by Tom Miller
The transporter flipped through a book of destination glyphs. She studied one for a moment then took a tube of aluminum the size of a milk bottle from her workbag.
“All quiet, please!” she called. “Clear the edge!”
I decided I didn’t want to go through with it after all. Denver to Boston was only a couple thousand miles—I could fly it myself. It would only take a few days. I’d just be a little late for the start of classes.
“Edge is clear!” replied the attendant.
I tried to push my way forward.
“Clear the edge!” our sigilrist repeated.
Before I had a chance to holler that I wanted off, we’d already jumped to an arena two hundred fifty miles away. The only physical sensation was of the ground shifting slightly, as the ten feet of sand beneath our feet that the transporter had moved along with us settled into its new surroundings.
I let my breath out. First jump ever—nothing to be ashamed of. Just a little jittery.
Our sigilrist tossed her head as if it were nothing and walked off under her own power. A new transporter took her place and we moved in like fashion to Junction City, Kansas City, and eventually St. Louis. I changed lines and after six more hops arrived in Boston in time for a late lunch.
• • •
The scene at the Boston transporter arena was overwhelming. Hundreds of people scurried to and fro, rushing to line up for jumps or climb aboard the horse-drawn trams that provided local service. Oddly, I saw no hoverers launching or setting down. Perhaps they came and went from a particular spot—it would be safer than trying to land amid such chaos.
I stood beside my belongings on the platform. I’d consulted some maps in the Billings public library and felt confident I could find my new apartment by air. I dug my harness out of my satchel and pulled it on over my summer-weight skysuit. I stepped through the leg loops and cinched the thigh straps, buckled my shoulder bands, and attached my bag holster. I was rummaging through my regulator box, looking for a clean tip, when a tiny young woman stepped in front of me, hands on her hips. She was blond, pink-cheeked, and quite pretty.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she demanded.
Several of Billings’ leading minds, including Willard Gunch and Blind Doyle, who’d once been all the way to Carson City, had warned me that devastatingly handsome men such as myself had to be on guard against city women, who were known to be brazenly forward in their attempts to corrupt the flower of American youth. I’d often considered how I’d reply to one of them upon my first encounter, but faced with this young lady I couldn’t do more than stammer.
“I’m, uh, flying to my lodgings,” I managed. I bowed and she looked at me as if I were the stupidest buffoon she’d ever met.
“Flying to your lodgings?” she asked. “How do you propose to do that?”
The young woman wore a gray poppy in the lapel of her jacket that rippled strangely when the wind caught it. Not a flower at all, but rather smoke pressed into the shape of one. Along with the glass tubes of powder stowed in compartments on the exterior of her handbag, it marked her out quite boldly as a fellow philosopher. I felt more comfortable at once.
“Now madam,” I said, “I realize you must be concerned about the cross breeze and that there clock tower with the pointy top. But I’m going to take a hyperbolic vertical course to two hundred feet and make my turn there.”
Now it was her turn to stare at me gape-mouthed. “You’re a Contingency student,” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Straight off the farm from Fumblemuck, Arkansas.”
“More of a country home than a farm. And Guille’s Run, which is twelve miles southeast of Billings.”
“I haven’t the faintest idea what a Billings is,” she said. “But the train station is a no-fly zone. You’re not permitted to hover here.”
That was the most perfectly unreasonable rule I’d ever heard—how was a person supposed to get home after a trip if not by hovering?
“The hack drivers bribed a lot of city councilmen to protect their livelihood,” the young woman explained. “What college?”
“Radcliffe,” I said.
She groaned. “Just my luck. Come on. We’ll share a wagon.”
She set off down the platform and I scrambled to keep up.
“I’m Gloxinia Jacobi,” she said, extending a hand, which I shook. “You call me Jake, under pain of having your pants set on fire when you have your back turned.”
“An old family name?” I asked sympathetically.
“No. Gloxinia is a showy Brazilian flower with petals in the shape of slippers. My parents saw it in a garden catalogue.”
