by Tom Miller
Across the room, Hardin was looking at me quizzically. My entire strategy had hinged upon the assumption that she would strike first. I didn’t dare try to attack her; I had no idea how the refractive effect worked from inside the shield—maybe the push would bounce right back at me. While Unger would certainly be interested, I preferred not to potentially go out in a self-inflicted philosophical explosion.
The crowd grew restless. They had expected a talent, then some sort of joke.
“One hundred bloody tigers . . .” sang a drunken man, before his neighbors shushed him.
I had to make a move. Every second that went by, my dissipate sigils faded. They didn’t have to be at full strength for the scattering effect to work, but I didn’t know how weak was too weak. If the sigils wore out, I wouldn’t get a second chance—I’d used up all my bronze. How much time had passed? Thirty seconds? As long as two minutes?
A few boos broke out. The Darling of the Dardanelles glared daggers.
“Hit me!” I shouted in desperation.
Dardanelles rolled her eyes and obliged, drawing a huge push. It was a big, fat, serves-you-right that should have meant good night, Robert. But nothing happened.
There was a look of disbelief on Hardin’s face. She drew another heavy one, then another. Still nothing.
I could see her mutter “Son of a bitch!” as she reached to check her last tube. I knew what she was thinking. Did my powder get wet? Did I use bronze instead of talc? Is someone playing a prank on me?
But it was no joke. And I had my own talc at the ready. Hardin saw me, realized she was completely exposed, and at the last moment switched to bronze. She got an awkwardly drawn dissipate done a second before I finished my own draw.
I’d aimed low and away. My push brushed the bottom edge of her dissipate and squeaked through to the unshielded part of her stool. It struck with enough force to lift the front legs two inches off the ground, but not quite enough to tip her over. The legs clacked against the floor as they touched back down.
Dardanelles had a look of panic.
I reached for another tube of talc and so did she. Rattled though she might be, Hardin was impossibly fast. She—
• • •
“—one of these idiots with the feathers every year,” a distant voice said.
“What?” I croaked.
I opened my eyes. A female figure dressed all in white was bent over me, applying a compress to my head.
“One of them ends up on my ward,” said the nurse.
“What?” I said again.
“Easy there, old Robert,” said Krillgoe, who was sitting beside my bed with Patrice.
“What happened?” I asked.
Dardanelles had fired off two half-strength pushes with her final tube. Her first had burned out her shield with enough energy left over to toss me into the air; her second had caught me a moment later, driving me across the room and slamming my head into the wall. The crowd had realized it was a real fight the moment before it ended and had gone wild; the consensus was that I’d lost my mind, attacked without regard to my own safety, and gotten the whupping I deserved.
I’d been knocked out cold before I’d even hit the ground. Krillgoe, Jake, and Dardanelles had dragged me off to a back room where neither smelling salts nor concentrate of bitterroot smoke had brought me around. Dardanelles had put me in stasis and Jake had flown me to the hospital. (It was the only time in my life I’d heard of Jake hauling a two-hundred-pound load.) Patrice and Osgood had gone out and told the audience that I’d popped right back up, demanding a second round; Osgood had done his comedy routine to uproarious laughter.
“The crack you took,” Patrice said, shaking her head. “I thought you were dead.”
“Thick skull,” I replied. “You might have warned me that trying to win is bad manners.”
“Not at all,” Patrice said. “Someone tries every few years. Rarely that spectacularly. Actually, it’s good form—they’ll come next year not knowing whether to expect a prizefight or a serenade.”
“Oh, they’ll expect a prizefight when old Robert sits down,” said Krillgoe. He laid a long red feather on the pillow next to my head. “This is yours. You earned it.”
• • •
It is a truism I’ve relearned many times, that the quality of one’s hospital stay is directly proportional to the quality of one’s visitors. And I’ve never had such a busy social schedule as I had during the next twenty-four hours.
Among my well-wishers were Jake and Francine, who visited to complain about having to teach my class of Ones. A few minutes later, the Ones hovered over en masse to complain about having to be taught by Jake and Francine. Dmitri and Osgood dropped by to pay their respects. Unger visited, too, curious to learn whether his stratagem had worked.
“Did you not see her first three pushes go bust?” I said.
“They did?”
Leave it to Unger, who’d been in the front row. The only way the man ever would notice a sigil being drawn was through the gauge of a Trestor device.
Stories of my prowess made it even as far as New York City, where Angela felt compelled to message her regards: Sluggd it out w/ Danielle Hardin? New stupidest.
By Sunday evening, my stream of visitors had left me with a throbbing headache behind the eyes. I was exhausted but couldn’t sleep and still saw double when I tried to read. So when Danielle Hardin appeared in my room out of nowhere, I took it as a sign of further brain damage.
“Hi,” she said. “Sorry. Don’t be startled. There’s a destination glyph in this room. It’s on the city register. The originator must have decided it was easier to transport in, rather than climb five flights of stairs. Not that I wouldn’t have climbed five flights to visit, but . . . well, there were an awful lot of people around and it makes me panicky, sometimes. I—I’m so sorry about last night.”
