by Tom Miller
“No, it’s not,” I said. I wasn’t going to have her develop a case of rear-facing motion sickness and throw up all over me.
I made the flight back a gentle one and Danielle fell asleep from the slow rocking motion. I had to wake her as I came in low over Cambridge to ask directions to her apartment. We set down in the street and the neighbors appeared at their windows to stare.
Danielle could barely stand. “Let me guess, twelfth floor,” I said.
“Second,” she said. “My window’s shut though.”
I smiled at that—it was a very dramatic idea of how a hoverer preferred to get into a building.
“Flying through a window is a stupid, stupid risk,” I said. “You can hit your head or catch your bag on the sash. But, if you’d put your arm around my neck . . .”
I picked her up and carried her.
“You’re going to hurt yourself,” she said as I staggered up the stairs and around the corner on the landing between floors.
“Am not,” I said between gritted teeth. “You’re just . . . a little . . . slip of a thing.”
A little slip who weighed almost as much as I did. And I’d been living the easy life, lifting a few powder bags, but nothing like the sort of work I’d been used to at home. I was getting soft.
I set her down and she unlocked the door, holding on to the knob for support. “I never even thanked you,” she said.
“Let me take you out to dinner,” I suggested.
“I have to eat dinner twice. You want to take me out the first time or the second?”
“Both.”
18
The coach swerves back in the other direction. “Give me a good strong Eupheus,” I shout to our sigilrist, “and overlay a powerful burst each three seconds!”
“What good will that do?” she cries.
“It will buffet us until we travel straight!” I answer. Or it will buffet her right out of the cockpit, which seems not a bad result, either.
Edwin Fitzenhalter, Fresh Gale on the High Sonora, 1888
“I GOT A MESSAGE that the Trencher you knocked out woke up,” Danielle remarked between spoonfuls of banana pudding. “He spit at Mass General’s medical philosopher and demanded a transfer to a different hospital.”
Danielle took a long drink from a glass of milk and began dismantling a slice of apple pie. She’d recovered well from the morning’s ordeal and had chosen the dining hall for her first dinner, a bold decision for a woman who’d traveled four hundred miles under her own power in a single day and had to eat like it. Sitting alone with me would only worsen the gossip. She didn’t seem to care.
“May I express my gratitude again for the way you dealt with him?” she said.
I examined my right hand, on which I’d split open two knuckles. I didn’t regret hitting the frail little man, only that I hadn’t struck him a little more gently.
“I was afraid I’d killed him,” I said.
“Nasty old men like him live to two hundred,” said Danielle with a shake of her head. “What kind of punch was it?”
“What?”
“Like a cross or a jab or what? I’m going to have to describe the whole thing to my dad. He loves boxing and it’s the kind of detail—”
“A wild punch like that is a haymaker,” I said.
Danielle tipped her head to one side and practiced the line: “A dark, handsome man came out of nowhere and flattened him with a haymaker.”
“Nobody’s going to believe the handsome part,” I said.
“Oh, please. You have quite the collection of young ladies who fan themselves at the mention of your name. If Rachael Rodgers had made you perform that striptease, you would have had a big audience.”
The incident still made me seethe. “That’s not how it—”
“I’m sorry,” Danielle said. “It would make me mad, too, the way people talk about it.”
But the idea had tickled her and she tried and failed to hide a smile behind her spoon. “It’s just that I might have bought a ticket, is all.”
It was an opening for a risqué rejoinder—something about a repeat performance or being available for private engagements. But I couldn’t quite find the words.
Danielle yawned.
“I should thank you for running that evacuation, too,” she added. “You really could try for R&E. You’re the one who’s always talking about it, right?”
“A couple times,” I said.
“Well, what you did today—I don’t think they’re that efficient in France, even. Have you done that before?”
“Not really,” I said. “But my mother was forever putting questions to us like that. A dozen wounded and two fliers: which ones do you take first, which ones go in stasis.”
“Is your mom a veteran?” Dardanelles asked.
“Cuba and the Philippines. And Hawaii. And France, the first time, in ’71.” I explained a little about my upbringing and our frequently unconventional dinner table conversations.
In return, Danielle told me about her first lessons in sigilry, in grade school. She’d shown immense talent, much to the surprise of her parents, neither of whom was philosophical. (Her mother came from a wealthy Tunisian family that had made its fortune building sailing ships; her dad was an old-money Yankee blue blood who’d become a minister largely because his father had forbidden it.) They’d told Danielle that sigilry was a gift from God, no different from mathematics or sculpture, and she should pursue it with her full energy.
From the beginning, Danielle had been fascinated by the transport sigil. A philosophical family would never have allowed her to try it until after puberty—it took an awful toll on the developing body and the chance of death or destruction if the sigils went awry was enormous. But her parents had found a series of private tutors willing to teach her. Danielle had run her first transport at the age of eight, taken her father as her first passenger a year later.
Danielle saw me cringe at that.
“Appalling, I know,” she said. “But my parents understood enough to protect me. They wouldn’t allow me to transport farther than I could walk in an afternoon. So, on my eighth birthday, I took my dad and hiked from Providence to Warwick, which was nine miles. And for years, nine miles was the longest I ever went. Not that it makes a difference—if you can go ten feet, you could cross the Pacific, though you’d burn up your heart doing it.”