“I’m Robert Weekes,” I said. “Folks call me . . . uhh . . . rather, they call me Robert.”
“Yours must be a literal people, twelve miles southeast of Billings.”
She led me past the streetcar line, past the row of coaches and hacks for hire, past the cheap wagons with their tough-looking drivers and broken-down horses, and past the post office carts. The only thing left before a railway siding filled with coal hoppers was the depot for Harnemon’s Philosophical Supplies. Jake walked around back to the loading dock and sauntered up to one of the enormous delivery wagons. The driver was lashing down a pile of canvas bags filled with fine-milled quartz.
“Jasper!” she yelled up at him.
The man turned around. His hair was white, as was his bushy mustache, but he was spry and barrel-chested—he looked just like the Harnemon’s driver back home. I wondered if they might be cousins.
“Little Jake!” he said, delighted. He leaned over the tailgate of the wagon and she kissed him on the cheek, between his mustache and sideburns. “Your daddy wrote to say we should expect you.”
“I’m not inconveniencing you, am I?” she asked.
“Not at all. Big deliveries for the Gray Box, the aerodrome, and half the girls in your dorm. I’ll come around and pick up your things. How many trunks is it this year?”
Jake smiled sweetly. “Eight.”
“You’re cutting back then! And the gentleman?”
I pulled the hand-drawn map from my pocket and read, “6A Story Street, apartment three. I believe if you come up the street that extends from the footbridge about three miles from—”
“I know where you’ll be living, son,” Jasper said. “I meant what have you got for luggage?”
“A duffel, two suitcases, and my rucksack.”
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll grab my logbook and find the pair of you.”
Jake led me back to the platform, which had largely emptied out except for my baggage and eight identical steamer trunks.
“I’ll explain how this works,” she said. “That nice big man loads your things into the wagon. Don’t lift anything. Don’t offer him money. You sit in back with me and make pleasant conversation. We stop in front of your apartment and Jasper carries your bags up the stairs. You say, ‘Geegaw gosh, Jasper, I’m so terribly obliged,’ or whatever people say where you’re from. He’ll be getting a lot of big tips from rich, pretty girls today, so even if you try to give him a dollar, he’ll refuse. Understand?”
I did. While we waited for Jasper to bring around the wagon, Jake lit a cigarillo, which she smoked with well-practiced authority. I stepped behind her pile of trunks to remove and stow my harness.
While I was working, three young men, nattily dressed in sport coats and straw boaters, ambled up the platform toward us. Jake’s trunks partially blocked my view of them, but I saw one of the boys point at Jake and whisper to his chums. He moseyed up behind her, threw an arm around her shoulder, and tried to pluck the smokecarved flower from her lapel. Jake startled visibly. The flower disintegrated.
“Hey love!” the young man said. “Is it true you philosophical gals have a sigil to make a man go all night long?”
Jake ducked out from under his arm and twisted away. “Don’t touch me, you ratfuck bastard!” she shouted.
He g
rinned. “Oh, come on and—”
In a fluid motion, Jake dropped her cigarillo and pulled a tube of powder from her handbag. She popped the cork and pointed it at the young man, who recoiled in terror.
“I’m going to count to three. And all of you better be running,” Jake shouted. “One.”
They hit a dead sprint before she even uttered two.
Belatedly, I stepped out from around the trunks with the intent of defending her.
“Oh, don’t bother,” Jake sneered. “Their sort always runs at the slightest provocation.”
She tried to secure her tube in one of the pockets on her handbag but her hands were trembling and she missed, spilling white powder. I picked up the cork and handed it to her.
“Welcome to Boston!” she fumed. “We’ve got Trenchers marching in the streets and college boys fondling strangers.”
“What did those three think you were going to do with an ounce of talc?” I asked.
“Make their manhoods shrivel up, probably. Men are all the same.”
“Not all of us,” I said.
“You don’t count, you’re a philosopher. Maybe.” She narrowed her eyes. “Can you really fly a hyperbolic vertical course?”
I raised my palms: guilty as charged. “Not unless I check a chart beforehand,” I admitted.
