by Tom Miller
4. The Tail————
On the third line he wrote Krillgoe Hosawither.
“Only one drink and you’ve misspelled your own name,” exclaimed the second man.
The third examined the card carefully. “No, he’s got it right,” he reported. “Poor chap got hit so hard last year it scrambled his letters.”
“Killgore, is it?” I asked.
“No, no,” he said, smiling. “It really is Krillgoe. Terribly traditional Belgian parents, I’m afraid.” The others chuckled knowingly.
He passed the card to his right. The second man sucked at the pen, then signed Osgood Fletcher on the first line.
“Brave man!” the third one said.
“Not at all,” Osgood replied. “Patrice is sure to claim top billing for herself. I, at least, know who I’m up against.”
He passed the card to the third man, who sighed and gave me a long look, sizing me up. “Quite a lot of practical philosophical experience you’ve got?” he asked.
“I suppose,” I said.
“You don’t frighten too easily?”
That was unsettling. “Not terribly.”
“Oh, and you’re a hoverer! It works on so many levels.” He wrote Dmitri Ivanovich on the fourth line.
“Seems ungenerous to put the new fellow in the two slot,” said Osgood.
“Hmm?” said Dmitri. “I don’t understand English.” That got a round of laughter from everyone but me. “Besides, I donated three teeth to the cause last year.” He ran his tongue over his gums and popped out a piece of bridgework.
He passed me the sheet. The remaining blank was on the second line, next to The Wing. I took up the pen and unscrewed the cap, but couldn’t quite bring myself to sign.
“Gentlemen,” I said, “this is perhaps the wrong moment to mention it, but I haven’t the faintest notion what any of this is about.”
Krillgoe nodded sympathetically. “Very sensible of you. The wager this year is for cognac and we’ve got a line on a good deal. It will only run one hundred dollars each.”
“Better make it one fifty and we can keep a few bottles for ourselves,” Osgood suggested.
“Plus dues,” added Krillgoe. “But there’s no rush. We know you’re Contingency, so you’ll be good for it in May when you get your bonus check. If you get killed, we’ll let you off scot-free. You get ten tickets. I suppose we’ll have to allow you to give them to your lady friends at Radcliffe, though God knows the crowd will already be on their side—”
“On account of them having so many more ex-Hens who come back each year and all of them with their ten, too,” added Osgood, not altogether helpfully.
“You wouldn’t mind explaining the specifics of . . . I mean, what it is actually that I’m signing up to do?” I asked.
“The less you know, the better,” said Krillgoe. The others heartily seconded the sentiment.
“Can you draw a push?” asked Dmitri, referring to the sigil that did exactly what the name implied.
“Of course,” I said.
“Then you’re in! All you need to do is sign.”
I recalled the moment in Fresh Gale on the High Sonora when Edwin Fitzenhalter joins the US Kite Marshalry after walking into the wrong building on his first visit to San Antonio—the slow, burning feeling in his gut as he realizes he doesn’t know what kind of work he’s signing on for, countered by the notion that the chaps around him seem to be men of quality. I couldn’t say that those three in the yellow ties resembled the deadeye sharpshooters and wild ex-mariners with whom Fitzenhalter had served; they looked instead like mildly spoiled Harvard College boys. But they were so excited and expectant. And after all, what was life without a little adventure?
I signed.
“Bravo!” shouted my compatriots. We drank a second round to finish the bottle.
• • •
On my walk home, however, the fizz of the preceding hours leaked away. I’d just stayed out until two in the morning with a paper unwritten and a full schedule of Zeds to teach at six. That was sheer stupidity. I hadn’t come halfway across the country in search of adventure, I’d come for an education! Contingency students could ill afford adventures, not unless they wanted to lose their scholarships.
As I approached my building, a light came on in the room below mine and a silhouette paced before the window. Mayweather. No rest for the wicked, it seemed, though a wicked gossip might be just the man I needed.
