by Tom Miller
“Sigilrists hate real Americans!” the man screamed. “Whores and warmongers, all of them!”
The first guard wrenched the man’s arms backward and the second punched him in the gut. He fell to his knees with no breath left to spew further abuse. The guards dragged him out.
The young ladies streamed for the doors, too, leaving in packs of eight or ten, no one walking alone. Many girls were in tears, their dresses ruined, in a few cases their only good dress, which was supposed to last the entire year. The remaining Contingency students retreated to their side of the room, the gentlewomen to theirs.
“Leave it to the Trenchers to break up a perfectly good party,” Unger muttered when I recovered him. The young woman with whom he’d been speaking so animatedly just a minute before had taken up a position on the opposite side of the hall and was now eyeing the Contingencies with disdain.
• • •
Sounds lik Bostn, all right, Mother replied when I messaged home with a summary of my day. Trnchrs under evry rock. If y see Max Gannet on the street, tell him the Montna Jyhwks ar srry they didn’t remove him in ’04 whn they had the chnce.
I chuckled at that. Gannet was one of the original Trenchers, a drummer boy at the Battle of Petersburg who’d escaped unscathed. He’d been one of the masterminds behind the First Disturbance, the man who’d planned the assassinations but always found a way for the blood to end up on someone else’s hands. In his latter days, he’d run for president four times as the nominee of the Trencher Party. He’d been so hateful that even the most vociferous anti-philosophical bigots had been scared to vote for him. The Trenchers in Boston had taken him in after the Gray Hats—the Eastern sisters of the Jayhawks—burned down his house in Virginia. Not the kind of person I’d be rubbing shoulders with.
Any more troubl by y? I asked.
N. Quiet last coupl days. Mybe Trnchrs scared.
Or waiting for the right moment to hit back.
11
You will find him a trial, I fear, for he spends his days as if lost in a waking dream. Yet Captain Clark’s maps are so incomparably detailed that they shall repay you many times over for the trouble he causes.
President Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Meriwether Lewis, 1803
EVEN TODAY, I CAN recall a few moments from the opening weeks of classes with perfect clarity.
I remember sitting in Theoretical Empirical Philosophy beside Unger, who took voluminous notes and turned to punch me in the shoulder whenever I drifted off to the sound of Professor Yu’s monotone. I remember working at a battered large-format message board on a bench table in Essential Sigils, delighted by the improved Huk method for sending images, only to learn with horror that the sand cost forty dollars per ounce. And I remember the first time I saw the Hero of the Hellespont, the Darling of the Dardanelles, the greatest American hero of the Great War, our classmate, Danielle Hardin.
On the day I met her, I was in the Gray Box, as we called Cadwallader Memorial Library, working through a difficult problem from my hovering textbook. It involved a pair of fliers clipped to each other who alternated as flier and passenger. Given certain constraints for powder type and glyph efficiency, what was their maximum range and flight duration? It would have seemed a ridiculous question had I not known that Jimenez and Hatcher had solved it while planning the first nonstop transatlantic flight in ’93.
Someone touched my shoulder. “Robert?” she said.
I jumped a mile.
It was Essie. She looked terrified. “Jake said to come get you. Rachael froze up a couple minutes ago. She was at five hundred feet helping a One with a turn. The One was so frightened she nearly crashed. A Two went up and brought Rachael in.”
“Good God!” I said. “Who was the Two?”
“Frieda,” said Essie.
“I believe we’ll have to promote her and give her a medal of some sort. Does Harnemon’s carry—”
“Jake says we’re going to the dean. Immediately.” Poor Essie looked even paler than usual, but twice as determined.
“Hasn’t she already tried that?” I asked.
“I don’t know what she’s planning,” said Essie. “I don’t want to lose my instructor’s position.”
“Why would you lose your position?”
But Essie had caught the sleeve of my shirt and was pulling me toward the stairs.
We met the other Threes, minus Jake, outside the dean’s office.
