I waited for her to tell me.  On Badezon a male of the species knew when the female to whom he had become attached was expecting a child; there was something in our biological make-up that made it so – a smell, a look, a difference, a genetic understanding.  I presumed this was not how it was with humans.  Typically their biology seemed to breed mental complications where ours stripped those complexities away, rendered them simple.  But I judged it best not to let on that I knew; I suspected it would – in a phrase I heard regularly among hang-gliding club members – freak her out.  In the meantime I tried to work out the implications of the as yet unspoken news, and to translate my instinctive Badezon reaction of joy and deep curiosity into some gently equivalent human male form.  Humans seemed to think that the gulf between their sexes was wider than it appeared to me to be, but perhaps the margin was most frequently at its largest when the half that were men were faced with the struggle of making the transition between partner and parent.  The little that Chan had told me about her previous partner seemed to confirm a male fear of being shaken out of a comfortable rut into one which he envisaged being both less comfortable, and less free.

We were sitting before the fire one night, watching the flames dance awkwardly to some of Chan’s favourite songs.  When the music stopped, a raging winter wind stepped in quickly to take its place, howling its frustration at not being able to blow our house down.  Chan took my hands and I knew this was the moment; I knew the words she was about to speak.  She spoke them, a badly disguised look of uncertainty in her eyes.  I smiled, and I kissed her, and, finding I was unable to pretend otherwise, told that I already knew, had known for some time.  She hit me on the head with a cushion then, and said, ‘Why ever didn’t you say?  I’ve been worried sick about telling you.’  Then she hugged me, and kissed me back.  It was difficult to gauge, but I think my reaction had pleased her.  She talked, slowly at first, then with her words tripping over each other in their rush to be spoken.  I listened, smiling all the while, and looked into the heart of the fire just as ancient cave-dwelling Badezoid males must have at the blaze pitched in the mouths of their shelters, dwelling with primeval satisfaction on the knowledge that their line was set to continue.

My attention was drifting, so I made an effort to reconnect with what Chan was saying, and realised to my surprise that she seemed to be seriously countenancing the possibility that this baby might be born with an unusual set of genes.  Not just a weird set, but alien.  This was a breakthrough; but it was probably also a sign that Chan’s underlying pragmatic determination was coming together with the maternal instinct to protect her unborn child from every conceivably threatening possibility.  She desperately wanted this baby, and nothing – not even alien genes – was going to stop the world from treating it like any other ordinary, wholly human infant.  After so many disappointments, she did not want success to turn into a freak show.  But it was what she asked me next that most confounded my expectations.

‘Are Badezoid babies born with little fledgling wings, or do they sprout from your shoulders at some point as you grow?’

Sandy’s seasonal workers had moved on, and though he didn’t really need help in the autumn and winter months, he let me pot-wash and collect glasses on the busier nights of the week.  Pot-washer by night, glider by day, or at least on those days that the school decreed it safe to take to the air.  The gliding burned off the excess of human adrenaline that – I now saw – had precipitated my mental crisis; strangely it also left me physically tired in a way that flying under power of my own wings had rarely done. 

Over the winter months I built back Chan’s trust.  I could see it returning in small increments (I had been with her long enough now to be able to begin to perceive these little human signs); in the momentary relief that showed before she composed her face each time I returned from gliding, and in the way she would half-smile as I described a typically ordinary evening at Sandy’s.  Her eyes clouded only at the mention of Badezon, which I had begun to talk about again.  I wanted to normalise the notion of what I was, and talk freely about my origins as I had in the period after she found me on the beach.  So, talking about the hang gliding, I would say, ‘I’m Badezon; we need flight to feel alive.’ And then wait hopefully for the kind of questions she used to ask, about life lived in the air, life lived on my planet.  Now and again, usually late at night, she would humour me.

I understood that she would have preferred me not to hang glide.  But she had also quickly understood that it was for me what ceramics were for her.  Before long I had flown from all of Cornwall’s recognised launch sites – Sennen, Perranporth, Chapel Porth, St. Agnes Head, High Cliff, Vault Bay, Carbis Bay, Carne, Carn Brea, Rosewall Hill, again from Godrevy, and from one or two unofficial places.  I never felt in the slightest danger.  I knew I could fly, whether with real or artificial wings; bird-alien that I was, I turned and dived in a way that few of the other professional pilots would dare to try.  Soon the school’s manager started to talk about me gliding competitively, even though he knew it meant that he himself would drop a place in any competition we both entered.  I wasn’t sure what to do.  Like any Badezon, I wanted to show off my prowess in the air.  But obviously it would draw attention to me, too much attention.  Chan immediately said no.  Now that I had begun to talk about my planet again, I could tell that she feared the stress of competition – of exposure – would force another crisis, another moment of dangerous madness; another hang gliding fatality.  She needed me to carry on existing and she did not have – could not have – my conviction that in the air I was safe from harm.  I agreed not to put myself forward, but the urge was strong, and I knew that eventually I would give in to it, and risk the consequences.

