The Philosopher's Flight

by Tom Miller

  We spent our nights at her place, no pretense at all.

  “What’ll you do at home?” I asked her.

  I was wearing the gloves and nothing else.

  “Be spoiled rotten by my aunts,” she said. “Spend hours upon hours baking with my mom. Watch my dad fuss over his Christmas sermon for days and then rewrite it at the last minute.”

  She pulled the quilt over us and nestled closer to me.

  “You never talk about your dad,” she said. “Did you know him at all?”

  “No,” I said. “He passed away when I was little.”

  “Tell me something about him?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Ma brought him back from Cuba. He was an American by the name of Beau Canderelli. He used to work for the Société as a field officer. They sent him to war zones to look for violations of the Rouen Conventions. He could fly some. He spotted Angela when she was learning—Angie still talks about that. Then when I was two, he died from septicemia. Ma was pretty broken up over it. She didn’t like to talk about him when I was little, didn’t like to hear him talked over. That’s pretty much it. Vivian could probably tell me more.”

  “Your middle sister?” Dar asked.

  “Yeah. She’s going to visit Billings for Christmas. I haven’t seen her in a couple of years. Angie will be home, too.”

  Danielle sighed. “That sounds nice. It’s going to be all yelling at our house. I wrote back tonight and said I’d do the meeting in Syracuse. My mom will be furious, but you said it yourself—when Senator Cadwallader-Fulton comes calling, you can’t say no.”

  I ducked my head and looked away.

  “What?” she said.

  “Nothing,” I said. “A country boy who thinks he’s going to court a big important person.”

  Danielle laughed at that. “I’m the one who should be worried.” She swatted me on the bottom. “Fancy college man. All the milkmaids paying you visits.”

  “It’s sheep and cattle ranching by us, not dairy farming.”

  “What?”

  “We don’t have milkmaids.”

  “Cattlemaids, then,” she said. “I ought to be the one making sure you remember me. Oh, I could ruin you.”

  She popped her head under the covers.

  “Wait,” I said, “what are you—”

  By the next morning, I’d strained my voice from begging for more.

  We rode the streetcar to the transporter arena together. We were a couple of dull young people in love, besotted, barely conscious of the hubbub around us.

  But that’s just the sort of moment when the gods decide they ought to lay you low.

  24

  Sherm’s gang comes at us, guns ablazing. We run for the cabin to take cover. “Don’t worry, boys!” cries Mrs. Gower. “I’ll put a watchman sigil upon it!” We pile in and Gower does just that. The glyph makes those bandits look straight past the place, though they ain’t ten feet away. But it does its work on Gower, too. After she’s drawn the glyph she can’t find her way back in, neither.

  Edwin Fitzenhalter, Fresh Gale on the High Sonora, 1888

  THE TRIP HOME WAS rough. A freelance transporter coming in from the field mistimed her jump and cut two attendants in half on the floor of the Kansas City arena, causing a twelve-hour delay. I didn’t arrive in Denver until four thirty in the morning.

  The temperature was ten below. I packed away the kidskin gloves Dar had given me in favor of my old rawhide mitts for the flight back to Billings. I made town shortly after dawn and orbited, blearily searching for the building where Mother had settled. Anticipating my difficulty, she’d written Weekes on the roof with coal dust in the fresh white snow, so I was spared the indignity of having to ask directions to my own home. It turned out to be the apartment above the dentist’s office.

  I staggered into the building and up a flight of stairs in my gear, which was covered in a thick rime of frost. Mother was waiting in the kitchen.

  “Good God, we’ll need till Easter to chip the ice off you!” she clucked, as I struggled out of my coat.

  “I’ve had colder,” I tried to say, but my face was so numb that the words came out slurred.

  It wasn’t until she pulled off my fogged-over goggles that I got a clear look at her.

  Ma looked appallingly old. Not merely gray, but white around the temples. Her shoulders were stooped; there was a moment of hesitation as she maneuvered to sit in her chair, the barest hint of a tremor in her hand. How could she have aged so in only four months?

