The Philosopher's Flight

by Tom Miller

  Can’t keep up with the girls, not even on the first day.

  Not that it had been any different with my sisters. Or with most of Montana’s better amateur fliers.

  In a half hour’s time, we reached our destination. The sandy beach made an easy landing for everyone but Essie, who made an unusually tentative approach. She had her jaw clenched and was panting so hard through her nose I thought she would hyperventilate. When she touched down, she closed her eyes and swallowed, looking as if she had stepped in front of the firing squad.

  “You made your first Three,” Jake said solemnly, taking a step toward Essie. “First Three drinks first.” The others repeated the mantra as they closed in on her, reaching to pull several different types of liquor from beneath their harnesses. Jake had rum in a metal flask; Francine, gin in a glass bottle; Astrid, vodka in an ornately carved ivory flagon; and Tillie, bourbon in a canteen. Essie couldn’t open her eyes.

  It was too much to watch.

  “Well, it was my first Three, too,” I said, as if I knew the rules as well as they did. “And Essie must be senior to me. So, shouldn’t I drink first?”

  No one objected. I went down the line, knocking back a belt from each of the containers. The world took on a pinkish, misty glow.

  I’d given Essie just enough time to regain her composure. She stepped up to Jake and wiped the top of the flask with her sleeve before lifting it to her lips.

  Jake snorted. “It’s strong enough to kill whatever Mr. Weekes may have brought with him from Montana.”

  “A duffel bag, two suitcases, and my rucksack,” I said unsteadily, having heard a question where none had been posed. I sat down before I lost track of the ground.

  Essie drank as little from each container as her honor would allow, but still ended up retching into the sea.

  With the ordeal over, we lay down in a row, took off our boots, and commenced imbibing at a more sociable pace, passing the flasks back and forth. Tillie rolled up the legs and sleeves of her skysuit, enjoying the warmth of the sun. Francine put on a pair of spectacles with smoked-glass lenses and a floppy, wide-brimmed hat.

  “Protects against freckles,” she explained.

  “Too late,” said Astrid.

  “I’ll lay a beating on you for that, even if you are twice my size!” Francine threatened.

  “Three times your size,” quipped Jake.

  Two thrown boots and four death threats followed before Jake turned the conversation to the subject of Rachael Rodgers.

  “We have to break her before she hurts someone,” Astrid said. “The only question is how.”

  “Pick the lock on her cubby and dye her skysuits purple,” suggested Tillie.

  “Millipedes in the corn powder,” said Essie, almost getting into the spirit of things.

  “Place a personal ad on her behalf in the Koru Cooperative Newsletter,” Francine offered. “ ‘Bad flier seeks good loving.’ ”

  That met with a roar of approval from everyone except me, since I wasn’t sure what they were talking about.

  Jake sighed and rolled on her side to look at me. “We’re not always this bad,” she said, “but Rachael had to be rescued twice during her first check-out flight, to say nothing of how many times the instructors carried her down when she froze. She flew all last year carrying a parachute.”

  “Pardon?” I said.

  “It’s like a . . . oh God!” said Jake. “Somebody make him understand.”

  Tillie took over. “The aeroplane pilots just started using them in France. It’s like a giant folded silk parasol you stuff into a bag and strap to your back. You pull a cord, the parachute flies out, forms a canopy overhead, and slows your descent to a manageable speed.”

  I’d never heard of such a thing. “This is a philosophical device?”

  “No! It’s attached with lines. You only use it if everything goes tits up—your powder flow fails at a thousand feet and you can’t clear your regulator.”

  “Or in Mr. Weekes’s case,” said Jake, “if he suffers a failure in both his primary and secondary bags.”

  Tillie nodded. “Now the hell of it is, one time Rachael actually used it. She was way up at cloud level trying to do a banked turn and she just froze. She kept her altitude but she was too scared to come down. The flight instructor was helping someone having a real problem, so Rachael just floated there for half an hour until her powder ran out and she started to fall. So, she pulls the rip cord and out pops the parachute. But there’s a problem. It’s a windy day and she can’t control which direction she’s traveling.”

