by Tom Miller
“He lost Mr. B!”
“Where are you hurt, sweetheart?”
“That’s not my name!”
“Where’s Emmaline?”
“Everybody shut up!” I roared. To my surprise, they did.
“We got called for an RA out past Bozeman,” I said. “There were no other fliers available, so my mother brought me. We found two injured and two more—deceased. Ma took the wounded, but I lost contact with her. I think she went down. And Carla lost her dolly.”
“You two, get her inside, please,” the hospital philosopher said to the others. “I’ll see to him.”
The nurse picked up the girl, but Carla squirmed in her arms, twisting so that she could see me. “I hate you!” she screamed.
I pressed my lips together and tried to regain my composure. The hospital philosopher put her arm on my shoulder.
“Is that Evelyn Klein’s girl?” she asked me. “My God, what happened?”
I tried to find my voice. “They shot her and hanged her and burned her. They shot everybody.”
“Oh, Jesus!” the woman said. “Does the girl know?”
“I don’t think she understands.”
“Oh, Lord.” She wiped her eyes. “That’s a terrible thing to see. You come inside, too, Robert. I’m Bertie Synge. I’m the chief of medical philosophy.”
I took her hand and shook it. “Doctor,” I said. “Are you a hoverer, by any chance?”
“Good heavens, no,” she said. “I do stasisry and smokecarving. I’ll be the one to do the anesthesia for the gunshot cases in the operating room.”
“There aren’t going to be any cases if we can’t find my mother,” I said. “Does anybody here fly?”
“One or two of the nurses, but certainly no one well enough to take a passenger.”
With mounting panic, I realized I was going to be searching for Mother alone. And I had no idea where she was.
4
Upward! You must be moving upward while launching. You are not flying, you are engaging in a prolonged and well-controlled ten-mile broad jump.
Amelia Tintinalli, Hovering Emergencies and Recovery, Third Edition, 1915
DR. SYNGE SHOWED ME into the hoverers’ room, which was a sparsely furnished office. I eased into a chair, my left ankle still throbbing, and drew to receive messages on the tabletop board. Nothing new. I tried another message to Mother.
“Nothing?” Synge asked.
I shook my head. I messaged the State Office to explain the situation and beg for help.
Impossible, they replied. There are 100+ injured or missing at the mining camp in Eureka. Have diverted volunteers from Boise, Spokane, and Calgary to assist. Cannot provide search team to you before late morning at earliest.
The Kleins’ stasis sigils only had a little more than an hour left—they were going to be dead by the time I got help.
I spread out the large Montana map on the table while Dr. Synge looked on.
“The Klein place is forty miles away,” Synge said. “That’s all rough country. You couldn’t search that much territory alone in a month.”
“Right,” I said. “But I lost track of Ma five minutes into the flight. It took her two or three minutes to message me. If she stayed within ten degrees of our course that leaves . . .”
I used a ruler and compass to draw a triangle on the map and did the calculations. Fifty-five hundred acres. Still impossible.
But then there it was, scrawled across the board: RA.
Request assistance. I heaved a huge sigh of relief. Mother was down and probably hurt, but she was together enough to send a meaningful message.
Where are you? I wrote.
This time the reply came quickly: Dwn. On course line.
Every hoverer who’d ever made an unplanned landing claimed she’d stayed right on course, even if she’d glided for miles in the wrong direction. But if Mother really had, then finding her would be as simple as retracing my route to the Kleins’ house. It might really be possible to do it myself.
Cn y light flares? I wrote.
Y.
Are y hurt?
No answer to that. So, yes.
I pushed myself to my feet, grunting in pain, and began buckling my powder bag back on.
“This is not a good idea,” Dr. Synge said. “If you try to do this alone with a bad ankle and a concussion, then we’re going to be searching for you, too.”
“There’s barely an hour left on those stasis sigils. They’re going to die if I don’t try!”
Dr. Synge hissed through her teeth. “How long can you fly before philosophical fatigue sets in?”