Danielle had been less interested in long-distance transportation than high-geometry. She’d learned how to shape the transport field so that it was squared off, rather than spherical, then how to make it irregular, clinging to an arm or a foot, a hair’s breadth from the body. She’d practiced incessantly to extend her radius, switching acres of uninhabited woodland with each other and then putting them back. It had required huge amounts of philosophical energy to move that much territory, but, since she was covering only a few miles, very little weight.
She’d come to Radcliffe at seventeen to hone her abilities and had won a well-deserved reputation for being arrogant and hotheaded—and for being the best transporter in New England. By her junior year, she’d become fed up with the school’s prim distaste for working sigilrists and had stormed out of her final exams to join the Corps, hoping that her talents might be better employed there. Instead, she’d been badly misused, moving supplies to France over the long jumps on the transatlantic chain, leaving her feeling sick and weak. When the British had inquired, she’d gladly accepted duty at Gallipoli.
“Transporting 250,000 men fifteen miles is what I was born to do,” she said. “But I kept asking why we hadn’t done it two years earlier, instead of letting them languish on the beaches. Or why not move them five miles beyond the Turkish lines and let them smash through from the rear? For that matter, why not move the troops straight to Constantinople? Or Berlin?”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because they’re afraid of us! When they passed the Rouen Conventions in ’80, they weren’t forbidding military sigilry out of concern for the
welfare of soldiers, or to reduce bloodshed, or promote the common good. It was a lot of old men trying to prevent philosophers from taking power.”
“But even Lucretia Cadwallader argued for the Conventions,” I objected. “She wrote about a thousand letters, made that famous speech to Congress—”
“Ah!” said Danielle, looking pleased that I’d disagreed. “You’re right. And it came from a good place in her, a humane place—I don’t want to see my life’s work used to kill. God knows she saw it taken to the extreme in the Franco-Prussian War when the Germans tried to smother Paris. But she didn’t argue to ban smokecarving from warfare, she argued to ban all philosophy. It was an overreach. It started the age of outlawing sigilry: can’t hover at the train station, no philosophy in the Atlanta public schools, shut down the Church of Christ Philosopher for promoting immoral behavior. From there, it’s a short walk to the Zoning Act.”
“Now, the Act is just inconceivable to me,” I said.
“Then you’re being lazy. It’s easy to understand.”
The fervor with which she said it made it sound not insulting.
“Let me ask it like this,” Danielle said. “If you could ban bonekilling, would you?”
That was a sigil that had come of age in the Philippines, a method of killing both horrible and intimate: draw the glyph on your victim’s skin and her bones dissolved instantly. The resulting wet sack of blood and tissue collapsed to the ground, suffocating without ribs to expand the chest, all the body’s muscles contracting into tight quivering balls that went on fasciculating for hours.
“I don’t need to ban it,” I said. “Murder’s already illegal.”
Danielle raised her palms to concede the point, but I saw her expression change, as if I’d revealed something in my answer. “Then, I’ll ask the question I should have: How old were you when you learned it? And who taught you?”
I was taken aback by that. I took it for granted that every serious philosopher knew how and that no one would ever discuss it.
“I was eleven,” I said. “Nobody taught me—just the opposite. It was in a book that my mother and sisters always told me never to read, it was absolutely forbidden.”
“Yet they never locked it up or hid it?”
I nodded.
“I was ten,” Danielle said. “Then literally the week after I saw a picture of the glyph, a girl at school said something to me and I decided to kill her. Because you can’t unremember that sigil—it’s only five lines. I went to the chemist’s shop down the street, plunked down a silver dollar, and said, ‘A tube of sulfur and bone meal, if you please,’ like it was the sort of thing I did all the time. The chemist, who knew my dad, said maybe I ought to talk it over with him first. I did, and Dad said sometimes we have to suffer the little children. So I didn’t kill her. But here’s my question: Would you sell sulfur and bone meal to a ten-year-old?”
“He didn’t have it behind the counter,” I said. “He was putting you on. Harnemon’s doesn’t carry it, either.”
Danielle was grinning. “Now you’re just being literal to annoy me.”
“What did she call you?” I asked.
“A name.”
“What—”
“A fat, miscegenated harlot.”
“I’ll kill her for you now, if you like,” I suggested.
“Very kind of you. But if you were the chemist behind the counter and I—”
“No,” I said. “I wouldn’t sell you the powder.”
“See! You admit it! And you feel like a traitor to other philosophers for even suggesting that a few regulations might be a good idea.”
“That really happened?”
“Exactly as I said. But now that you admit it, it’s a short walk. Is it reasonable or unreasonable to prevent your neighbor, who happens to be a smokecarver, from stockpiling a thousand cubic feet of incendiary material in her basement? And don’t give me, ‘Well, what kind of tank does she use to—’ ”
It was a good imitation of my voice at its dimmest.
“Reasonable,” I said.
“And if I require paperwork from every hack driver who owns two horses and a cab, what about a license for a flier who takes passengers within the city limits? Or a transporter who runs crosstown service? Reasonable or unreasonable?”