“We’re marching right in there and if that bitch Addams tries to stop us, I’ll throw her out the window!” Francine fumed.
“This is why we’re not letting you do the talking,” Astrid countered.
“Well, I still think it’s idiotic to bring her along for this,” Francine said.
Tillie laughed. “She gets what she wants. And she knows how to threaten the administration without cussing.”
Francine turned as red as her hair.
I wanted to ask who they were talking about, but right then Jake joined us accompanied by a large, unsmiling figure. I recognized her from her pictures in the newspapers: the deep brown skin, the curly black hair that hung to her shoulders, and the rings around her eyes just as dark: Danielle Hardin.
• • •
To write about Miss Hardin, especially in the current age, is to invite every sort of intense feeling and prejudice. I would invite you to think of her as you might have in the early fall of 1917—as a young woman well known but not yet famous, viewed by the general public not as a philosophical radical or a revolutionary, but as a soldier who had acted with exemplary valor.
The US Sigilry Corps, which counted Miss Hardin among its officers, had been in France from the opening days of the Great War to ensure that the belligerents observed the Rouen Conventions and abstained from using sigilry for military ends. The British and French were hopeless philosophers, so there was little risk there; the Germans, on the other hand, had concluded the Franco-Prussian War four decades before with a display of smokecarving so overwhelming that it had nearly smothered Paris. Popular opinion held that the Huns were likely to try it again unless the Corps kept them in check. But as the Great War dragged on into its second and third years without serious philosophical misconduct, the Corps had nothing to do but pick daisies.
So, in late 1916 when the British Army inquired about borrowing a few transporters for a mission in the Dardanelles Strait, the Corps was happy to oblige. The British Commonwealth had some sixteen divisions, mostly Australians and New Zealanders, trapped at Gallipoli, where the Anglos had advanced a scant mile from the beaches during two years of bloody fighting against the Turks. The British had decided to abandon the campaign, but withdrawing their forces would be tricky. If they massed on the beaches for evacuation by sea, the Turks would rain artillery on the exposed soldiers. On the other hand, if they pulled out gradually, their rearguard was likely to be overrun.
Instead, the British generals had decided to transport their entire army out in one night. The Greek-held island of Imbros lay only fifteen miles west in the Aegean Sea; with appropriately placed destination sigils, a few experienced American transporters would be able to evacuate all quarter of a million men in a few hours, moving entire divisions at once.
On a moonless February night, the generals gave the order to proceed. The Commonwealth soldiers abandoned their positions to muster at the evacuation sites. The five American transporters on Imbros drew their sigils and vanished. But only one of them appeared on the beach in Turkey. No one could understand it. The British staff discussed aborting the mission, but the Turks had realized the trenches opposite them were empty and were already advancing. It was retreat or be slaughtered.
The only remaining philosopher, Sigilwoman Second Class Hardin, agreed to take as many men as she could. She began running transports back to the island, moving thousands of troops with each jump. She continued even as the evacuation sites came under fire, past the point of exhaustion, then past the point where the strain should have killed her two or three
times over. By morning, she’d saved nearly the entire Commonwealth army. She’d made forty-eight jumps—720 miles—and lost twenty-one pounds. Somehow she’d survived.
The Germans had been furious—they’d called Gallipoli a flagrant violation of international law, one that had freed 250,000 men to oppose them on the Western Front. They’d threatened to pull out of the Rouen Conventions and use their Korps des Philosophs to obliterate France.
But the Sigilry Corps had been delighted. Here was the unlikely hero they’d been waiting for, a quiet Rhode Island lass, the daughter of a Congregationalist minister. “Dardanelles” they’d dubbed her, and that was the name by which she became known throughout America, her serious visage plastered across a hundred front pages.
