The Philosopher's Flight

by Tom Miller

  That was Mother for you.

  “So what about you?” Angela asked, dabbing at her eyes and resuming her duties as big sister. “If Mother retired tomorrow, what would you want to do?”

  If I couldn’t admit it to my own sister . . .

  “The Corps,” I said. “Rescue and Evac.”

  Angela snorted. “Oh, be serious.”

  It only dulled the sting a little that I would have reacted the same way a few days before.

  “It’s an adventure,” I said. “See the world—”

  “If you want to get out of Billings, there are easier ways than the Corps. You’re a better sigilrist than half the girls I work with and most of them have a degree in empirical philosophy. You could get one, too. You’re smart enough.”

  I hadn’t ever really considered that.

  “I wasn’t much of a student,” I said.

  “You were when you weren’t bored. You got As in every chemistry and math class you ever took.”

  “Well, that’s different. That’s how you do your powder and navigation. It’s life and death.”

  “So study something practical.”

  “How would I ever pay for it?”

  “Sign up under the Contingency Act.”

  The Act had been passed in response to the shortage of philosophers caused by the Great War. The Corps had deployed ten thousand women overseas to make sure the European powers adhered to the Rouen Conventions, which forbade the use of empirical philosophy in armed conflict, except for humanitarian endeavors, like evacuating the wounded. The Act would pay your college tuition, provided you agreed to serve an equal number of years in an area in the States that was short on philosophers.

  “Just do it for one year and see if you like it,” Angela suggested. “You’ve got to do a year of service afterward, but you could request to do that anywhere. Hell, the whole state of Montana is classified as under-resourced. If you got the right reviewers, they could post you here as Mother’s apprentice. Then you watch the State Office lose their minds over it. Or request an assignment somewhere you’d want to live. New York. Denver. Hawaii.”

  Or in the Corps. Contingency Act students could volunteer for the Sigilry Corps, too.

  “That’s pretty good,” I said.

  “Of course it’s good!” Angela replied. “We just need a university dumb enough to take a male philosopher.”

  Dr. Synge was passing the door and caught the end of the conversation.

  “Radcliffe College,” she suggested.

  “A male philosopher,” Angela repeated. “They’re a women’s school.”

  “They’ve made a few exceptions for Contingency students,” Dr. Synge said.

  “Radcliffe’s no place to study philosophy,” Angela scoffed. “It’s a lot of rich New England snobs. Do they even have professors of sigilry?”

  “They have some excellent ones,” Synge said. “I went there.”

  “Oh,” said Angela.

  “My old lieutenant from the Philippine-American War became one of their deans,” Synge offered. “She’d be interested in you, Robert.”

  Being educated alongside a couple thousand women sounded not unattractive.

  “Boston’s nice enough, I suppose,” Angela said, “but it’s about the Trencheriest city outside of Atlanta. You’ve got Maxwell Gannet sitting in his castle, giving sermons on how philosophy will bring about the end of the world.”

  “There’s one Trencher meetinghouse downtown,” Synge reassured me. “You stay clear of there, you’ll never so much as see an anti-philosopher.”

  I shook my head. “But what do we do about Ma?”

  “Oh, get poor Emmaline a couple proper apprentices!” Dr. Synge said. “It’s long past time and she knows it. Mrs. Yzerman’s youngest girl is sixteen. She’s very capable, but she’ll never get the experience she needs at home—she has four older sisters.”

  “Ma and Mrs. Yzerman go way back,” Angela said. “They’ll both like that idea. I’ll talk to Ma about it tonight. Shit, I’ll talk to her about it right now.”

  Angela ducked out.

  “And then,” Dr. Synge said quietly to me, “you use your connections at Radcliffe to find a general crazy enough to put a man in R&E.”

  • • •

  Over the next day, I composed a letter to Radcliffe’s admissions committee in which I laid out my good points, talked a bit about my practical experience, explained that I wanted to work someday serving the public interest (which Angela said they’d like), and wouldn’t they please admit me under the Contingency Act? Dr. Synge wrote her friend the dean on my behalf, too.