She was trembling. A few weeks later, she admitted to me that this was the longest piece she’d spoken in private conversation since returning to Radcliffe.
“Hi,” I said. I couldn’t believe she was nervous. She’d saved a quarter of a million men at Gallipoli. There was talk of King George V knighting her. I ought to be the nervous one.
“Are you feeling better?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “This is the second worst I’ve ever felt.”
“Oh?”
“When I was twelve, my friend Willard Gunch tried to teach me to ride a horse. I needed all of forty seconds to get thrown. I hit the ground so hard the sky went orange and the sun turned blue. ‘Well,’ I said to myself, lying there, ‘this must be as bad an injury as a man can live through.’ Then the horse came around for a second pass and trampled me. Willard sent for my mother and after she determined I was still breathing, she gave me the worst thrashing of my life. That was worse.”
Hardin looked startled by the story. She’d expected me to be angry.
“I’m sorry about hitting you the second time,” she said.
“Don’t be,” I replied. “Hell, if you’d been one of my sisters, you would have hit me a third time and stolen my pocket money.”
She smiled wanly at that and I smiled back.
“It was just—I thought you’d played a trick on me,” she said. “Replaced my talc with gypsum. Put me on display to have some fun at my expense. What did happen?”
I explained about Unger and layering shields and scattering vectored sigils.
“Who’s Unger?” she broke in.
“My roommate,” I said. “Chubby Hungarian-American fellow? Favors bow ties?”
“A hundred forty-one bow ties,” Danielle said. “I knew I recognized the name. He just figured this out?”
“He read it in some journal from 1896.”
“There for anyone who wanted to find it.” She shook her head. “You know, you had me. When I was putting up that dissipate, I drew it like all my years of single transports, instinctively, as tight as I could. A little voice in my head was saying, ‘Sister, if he go
es for the bottom of the stool, you’re finished.’ And then you did.”
“How do you get a dissipate that tight?” I asked.
Our conversation degenerated into shoptalk. We drew figures back and forth with our index fingers in the air and carried on like a couple of old sigilrists who loved nothing better in the world. I got the impression that war heroes didn’t get to do much of that, people taking their opinions so seriously and all.
“You’ll have to teach me your dissipate form,” I said.
“Sure, if you teach me yours,” she answered. “Yours were both new to me. So were the ones the other Cocks used. They weren’t real sigils, were they?”
“Krillgoe’s might have been real, but the rest were faking it. I’d bet money on it.”
“That’s funny. Do you know what we were betting on before we came out?”
“Whether Dmitri would take his pants off, too?”
“What your act would be. It was knife throwing, bird calls, or rope tricks.”
“Which one did you say?”
“I said a man as dim-looking as you could only do an impression of President Taft stuck in the bathtub.” We laughed too hard at that and heard the clack of footsteps out in the hall as my nurse approached.
“Now, I’m going to get in trouble,” I whispered. “I’m not supposed to have female visitors without a chaperone.”
Dardanelles pulled a double-sealed tube containing a gram of milled aluminum from her pocket.
“You never saw me,” she said, moving to an unobstructed position in the center of the room. “We’ll have to do that lesson another time.”
“I’d like that,” I said. “Let me give you my glyph.”
But she was gone.
16
OCTOBER 1917
Have you heard the carpenter’s adage “Measure twice, cut once”? Now consider that for you “cutting” may mean your death or that of your passengers. So how many times will you measure your radius? Once? Twice? The answer should be: until you are absolutely certain.
Jessica Littlejohn, The Ten-Minute Transport, 1912
I WAS GROUNDED TWO weeks following Cocks and Hens on account of headaches and intermittent dizzy spells. Instead of teaching, I worked in the aerodrome’s supply room, filling bags and mending harnesses.
A few of the novices took to sneaking in to visit me, asking to see my bruises and pumping me for details on the secret plan that had nearly beaten Danielle Hardin. Jake chased them out time and again.
“Stop encouraging them!” Jake scolded me.
“She had a question about her rigging,” I replied, looking regretfully at the pretty young Two headed back to the classroom.
“ ‘Oh, Mr. Weekes, could you put your hand right here and tell me if my thigh strap seems tight enough?’ ” Jake said in a simpering little girl voice.
“It was a reasonable—”
“Not one from the aerodrome! There are plenty of respectable Cliffes who wouldn’t mind a male philosopher with a few dents.”
Not that Jake seemed to be putting much effort into finding me one.
I trudged fifteen minutes back to campus, my harness and a half-filled powder bag slung over one shoulder—I would be back on regular duty the next morning. The sunset was huge and orange. The chill of the first week of October hung in the air.
As I passed the Gray Box, I saw a group of women gathered by the west side of the building, pointing at something.
“She’s going to jump,” said a young lady.
“No, she’s not,” scoffed another. “She’s having a pout and wants us to notice.”
A three-foot-high brick lip ran around the edge of the library’s roof. Someone was sitting on it, her legs dangling over the edge.
“It’s Ida,” said the first woman. “That Harvard boy she’s been seeing proposed to a society girl from South Carolina. She said if she couldn’t be with her one true love—”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” the second broke in. “It’s the Hero of the Hellespont.”