“Well, aren’t you a puzzle. Let me see that harness.”
I handed it to her. Jake ran her hands over it, testing the thickness of the leather of one of the straps between her fingers.
“Or, rather, you’re not a mystery at all,” she decided. “I can tell you everything about you.”
“A mind reader?”
“There are two marks on the straps four notches apart,” she pronounced. “So it’s secondhand, given to you pretty recently by the depth of the divot. You’ve used it heavily, as did the person before you. She was quite a bit smaller, which isn’t a shock. A woman, certainly, somewhat taller than me. Probably your mother. It’s a Springfield 1896 getup; the ink has faded, but you can still see the die stamp on the left rib guard. An original, not one of the Harnemon’s reproductions, because the canvas on the shoulder pads is olive drab instead of black. Hand-stitched leather, which means it wasn’t actually made in Springfield. Probably one of the special editions from Laredo issued to the most experienced officers in Cuba.”
She inspected the chest plate. “No piping or unit insignia,” she pronounced. “I’d say your mother went over in ’97, a command officer, a captain at least. She must have been quite old already. We are talking about your mother, yes?”
I nodded.
“Old because the haul clamps are knotted with Swicker twists, which I haven’t heard of anyone using since . . . Christ, since the Franco-Prussian Intervention. But if she fought in France the first time she must be—sixty-five? Is that right?”
“Sixty,” I said.
“Lied about her age to join up, then. She probably taught you the same way she learned. Solid, if terribly, terribly old-fashioned. You’re rigged fore and aft, so you’re versatile and do mixed passengers and cargo. Double-D drop-forged rings, new ones, you’ve added those. Expecting to do heavy lifting.”
She handed my harness back. “On the balance, you’re sensible and well trained, but not overly set in your ways. More used to short hops than long hauls. You land poorly—”
“You can tell that from my harness?” I asked.
“No, because you’re favoring your left ankle. Inquisitive, willing to experiment, brash in order to hide a conservative streak, and you’ve got sore balls.”
I flushed bright red. “Excuse me?”
“Your privates must be chafed from the leg straps digging into your groin.”
“Every time I bank past fifteen degrees with a load,” I admitted.
“We ought to find you a solution for that,” said Jake. “Dunwick Consolidated used to make a sort of codpiece, but they didn’t sell any. I haven’t seen one in ages. You could try a rig that puts more weight on the chest and less on the legs, or one with a wide, stable band mid-thigh. One of the new McCoules might work, but I doubt it would be long enough. You’re one for custom fabrication, if ever there was.”
I stared at her, stupefied. “How do you know all of those—”
“Daddy used to drive for Harnemon’s in Baltimore,” she said. “I rode with him for deliveries. They called us Big Jake and Little Jake. He’s a part owner now.”
Big Jake’s business partners had adored Gloxinia and had given her every last demonstration harness, discontinued regulator, exotic tip, and prototype gizmo that had come through the depot. She’d created a minor scandal her freshman year by arriving at school with ten steamer trunks in tow. However, by year’s end, she’d given away the contents of nine of them. Contingency girls who had planned on studying message sigilry or the reduplicatory arts because they didn’t have money enough for supplies were able to study stasis or transport thanks to Jake’s endless supply of silver chloride and refined aluminum. Anything that anyone had asked for, even beyond the bounds of reason, she’d been able to pull from her trunks. In the rare case she didn’t have it, a Harnemon’s man would be at their door the next morning, tipping his gold and gray cap, handing over a package containing a dozen live tarantulas or Romanian walnuts.
As a result, Jake had a great many admirers. And, as Jasper carried my trunk up three flights of stairs an hour later, I decided I was one of them.
She was the first of two exceptional, lifelong friends I made that day. I met the second only a few minutes later.
8
Do not choose a figure that may be easily guessed. Not your name nor a too-familiar image. Yet do not choose one so ornate or fussy that you or your friends will struggle to re-create it.