• • •
In person, though, Dardanelles looked terrible. Her face was haggard and blotchy, as if she’d been dragged out of bed two hours into a ten-year nap, an impression reinforced by the wrinkled khaki skirt and tattered blue cardigan she was wearing. Her eyes were sunken and her gait shambling. She wasn’t fat, exactly, but she’d more than regained the weight she’d lost seven months earlier.
Hardin nodded to a couple of my colleagues, straightened her posture, and got down to business. “Jake’s explained about Rachael Rodgers,” she said, her voice a quiet alto. “There’s more than enough evidence of incompetence. I’ll lay the facts out to Belle Addams. If she asks for one of you to corroborate, we should choose—well, which of you have had run-ins with our special assistant dean in the past week?”
Francine’s lip curled into a half snarl. She raised her hand. So did all the others, including Essie, who to my knowledge had never even met Addams.
“She seems to like me,” I offered.
Dardanelles rolled her eyes. “That about figures. If she wants to hear from one of you, then that one speaks,” she said, pointing at me.
We entered the office to find Addams sitting placidly at her desk.
“No,” Addams said. “Whatever you’re here for, the answer is no.”
“Ma’am,” replied Danielle. “We would like your assistance.”
“You of all people have no right to do this,” Addams said. “I went to the chair of Romance Languages last week on your behalf. Do you have any idea how poorly it reflects on this office to have to beg for an exception for a young lady who has failed introductory French twice?”
Danielle looked needled, but she persevered. “I’m not here about French,” she said. She summarized the events of the morning cogently and pointedly, with an earnestness that Jake, even on her best days, couldn’t have approached.
“We’re aware of the situation,” said Addams. “It’s being handled.”
“Really?” Francine cut in. “Because that’s what you said last week when I told you Rachael needed five tries to launch herself while teaching the Ones basic maneuvers. It’s what you said when I reported we’ll need two years at the rate we’re going to get the Zeds their individual instruction time—”
Addams cleared her message board with a swipe that sent sand skittering across the floor. “That’s enough!” she roared. “This is not Sunday school. There are no gold stars for tattling. If you’re so concerned for the well-being of your fellow fliers, then you should spend more time instructing and less time undermining the efforts of your senior instructor. And Miss Hardin, I hardly understand your interest. If these young ladies”—and here Addams seemed to include me—“are so concerned, then why don’t they speak for themselves?”
Danielle looked pleased to be asked. “Because they’re going to strike if Rachael isn’t removed. That’s the sort of message that ought to be delivered by a neutral intermediary. Besides, I’m the one with standing invitations from the Globe and the New York Post to contribute columns on whatever subject I like. Dean Murchison’s indifference on this matter could make a very interesting story.”
Addams was apoplectic. “The Corps may treat you like their Princess Sergeant Major, but around here you’re nothing more than a second-rate student who comes into my office sniveling for special treatment one day and making threats the next. Get out!”
“You told me the dean was available to me at any hour,” said Danielle without so much as raising her voice. “I want him right now.”
Danielle started toward the dean’s office flanked by Astrid and Francine. Addams leaped to her feet as if to block the much larger women.
“Out!” Addams cried. “All of you, out!”
Danielle slid past Addams and opened the door to the dean’s office. The rest of us followed her in. Only, there was no sign of the dean. Just a faint, rhythmic thumping.
Addams found Dean Murchison squatting under his desk, his fist pressed to his mouth. He rocked on his heels, bumping the back of his head against his chair, staring at the carpet. He was barefoot, having abandoned his shoes and socks on his desk blotter.
“Lennox,” said Addams. “Come out from under there.”
“The warp and the weft, you see,” the dean said, still rocking. “If paper were woven in such a fashion, the ink . . . If paper were made . . . If paper . . . If . . .”
“Sit in your chair, Lennox,” Ms. Addams said in a voice that brooked no disagreement. The dean took his seat.