  We mailed off the letters. Dr. Synge discharged me home to convalesce with a stack of books on smokecarving and stasis sigilry, which I slogged through (in between rereading Life and Death on San Juan Hill for the thousandth time). When that grew dull, I played cards with Mother or Angela. I wrote letters to my friends who’d enlisted and were already away in basic training. (I am worried, Willard Gunch wrote in reply. What if the war ends before I get there?)

  Three weeks passed. Gradually, I realized how little interest a women’s college in New England must have for a male philosopher from out West, even if he’d recently had his picture on the front page of the Billings Gazette.

  “Don’t take it too hard,” Mother said. “I can always use your help around the house. Show young Miss Yzerman the ropes.”

  If the thought of helping to train my sixteen-year-old replacement put me in a funk, I tried not to show it.

  But the deans at Radcliffe must have been in a whimsical mood the day they reviewed my application. Deciding there couldn’t be too much harm in admitting one simpleton from Montana, they offered me a spot. We got the letter a few hours before Angela was to head back to New York.

  I was stupefied.

  “I knew it!” Angela shrieked. “My idiot brother, the college man! I should have made you do this ages ago.”

  Ma was more skeptical.

  “What are they going to teach you about philosophy in a classroom?” she complained. “The proper place to learn sigilry is in the field.”

  “Mother!” said Angela in a warning tone.

  “Well,” Ma said. “Maybe he’ll find himself a rich wife out there and support me in my old age. At any rate, it sounds like a grand adventure.”

  The next morning, Ma woke me at five o’clock.

  “If you want to learn sigilry out of a book, that’s your business,” she said, while I was still rubbing the sleep from my eyes. “But I’m not sending you clear across the country so you can horrify a lot of overbred princesses with that preposterous landing vector you favor. We’re going to put you in the air and you’re going to angle and tuck until you get it right.”

  • • •

  In late May, Radcliffe messaged that they’d arranged housing for me in an apartment a few blocks from campus along with another male empirical philosopher, Karl Friedrich Unger. The college provided his postal address, but oddly not his personal glyph. I mailed him a letter asking him to message me, but never heard back. I had visions of some urbane sophisticate sitting in an overstuffed leather chair in the oak-paneled library of his family’s mansion, opening my dust-stained envelope, reading my inelegant prose, and remarking, “How ghastly! I’m to room with a primitive from the Wild West.” But there was nothing to be done about it.

  By June, the youngest Yzerman daughter had moved in to act as Mother’s assistant; she was joined a few days later by a pair of sisters from a philosophically minded family in Butte, who were to replace me as the “essential support personnel.” I’d expected to need several weeks to train them, but one was quieter and more serious than the next, and it took them all of three days to render me superfluous. They had, after all, been raised from infancy to do that sort of work.

  So I spent my last weeks at home flying, training under Mother’s critical eye and building up my resistance to philosophical fatigue until I could spend two, then three hours in the ai
r. When my temples began to throb, I drank gallons of mint tea and read Mother’s library of philosophical guides and manuals, trying to fill in the sizable gaps in my knowledge.

  It should have been as languid and happy and peaceful a stretch as you could ever imagine. But, as Sheriff Hansen had predicted, the summer was a bad one.

  The trials of the young men who’d murdered the Kleins ended with all ten of them convicted. They were hanged. And all across Wyoming, North Dakota, and Montana, philosophers’ houses burned. I could see Ma itching to do something about it, but she put her energy into her apprentices and me instead.

  Then, three days before I was supposed to go east, a gang of Trenchers lured County Philosopher O’Malley into an ambush a few miles outside Butte. Shot her twenty-eight times. They dumped her body on Main Street and fled into the hills. In retaliation, a band of Jayhawks attacked the Hand of the Righteous church in Hillcock with incendiary smoke during a prayer meeting. The building erupted into an inferno—thirty-one dead, mostly women and children.

