The Philosopher's Flight

by Tom Miller

  “Halloo!” she called. “Over here.”

  I walked over. She’d been waiting outside and had missed my exchange with Rachael.

  “Good morning,” I said. “I’m afraid I shouldn’t—”

  “Oh, I do get the famous Mr. Weekes after all!”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry, but—”

  “I saw Nancy last night and she is just so impressed with you. ‘The very epitome of alacrity and sangfroid,’ she called you.”

  I had to take it on faith that was a compliment, as it would have sent me to the dictionary three times in the space of five words.

  “I shouldn’t say this, but Nancy’s thrilled to be the center of attention. A good, modest girl all her life but now with a frisson of danger, too! She won’t stop talking about you. She’s going to eat her liver when she finds out I got you to myself for a whole lesson.”

  “About that,” I said. “I should really—” And then I thought to myself, What’s the harm?

  “Well, show me your launch sigil with good body position, if you’d be so kind,” I said.

  “Good body position,” she tittered. “I’m sure if I actually tried it, I’d end up in the river, too. Though I might not mind the dunking if I were certain of being rescued. Would you tell me how it happened?”

  I gave an account of the previous night’s rescue and then tried to keep up with her questions about my sisters and the native flora and fauna of Montana and, yes, really, poor Nancy had gone straight in. I persuaded her to draw a few glyphs, but she was no more a practical philosopher than I was a deep-sea diver. I’d had girls like that now and again, more interested in flirtation than flying. Usually, I resented them for taking time away from the more dedicated students, but the way the day was going, I didn’t care.

  “I’m glad you tried a sigil, at least,” I said at our session’s end. “You’re probably my last student. I believe Miss Rodgers fired me as I was on my way out to meet you.”

  “Oh, Rachael’s insufferable! Don’t pay her any mind. Besides, Nancy comes from money—her father would never allow you to be let go, not after last night.”

  That was something I’d never considered.

  “For what it’s worth, I thought you were brilliant. You’re so unusual! I mean, everyone always says any boy who can do philosophy must like other boys—romantically, I mean. But you’re such a man’s man! All business. You don’t seem like one of those.”

  I’d heard endless versions of that line over the years—“Hey, philosopher—you a pansy? A shirt lifter? A little witch, just like your mama?” I’d beat the tar out of half my male high school classmates over quips like that.

  “No, I like women romantically,” I answered, trying to maintain a veneer of politeness.

  “Do you have someone back home? I hope I’m not prying. I just never heard of you with anyone here, is all.”

  “No one back home.”

  “Well, you’re going to make someone happy with those big hands of yours. A few of the girls were saying they thought you and Miss Jacobi—well, it’s very silly.”

  “Very.”

  Ridiculous to imagine the two of us together. No time, no privacy, no interest on Jake’s part, she’d made that clear from the day I met her. And yet the thought stirred something in me. If I were to be tossed out of the aerodrome, then that was the affair I wanted—not this tactless little rich girl. Gloxinia was too beautiful, too fearsome for me not to chance it. Find yourself chained to a bedframe falling out of the sky at ten thousand feet if you ever crossed her. Though that might be preferable to whatever method Cocks and Hens would find for staving in my head. And Jake just might be able to shed some light on that, too.

  • • •

  Shitty chain of commnd if nonsuprior officr threatns to flog you, Mother sympathized. Hit hr hardr nxt time. And, Y, agree discuss w/ yr lead flyr ASAP.

  So I messaged Jake, asking for an audience; she said to come by that evening. Dn’t wrry—I only spank men wh ask nicely.

  Which was intriguing. Perhaps my well-dressed Zed knew something I didn’t.

  I tried out my sharpest shirt and tie, with a brown fedora supplied by Unger, and headed to the Women’s Philosophical Dormitory with a gait pretty well approximating a swagger. But when I strolled into the women’s dorm, a wide, matronly woman intercepted me.

  “May I help you?” she said.

  “Here to see Jake,” I answered.

  The woman frowned. “Who?”

  “Gloxinia Jacobi.”