Lennox Murchison was a grizzled old man from Peoria who happened to be the world’s leading cartogramancer—a philosophical mapmaker. He’d spent twenty years on loan from the Corps to the Royal Geographical Society, during which time he’d created intricate maps of New Zealand’s South Island and all but accidentally invented a sigil for determining the depth and movement of snowpack. He’d devoted the next twenty years to charting the glaciers of Alaska, where he’d also developed a glyph that accurately predicted earthquakes. Hoping that he might make his next breakthrough in less than two decades, the Corps had reassigned him to administrative duty. During his first month, Murchison had created the two-ink system for identifying metal deposits, devised a method for recognizing the microscopic depressions in the earth caused by human beings standing in a particular location, and suffered a nervous breakdown from being back in polite society after forty years of solitude.
Radcliffe, which prided itself on always having a theoretician as its Dean of Empirical Philosophy, had offered Murchison the position in ’14, when his predecessor resigned to take a commission in France. Murchison had proven a capable enough administrator, largely because he delegated all issues of tenure, staffing, and discipline to Ms. Addams.
“I’m sorry about the disturbance,” Addams said. “These people wanted to talk to you.”
“What disturbance?” asked the dean. “What people?”
Seeing what was likely to be their only opportunity, Jake and Francine began speaking as loudly as possible. Addams talked right over them. Tillie and Astrid joined in for the sake of completeness.
The dean didn’t notice any of it. He disassembled his fountain pen, laying out the pieces in a row on his desk. He removed a sheet of paper from a drawer, tapped a single drop of ink onto it from the barrel of the pen, and traced his finger through, so quickly and finely that I couldn’t make out his glyphs. The ink danced across the page, resolving itself into a floor plan of Murchison’s office.
My hackles rose. That was not how cartogramancers worked. They needed hours, days even, to make a map.
“Oh!” the dean exclaimed, delighted. Everyone went silent. “The fliers are here! You can tell by the corn dust on their shoes. And one transporter. Aluminum on hers.” He looked up at us for the first time. “Welcome! The situation has been made known to me. A decision has been made. Good day!”
He seemed surprised when no one moved. “They will leave now?” Murchison suggested to Ms. Addams.
It was pointless to get angry at someone so obviously mad. You might shout at him all day and he wouldn’t so much as blink. Any sort of intercession would have to happen through Addams and we’d just destroyed that option. She pointed to the antechamber and we filed out.
> “Excepting Miss Hardin and Mr. Weekes,” Murchison added.
I thought I’d imagined the last and took two steps for the door before Addams spun me around.
Murchison tapped his paper and the blueprint faded, coalescing into a drop of ink, which he squeezed back into his pen.
“Cartogramancy is more than the making of maps,” he said to us. “It is seeing the world as it really is.”
He observed us with a pair of deep-set eyes. His light-brown irises looked as if they had faded in the sun, but as he gazed at us, they darkened and intensified in hue, backed by a fierce, alien intelligence.
“Do you dream of them?” he asked. Though he did not look away from me, he meant the question for Dardanelles.
She went whiter than bones. “Do I what?”
“How are your dreams?” he asked.
“They’re fine,” she said hoarsely. “I don’t dream.”
Murchison shook his head and gave a tut. “They’ll improve in time,” he said, and folded his hands. “The Corps asked that an investigation into Gallipoli be conducted by me. The results may interest you. The destination glyphs on the beach were placed by a cartogramancer. A Canadian.”
“Yes,” said Dardanelles. “I saw him do it. He drew the sigils himself to ensure they were in the right places.”
“He chose incorrect figures,” Murchison said. “Designed for higher angular velocities nearer to the equator. They warped. They deposited your colleagues one mile northwest of where they were drawn.”
Danielle frowned. “I never knew that. But a mile northwest would have been—that would be right in the middle of the Aegean. With forty pounds of gear.”
“Presumably they drowned,” said Murchison.
“Presumably,” agreed Dardanelles. Her face darkened. “Even my glyph was wrong. It put me half a mile too far down the beach. So, I was just lucky, is that it?”