“Reasonable.”
“Then you’ve got common ground with the men trying to pass the Zoning Act. And so do I! It’s just a matter of where you draw the line. If we want to prevent them from banning philosophy outright, then we have to engage them: editorials, debates, conversations at dinner parties, marches. That’s what I want to do. It’s what you ought to be doing, too.”
“I think I punched the last one instead of having a debate.”
“Not him! Not the Trenchers tearing the skirts off elderly ladies. Not Max Gannet’s fanatics. Sometimes you have no choice but to meet force with force. But you? As a man? You’ll have lots of chances to convince other men.”
I must have looked uncomfortable at the prospect.
“If you don’t—if you and I hang back and do what’s comfortable, if philosophers wall themselves off and only associate with other philosophers, then the Zoning Act is going to sneak through and we’ll all shake our heads and say, ‘How did it happen?’ I tell you, if we don’t fight now, with every breath of air in our lungs and every ounce of powder in our hands, we’ll be the last generation of philosophers.”
I looked at her and I believed it. She was ready to go to war and I was ready to follow her.
“I’ll have to march with you next time, then,” I said.
Danielle smiled. “I hope you do.”
She blinked so slow and long that I thought she might fall asleep at the table.
“Are you really up for a second dinner?” I asked.
She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. “Oh, don’t even talk about that! I feel like I’m going to burst. I’ll go home, sleep a few hours, and then run out at midnight to eat a pile of sandwiches somewhere. Don’t feel obligated.”
“If you’d rather not take me . . .” I suggested.
She shook her head. “I hate going out alone at that hour.”
“Well, I haven’t been out at all in Boston. I’d consider it a favor.”
“You’re doing this to be kind?” she asked.
“No.”
“Because you think you’re in love with me?” She said it in a way that suggested it had happened more than once.
“I barely know you,” I said. “But I’d like to.”
That seemed to placate her. “I’ll send you a message about eleven thirty,” she said. “Just say no if you’re not interested. No hard feelings.”
• • •
I didn’t have any second thoughts, just a lot of nerves. No way around it—I was sweet on her. Worse than Unger pining over Dizzy, even. I couldn’t go two minutes without checking my message board and wondering why she hadn’t written yet. By midnight, I’d decided that Danielle must have forgotten about me. Or, it was a deliberate snub, she’d been so exhausted that she’d never woken up, she’d fallen and injured herself, she’d been called away on secret business for the Corps, President Wilson had needed her opinion on vital matters of national interest, or her father the minister had dropped in for a surprise visit. Probably all of them. At 12:02 she messaged to ask if I was still interested.
Yes, I answered. Then I damned myself for not waiting long enough to look decent. Make her sweat a little in return, not that she seemed the sweating type. She replied that I should call at her apartment building; she knew a place close by.
As it was a cool night, I put on my gray wool suit, made by the same Billings tailor who’d manufactured the tan linen calamity I’d worn to the freshman social—he’d assured me the suits were cut identically. Yet this one was long enough in the legs and wide enough in the shoulders so that I didn’t look like I was wearing a younger cousin’s church clothes.
It was all I could do not to put
on my harness, too, and fly over, or, barring that, to run. But some degree of self-control was called for. Brisk walk, ten minutes. I rang up to her apartment and Danielle came down wearing a light coat over a black dress, which, while modestly long, swooped down at the neckline, exposing a great scoop of chest.
“Hi,” I said, trying not to stare.
“Hi, yourself,” she said. “You didn’t have to dress up.”
“You did,” I said. “You look beautiful.”
Danielle grimaced. “It’s all wrong. I don’t have a thing to wear when I’m this chicken-necked.”
She buttoned her coat and took my arm. “Besides, that means a lot coming from you. You look like you’re dressed for a funeral.”
That rankled. Some of us didn’t have two family fortunes to spend on our wardrobe.
We set out, arriving a few minutes later at the Widow’s Waggle, a nightclub named for a kite jockey maneuver. The place was decorated in a pseudo-Western style, with wagon wheels on the walls and lifter sails on the ceiling. The bar itself was made of doors taken from kite coaches, which had been nailed together and coated in a thick layer of shellac.
The hostess recognized Dardanelles and led us to a table in a secluded nook beside the bandstand, where a sextet played a slow, reflective tune. It was music for listening, not dancing.
I couldn’t help but notice that all the musicians were black. Having grown up in one of the whitest states in the Union, this struck me as extraordinary.
“Don’t think I’ve ever sat this close to a bunch of colored folk before,” I remarked.
Danielle glared at me, livid. “You must really be country to say that in front of me. Now you get to tell the boys back home that you stepped out with a colored girl and she took you to a bar full of Negroes, is that it?”
“No, but you’re not—”
“I was born in Africa. My mother is half Arab. You’re going to tell me what I am?”
Neither of us breathed for a second.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”
She set her jaw. “Well, I don’t suppose you’ll mind when I tell the girls back at the country club that I went out with a dumb hick with his head so far up his ass that he doesn’t need a pillow. Because most people who make remarks like that do mean something by it.”