  “Just a moment,” she said, and retreated to a desk next to the door. She took out a slip of paper. “Whom shall I say is calling?”

  “She’s expecting me,” I explained. “I’ll just go up.”

  “Certainly not!”

  So, twenty minutes later, after a note had been sent up to Jake and she’d sent one back, as was required protocol, my sense of derring-do had diminished.

  Jake came down the stairs, grabbed my arm—though not in the way I’d been hoping—and led me outside.

  “Holy hell, Weekes, you’ve had a day for the ages!” she said. “You don’t have any idea who Nancy Durstman is, do you?”

  “No, but everyone keeps—”

  “Her daddy is president of the fourth-largest insurance company in America. Then you went and goaded Rachael into a fight? And slugged her? Did you also set the aerial speed record while you were at it?”

  “No,” I said. “But I do seem to have joined the Most Ancient and Noble Order of the Chanticleer.”

  Jake smirked. “Of course you did! Well, they picked the right man—you’ll put up quite a fight.”

  “Provided I don’t get expelled first.”

  “Nobody’s expelling you,” Jake said, laughing. “It’s not the first time Rachael’s started a fracas. No, you just go into Brock’s office first thing tomorrow morning for confession and she’ll tell you say ten Hail Marys and sin no more. It’ll blow over.”

  The relief must have been spelled out all over my face.

  “Better for you that you had been expelled,” Jake snickered. “Joined the Cocks. No wonder you’re living recklessly. You’re not going to survive the weekend.”

  A good joke, I hoped. “It’s like a pyramid scheme, right?” I asked. “There’s no actual violence involved?”

  She looked at me with mock solemnity and shook her head.

  “Could you enlighten me on . . . I mean, what actually happens?”

  “It’s a secret,” she said, and winked. “I’ve been twice as a guest and we’re made to swear a bunch of very bloody oaths never to reveal it.”

  Her wink emboldened me. I gazed at her with enough smoldering intensity that she frowned and looked away.

  “Tell me anyway?” I asked.

  “Yeah, sure,” she said. “You sit on stools ten paces apart. You get a belt with four vials of bronze on one side and four of talc on the other. There’s a referee and a surgeon standing by. When the referee says go, you both draw dissipate glyphs to shield yourselves. Ten seconds later, the referee blows her whistle. Draw another dissipate, draw push, or jump for your life—whatever you choose. The first one to get knocked off their stool loses.”

  Only moderate potential for remodeling your skull in a game like that. “So it’s like Queen of the Hill,” I said. “But that’s all about brute philosophical force. How do the men ever win?”

  “They don’t,” Jake said. “They did, once, in ’08. They cheated. But the Hens have been more careful since. They haven’t so much as lost a round.”

  We turned for a second lap around the quadrangle and Jake retook my arm.

  “Out of sheer morbid curiosity, which piece of the rooster will you be representing?” she asked.

  “The Wing,” I said.

  “Oh, poor Robert. Write your last will and testament now.”

  “Why, who’s the Wing for the Hens?”

  “Hmm-mmm.”

  “Mayweather will tell me.”

  “H
e doesn’t know.”

  “If I give you one of my invitations?”

  “You’re going to do that anyway.”

  Her golden hair glistened in the sun. I could feel the heat of her palm on the crook of my arm.

  “If I took you to dinner beforehand?” I asked.

  “No,” said Jake.

  “If I took you out another time?”

  “No!” She dropped my arm and looked up at me in annoyance. “Stop it! I’m not kidding.”

  “I just thought—”

  “Stop looking at me like you want to rip my shirt off. I’m not interested and I’m not your type. You need somebody who’s as goddamned serious as you are.”

  “And that’s not you?” I asked, trying my damned most serious to sound light.

  “No!” she said. “You may think I’m a hell-raiser, but I’m daddy’s little princess who’s six credits short of a degree in accounting. You need an Amazon warrior queen. We’re fresh out of those.”

