by Tom Miller
As Unger and I moved along the buffet line, filling our plates with meat and vegetables, I could feel the eyes of twenty-four hundred women on us. The hostility was palpable. We sat at the end of a long table with ten empty chairs between us and a group of girls who stopped their conversation long enough to stare then glare openly.
“Bit of a cold shoulder, I’m afraid,” said Unger. “Though from what I hear from the other fellow, though, it improves with time.”
“Only one other man?” I asked. I’d hoped Radcliffe had taken a few more of us than that.
“Yes. He’s in the apartment one floor below us, a very decent sort. You’ll like him. Everyone seems to. He’s planning to study Eupheus.”
“Wind sigilry?” I asked around a mouthful of green beans. “What’s he want to learn that for?”
“I gather he’s going to drop out of school, dodge the Contingency Act, and live a life of luxury drawing sigils for clipper ships, visiting every exotic corner of the globe.”
“He wants to be an engine for a cargo ship?”
“That’s what I gather,” said Unger. “Though he may have just been saying that to impress—”
An expertly lobbed frankfurter coated in mustard struck me on the neck and rolled down my brand-new shirt into my lap. The women at the table behind me made a poor attempt at hiding their laughter.
As I tried to unclench my fists, I asked Freddy if he’d seen who threw it.
“Not which one of them, no.”
That was just as well. I couldn’t imagine what I might have said to her that wouldn’t have made me look like an even bigger ass.
“You were saying about the other man?” I asked Freddy.
“Go home, Galen Wainwright!” someone shouted from the other side of the hall.
“Go back to Harvard, you poofs!” someone else shouted. “You oily sodomites!” This time the laughter was widespread.
I ran my thumb over my teeth hard enough to leave a mark. It was just talk. It was juvenile and galling and ultimately harmless.
“I should possibly have mentioned that there was a fourth man as recently as yesterday,” Unger added. “I’m told he crudely propositioned one of the ladies while assembling his breakfast. It took one of the more talented smokecarvers three minutes to snake a cloud of vaporized resin of T. radicans right up the leg of his pants.”
“Poison ivy smoke?”
“Indeed,” said Unger. “He’s quite allergic as it turns out. He decided to continue his education elsewhere.”
“So, maybe the best thing is to finish eating quickly and get out of here?” I suggested. “Before they decide to do us the same way.”
A carrot zipped past me and hit Freddy’s glasses, partially dislodging them.
“Or right now would be fine,” he said.
• • •
Unger weathered the whole incident with such equanimity that it was contagious. By the time I’d changed out of my mustard-spattered shirt and pants I’d nearly calmed down, too.
“Whenever something like that happens,” Unger said, “I think of my little sister, who, when I got my acceptance letter, said, ‘If you’re going to Radcliffe, then I’m going to Harvard.’ If you imagine what it’ll be like for the first woman—well, the nastiness here will seem mild by comparison.”
I could hardly disagree.
“She’s only twelve years old,” Unger reflected. “Maybe she won’t have to be the very first.”
He plucked a deck of cards from his desk and sat at the table in our common room, practicing his one-handed shuffle. “Do you play mudge, by chance?” he asked.
“Do I what?” I asked.
“Or double mudge?”
As Unger laid out his deck of cards and explained the rules, I recognized the game. “We call that jiggery back home,” I said. “But we booted on jacks instead of tens.”
“And you would have played to eighty-eight points, not one hundred,” Unger added, “with queens worth half a point.”
I was a decent card player, but Freddy was a master. After playing a dozen hands, he could pick out with uncanny accuracy whether I was holding a three or a five and he always knew when I had a queen.
“You should play with Grandpa Unger,” he said, after finishing me off with jigs on three successive turns. “He can’t even see the cards and he still wins.” Unger began talking wistfully about how the real art of double mudge was playing in pairs, setting up your partner and playing out complicated defenses.