That was a fair question.
The problem for philosophers is that you can’t get something for nothing. When a philosopher’s body supplies the philosophical power for an energy-intensive sigil, like hovering, it throws her blood chemistry out of kilter. Mother, who’d been flying for four decades, could go hours without feeling the effects, but if I hovered longer than an hour I wound up with a raging headache. Push beyond that, and I risked muscle cramps, confusion, and palpitations. Go further still and my heart might simply stop.
“I’ll be fine to get there and back,” I said. I pulled on my helmet and goggles.
“I can’t allow this,” said Dr. Synge. “You’re an unqualified teenager, a male, who’s never—”
“I’m Emmaline Weekes’s son!” I shouted. “Either help or get out of the way.”
Synge gave a half shake of the head. She pulled my arm over her shoulders and helped me limp out of the hospital and onto the landing field.
“Godspeed, Mr. Weekes,” Dr. Synge said, tucking an extra stasis kit into my workbag.
I launched and accelerated hard, cleaving as closely as possible to my line of navigation. The rain had slackened and the cloud cover was beginning to break up. That was good news for the moment, but that sort of change in the weather often presaged dense banks of fog, which would be disastrous. After twenty minutes, as I neared the point where Mother had most likely lost power, I slowed and descended.
To my surprise, I found her almost immediately. The blue light of several safety flares shone around her. True to her word, she’d stayed right on course. That was experience for you.
I drew sigils to land, setting down with an overeager touch-and-crouch approach. My ankle turned under me and I nearly fell on Mother.
“Damn time,” she said.
“If you’d answer your messages—” I growled, then stopped short.
Ma looked awful. She’d ended up prone with the still-paralyzed man on top of her, pinning her to the ground. One of the straps binding her to her front passenger had come loose, tangling around Mother’s right arm, which looked broken.
I reached down to unhook the boy from Mother’s front, but the steel carabiner was bent.
“Cut it,” said Ma.
I cut the straps with my belt knife and pulled the boy’s inert body free. Then I dragged the man off her and cut away the straps that Ma’s arm had fouled in. Mother rolled onto her side. She grimaced and drew her wounded arm to her chest. She was breathing in short, grating pants.
“Broken ribs?” I asked.
“Can’t get any air,” she gasped.
“Let’s get you to the hospital.”
She waved me off and for a moment made as if she might climb to her feet. Her primary powder bag had burst when she hit the ground and her secondary had a large tear in it. Not fit for use, but she reached for it anyway, like she was going to attach it to her rigging, which I’d just shredded. She wasn’t thinking right or breathing right. I knew what I had to do. I tried not to let the fear seep into my voice.
“I’ll put you in stasis,” I said. “It’ll be easy. You’ve seen me do it a hundred times.”
“On paper,” she said. “Have you ever? On a person?”
“Once. Sort of. On Willard’s horse when it broke its leg.”
Ma winced. “How’d the horse do?”
“Well, he di
ed. But not because of my sigil!”
Mother shut her eyes and I helped her roll on her back. I extracted one of the thin strips of indicator paper from the kit Synge had given me, wet it with my tongue, and stuck it to Ma’s neck. I could see the pulse in her neck bounding.
“Fly them first,” she murmured.
That made good sense. There was enough time to get the Kleins to the hospital before their stases wore off, but not enough to take Mother and then come back for them. Putting them under a second time was out of the question—the simple stasis sigil that Mother and I used didn’t work on the same person twice.
I popped the cork off the tube of silver chloride and kissed Ma on the forehead.
“Don’t fuck this up,” she whispered.
I blew a breath out and before I had a chance to reconsider, let the powder spill out, tracing the series of arcs over her chest. She blinked and her eyelids froze half-shut. Her pulse was gone. Her breathing had stopped. Trembling, I reached for her hand and pulled on it. It didn’t move. A good, strong stasis.
I peeled the indicator strip off her skin and tested it with formic acid: sixty-eight minutes before Mother woke. I didn’t have a second to waste.