  She stood on tiptoes to adjust my hat to a more rakish angle. “You just worry about putting on a good show at Cocks and Hens. If you manage that, you’ll have no shortage of interested parties offering to take you over their knee in the bedroom. I’ll pick the right one for you, I promise.”

  • • •

  I visited Professor Brock in her office in the fifth sub-basement of the Gray Box the following morning. It smelled of mildew and machine oil. She had a foot-powered lathe and crates of regulators in various states of disassembly, as well as books and journals stacked high enough to kill someone if they toppled over.

  “Sit,” Brock said. “Every time I hear the story it gets bigger. Please tell me Rachael didn’t actually order you to strip naked or threaten to sodomize you. And tell me that you didn’t slap her in the face or threaten to retain a lawyer and sue for battery.”

  “No ma’am,” I said. “She laid hands on me, I pushed her away, and she fell down.”

  “Fine. Apologize when you see her next. I’ve told her to do the same. You’re not fired unless you want to be. I can’t afford to lose you, not with as many girls as you’ve taken on, and I can’t afford to lose her—her ground instruction is the reason most of your Zeds pass on the first try.”

  “She came up to me carrying a—”

  “I don’t want to hear any more about it. Yesterday’s fight is small potatoes. You know what your real sin was?”

  “Splashing a young lady?”

  “Splashing the richest girl in the sophomore class. She’s too stupid to understand how close she came to drowning. Her father’s no brighter. He wrote to express his gratitude at the amazing instruction his daughter’s receiving—if even our male can effect such an effortless rescue, then we must be the most extraordinary group of hoverers in the world. He wondered if he might do something nice for us. I suggested a set of spiral-cut regulators from Denver Custom Instruments for our General’s Cup team.”

  I whistled at that. I wasn’t going to resign if I had the chance to fly with one of those.

  “I personally don’t mind what you did,” Brock said. “I trained at Detroit in the ’90s and we splashed a couple girls a week off Belle Isle. That was the culture. But eight years ago—right before they hired me—Radcliffe had a novice die in a crash. If we ever lose another one, that’ll be the end of flying at Radcliffe, maybe the end of empirical philosophy entirely. So, you cannot turn your lessons into an audition for Rescue and Evac.”

  “Understood,” I said.

  “Good. I should add that if you’re still serious about R&E, I think I’ve found someone to train you. It’ll be a couple of weeks before we can finalize the arrangements. We’ll bring in a bunch of other instructors at the same time—we can’t have the six of you trying to cover five hundred trainees all year.”

  “That sounds terrific,” I said. “I’m on the schedule for eight Zeds this afternoon.”

  Brock grimaced. “Ouch.”

  Then she laughed. “Is it true you’re sitting for the Cocks?”

  It startled me that even she knew.

  “I’ll clear the schedule for Monday,” Brock said. “It’ll give us time to attend your funeral.”

  14

  By obliterating a sigil, one begins to see its edges.

  Dr. Jenny Yu, Toward a Unified Theory of Empirical Philosophy, 1926

  RACHAEL AND I SHOUTED apologies at each other from across the landing field that afternoon. Then I turned my full attention to not being mashed into a pulp during Cocks and Hens.

  The fundamental problem was that I didn’t have the raw philosophical strength to overcome a woman. We would begin the match by drawing dissipate glyphs—shields that could soak up a limited amount of philosophical energy—and then attack on the count of ten with push sigils. Unfortunately, a good woman would have a shield stronger than my best push and a push that was much, much stronger than my best shield.

  If my opponent drew faster, she’d win, period: her push would burn out her shield, burn out mine, and hit hard enough to knock me to the ground. If I beat her to the draw, I would burn out my own dissipate, only to watch my push die against her shield. She’d be able to flatten me with a counterattack.

  Guess y hav to cheat to win, Mother advised.

  How? I asked her.

  Dunno. Y need smbody smarter thn me.

  I should hv said no Its a stupid distraction. Time away fr aerodrom & fr studyng.

  So? Ma answered. Snds lik fun.

  As if I’d ever seen Mother take a couple days off work in the name of fun.

  Any mor Trnchr trbl? I asked her.