“Well, I met a young lady at the transporter arena today,” I said. “Maybe she plays.”
“Oh, but men aren’t allowed in the women’s dormitory after eight,” said Unger.
“Are they allowed to visit us here?” I asked. Not that after our dinner debacle I imagined many women would be racing to befriend us.
“It’s not explicitly forbidden,” Unger temporized. “Technically, our apartment isn’t on university grounds. But how would you get word to her?”
“We exchanged glyphs.”
“You what?” asked Unger.
Rather than try to explain, I retrieved my message board. Even under ordinary circumstances I would have felt nervous sending a message to a pretty girl I’d just met; after Unger’s suggestion that there was something indecorous about proposing a meeting, I adopted a formal, written-out style: My roommate and I are looking for a pair for double mudge. Any chance you might be interested?
Her reply came inside a minute: Y. Arr 2145 w/2. Nd tlk to y nway.
“Astonishing!” said Unger. “But it doesn’t seem to have quite worked. Half the letters are missing.”
Hoverers were bad about shorthand—every second you spent writing while in the air meant your arm was out of position—though Jake’s language was simple enough: Yes, she would come at a quarter to ten, would bring a partner, and was glad I’d written, since she needed to talk to me anyway. Not that she’d said glad.
Unger was pleased at the prospect of a real game. But his amazement at the simplest of practical sigils surprised me.
“Freddy,” I asked, hoping I was being tactful. “Yes or no: Can you send a message?”
“I’ve studied them a great deal.”
“That’s not a yes or a no.”
He cleared his throat. “No.”
“Have you ever even tried?”
“No, never.” He sounded relieved.
“I’ll teach you right now! It’s the simplest thing in the world. Why, back in Billings, we even have a dog that can send messages. Name of Barney.” (The last was a lie, of course.)
An hour later, I regretted my flippancy. Unger designed his glyph with aplomb—he’d spent the last twelve years thinking about it—a stylized version of his initials, with a double bar on the U. That was an embarrassingly literal choice, but no one else in her right mind would ever use it, which was the point of a personal glyph. If you chose a figure that someone else in, say, Florida had already laid claim to, then you got each other’s mail for a few days, apologized, and switched to a different one.
But Unger couldn’t get it to work. He was a little inconsistent with his counting and a bit sloppy with his form, though not so much that I would have expected his sigil not to take. Yet after an hour of labor, he could neither send a message nor retrieve one.
I’ve been asked countless times whether I think skill with empirical philosophy is inborn or learned. In 1917, I would have come down on the side of nurture. My mother and sisters had instilled in me the notion I was capable of any sigil they were—just not with the same strength as a woman, of course. If I couldn’t get a glyph to work, I had nothing to blame but my own laziness. But I’ve since learned that a few people really have no aptitude for empirical philosophy. They can practice all they want, study with the finest teachers, read the most authoritative books, and still fail to perform even the simplest sigil. It’s no different than one fellow who’s born with perfect pitch and another who can’t carry a tune, one who’s a natural artist and
another who can’t so much as draw a straight line.
Unger was one of the tone-deaf ones.
It came as a relief for both of us when Jake arrived and we could put away the message board. She’d brought her roommate, Delores Isadora Gutierrez, or simply Dizzy to anyone who’d known her for more than a minute. Dizzy was a third-generation practitioner of Eupheus sigilry. She was the product of one of those stereotypical romances between a kite jockey, who drove one of the last sail-powered stagecoaches through the deserts of the Southwest, and his philosophical counterpart, who summoned the wind. Dizzy was tall, dark, and carelessly good-looking, with flyaway strands of long black hair that formed a perpetual halo around her head.
Unger was smitten. “Welcome, welcome to our humble abode,” he said. “May I offer you a seat?”
Dizzy accepted. Unger plopped into the chair opposite her.
Jake stood in the doorway, hands on her hips. “Did you seriously invite us over with only two chairs in the whole place?”