  But Ma went on the offensive, pouring coffee into me as she fired off one fusillade of questions after another: Boston, classes, foodstuffs, entertainment. She was kind—jolly, almost—and perhaps in my increasingly excited answers, she saw something of the young girl who had left rural Missouri for Paris, St. Louis, and Kansas City, before settling down in Guille’s Run.

  “And there’s a lady friend, I hear?”

  No way to escape it.

  “The corpswoman who led the evacuation at Gallipoli, no less!” Ma said. “God, but we could have used one like her in ’97. You have to tell me something.”

  “Tall and dark,” I said. “Political type. Her dad’s a minister. Not much else to tell. Rich Eastern girl, Ma. Sorry.”

  She waved as if to say it couldn’t be helped. “Are you silly for her or serious?”

  “Both, maybe.”

  “You don’t have a silly bone in your body.”

  She was right. And now that my serious bones had begun to thaw, they were insisting that this was not the Emmaline Weekes I knew—sitting at home at eight o’clock on a weekday, gossiping with her son. I had the overwhelming sense of wrongness, of something big and awful.

  “What aren’t you telling me?” I asked. “What happened?”

  “Oh, lots has happened since—”

  “Ma!”

  She grimaced.

  “There are a few things we ought to talk about,” she allowed. “First, I’ve had trouble with my arm. The shoulder’s come out of joint a few times. Twice while I was in the air. Once with a client.”

  “But you didn’t get hurt,” I said. “Not worse.”

  “I got down to the ground in a hurry—not my most graceful landings. I asked Bertie Synge if she knew anything for it, a brace or exercises. She says the more often it’s popped out the more often it will. Told me to ground myself before I kill someone. Indefinitely.”

  Grounded. Half my childhood memories involved Ma throwing on a skysuit and charging out to intervene in a disaster or coming home afterward with tales that made us wide-eyed. Even quiet nights she’d devoted to instruction on some technical point of regulator maintenance. Mother was so inextricably bound up with hovering—I couldn’t imagine her not doing it. To say nothing of her livelihood.

  “Will the State Office let you stay on as a county philosopher?” I asked.

  Mother stood and went to the sink to wash dishes.

  “They expressed their thanks over my having trained Julie Yzerman,” Ma said. “Said if a doctor ever cleared me, they’d be happy to take me back.”

  “No!” I said.

  Ma rinsed the coffee percolator. “Truth is, I would take the chance and fly again. But it’s not right to risk a passenger that way. I have lots of clients in town and lots more close enough to walk or ride to—they’re keeping me plenty busy. It’s been a more regular schedule, which I like. And Julie’s done a fine job as Yellowstone County CP. For a little over a month now. Took the younger apprentices with her.”

  I looked at her, incredulous. “A month? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “What were you going to do other than worry about it?” Ma said. “Vivian said it would be worse if I waited, but I wanted to tell you face-to-face.”

  She reached for a dish towel and dried a mug.

  “And that’s why you moved to town?” I asked. “Closer to business?”

  “In large part,” Ma said.

  She was being too careful with her words.

&
nbsp; “What’s the other part, then?”

  “Well, I’ve had more free time,” she said. “Some friends from the old days got in touch. They’d figured out which men shot Erin O’Malley last summer. They wanted someone local as a guide. So, we went together and fixed things.”

  “God, Ma!” I said. “You told me that killing Trenchers was the wrong way. You said it only caused more—”

  “I know. But Erin and I fought in the Disturbances together. She would have done the same for me.”

  She wiped her hands.

  “Afterward there was some talk in town: ‘Emmaline’s back at it.’ Then a couple nights at home I woke up and—well, I don’t know what. There aren’t many Trencher-sorts near Guille’s Run and they aren’t very brave. But one woman, alone, in a big old house in the country? It doesn’t take brave and it doesn’t take many. So I moved in here.”

  “And you feel safer now?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Can you imagine someone dumb enough to try to shoot his way in? Doc Haley downstairs don’t but drink, pull teeth, and pop-pop-pop.”