I climbed a flight of stairs and knocked. I heard the thud of footsteps and then the door crashed open. Mayweather and a young woman answered it together, both laughing uproariously, completely drunk, neither wearing a stitch of clothing, a fact which they had ineffectually attempted to hide by wrapping themselves in the same blanket. My instinct was to run, but I was too plum shocked.
“Robert!” cried Mayweather. “Lucille, do you know Robert? This man is a hero! He swam the Charles to save Norah’s life. Nancy’s life. He’ll tell you all about it. He shot a man in Abilene! Isn’t that right? Come in, come in! Do you know Lucille?”
As it happened, I did: she was one of the Zeds I was supposed to teach in roughly four hours.
“Did you tell him to come?” asked Lucille, whose feet had become tangled in the blanket. “You told him to come!” she said and tripped, sending both of them tumbling to the floor, paralyzed in hilarity, and doing a poor job of protecting their modesty.
“I don’t know why you told him to come,” complained Lucille, climbing to her feet and yanking the blanket away from Mayweather, who rolled over onto his belly and grinned stupidly.
Lucille wobbled toward the bedroom, stopping to collect several articles of clothing, hurl an expensive pair of trousers at Mayweather, and lose track of her blanket entirely.
“I was just going!” she shouted from the bedroom.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
I began backing out of the room, but Mayweather, drunk or not, was quick and surprisingly strong. With one hand clamped around my arm and the other clutching his trousers to him, he dragged me over to a plush lounge chair.
“We are going to have a drink, Robert! A man like you, you’ll go places. A man worth knowing. You should hear what everyone says about you—a goddamned saint.” He reached for a bottle of Scotch and upended it over a glass. The bottle was empty.
“I should go,” I said, but Mayweather restrained me.
“Robert, Robert, Robert. You’re out in the middle of the night. There’s only one reason at this hour. They’re so easy, these philosophical girls. You want to defend them from all that slander, but it’s true—they fall over one another to give it up. A man can hardly choose! So who was yours? You saw mine, you have to tell me yours!”
“I was coming for advice,” I blurted. “Three men dressed in feathered hats came to initiate me into some sort of society. They have a rickety clubhouse four hundred yards northwest of Harvard Square.”
Mayweather looked at me, stupefied. Then he gasped. “Your problem isn’t your cock, it’s the Cocks,” he said, delighted by his own wit.
“What are the Cocks?” I asked. “What do they do?”
“It’s the best party of the year. You have to give me a ticket. So I can come watch you. Two tickets.”
“What happens at the party?”
“Blood sports. They try to kill you.”
“The other men try to kill me?”
“No! The Hens. Each one of them tries to mash one of you.”
That made sense. Almost. Four women and four men—an empirical prizefight. I’d suffered through plenty of those as a child without any opportunity to win liquor.
“I thought long and hard when they invited me,” said Mayweather. “I want to see it, but I’m not suicidal.”
“They asked you?”
“Ages ago.”
That didn’t raise my opinion of the Cocks. Mayweather knew his way around a message board—during the day he didn’t seem to go longer than twelve or thirteen seconds withou
t checking his portable—but he was no practical philosopher.
“Do you know who the Hens put in the two slot?” I asked. “Who their Wing is?”
Mayweather nodded, and rattled off a list of names, none of which I recognized as Radcliffe students unless Mrs. Woodrow Wilson and Queen Victoria had recently enrolled.
I was saved from further conjecture by Lucille, who reentered fully dressed. Despite wearing three-inch pumps, she seemed to be having far less trouble maneuvering than she’d had barefoot.
“I was just leaving,” she said.
“No, no,” I said, rising. “I was just leaving.”
“No!” said Mayweather. “You can’t go. This man is a hero! He’s a prince. Let me pour you a drink.”
“You did pour me a drink,” I said. “It was delicious. But I have to be off—there’s someone waiting up for me.”
“Oh-ho!” said Mayweather, winking. “Well give her one from me.” Then he turned to Lucille. “Where are you going?”