“Looks that way,” I admitted.
“And nothing to drink?”
“Not a drop,” I said.
“You’ll have to correct that. I’m only here because nobody bothered to mail instructions to the prospective fliers. That’s typical—the college would rather not allow flying at all, since they’re responsible for our safety and not all the girls are bright enough to avoid a sudden introduction to the ground.”
Jake looked at me as if I likely fell into the accident-prone group.
“There are check-out flights tomorrow morning at six, eight, and ten—to make sure you won’t dig a ditch the moment the instructors turn their backs.” She handed me a sheet of paper with the testing requirements printed on it. “The serious fliers check out at six. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have one more hoverer left on my list.”
Unger was demonstrating his shuffle for Dizzy, who seemed enchanted. Jake coughed.
“Oh, let’s play just one game,” Dizzy said. Her voice had a delightful lilt. “Who is it you have left? Yancey? She knows when to come.”
“Well, I’m not playing standing up,” Jake said.
Unger gave up his seat and we played standing men against sitting women. Unger played magnificently, Jake played indifferently, I played badly, and Dizzy appeared never to have held a card before. We stopped one or two thousand times so that Unger could re-explain the rules. Dizzy was inquisitive and charming and Unger was patient and gentlemanly. By the third time Dizzy stopped the game to ask what the name of the card with the J on it was, Jake and I were openly rolling our eyes—she was putting on a show.
Unger and I won by forty-two points, a colossal victory. Unger explained that traditionally this would mean they owed us forty-two cents, but that teaching the game was reward enough and he would never imagine playing for money with a novice.
“But surely some sort of reward is in order for so marvelous a triumph,” Dizzy purred. “A kiss perhaps?”
Jake rolled her eyes so hard I was afraid she would injure herself.
“Madam,” said Unger, “I would like nothing better, but under the circumstances it hardly seems right. I barely know you.”
Dizzy nodded seriously. “When you know me better, then.”
“Robert from Billings can get his twenty-one cents from me tomorrow morning,” Jake replied. “Six o’clock. Bring your own harness.”
9
Hovering is a dangerous, useless pastime for tinkerers and rogues. It has no future in the Corps nor anywhere.
Mrs. Lucretia Cadwallader, quoted in “Chippewa Woman Flies Across Lake Ontario!” Detroit Defender, May 3, 1870
I ROLLED OUT OF bed at five thirty in a foul mood. The noise from the street, unfamiliar and vaguely sinister, had kept me up all night. Shops being opened and closed, wagons making deliveries or dropping off passengers. Dogs barking. Conversations. All of it quotidian, but compressed and layered so closely as to seem threatening.
I dressed in a light skysuit and packed my harness, then walked down to the Charles River and across a footbridge to the far side, where Radcliffe’s hovering building was located—the aerodrome, the girls called it, in the French fashion. It was surrounded by a large grassy field for practicing launches and landings. Unfortunately, the city of Cambridge, in its wisdom, had zoned the area between the college and the field “no fly” out of concern that a student hoverer might fall out of the air and kill a bystander on the ground. That meant a twenty-minute walk, instead of a two-minute flight.
A young lady a block ahead of me turned down the path toward the aerodrome, but found her way blocked by a group of middle-aged women holding handbills. They reached out to stop her, thrusting papers at her. The girl put her head down and pushed her way through, making for the aerodrome at a run.
I reached the same group a minute later, though they behaved more civilly with me, perhaps not recognizing a man as a hoverer despite my skysuit.
“Sir, do you have a moment?” one of them called to me. “Do you know about the Philosophical Corps?”
“Sure, yeah,” I said, committing the tactical error of making eye contact.
“They’ve forced the country into war—they’re the ones responsible for the draft! They’ve as good as taken President Wilson hostage.”
“Listen,” I said. “I’m running late for—”
“They have whole warehouses packed full of plague! They could release it at any moment. They wouldn’t hesitate to kill you, to kill your family.”
