The fliers’ base of operations was an offshore crater rim island, called Santorini. After breakfast the group went down to the docks together and got on a ferry, and debarked half an hour later on the little arcuate island, and trooped with the other passengers up to the gliderport.

Nirgal had not flown for years, and it was a great joy to strap into a blimpglider’s gondola and rise up the mast, and let loose and soar on the powerful updrafts pushing off Santorini’s steep inner rim. As Nirgal ascended he saw that most of the fliers wore birdsuits of one sort or another; it looked like he was flying in a flock of wide-winged flying creatures, which resembled not birds but something more like flying foxes, or some mythic hybrid like the griffin or Pegasus: bird-humans. The birdsuits were of several different kinds, imitating in some respects the configurations of different species— albatross, eagle, swift, lammergeier. Each suit encased its flier in what was in effect an ever-changing exoskeleton, which responded to interior pressure from the flier’s body, to take and then hold positions, or make certain movements, all reinforced in proportion to the pressure exerted inside them, so that a human’s muscles could flap the big wings, or hold them in place against the great torque of the wind’s onslaughts, meanwhile keeping the streamlined helmets and tail feathers in the proper positions. Suit AIs helped fliers who wanted help, and they could even function as automatic pilots; but most fliers preferred to do the thinking for themselves, and controlled the suit as a waldo, exaggerating many times the strength of their own muscles.

Sitting in his blimpglider Nirgal watched with both pleasure and trepidation as these bird people shot down past him in terrifying stoops toward the sea, then popped their wings and curved away and gyred back up again on the inner-wall updraft. It looked to Nirgal like the suits took a high level of skill to fly; they were the opposite of the blimpgliders, a few of which soared with Nirgal over the island, rising and falling in much gentler swoops, taking in the view like agile balloonists.