“I was just leaving.”
“You can’t leave now!” objected Mayweather.
He tugged at her hands and she sat down hard in his lap, both of them laughing. I heard thrilled-sounding shrieks as I climbed the last flight of stairs to my room, where, to my surprise, someone really was waiting up for me.
13
Energy comes in a packet
That can’t be further divided—
Moving, it interferes with magnets—
Measure finely enough and you will see
The spark in your glyph—that moves the world.
Maria Trestor, “5th Precept,” 200 Precepts, 1848
I FOUND UNGER PACING the living room, mouthing along as he read through a sheaf of papers.
“Late night?” I asked him.
He looked up at me in surprise. “I heard you nearly drowned rescuing Nancy Durstman. Are you quite all right?”
“Yeah,” I said, feeling embarrassed that he’d thought it necessary to wait up. “It wasn’t as dramatic as all that.”
“Robert, three different people told me you dove in after her and she pushed you under. They kept repeating what you said, that you have to fly instead of run at an emergency.”
“I didn’t come up with that, my mother used to—”
“It put me in mind of a classic calculus problem,” Unger continued, his eyes bright and distant, “about saving a drowning man who’s down the beach a few hundred yards and some distance out to sea—you can run faster than you can swim and how far should you go before entering the water? It’s really a metaphor for the refractive index of optical media. That gave me the most intriguing idea about Trestor’s eighty-eighth precept.”
“About what?” I asked.
“There’s a way to put it to the test! It’s not practical, it would take a thousand years—but I simply had to rewrite my paper. I ought to have you read it over, Robert. You have the most original notions about empiricism.”
He thrust his paper into my hands. “Tell me if it’s coherent. And would you mind terribly if I had a look at yours? I won’t alter a word, I just want to see what you’ve come up with.”
So, I read Unger’s essay. The parts I could understand dealt with one of the precepts written down by Maria Trestor, who was either the greatest theorist sigilry had ever seen or its greatest madwoman. Trestor had spent her brief life shut away in a garret apartment in her parents’ house in Connecticut, writing on the theoretical underpinnings of glyphs. When she’d died at age twenty-nine, her last wish was that all her papers be burned. Instead, her family published the more comprehensible ones. Several of her precepts had provided invaluable insights into empirical philosophy, though no one knew how she’d formulated them—experiments or mathematics or intuition.
Unger had applied Trestor’s principles of inversion to the problem of creating a Zephyrus glyph—a sigil that would summon the west wind—by reversing the Eupheus glyph, which could only call winds from the east. That much I understood. But the rest was so technical that I could barely follow. Unger seemed to believe that a simple inversion did work, but so slowly and inefficiently that by the time your west wind finally arrived it wouldn’t blow with any discernable force and you’d have been dead for four hundred years. It struck me as a typical theorist’s solution.
Unger had read my essay as well—all six lines of it. He couldn’t help himself and had penciled in several improvements to my grammar.
“A bit of work left, then,” he said.
“A bit,” I said morosely.
“What were you doing all night? Weren’t you in the library?”
I explained my diversion at the hands of the Order of the Chanticleer.
“Dear heavens!” Unger exclaimed. “I saw the cards pinned to the door. I thought you knew.”
“Knew what?”
“That if you want to decline, you slide your card under the door of their clubhouse. I know I never ran so fast as I did last week when I returned mine.”
They’d asked Unger ahead of me? Krillgoe Hosawither and his brethren must be even bigger fools than I’d thought—there wasn’t a man on earth less well suited for an empirical duel than Freddy.
“Do you know the logistics of it?” I asked. “How it actually plays out?”
“Oh, they go to tremendous lengths to keep the whole thing secret,” he said. “It’s supposed to be great fun to watch, just—well, perhaps hazardous for the participants.”
He came over to shake my hand. “In all seriousness, congratulations. The Cocks don’t ask just anyone.”