“What’s she got to sulk about?” asked the first.
“Maybe the pastry shop ran out of doughnuts,” retorted the second, to a general titter of laughter.
If it were a young lady contemplating ending her life, I might be able to talk her down, or barring that, grab her before she jumped. If it were Dardanelles—well, she’d suggested she might not mind seeing me again. Of course, if she decided she wanted a rematch, I’d probably end up as the body hurtling off the roof.
I walked around to the opposite side of the building, put on my gear, and took a short, low-angle hop up top, setting down as quietly as I could.
The whole building had a golden sheen to it, as if the trace of bronze powder that had been mixed into the concrete—intended to prevent any philosophical accidents from leaking out of the building—was catching the light. On the far side, silhouetted against the setting sun, sat the young lady. I stole toward her in a crouch.
She glanced over her shoulder at me. It was the Hero of the Hellespont indeed.
I smiled inwardly.
“Hi,” I said. “Don’t be startled. There’s an old—”
“Don’t,” she said. “There are people watching.”
“I know,” I said.
“They talk. They see me together with anyone, they talk. You don’t need that sort of trouble.”
Far be it from me to go looking for trouble. Still crouching, I duck-walked up to the ledge, screened from view by the wall. Not a bad place to meditate, other than the drop. And the occasional shouts, alternately concerned and sarcastic, from the ground.
“It doesn’t look the same,” Dardanelles said, her back to me.
“Pardon?”
“The sun. It was bigger over there. Redder.”
“At Gallipoli?”
“On the island,” she said. “On Imbros. The generals brought us over and then they got cold feet about the evacuation. They needed four months to decide. We sat there the whole time.”
“That’s a long wait,” I said.
“It was excruciating. We played five-handed mudge all day long, endless games that we were too exhausted to finish. Then the sun would finally set over the Aegean and we would all go out to watch. One hundred twenty-eight times.”
“That’s why you’re up here?” I asked. “To see the sunset?”
“Yes. And to be alone. And to think. I’ve come up a few times and no one ever noticed. But now I’ve made a spectacle of myself.”
She swung her legs around, climbed down, and sat beside me. The scent of crushed jasmine and lavender clung to her. A smokecarved perfume, perhaps. Those could be dangerous—under the influence of some of the heavier fragrances, you might have to be forcibly removed from the wearer’s bosom. And Dardanelles had quite a nice one, I couldn’t help but notice, as her blouse’s collar flapped in the wind, revealing a lacy undergarment beneath.
She put a hand over her chest.
“People keep paying me the nicest compliments for thumping you,” she said. “I’ve thumped a few men in my day, but never anyone coming up to me on the street and saying, ‘Oh, well done!’ ”
“I must have had it coming,” I said. “My sisters always told me I had it coming when they thumped me.”
She smiled at that. “I can scarcely imagine. That must be what made you so brave—a lot of women beating courage into you.”
Her hair rippled in the wind. A few strands stuck in my mouth when I opened it to reply.
“You mean Cocks and Hens?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “And pulling Nancy out of the river. And just going to the aerodrome every day knowing that some of the women will hate you for doing it.”
Nobody had ever said the last to me in as many words.
“Thank you,” I said.
“I wondered if you might—” Danielle began. “Well, do you know about the march tomorrow?”
I didn’t.
Danielle and a small delegation of Radc
liffe women were headed to Washington to march in protest of the Zoning Act. The Trencher sympathizers in Congress reintroduced it every year: a bill to make the practice of philosophy illegal, except in explicitly defined zones that each state legislature would choose and only then for philosophers licensed in each glyph. Sending a message might be prohibited on one side of the street, but legal on the other. You would have to carry one card in your wallet to transport, another to fly, more for ignite glyphs and stases and korus. Absurd. But plenty of people liked the idea and each time it came closer to passing.
“The Corps always organized against it in the past,” Danielle explained, “but this year, with so many women overseas, the professional sigilrists’ unions had to step up in their place. They asked me to be one of the grand marshals.”
“That’s terrific,” I said.
Dardanelles shook her head. “I went to one a few years ago and there were fifteen thousand women. It really impressed me. But we’ll be lucky to have a tenth of that tomorrow. Plus, no trained killers in uniform to scare off the counter-protestors. It’s going to be ugly.”
“You think it’ll turn violent?” I asked.
“It might. The threats have been . . . graphic.”
I narrowed my eyes at that. “Trenchers?”
“Of course. And Maxwell Gannet is sending his disciples down to Washington in droves.”
“Lord,” I said. “I used to think he was a boogeyman that my sister made up to scare me. ‘Behave yourself or Max Gannet will chop off your fingers and stew them for his supper.’ ”
“Oh, he’s real,” Danielle assured me. “He’s never the one to throw the rocks, never the one to tell his followers to do it in as many words. It’s all innuendo and insinuation from him—until one of his fanatics comes out shooting. Though, you’re from Montana, right? You probably know all about that. All those attacks last summer. Were any of them close to you?”
“One of them was,” I said. “I saw . . .”
I hadn’t told anyone about it since coming out East. Not that I didn’t trust my classmates, but Radcliffe felt like a different life sometimes.