But that winter, alien-human relations were at their best.  When I came home from the bar or from the air, and Chan from her potter’s wheel and kiln, we would both ache with virtuous exhaustion.  After preparing and eating a simple meal, we would sit before the flickering open fire and listen to music – Earth songs about the sea and the moon, or Spain, or hearts entwined with human complications.  When the songs finished we would allow the wind to slip in and take its place, and listen to the music of the onshore breeze rising off the sea, ascending the hill, deviating over the roofs of the houses that clung to it, until it gusted down our chimney, scattering the flames in all directions, and left behind a sound like the fading shimmer of a cymbal.  And then we ourselves would rise on an indoor thermal and without any seeming effort find ourselves in what I began to think of as not Chan’s but our bed.

That was the night I remembered making love with another of my species, in the air above the semi-translucent sloping fields of quartz, as Badezon’s two dying suns set them aflame.  In our sleepy, stream of consciousness bliss, I immediately relayed this flashback to Chan, who to my surprise roared with laughter.

‘Well, that brings a whole new meaning to the Mile High Club,’ she said.  Then, laughing hysterically, ‘Don’t even think of trying that in a hang glider.’

The hang gliding school were wary of my credentials, and warier still when I appeared not to know certain technical terms which were their lingua franca.  I said we’d developed our own Aussie slang for the kit we used, and improvised some names for them on the spot: goblet, tinny, short leg, gastropod.  They were still wary, and later I learned that one of them had checked the internet to satisfy himself that the club I purported to teach for really did exist.  But Chan and I had done our research; she had meticulously faked a certificate from the Australian hang gliding association, and, with the help of an acquaintance of Sandy’s, had come by a marriage certificate and proof of joint nationality.  With this and one or two other easily acquired items, I could open the bank account I would need to become employable.

I committed to memory all the basics of hang gliding, and visualised what in artificial terms I needed to do to become airborne.  Once in the air, I was convinced that my genetic, natural flying ability would be there waiting for me to reclaim it.  There might be some bumpy moments as I adjusted my centre of gravity to the fact that my wings were no longer attached at my shoulders but were instead held by a frame some number of feet above my head; I would ride those out.

At the end of that first meeting with the people from the school, they seemed more or less satisfied, and told me that they would ring me when the weather was set fair for flying.  As for teaching, well, they’d have to see how I flew; but even then, I’d need to take the national association’s qualification before they’d let me near novices.

When the day came, my skin prickled and my mind exploded with flashbacks to Badezon.  The clouds were the flat-bottomed cotton-wool puffs of cumulus that signified safe gliding, and as the pilots gathered on the hillside at Godrevy, there was talk about streets, glassoffs and elevators.

I was impatient to feel the air about me as I had on Badezon, but I carefully and methodically adjusted my kit as protocol required, and waited my turn.  As I launched myself from the hillside, I tucked my legs into what they called the cocoon and I the gastropod – like the bottom three-quarters of a sleeping bag – and was transformed into a giant wasp with chevron sails.  Immediately I felt myself rise on a thermal, sniffing the air for its feel and its path.  These wings were clumsy in comparison with my own, but I soon had their measure, and knew they would do.  So I swooped down and into and up on a thermal.  I wheeled like a gull, and wheeled again.  Then I glided for miles along the coast, watching the human flyers drop behind me and away.  I ignored the variometer.  The climatic conditions were near-identical to Badezon.  When my wings had first been strong enough to lift me into the air, I discovered that what my parents said was true – you’ll know what to do, and where the good air is.  And then I was alone, I was free, soaring as we used to do on Badezon across the plains of rock that heated the air and created the uplift which bore us higher, lighter than a single one of our feathers.

From the skies, I could see the beauty of the planet I had found myself upon.  If the coastal walks with Chan had given me a glimpse, now I had a three-dimensional panorama all about me.  But to what astonishing effect the planet’s weather systems and the bodies of water and earth interacted; light reflecting and deflecting off clouds and sea, and colouring the emeralds, yellows and greys of the land with a degree of intensity that momentarily dazzled me and took my breath away.  And as I had come to expect at such moments, a flashback hit me, and I remembered the exhilaration of flying over features of the Badezon land- and waterscape that I had never before encountered.

While I was in the air, the wind changed direction, and I was able to head back the way I had come, landing to everyone’s astonishment on the very hill from which we had taken off.  I was a natural bird-man, they said.  Unusual technique.  But very effective.  ‘So you believe me now?’ I said, softening the impact of the implicit criticism with a smile.  The school’s manager cracked a smile in return, and I knew I was in.