  “I doubt the Hand were even the ones who killed Erin,” Ma said, shaking her head. “But now we’re going to see them hit back, too.”

  “It’s getting out of control,” I said. “Maybe I should stay here.”

  “And do what?” Ma asked. “Sit up all night on the porch with your rifle in your lap?”

  “If I have to,” I said. “Or . . .”

  “Or you’re going to go hunt Trenchers? Fly into Hillcock and shoot the place up?”

  The thought had occurred to me. “You used to,” I said. “Or something like it.”

  To my surprise, Mother looked at me with an expression of tenderness. She took me by the hand and led me outside, where we sat on the porch swing together, looking out into the darkness.

  “Robert,” Mother said. “This isn’t a new war. Since the first woman lifted a finger to send a message, since Cadwallader carved the first piece of smoke, since I learned to fly, people have tried to destroy us. I spent years fighting. So did Lew and Bertie. We fought the wrong way. We always thought that if we killed enough of them—killed the right ones—that they would leave us in peace. All that got us was one cycle of violence after another. And now it’s come back on us again.”

  Mother pushed the hair out of my face. “Yes, I want the ones who killed Mrs. O’Malley hung from a church steeple. But I want better, too. I want your generation to be the one that wins. It’ll be a different kind of reckoning, slower and deeper. Go to school. Show average people the value of philosophy. The ones who can barely work a message board or have no sigils at all—let them see it and live among it and respect it. That’s the only strategy that will endure. It took me sixty years to understand that. Don’t let it take you that long.”

  “So, I’m just supposed to abandon you?” I said, near tears. “What kind of man does that make me?”

  “A good one. If you stay home this year, you’ll never leave. And then the Trenchers will have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Because you were meant for something bigger. And they made you too scared to do it.”

  PART 2

  THE RADCLIFFE MAN

  7

  SEPTEMBER 1917

  Our beautiful transcontinental railroad, constructed at a cost of fifty million dollars and hundreds of lives, its tunnels blasted through the mighty Sierra Nevadas, its bridges constructed over perilous gorges and raging rivers, seventeen hundred miles of track laid through dogged, indefatigable manly effort—all this and you would allow it to be run out of business in a month by a pack of colored women who can travel by sleight of hand. It goes against the natural order.

  Transcribed message from Sidney Dillon, president of Union Pacific Railroad, to President Ulysses S. Grant, May 1, 1875

  TWO DAYS LATER, I flew from Guille’s Run to Denver on a warm, clear morning. Even the sweetness of hovering under such perfect conditions didn’t ease my mind: flitting off to live the easy life of a college man while Ma fought off the Trenchers alone. Disgraceful. I would have to be worthy of it—it was the only answer. I would work twice as hard as those soft Easterners. Not merely a good philosopher for a man, but a damn good philosopher.

  If I’d been in a more reflective mood, I might also have admitted that I was nervous over leaving the only home I’d ever known, worried over what a bunch of sophisticated New England girls would think of me, and dreading that my trip to Boston meant putting myself at the mercy of a form of philosophy that unnerved me: transporting.

  The transport sigil worked by instantly exchanging a bubble of space surrounding the philosopher who drew it with an equal volume at the destination—one chunk of the world simply switched places with another. An expert transporter could move a huge chunk of ground and the passengers standing on it several hundred miles in a fraction of a second. The only problem was that if she drew her lines wrong and the edge of the transport bubble came up short, it might cut you in half.

  Those sorts of accidents had been horrifyingly common sixty years earlier, when the sigil first came into use. Only the foolish or desperate had relied on it as a means of travel, though a few cargo routes for hauling cotton had been developed in the Southern states, using slaves as sigilrists. Those transports had been made at gunpoint, just in case the philosopher had gotten hold of an alternative destination glyph and decided to make a break for freedom.