  Astrid and Francine were holding each other and laughing so hard they could barely breathe.

  “Right smack in the middle of the river?” I said.

  “No, better,” said Tillie. “She gets blown clear across the river into Harvard Yard and the parachute hangs up on the University Hall weather vane. In two seconds, there’s a hundred Harvard men gathered round, catcalling her. Because this is a warm day, too, and our Rachael has never been one to fly in a skysuit if she can help it. She’s wearing a light skirt, which keeps blowing up around her ears, and purple underwear. Not bloomers, either, but a pair of real sleek, stylish, French-cut panties, a fact recorded with great precision in the Harvard Crimson the following morning. The president of the university, who has his office on the third floor, hears the commotion and sticks his head out the window. He sees Rachael’s feet hanging there. But he’s so polite, he doesn’t know what to do other than tip his hat and say, ‘Madam.’ Then he closes the window and goes back to his books.”

  “Who fetched her down?” I asked.

  “No one,” said Tillie. “The fire department had to cut her lines and carry her down a ladder. She was up there an hour.”

  Tillie, who had been remarkably straight-faced throughout, broke up in hysterical giggles, too. All the girls—even Essie—were laughing and wiping away tears.

  Now, I suppose if it had been a hoverer I’d known, and it had been the steeple of St. Mark’s Church in Billings on a Sunday morning, and if it had been old Father Valentine who had to call out the volunteer fire company, that would have been about the funniest thing in all creation. But hearing that story, try as I did to laugh along, I mostly felt sick that such a thing should happen to another flier.

  Jake seemed to sense my mood. She blew her nose and said, “You know how the story really ends, though? Rachael broke her arm when she hit. We had two instructors fired for carelessness and Brock nearly lost tenure. Someone broke all the windows on the aerodrome and smeared the door with human excrement. And then after Detroit drubbed us at the General’s Cup, they threw purple panties at us. I don’t bear Rachael ill will over it. She got back up a week later and checked out for her Two with a cast still on her arm. She’s as strong-willed as any. But she never should have made Three. And hiring her as instructor is absurd. Someone is going to plummet out of the sky, and instead of catch and carry, it’ll be ‘Uh-oh, uh-oh,’ splat!”

  “We petitioned the department,” said Francine. “But they don’t want students weighing in on hiring and firing. So, we’ll ride her till she cracks. Trust me, she’ll crack. We nearly had her in tears today and she only had to survive fifteen minutes with us.”

  “Why’d they hire her?” I asked.

  “Her auntie is Lt. Col. Rodgers,” said Francine, naming the most famous R&E flier of the Spanish-American War.

  “Shit,” I said. “I read all her books growing up.”

  “We had so many better women,” lamented Tillie. “We graduated fifteen Threes last year. Five took good jobs. I mean really good ones, eight thousand dollars a year for high lifting or passenger flights in New York, they’re so short on competent hoverers. The other ten are flying in France.”

  “Three are flying in France,” Jake corrected. “Trish, Xu, and Tammy couldn’t stomach the gore. They’re working the message boards now. Gomez is missing. Clara bought it. The Germans shot down Sue the Sioux. And Ruby’s still in th
e hospital.”

  “You’ve heard from her?” asked Francine.

  “She told me,” said Jake, trying not to let her voice waver, “that she doesn’t much feel like sending messages, so stop writing. She thinks she’ll recover enough to walk a few steps at a time. And she says . . .” Here Jake abandoned any pretense of composure. “She says she doesn’t have to be able to walk to be able to fly.”

  Jake was half-drunk and weeping.

  “And she says she saw a horse at Passchendaele that looked just like Detroit’s number two long-courser.”

  Everyone went silent. There was no sound but the gentle wash-wash of the waves.