  And indeed, Doc was probably a better marksman than dentist.

  “No, I’m plenty safe,” Ma said. “It’s you I’m worried about. You and your lady friend.”

  She ducked into her office and came back with a piece of paper.

  “It was three men who killed Erin,” Ma said. “One, she’d given evidence against in a burglary trial. Another owed her a lot of money. But the third—he was a different kind. He had this.”

  “A list of names?” I asked, as I looked it over. They were all famous philosophers, numbered one to two hundred. In the first column, I recognized Josephine Cadwallader-Fulton, Anna Blackwell, Apollonia Polidori, and Josofea Jimenez. Number 28 was Annabelle Addams. Number 141 was Erin O’Malley. Number 198 was Danielle Hardin.

  “Oh, hell!” I breathed. “Is this Maxwell Gannet’s list? ‘Kill the right two hundred sigilrists and empirical philosophy as we know it will come to an end.’ ”

  “You say that like you worry it might be true,” Ma said. “It’s not. Kill those ones and you’ll have a shooting war without any of the sensible voices left to oppose it. But Gannet’s been plying that line for so many years that the Trenchers take it as gospel.”

  “Danielle,” I murmured.

  Mother put a hand on my shoulder. “Dr. Synge put me in touch with your Lt. Addams. She told me my list was three months out of date. She’s aware.”

  “Lord.” Getting an anonymous death threat in the mail was one thing, but being on a thinly veiled hit list was quite another.

  “Danielle’s in good hands,” Mother said. “Addams had a reputation in the Philippines—even the other smokecarvers were afraid of her. What I can’t get over is that Gannet wrote it down. That’s new. During the Disturbances, all the Trencher factions were paranoid as hell. They waged their little local campaigns, but they were afraid of the other sects conspiring against them. Even Gannet, as often as he went on about ‘the right two hundred,’ never named which philosophers, let alone wrote a list. This is something bigger, something for them to rally around all over the country.”

  Ma reached into her pocket and pulled out a little four-shot revolver. It was one of her treasures. Several of the women she’d commanded in Cuba had commissioned it for her, a one-of-a-kind piece designed so that she could cock and fire it left-handed while flying without the recoil knocking her out of the sky. I’d never seen her carry it. Instead, Ma had favored a big Colt .45, working from the principle she’d rather plant both feet on the ground and use a weapon that made a large hole.

  Ma laid the gun on the table in front of me. It was comically small—tiny enough to fit in a change purse—with rose-colored mother-of-pearl grips and silver plating etched with a whorling design that some gunsmith must have imagined resembled sigils.

  “For you,” she said. “If you want it.”

  “Ma, I couldn’t!”

  “I offered it to Vivian once,” Ma said, smiling. “She called it a ‘pretty little girl’s gun’ and asked for a semiautomatic. Boober, if it’s not your taste, I’ll find you a—”

  “It’s beautiful,” I said. “Thank you.”

  The silver glinted as I picked it up. It wasn’t even as long as the palm of my hand.

  “I don’t think I could ever bear to do more than polish it,” I said.

  Ma laughed. “Neither could I, mostly.”

  I opened the cylinder to unload it and shook out the tiny cartridges. Ma’s smile faded.

  “It shoots straight enough, though,” she added.

  • • •

  I slept and ate and worried over all of it: Mother’s health and assassins in the night, but most of all Danielle being on Gannet’s list. If Ma had thought it necessary to arm me, then did that mean I was supposed to take matters into my own hands?

  “Have you talked to anyone from the old days about Gannet?” I asked Mother that night.

  “A few people,” she said. “He’s a dangerous one. He’s got purity of motive, purity of action. I can almost respect him.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “He acts as he preaches. He’s not one of those hypocrite Trenchers who keeps a message board or rides the National Transporter Chain when it suits him. No, damn the inconvenience—no philosophy, not in the slightest.”

  And he lived not even four miles away from Radcliffe.