I wrestled the still-stasied man into an undamaged harness and rolled him so that he was facedown in the mud. Then I clipped the boy onto my back and—thank God the kid was small—lowered myself, so that I was lying on top of the big man. I attached my chest clips to the back of his harness, then heaved onto my side and got my right leg under me. I opened my regulator wide, drew to launch, and pushed off with my good foot.
I sprang into the air and the bodies came with me. After a series of sigils to level us, I shoved my passengers into positions where they weren’t banging into some vital part of me, poured on speed, and made for Helena.
I pushed my regulator to six ounces per minute and then worked my way up to 9.9. I’d never had it so high. Even with all the weight I was dragging, I should be making nearly one hundred fifty miles an hour. But any slower and Mother would come to before I got her to Dr. Synge.
I spotted the landing field in the faint predawn light and prepared to land. Touching down with stasied passengers was complicated because they hit the ground before you did. I tried to make sure that the large man strapped to my chest made contact with both feet at the same time, but he struck one side before the other and toppled sideways, spinning me down to the ground with him.
“Flier down!” came the shout.
Dr. Synge, along with the same doctor and nurse, ran over and unhooked my passengers. Several orderlies came up with stretchers.
“How’s your mother?” Synge asked.
“Bad,” I said. “She couldn’t breathe. I put her under.”
“How long on her stasis?”
“She’s got about fifty minutes left,” I said. “It was my first time.”
“That’s a hell of a way to learn. Your head’s okay?”
“Achy,” I said. “But I hit it twice. I don’t think it’s philosophical fatigue, just a concussion.”
“Lovely,” Dr. Synge deadpanned. “Go quick.”
I launched, flew twenty minutes, and found Mother without difficulty. I landed and grabbed Ma under the armpits, pulling her upright so that she was leaning back against me. I attached her to my chest harness and lifted off.
Two minutes into the return flight, the sun peeked over the horizon and I realized something was wrong with me. Faintly at first, then steadily louder, came a sound like a vast sheet of metal being cut by an endless saw blade. As the sunlight grew brighter, the shrieking in my head intensified.
I began to panic. It was philosophical fatigue, coming on me rapidly. I’d never had it so bad—it felt as if my brain were tearing itself in two. I reached to turn my regulator down but couldn’t focus my eyes. My fingers didn’t look real.
Did I have minutes left before my heart seized up? Another hour?
As I approached Helena, the city dissolved into a blur. Splashes of color played across the inside of my eyelids: spinning concentric circles, dumbbell shapes expanding and contracting, tangled messes of lines.
This is how I’m going to die. I couldn’t banish the thought. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move.
Then a final reserve of energy surged up. Acting on reflex, I cut speed and turned, following the same course I’d flown twice already. The hospital materialized through the haze and then the landing field. But I couldn’t judge my altitude. I was approaching too fast.
Do it ugly.
I clutched Mother to my chest, aimed for a piece of ground free of cows, and shut off my regulator. My sigil sputtered out and I glided in the last few feet, legs stretched out in front of me like a ballplayer sliding. I hit the mud butt-first, knocked my head backward into the ground, and skidded to a stop.
The whine in my head slowly dropped in pitch. I was content to lie there, my eyes clamped shut, until the end of days.
Several sets of hands unhooked Mother from me.
“—hear me? Robert! Robert?”
Dr. Synge.
“Open your eyes, Robert!”
My eyes fluttered open and I got a face of the early-morning sun.
“Well,” I mumbled. “That wasn’t so—”
And then my heart stopped.
5
God looked down and said, “Give me the right sort of American. Give me a woman who’ll tend a garden in the time-honored fashion, with watering can, long-handled hoe, and salt for the slugs. No piece of sorcerer’s glass for her. No, she’ll grow tomatoes as we have for six thousand years and if she picks them three months later, they’re all the sweeter for it. And I’ll call that woman a Trencher.”