  “You have to understand,” said Jake at last, “Ruby was our queen bee. When she was good, she was very, very good, and when she was bad—when all of us were bad—no one talked about anything else for days. That’s important. Radcliffe’s board of directors keeps threatening to cut empirical philosophy as a field of study. They hate having a bunch of common sigilrists mixed in with their upper-crust Yankees. We’re not genteel enough, not pretty enough, fated to do common labor when we graduate. Responsible for attracting ‘a dangerous element.’ Well, sometimes the higher-ups need a good shaking. So it falls to the hoverers. The stases are too serious, because they deal in matters of life and death. The transporters are too busy stuffing themselves. The smokecarvers burned up their sense of humor. The message specialists have to be good because they’re trying to land husbands.”

  “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” interjected Astrid.

  “The koruists are all Sapphists and they’re too busy kissing each other to raise hell,” Jake continued. “The synthesists are synthesizing because they can’t do anything else right. And I’m sure the theorists come up with all sorts of good ideas for trouble, but they can’t actually put them into practice. Did I leave anyone out?”

  “Cartogramancers,” I said.

  “We only have one of those and he’s the dean,” said Jake. “So it’s our job to shake things up.”

  • • •

  The lapping of the waves had a soporific effect on me and that, combined with the early start to the day and the warmth of the sand, caused me to drift off. I awoke an hour later, disoriented and groggy. Beside me, the other Threes were stirring, too.

  Tillie produced a thin wooden flute from her pocket and launched into one of the popular tunes of the day. We all sang along:

  Oh, Mama’s gone off to the war.

  She went and joined up with the Corps.

  Daddy is sad, cuz his cooking’s so bad,

  And Mama’s gone off to the war.

  Oh, Mama’s in Gay Paree.

  I hope she remembers me.

  She’ll scrap with the Hun, but when the fighting’s all done,

  I hope she remembers me.

  When Ma marches into Berlin

  Daddy will tuck me in.

  No kiss on the cheek, and my eyes will leak

  When Ma marches into Berlin.

  Francine shuddered. “Don’t play the rest. That’s such a terrible song. I’d hate to think of my children singing the last couple verses.”

  “Aw, my ma remembered me when she got back from the war,” I said.

  “Which one was she in?” asked Francine.

  “All of them.”

  Jake dragged herself to her feet and the rest of us followed. I shook my head to clear the spinning sensation.

  “I think I’m missing freshman orientation,” I said hazily.

  “Up,” said Francine, pointing at the sky. “That’s all the orientation you need.”

  But Jake wasn’t in a joking mood. “Seeing as how Mr. Weekes has well and truly fouled up our tradition of nude bathing, and whereas we do have a responsibility not to contribute overmuch to his delinquency so early in the semester, I propose an immediate return home. And we’ll divvy up the new girls.”

  We found the aerodrome deserted. Posted outside the door were lists of the fliers who had checked out that morning, organized by number grade.

  “Oh my God!” said Jake as she perused the lists. “This is a disaster.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  There were three hundred twenty-four Zeds, a hundred fifty Ones, twenty-seven Twos, and exactly six Threes: the six of us. To train the five hundred four student hoverers, Professor Brock was scheduled to spend sixteen hours per week doing practical instruction and Rachael Rodgers was on for forty. Ordinarily, volunteer instructors drawn from the ranks of the Threes made up the rest of the time. We would have to work dawn to midnight to provide enough hours for the trainees.

  “All the little ladies must have decided this was the year they were going to learn to fly,” Tillie said.

  “They’ve been watching too many news reels,” Francine said. “They make it look glamorous.”

  “Rachael’s got to be having a conniption!” Astrid gloated.

  “But who do you think she’s going to take it out on?” Jake asked.

  10

  No, all my students will be women. It’s impossible for men to fly—they lack the philosophical strength to so much as get off the ground.

  Mary Grinning Fox, quoted in “Hovering to Become Field of Study at the U,” Detroit Defender, January 8, 1871

  I STUMBLED BACK TO my room, shed my gear, and took a brief but renvigorating bath. I would have to hurry to make the end of orientation.

  Unger returned, carrying an armload of books and fliers, while I was getting dressed.

  “I’m sorry to have missed you,” he said. “I looked for you everywhere.”