  After Teddy Roosevelt had banned the Trenchers as an organization in ’08, many of them had relocated to Boston. The city’s mayor had been a famous anti-philosopher and had given them protection, going so far as to install Gannet in an apartment in the old Trencher meetinghouse, which they now called a private gentlemen’s club. Gannet had been holed up there ever since, writing his screeds and making the occasional speech.

  “It’s about the most secure building in the world,” Ma said. “It looks like a medieval fortress. He sleeps in an interior room, always, no windows. So a smash-and-grab job is out.”

  She’d clearly thought it through.

  “His sermons,” I suggested. “Someone sets up across the street on a roof with a rifle and a good scope. Or, hell, hover your markswoman in.”

  Mother clicked her tongue against her teeth. “No, that’s how a man would assassinate him, not the philosophical underground. You’re curious how we would have done it back in the day?”

  “Educate me.”

  “Used to be two schools of thought on technique. One was to choose an obscene method and then display the body so there’s no mistaking who’s behind it. Dissolve his bones and tie the corpse in a knot. Flay off his skin and hang what’s left by the heels from the highest church steeple in town. But that scares the common folk to excess. I always favored disappearing someone.”

  I almost laughed. “What, you had a sigil to make him—”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Mother said. “No, take them quietly in the night and then dispose of the body. It terrorizes the right ones. Is he alive or dead? In hiding? Did he go over to the other side?”

  “Hmm,” I said.

  “If you ask me, Gannet’s a lousy target,” Ma said. “He’s old and frail—it’s always unseemly when you kill those ones. Him dying would rile up the whole Trencher movement, even the ones who think he’s a madman. And if they have started cooperating between states, it clears the way for a younger, smarter man to take command.”

  “So if Gannet disappears . . .” I suggested.

  “Then it was someone better than me who did it,” Ma said. “And someone a lot more experienced than you.”

  • • •

  I wrote to Dar, who did her best to reassure me—Addams had warned her about the list months ago; nothing had ever come of it. Besides, if Gannet’s followers hadn’t made a move against her on their home turf in Boston, they were hardly going to attack her over the next week in Providence.

  My mom on the other hand, Dar wrote, might try to kill me if I go to that meeting in Syracuse. It
’s been one quarrel after another here. I’m miserable. I miss you.

  I couldn’t sleep at night for thinking of her.

  • • •

  I took target practice in the backyard, I reread Life and Death on San Juan Hill, I cooked overly elaborate meals for Ma—anything to distract myself. Then on the morning of Christmas Eve, while I was at work in the kitchen chopping garlic and rosemary for a leg of lamb, Vivian arrived, having flown three hours through subzero temperatures from Spokane. Seeing her dug up long-buried feelings of a different kind.

  My earliest memories were of having two mothers. One of them was old and cruel and had to be watched like a wounded dog, lest you get too close or play too loud and set her off, snapping and snarling at you. My other mother had been young and (to my eye) beautiful, kind, and gentle. I remembered crawling into Vivian’s lap, night after night, as she sat knitting by the fire, so that she could pet my head after Ma had said something that frightened me.

  I didn’t remember much else about those early years—or I chose not to. I did recall Vivian lighting out for Washington when she was twenty years old and I was six. (“With the first man who would have her, homely as she is,” Ma had once bitterly remarked.) I remembered what I’d said to Vivian in a screaming fit when I’d last seen her; I’d been fourteen and had used every curse word I’d ever heard. Viv had just shrugged. She’d been cordial enough by message board since. Always a note for my birthday, how proud of me she was when I’d rescued Ma, congratulations when I’d been accepted to Radcliffe. I’d usually written back a few half-hearted words.

  I’d never been confused about Angela—she was my big sister, bossy and snotty and mean at times—but I knew what she was. Vivian though . . . there wasn’t a name for what a fifteen-year-old who was put in charge of her kid sister and baby brother for weeks at a time was. Or a word for how abandoned I’d felt when she left.

  Mother was out shopping, so I helped Viv out of her ice-covered helmet and belted flying coat. I always remembered her as she’d looked when she left home—short and stringy. Now, she looked like a plumper, ruddier version of Ma. They stood the exact same height, same dull brown hair.