Miss Goodbody’s Book for Girls, 1899
MY APARTMENT HAD SEEN heavy use over the years, but it was clean and serviceable. There were two small bedrooms and a shared living room with a fireplace, table, and two chairs. Several suitcases and boxes of books were stacked neatly to one side of the door—clearly my roommate had arrived, but had been considerate enough not to claim a bedroom without discussion. I liked him already.
We had our own bathroom, too. Of all the city luxuries that Angie prattled on about, she spoke most enthusiastically about unlimited hot water at the turn of a knob. I sat on the edge of the bathtub and turned the handle marked H. The faucet spluttered and spat out a thin stream of cold, yellow water.
Well, that was too bad. We did have the fireplace, so as long as we found some big tin buckets we could always heat the water there and . . . but then the water cleared and poured into the tub steaming hot.
“Fantastic,” I murmured.
“Yes, it is,” said a nervous voice behind me. A plump, bespectacled young man stood in the doorway. He looked all of fourteen. And he’d just caught me ogling the plumbing. Perfect.
“My name’s Freddy Unger and I own one hundred and thirty-eight bow ties,” he said by way of greeting, pointing at the forest-green bow tie with pink polka dots that he was wearing. I looked at him, agog.
“My name’s Robert Weekes and I’m a-heading straight back to Guille’s Run, Montana,” I replied.
For a moment, it could have gone either way. Then we both burst out laughing and we were safe. Unger was eighteen, not fourteen, and he’d been raised in Jamaica Plain, in Boston.
“I wanted to send you a message, but the college didn’t include your glyph,” I said.
“I’ll need to invent one,” said Unger. “How exciting!”
I supposed he meant that he was between message glyphs at the moment, which made sense. Start college, use a fresh glyph. (Or, if you have three sisters, sometimes one of them discovers the figure you’ve been using for private messages and then you have to contact your confidential correspondents and switch them over to a new one.)
“I mean, you do know how to send a message, right?” I asked good-naturedly.
“Certainly!” said Unger. �
��We spent an ungodly number of hours studying message sigilry in school, even though we weren’t permitted to practice it on campus.”
I nodded. “We went through the same thing in high school after somebody set Mrs. Spurgeon’s wig on fire with an ignite glyph—no sigils for nobody all year.”
“How awful,” said Unger. “But that means you can help me with the practical side of things? Because I’m an abject failure when I try to put sigils into practice.”
“Oh, you’ll pick them up with a little practice,” I said. “I’m just glad to have someone who knows his way around the city. I wasn’t here two minutes and I almost launched in the middle of a no-fly zone.”
“Where was this?”
“At the transporter arena.”
Unger looked confused. “Was there . . . you tried to hire a passenger hoverer? But they’re not allowed to . . . or are you the hoverer?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Oh, good for you! It looks thrilling.”
“If it’s thrilling, you’re doing it wrong. Have you ever? Flown?”
“No, never.”
As we moved on to the important business of deciding who got which room and unpacking, I had Unger pegged as an excessively modest philosopher who simply needed to build his confidence. The problem with his whole routine was that it could convince a less discriminating mind than mine that he didn’t know the first thing about the actual practice of philosophy. Men especially had to be careful about that—everyone already assumed anything more complicated than message sigilry was beyond you.
“Why did you introduce yourself that way?” I asked, while hanging my shirts in my closet. “With the bow ties and all?”
“That’s a strategy I adopted just this morning so that people will remember me,” Unger explained. “For the duration of my studies here, every time I introduce myself, I’ll mention the bow ties. Just think of it—twenty years down the road at a reunion, someone turns to the other and says, ‘Remember old Freddy Unger?’ and she says, ‘I do so remember him: one hundred and thirty-eight bow ties!’ And it’s perfectly true. I adore bow ties.”
It seemed to me there had to be better ways of getting people to remember you. Then, when Unger led me a few blocks up the street to the dining hall on Radcliffe’s main quad for dinner, I realized that for the two of us, not being remembered, even at our fiftieth reunion, would be the more noteworthy accomplishment: in that entire room, there were no other men.