  Denver’s transporter arena was a far cry from those early transporter tracks. It was a vast, warehouse-like building with a hard-packed sand floor on which dozens of sets of concentric circles had been marked with chalk, each one with a destination glyph drawn in the center. I waited along with several other travelers on a raised platform separated from the main arena floor by fifty yards. I kept checking my wristwatch and edging back from the railing.

  “First time?” asked the woman waiting next to me.

  “Yup,” I answered. “Down from Billings.”

  “They ought to build a branch line up that direction. Save you the flight.”

  I couldn’t help but feel it would probably take a gun pointed at the more sensible philosophers in Montana to get them on a transport as passengers. But I tried to remind myself about the metallurgical breakthroughs in the 1870s that had allowed aluminum to be refined to a much higher standard—the sigil was infinitely more reliable than it used to be. In fact, conventional wisdom held that it was now safer to travel across the country by transporter than by hovering.

  I took another step back and then stifled a gasp.

  A thousand people had appeared in the largest circle on the floor—no noise, no flash of light, no warning. They were simply there. At the center of the crowd stood a stout black woman—the transporter who’d made the swap. She had an exhausted, wild-eyed look. She staggered a few steps toward the waiting area and collapsed.

  “Jesus!” I said.

  The passengers waiting around me cried out with dismay, too. A pair of stretcher bearers, who’d been standing at the ready, trotted out to retrieve her.

  “All’s well, all’s well!” called out a uniformed conductor. “Happens every now and again. A few days’ rest and she’ll be right as rain. Follow me, folks. All aboard for Colby, Kansas, continuing down the line to St. Louis!”

  I swallowed down my nerves and followed the conductor as he wound his way across the transporter floor, giving the other sets of circles a wide berth. There were no other transporters due in for another hour, but so long as the destination glyphs had been drawn on the ground—even if they were years old—anyone who knew them could appear, including any lunatic wildcatter or amateur coming in from the field. They were supposed to message ahead for permission, but every once in a while someone arrived unannounced. If a pedestrian was in the wrong place, it made a terrible mess.

  The conductor packed us shoulder to shoulder inside the huge green circle for the main east-west route. Porters arranged our luggage inside the yellow circle—if the transporter’s sigils came up short, better to lose a suitcase than an a
rm—and everyone stayed well clear of the red line, which marked the anticipated edge of the transportation field.

  A few minutes later, a fresh transporter made her way out onto the floor and to the middle of our circle. She took a tape measure out of her workbag and double-checked the distance from the center point of the circle, where she would be standing, to the green circle, drawn forty paces out, then the yellow circle twenty paces beyond that, and the red line farther out still. She returned to the center.

  Our woman looked bright and competent. Well-fed, certainly, which was important: a transport burned the same amount of body mass as covering the same distance on foot. Thirty-five miles for a pound of flesh, according to conventional wisdom, with the weight loss happening instantaneously. A long enough jump would consume a sigilrist’s entire body, though even repeated shorter jumps put a horrible strain on the internal organs. The first generation of transporters, the slaves who’d been put through hundreds of rounds of fattening and reduction, had suffered from that kind of overexertion; most of them had died by the age of thirty. Today, however, the union transporters on the national chain had a strict upper limit of three hundred miles per day, time off after every jump, and weekly doctor’s checkups. They made a fine living working only a few hours a month, retired after twenty-five years, and had a life expectancy nearly as long as anyone else’s.

  But on one jump out of ten the transporter might faint, as we’d just witnessed. And a couple times a year, the radius on a bubble came up wrong and dismembered a bunch of people.

  “All quiet, please!” our transporter sang out in a well-practiced cadence. “Destination status?”

  One of the attendants on the platform sent and received messages. “Colby reports ready and clear at the number seven destination sigil,” she called.

  I knew that accidents almost never happened on the national chain’s main lines—one of their best women would be running this hop. It was the little branch lines where trouble usually struck. But my hands were shaking.