  Oh for Christ’s sake, Boober! Go enjoy yourself for a whole ten minutes. Trencher situation is much imprvd. Lew Hansen sat dwn w/ Hand and Trnchr leaders. Negotiatd a ceasefir—they would only tlk to a man. So, put Trnchrs out of yr mind and giv thm a good show.

  I met with the Cocks on Friday morning, the day before the event itself, for our final planning session. They seemed more concerned with the catering arrangements than with winning any of our matches.

  So, I found someone smarter than me.

  • • •

  “What a fascinating problem!” said Unger, when I put the scenario to him. “You do realize that the men haven’t actually tried to win a bout in years. You’re supposed to do something amusing and then your opposite number knocks you off your stool as gently as possible.”

  “What if I want to try?” I asked.

  Unger sighed. “Robert, that’s unwise. If the Hens put up a true brute force philosopher—a precision wide-field transporter, say, a woman the caliber of Danielle Hardin—her push could hit hard enough to kill you where you sit.”

  “Well, do you have any good joke books then? If I make her laugh, maybe she won’t break me in half.”

  “Hah, joke books!” laughed Unger. And then his face settled into a wild, distant expression. “Though, you know, there was a funny bit in that paper on constituent quanta of vectored sigils in the Annals of the Société in . . . ohh, was it ’97 or ’98? The one with the red cover . . . Breaking in half, that’s not a bad way of putting it . . .”

  Unger wandered off to his room and shut the door. I wondered if I’d said something to offend him. But he emerged five hours later equipped with an armload of books.

  “It could work!” he said, with a manic gleam in his eyes. “It’s possible. It’s theoretically sound!”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “Come with me!”

  We went down to the sixth sub-basement of the Gray Box, where Unger requisitioned several pieces of equipment and signed out a room for us to use. It was a bare ten-by-ten-foot cube. Unger stood me along one wall and set a sturdy chair opposite us. In the middle of the room, he positioned a battered contraption that looked like a metal suitcase with a hose and showerhead attached to the top.

  “What have you got there?” I asked.

  “This?” Unger said, looking shocked that I didn’t recognize it. “Why, i
t’s a Trestor device. You can’t mean to tell me you haven’t seen one before?”

  I hadn’t, though I understood roughly how it worked. The Trestor device had been invented two decades earlier by Thomas Edison, who, fresh off the motion picture camera, had decided there was good money to be made in inventing sigils. As his first order of business, Edison had wanted to measure philosophical energy. He’d read the bits of Maria Trestor in which she claimed philosophical effects were transmitted by discrete packets of energy called quanta; he’d become convinced she must have built a detector. After three years of maddening failures, Edison had cobbled together a functioning machine, which he’d named in her honor. (The great irony, of course, is that Edison never managed to invent a single new sigil, though he described the characteristics of dozens of existing ones in minute detail.) The Trestor device in front of me was not much changed from Edison’s early models—heavy, awkward, and balky.

  Unger handed me a tube of talc and aimed the detector in my direction.

  “All right now, sport,” he said. “I want to take a couple of readings before we try the tricky part. Would you be so kind as to draw one push at that chair?”

  I took aim and let the talc trickle from the tube, drawing a push sigil in the air. The chair flew backward and slammed into the wall. I expected someone to come running at the commotion, but apparently loud, abrupt noises were common at these depths.

  Unger’s eyes went wide. “Is that typical for you?”

  “Why, what’d I get?” I asked.

  “Thirty-four hundred milli-Trestors.”

  “Is that good?” It had felt good. I hadn’t hit anything as hard as I could in ages.

  “If that’s accurate, it would put you—maybe four standard deviations above the average male for philosophical power,” he said, consulting one of his books. “Let me recalibrate the coils.”

  He fiddled with some knobs and had me draw three more times. I moved 3,900, 4,200, and zero milli-Trestors, missing entirely on my last attempt.

  “Remarkable,” Unger said. “Four standard deviations, indeed!”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “It makes you one male out of thirty thousand. There would be, perhaps, two or three thousand men in America who have that much power.”