God said, “Give me a man who’ll wake at dawn to feed the horses, put in a full day’s work, and ride five miles into town on a Tuesday night so that he can vote in a municipal election, then ride five miles home in the dark. What use does he have for flying? Leave it for the birds, the bats, and the angels. He lives his life in the right way, the one his father would recognize—and the generations before, straight on back to Adam. And I’ll call that man a Trencher, too.”
Maxwell Gannet, “Sermon on the New Trencher Party,” 1917
I SPENT TWENTY-EIGHT HOURS sleeping off the effects of my overexertion. When I finally woke, I saw a familiar figure sitting in a chair at the foot of my bed. I could tell she was annoyed, no less so for being focused on her knitting, which she performed with such intensity that one pitied the yarn. My littlest big sister, home from New York City.
“Angela,” I called out hoarsely.
She barely looked up from her row of stitches. “Is it true you botched three landings in one night?”
“Yeah,” I croaked. “At least.”
“It’s a good thing they forbade me to touch you, because I should give you a thrashing like you wouldn’t believe. Embarrassing me like that. Folks are going to say Angie Weekes forgot to teach little Boober how to land. You made the front page of the Billings Gazette, by the way. It must have seemed amusing enough that the Tattler in Detroit picked it up, too—‘Male Flier Rescues Three in “Mantana.” ’ The article was almost as long as the title. I’ve had to fend off your throngs of admirers.”
“Hundreds?”
“Thousands,” she said dryly.
Angela set down her knitting and came over to take my hand. “So, you lost your pulse for about a minute after you landed with Mother. Dr. Synge said you were too stupid to die and as long as you survived the first day, you’d probably make a full recovery.”
“Glad to hear it,” I rasped. I touched my nose. There was a rubber tube running through it and down my throat.
“Ma dislocated her arm and punctured a lung,” Angela continued. “She’s looking fit, all things considered. They’ve caught her twice trying to sneak out to take calls.”
Angela kissed me on the cheek. “I have to go find Dr. Synge. If you die in the next five minutes, I’ll never hear the end of it.”<
br />
Synge bustled in a moment later.
“Entirely in your debt, Mr. Weekes,” she said. “We so rarely get to see the effects of over-philosophizing in a male, much less with a full-blown cardiac arrest. I’ll get a paper for the Journal of Experimental Medical Philosophy out of you for certain.”
“Terrific,” I said.
She tested my reflexes and grip strength and, satisfied I wasn’t dying in front of her, rang for a meal tray.
“We’ve been running potassium chloride into you through that nasogastric tube, but I think it might be pleasanter to do it the old-fashioned way,” she said.
Dr. Synge yanked the two-foot-long rubber tube out through my nose. I groaned and wiped blood from the nostril.
An orderly brought me mashed potatoes, sliced bananas, and fresh orange slices—the philosopher’s classic high-potassium recovery diet. I was ravenous. I stuffed sections of the orange in my mouth and though the juices stung my throat, I asked for a second helping of everything.
“You’re indecently healthy for what you’ve been through,” Dr. Synge told me. “You’ll have to forgive me if I spend too long with you. I needed a win.”
“The Kleins,” I said, “did they not . . . ?”
She shook her head. “The husband went quick. He’d lost too much blood. But we spent eight hours in surgery with the son. We thought we’d repaired the damage. Then his carotid artery ruptured.”
She exhaled sharply.
“And little Carla,” Synge continued. “She was in every hour to see you—we couldn’t keep her away. She told anyone who would listen that some boys can fly. ‘Did you know some boys can fly?’ ”
Her voice caught at the end.
“Her aunt came from San Francisco,” Synge said. “She took Carla back with her. But they left you something.”
She glanced toward an old rag doll on my bedside table.
“Mr. B,” I said.
“The groundskeeper found it while he was mowing the grass yesterday.”
I picked the doll up and held it. It smelled like smoke. I thought of the hanged woman—her face charred to the bone, her body scorched. My jaw clenched.