  I filled Unger in on my morning’s activities. “So we ended up holding, erm, an administrative meeting,” I concluded. “Among the student hover instructors. Of which I’m now one.”

  “Are you, then?” he said, looking genuinely pleased. “Oh, splendid! Well done. I’m sure you didn’t miss anything of value.”

  As it turned out, I’d missed quite a lot, including the card that contained my schedule and the name of my advisor, with whom I was supposed to meet. I hurried to Moss Hall, where a couple of elderly ladies were packing up the last of the paperwork. After only a little abject begging, they dug my card out.

  My advisor was listed as L. Murchison, Garden Hall 448. We were scheduled to meet at noon. I was already late. I set off at a run and by twelve thirty had found the office in question. But the door was labeled DEAN OF EMPIRICAL PHILOSOPHY. That hardly seemed possible for the likes of me—perhaps my card was in error. Much as I hated to disturb one of the bosses, I needed to ask someone directions. I knocked and a firm female voice told me to enter.

  The anteroom was large, but felt claustrophobic due to the stacks of paper piled on every available surface—filing cabinets, bookshelves, small tables, even the thickly carpeted floor. Seated in the middle of the storm was a black woman of about forty-five, with steel-rimmed glasses and a severe expression. She was working her way through a pile of forms.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” I said. “I’m looking for Ms. Murchison?”

  “You’re looking for whom?” she asked. She signed a piece of paper and pulled the next one off the nearest stack.

  “Mrs. Murchison? Professor Murchison? My advisor.” I extended my card toward her. Paperwork being something she was apparently more comfortable with than social niceties, she snatched the schedule from my hand and took in its contents in a glance.

  “That’s Mister Murchison you’re looking for,” she said. “Dean Murchison. Unless he got married this morning, there’s no Mrs. Murchison.” Her hand twitched, as if it didn’t know what to do without a pen.

  “I’m sorry I’m late,” I said.

  The woman sighed and looked up at me bleakly. “The dean is not having a day on which he wishes to speak to other human beings. I don’t suppose you brought any interesting rocks?”

  I hadn’t. She waved for me to sit.

  “I’m Ms. Addams. I’m the Special Assistant Dean of Empirical Philosophy—it means I do
whatever Dean Murchison can’t. Come to me if you need to drop a class, resolve a scheduling conflict, or report a death threat.”

  She didn’t sound like she was joking with the last.

  “I’ll act as your advisor today. You’re Contingency, so your course of study is mostly set. Theoretical Empirical Philosophy is required; all the freshmen take it. Lecture hall with two hundred people. Dr. Yu covers the theoretical part in ten minutes, which means she spends the next eighteen weeks speculating. Stay awake and you’ll pass. Empirical Chemistry is also required—laboratory in groups of twenty. If you don’t ignite your partner, you’ll pass. Essential Sigils is required, too, groups of twelve. Most of the sigils are useless, but some committee put them on the Contingency Exam, so for you they really will be essential. German fulfills your liberal arts requirement. It’s a good language for a practical sigilrist—lots of articles were coming out of Berlin on new smokecarving techniques before the war.”

  Ms. Addams drummed her long, immaculately polished fingernails against the desk and gave me a look of concern. “Introduction to Hovering puts you at twenty credits, which is ambitious. If you find yourself overwhelmed, you might ask whether you really want to learn to fly.”

  “I do fly,” I said.

  I could hear the schedule cards reshuffle in her mind. “Oh, you’re the one from Montana! Capt. Synge raved about you—and she was the meanest son of a bitch I ever had the pleasure to serve with. If half of what she said is true, you’ll find Intro Hover far too elementary. But it puts you in a strong position for your Contingency Exam in the spring. Have you thought about what kind of position you want for your service year?”

  “Would it be absurd if I said the Corps?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she replied, nothing cruel about it, just a cold statement of fact. “Though maybe not impossible. They have two dozen cartogramancers, all of whom are men, naturally, to make maps. Aside from that, another ten or so males in clerical capacities. They go into the field to train the army board technicians who direct medical flights. Would you have interest in that sort of position?”