It was a lot of typical Trencher nonsense. One of the women shoved a piece of paper into my face.
“Not interested,” I said, plowing past them.
“That Radcliffe lot is a pack of common whores!” one of them shouted after me. “They’ll corrupt you, body and soul.”
“Have a pleasant morning,” I replied in a voice better suited for saying, “Go back to the hell that spawned you!”
But the Trenchers’ wives, or whichever concerned organization the women represented, didn’t dare come closer to the aerodrome.
Roughly two dozen young ladies had queued up in front of the building. A handful looked like veteran fliers—their broken-in skysuits and looks of sleepy assurance gave them away. The rest were a much chattier, more stylish group. I spotted a pair of gold-rimmed touring goggles more appropriate for a costume party than field use and a set of divided skirts that would have made it impossible to fly faster than ten miles per hour. There was no sign of Jake.
“Are you lost?” one of the well-dressed fliers asked me.
“It’s the man with the wiener in his lap!” observed a second.
“He can’t be here,” insisted another. “He’s not allowed to be here, is he?”
No one was willing to try and drag a 210-pound male philosopher off the field, however.
At six, an instructor in a sharply pressed red-and-black skysuit marched out of the building. She was barely older than me. A few of the more experienced fliers snickered.
“Uh-oh! Uh-oh!” one of them called out in a voice like a parrot’s.
“Where’s your parachute, Rachael?” another yelled.
The instructor blushed as red as her uniform.
“Who’s the rescue flier?” a third woman shouted.
“Ladies, that’s quite enough,” the instructor said. “For those of you I’ve not met, my name is Rachael Rodgers. I’m the senior flight instructor. Professor Brock will be along shortly to fly point. If you encounter any difficulties, she will assist, including catch and carry if necessary.”
Rachael launched into a dry description of Radcliffe’s grades of hoverers, which I suspected she’d memorized from the same sheet Jake had given me: Zeds were novices, allowed to fly only under direct supervision. Ones were provisional; they could draw up to ten pounds of powder a week from the supply room and fly below two hundred feet when an instructor was on duty. Twos were proficient; they were allowed twenty pounds a week and could fly in fair weather during daylight hours within a
two-mile radius of the aerodrome. Threes were expert; they were given a key to the storeroom, asked to log whatever supplies they took, and permitted all-weather, day or night flight on any flyway. You had to pass a flight test for each level.
Those with no experience whatsoever signed their names in a logbook as Zeds. That took care of a dozen girls.
The qualification for a One was to climb to ten feet, fly the length of the field, and set down without injuring yourself. We lined up and the instructor handed out harnesses and prefilled bags fitted with late-model regulators. I took one of the standard-issue harnesses and slid the shoulder straps out as far as they would go, but there was no way it was going to fit me. “Ma’am?” I said, calling the instructor over.
“Is this a joke?” she asked. “Who put you up to this?”
“May I use my own?” I asked. “I brought my gear.”
She waved disgustedly for me to go get it. I put on my harness and rejoined the others. One of the regular faculty came out of the aerodrome and, after a word with Rachael, launched to spot us.
We proceeded in alphabetical order.
Despite the minimal requirements for a One, two girls failed. The first tried and tried to draw a launch sigil but couldn’t get it to take. After her twentieth attempt, she broke down in tears and was led off by Rachael to stand with the Zeds. The second managed to launch and wobble along for a few seconds, before warping her glyph and veering right. Somehow she maintained her altitude, but couldn’t recover directional control. She was headed right for the river.
“Put down!” shrieked the instructor. “Land!”
For all the snide remarks during the other flights, the group fell silent now. Above us, the rescue flier noticed something was wrong and dove toward the struggling girl, who had the good sense to simply turn off her regulator when she was over the river. She flopped into the water with a huge splash, bobbed to the surface, waved, and swam to shore. The rescue flier swooped in, too late to do any good.