“No,” I said. “Apparently they asked everyone and I was the only male sigilrist left.”
Unger didn’t know what to say to that. In fact he looked a little hurt. Well, why shouldn’t they ask the local boy before me? It wasn’t his fault.
“You’re coming, of course,” I said. “And you’d better cheer louder than anyone.”
“Bully!” said Unger. “It would be an honor.” Then a thought flashed across his face. He cleared his throat. “This is going to sound terribly selfish . . .”
“You want a second ticket so you can ask Dizzy.”
“You needn’t give me the ticket, you could give it to her.”
“You’re trying to invent a sigil that’ll let her call the west wind, right?”
“For everyone,” Unger murmured, embarrassed. “But yes.”
“Then have two tickets and ask her yourself,” I said.
Unger looked apprehensive over the prospect but also pleased.
I stayed up the rest of the night working on my essay, which became ever more nonsensical as morning drew nigh. At five thirty, I hid my paper in my desk, lest Unger read it out of curiosity and die of heart failure, and dragged myself to the aerodrome.
(I earned a richly deserved D– on that essay. Unger got his paper back without a grade. Professor Yu had been so excited that she’d forgotten to mark it. After several lunches with the best theoretical minds at Radcliffe, Yu and Unger concluded that he’d made a mistake in his mathematical model and that the actual time to run his experiment would be on the order of twenty thousand years. Unger published his work the following spring in The Annals of Theoretical Empirical Philosophy, to overwhelming disinterest. But I never saw Unger prouder than the day he got his copy of that journal in the mail.)
• • •
Exhausted as I was, I couldn’t beg off teaching my classes. I did uneventful individual sessions with two Zeds. Mayweather’s lady friend, Lucille, should have been my third student, but didn’t show—probably still hungover at his place. I took advantage of the break to make a cup of coffee at the little perpetual heat stove we kept in the aerodrome’s storeroom.
I emerged a few minutes later to find Rachael Rodgers blocking the aerodrome’s main door. She held a leather harness strap in one hand, a prop for the class she was about to teach. When she saw me, she pressed her lips into a nasty smile and thrust her chin in the air.
“You stupi
d son of a bitch!” she sneered. “You thought I wouldn’t find out? You nearly kill a girl in an unauthorized session and don’t say a word?”
“I logged it,” I said, trying to keep my face steady. “It was a supervised self-study class. Nobody had to authorize it.”
At the sound of our voices, thirty or so heads popped around the corner from the classroom. Rachael looked pleased to have an audience.
“You’ve been an insolent, incompetent distraction from the very first day,” she raged. “I want you gone. Now!”
“I’m going outside to teach my next Zed,” I said.
“Don’t you dare contradict me! You’re through. You’re fired!”
“You don’t have the authority.”
Probably that was true—I’d heard Jake claim so. But Rachael seemed to sense my uncertainty and it emboldened her.
“You’re nothing more than a whining little brat who wishes he’d been born a girl. You ought to be taken out back and paddled.”
A couple of the Ones giggled at the thought. “Do it, Rachael!” one of them called. “Put him over your knee and spank him!”
If there was further laughter, neither Rachael nor I heard it. I knew what she was going to do almost before she did. It didn’t matter that I was twice her size; she’d just made a half-serious threat in front of thirty novices and she either had to follow through or lose face.
She raised her strap and stepped toward me.
“Don’t touch me,” I growled.
Rachael caught hold of my skysuit and swung at me. I shoved her arm down and away. She lost her grip, took a step backward, and sat down hard.
“Don’t touch me!” I shouted.
I walked around her and out the door without looking back.
• • •
It was liberating in the way a death sentence must be. The worst had happened: I’d knocked down a girl and she would see to it I was fired as an instructor and probably expelled. Nothing I could do would change that. In the meantime, I had complete freedom.
A woman waved to me from the hover field. Undoubtedly my seven thirty—the brand-new tailored skysuit and cream-colored kid gloves gave her away as a particular sort of Zed.