'I'm afraid I don't follow.'

'Didn't I tell you?'

'Ah, no.'

'My regiment is being posted to Mindanao. Off to fight the wretched Moros. We leave next week.'

Pantaleon Quiroga cranked the handle on the front of the Flanquin and the engine fired into life. The Aero-mobile shuddered and quivered, as if suddenly animate. The chain drives to the propeller mountings hummed and clattered on their sprocketed wheels. Carriscant and Pantaleon stepped back and looked on in a moment of amazement before Pantaleon beckoned Carriscant round the thrumming machine to where the spinning bosses of the pushing propellers (yet to be mounted) were fixed. Carriscant rested his hand gently on a panel of stretched and doped silk and felt the powerful vibrations travel up his arm. For the first time he sensed that Pantaleon's dream was not a deluded fantasy after all, the fellow might actually be on to something.

'Two propellers pushing,' Pantaleon shouted, twirling his fingers in illustration. 'But I'm a little concerned about the allowances I made for the fuel tank and the radiator. They were heavier than I thought.'

'Is that bad?'

'We're getting close to the maximum weight if my calculations are right. Very close.'

Pantaleon walked forward and slung a long leg over the forward of the two bicycle saddles mounted above the four-wheeled carriage the machine rested on. He reached over and adjusted the throttle control on the engine and the noise slackened as the motor idled. He listened to it for a moment, his head cocked, and then switched it off.

Carriscant peered over his shoulder at the two wooden levers that were mounted in front of him and the pedal controls that were operated by his feet. Above his shoulders were two other levers sticking forward, like handles on a wheelbarrow, from the leading edge of the upper wing.

Pantaleon saw him looking and explained. 'The whole front edge is hinged,' he said, gripping the handles and demonstrating. True enough, he could move a front flap of wing up and down through an angle of forty-five degrees. 'On leaving the ground it is pushed up to the full extent to provide maximum lift. Once we are in the air I can pull it down to reduce resistance, or up if we need to be more… ' he searched for a word, '… buoyant.' Carriscant had a sudden perception of a vocabulary adapting itself, creating itself. Like medicine and surgery, new discoveries enriched the language-germ, appendix, bacillus, phagocyte, micro-organism…

'I call it the "air-catcher",' he said. 'I've applied for a patent. If it works, who knows? I might-'

'If it works? My dear Panta, you can't possibly take such a risk.'

'On the gliding models it seems fine. But once we're up with a machine of this weight… ' He turned and pointed to the second bicycle saddle behind him, with its own set of levers. 'That's why I've reproduced the tail-warping mechanism here.'

'You don't mean to tell me you're going to move seats in mid – ' he was about to say 'journey' but it seemed wrong, ' – while the machine is in the air? In its aerial trip?'

'No, no. My fellow-flyer – my co-flyer, indeed – will be controlling the warping while I deal with the elevators,' he pointed to his foot controls, 'and the air-catcher.'

'I see. I suppose it makes sense.' Carriscant frowned: he had grown used to the Aero-mobile by now, with its fragile, translucent ugliness, but these controls seemed unnecessarily complex. Surely there must be a simpler way? All these moving surfaces – warping, elevating, catching -all these levers, struts and wires. When you saw a bird fly it seemed… He stopped. Pantaleon was looking fixedly at him, his eyes wide, strange.

'What is it?' Carriscant said.

'I was wondering, Salvador, if you'd do me the honour.'

'Of what?'

'Of joining me on this historic flight.'

The first rains arrived early that year but Dr Salvador Carriscant, ever prudent, had been carrying his umbrella with him since the end of January and, as the first fat drops hit his head, he congratulated himself on his foresight. He folded away his small easel and sketch pad and closed his box of water-colours before retreating to the shelter of a nearby bamboo grove, where he was still afforded a clear view of the Calle Lagarda and of the entrance to the Sieverance home. The bamboo grove was on the other side of a small overgrown creek – the estero San Miguel – from the Calle Lagarda and its spacious villas. Conscious of the risks he had run on the last occasion he had indulged in espionage, he had gone to some lengths to make his presence here plausible should he be discovered. In his sketch book were several indifferent and half completed views of this undistinguished portion of Manila 's suburbs. An expanse of marshland, some rice fields, a few palm trees and in the distance the neat dome and campanile of the San Sebastian church and convent. He had always vaguely planned to take up water-colouring as a hobby and respite from the relentless demands of the operating theatre and had seized on this pastime as the perfect way both to satisfy this urge and 'innocently' observe the Sieverance home. He had to admit, however, it was the proximity of the house and its occupant that distracted him and dominated his mind and not the soothing effect of his daubings.

Colonel Jepson Sieverance and his new regiment, the 1st Nebraska Volunteers, had embarked for Mindanao five days previously on the steamer Brewster, according to the gazette in the Manila Times, a fact that Paton Bobby had confirmed too. With the husband gone, Carriscant knew he had to see Delphine once more, but without the presence of Nurse Aslinger as chaperone. The nurse, he reasoned, must quit the house occasionally, but three days of patient water-colouring – two hours the first, four and a half the second – had seen no-one but servants enter or leave the compound. He checked his pocket watch: he had been out for almost three hours again today, and now the rain had started he wondered if it were worth lingering further. He looked up at the turbulent, livid sky. Rain in the Philippines is a full-blooded, uncompromising, natural phenomenon. The big drops noisily battered the material of his umbrella and he could feel the ground beneath his feet beginning to soften and deliquesce. Above his head the fine spiky fronds of the bamboo stands were thrashed and flung this way and that by a robust breeze. Some beetle droned by searching for shelter, an angry noise in a black dot…

A faint clatter of hooves made him look sharply across the estero as, to his surprise, he saw the gate to the Sieverance compound open and a small carromato emerge containing, indubitably, the mackintoshed and ample figure of Nurse Aslinger. It trotted down the Calle Lagarda towards the Malacanan Palace and as it did so, Carriscant, bent beneath his umbrella, hurried upstream to the Marquez bridge and splashed his way down the dirt track that led back into San Miguel. He was at her front door in five minutes. Two minutes later he was pacing damply about her living room waiting for the maid to inform Mrs Sieverance that Dr Carriscant was here to visit her. In his hand he held her copy of East Angels by Constance Fenimore Woolson. As a dutiful and responsible borrower, he told himself, he was returning the book promptly to its owner.

She came slowly into the room, walking with two sticks to help carry some of her weight. She was wearing an apple-green dress and her hair was up. Her wide smile of welcome was pronounced and irrefutable. His nervousness returned with perplexing force.

'Dr Carriscant, what a surprise.' She frowned, suddenly. 'I haven't forgotten, have I? We hadn't planned -'

'No, no. Ah… I was visiting my colleague, Dr Quiroga. I took the opportunity of returning your book.' He thrust it forward as if he had just learnt the meaning of the phrase, realised it was going to be awkward for her to take it, what with her two sticks, and looked around foolishly for a table on which to set it down.