and verified that the radio, backup radio, and emergency locator beacons worked.
     
    Across the kayak launch bay, Leah and Carlos Fernando had already pushed off. Carlos was sculling his wings alternatingly with a practiced swishing motion, building up a pendulum-like oscillation from side to side. Even as I watched, his little craft rolled over until for a moment it hesitated, inverted, and then rolled completely around.
     
    “Showing off,” Epiphany said, disdainfully. “You’re not supposed to do that. Not that anybody would dare correct him.”
     
    She turned back to me. “Ready?” she asked.
     
    “Ready as I’m going to be,” I said. I’d been given a complete safety briefing that explained the backup systems and the backups to the backups, but still, floating in the sky above a fifty-two kilometer drop into the landscape of hell seemed an odd diversion.
     
    “Go!” she said. She checked the seal on the cockpit and then with one hand she released the docking clamp.
     
    Freed from its mooring, the kayak sprang upward into the sky. As I’d been instructed, I banked the kayak away from the city. The roll made me feel suddenly giddy. The kayak skittered, sliding around until it was moving sideways to the air, the nose dipping down so that I was hanging against my straps. Coordinate the turn, I thought, but every slight motion I made with the wings seemed amplified drunkenly, and the kayak wove around erratically.
     
    The radio blinked at me, and Epiphany’s voice said, “You’re doing great. Give it some airspeed.”
     
    I wasn’t doing great; I was staring straight down at lemon-tinted haze and spinning slowly around like a falling leaf. Airspeed? I realize that I had entirely forgotten to pedal. I pedaled now, and the nose lifted. The sideways spin damped out, and as I straightened out, the wings bit into the air. “Great,” Epiphany’s voice told me. “Keep it steady.”
     
    The gas envelope seemed too fragile to hold me, but I was flying now, suspended below a golden sky. It was far too complicated, but I realized that as long as I kept the nose level, I could keep it under control. I was still oscillating slightly—it was difficult to avoid over-controlling—but on the average, I was keeping the nose pointed where I aimed it.
     
    Where were Leah and Carlos Fernando?
     
    I looked around. Each of the kayaks had different markings—mine was marked with gray stripes like a tabby cat—and I tried to spot theirs.
     
    A gaggle of kayaks was flying together, rounding the pylon of the city. As they moved around the pylon they all turned at once, flashing in the sunlight like a startled school of fish.
     
    Suddenly I spotted them, not far above me, close to the looming wall of the city; the royal purple envelope of Carlos Fernando’s kayak and the blue and yellow stripes of Leah’s. Leah was circling in a steady climb, and Carlos Fernando was darting around her, now coming in fast and bumping envelopes, now darting away and pulling up, hovering for a moment with his nose