The Philosopher's Flight

by Tom Miller

  • • •

  On May 1, Brock drew up our official list of hoverers. Eleven of our fliers would compete for Radcliffe’s greater glory in the Cup’s four events.

  Most glamorous was the short course, a mile-long slalom through pylons set at irregular intervals. It required quick reflexes and raw acceleration. At Detroit and Sacramento, women spent years training for the event; they held tournaments to winnow the thousands of fliers at each school down to their two finest. Sacramento, we suspected, would send Aileen Macadoo, the young woman who’d won the event three times before and set the world speed record at 518 miles per hour. Against them, Radcliffe would fly our two most agile women: Jake and Francine.

  Less prestigious, though no less entertaining, was the endurance flight. Each woman received one pound of powder and whoever traveled the greatest lateral distance won. It rewarded impeccable glyph technique and efficient body position, as well as innovations to harness and regulator design—or “cheating,” if you were being strict about the rules. The list of banned technologies currently stood at forty-one. Brock was responsible for four of them and appeared to be in the midst of building a fifth. She’d moved an industrial-weight sewing machine and a small forge into her laboratory and had held several nighttime consultations with an armorer from the Museum of Fine Arts. Tillie would fly endurance for Radcliffe, as well as one of our newly minted Threes, selected (we heard it whispered) because she most closely matched Tillie’s height and weight. Neither of them would say a word about what Brock was planning.

  Next was the aerial pull, a sky-bound tug-of-war. Brute philosophical force was at a premium, but so was wrangling the team to pull along the same vector. That meant Astrid as captain and the four women who scored highest on a Trestor device as pullers.

  Last was the long course, home to the hoverers who liked their play to look like work, the fast, ugly fliers who knew how to use a compass and tie knots. With a hundred miles and ten landings, it often got contentious; the previous year had seen an intentional collision at the eighty-mile landing field, in which a Sacramento flier had broken the arm of Detroit’s best hoverer. The two teams had come to blows during the medal ceremony. Into that mess we’d be throwing Miss Etiquette herself—Essie Stewart—and the inimitable Mr. Weekes.

  The University of Detroit’s first reaction to our roster was that it must be a joke: a male had never flown in the Cup. Their second reaction was a strongly worded letter to Brock. Their third was an editorial in the Defender laying out their rationale for a boycott, unless “the man” was removed from Radcliffe’s team.

  “Brock has to let you fly, after all the work you’ve put in,” Dar reassured me. “That’s just ordinary fairness.”

  “Thank you!” I said.

  “You’ve got to admit, though, it’s a good letter.”

  And it was:

  More and more frequently, our world requires the mixing of the sexes. We welcome men as sigilrists—indeed, the vigor of empirical philosophy demands it—but the General’s Cup, with its storied traditions of sisterhood and fellowship, is not the proper proving ground for male philosophers.

  Leave us our own spheres into which we may retreat. The Harvard-Yale football game is the sphere of men; Radcliffe surely would not intrude upon it by placing a woman on the field, even if she were physically able. Likewise, let us not diminish the feminine beauty and precision of the Cup by introducing the base brutishness of male flight.

  Our first and foremost hoverer, Mary Fox, said it best: To the men the earth, to the women the sky, as God willed it.

  “Mary Fox was wrong about plenty of things,” Brock raged. “Powder ratios, sigil inversion, harness technique. Tied all her hitches backward.”

  “If it’s going to ruin the Cup for me to fly,” I suggested, “then—”

  “Don’t you say that!” Gertrude said. “If Detroit boycotts, you move two spots closer to an invitation to test for the Corps.”

  “That’s the wrong way to do it,” I said.

  “Any way is the right way! Sarah, rig him for a hundred and eighty pounds. Start with the calisthenics your Russian invented.”

  Essie helped me attach five sandbags on my back and four on my chest. My legs burned as I walked back and forth across the field, touching my knee to the ground with each step. One length, two, and again. Half a mile. Then backward.

  Essie, willowy as she was, did it with one hundred pounds.

  “They have to let you,” she gasped as we both collapsed, sweat-soaked, on the field. “No one who’s actually met you—all the things they’re saying about you—it’s terrible. They have to let you fly.”

  “All the things who’s saying?”

  Seventy-one current Radcliffe fliers, as it turned out, in a letter to Brock published in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Defender, and anywhere else that would print it, with none of the conciliatory language of Detroit’s editorial: they refused to fly until I was removed from the team.

  Depraved experiment in social engineering . . . example of the sexual confusion that permeates American manhood in the modern age . . . a distraction—indeed, a danger—to honest women . . . blatant favoritism at the expense of philosophers faster and more talented than he is . . .

  “Stop it!” Dar said, snatching yet another newspaper clipping out of my hands. “You had your day to wallow in it. Now you have to stop. If I took it personally every time someone called me a conniving, hot-blooded African whore who was too ugly to go into politics, I would have lost my mind by now.”

  “They’re not people you know,” I answered.

  Rachael Rodgers topped the list of names, as I knew she would. But forty-two of them were women I’d instructed. Most of them I had liked. Had thought they liked me.

  “Lynnette Osterburg?” I said. “I promoted her from Zed. She chose my section of Ones. She told me she wanted me to teach her sister to fly when she comes next year.”

  “Robert—”

  “Paula Andretti,” I said. “She got her Two and said she wanted me to be the one who signed her card because—”

  “Three hundred fliers refused to put their names down because they know you and respect you.”

  But I didn’t have a list of their names. And Rachael—or one of her seventy lackeys—was kind enough to pin a fresh copy of the letter to the curtain of my locker room each day.

  “Just have to make life harder for the rest of us, don’t you?” Astrid complained, as she loaded sandbags on my back. Three members of the pull team had joined the boycott.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  Astrid snorted. “Not as sorry as me. I’m going to have all freshmen. If I lose any more, I might have to start using men.”

  I would have given her an appropriately snotty answer, but she’d just finished rigging me with 240 pounds’ worth of weight—a third more than I would be carrying in the Cup—and I had no breath left over.

  • • •

  With three weeks to go, Astrid’s replacements quit, too.

  By the hundredth death threat for Professor Brock, her mail was going through Ms. Addams as well.

  Some wag with a steady hand painted an eight-foot-tall naked woman with enormous breasts on the front of the aerodrome. She was pleasuring a German soldier who sported a spiked helmet and an impressively detailed phallus. Beneath was scrawled Deviants.

  “So, I’m a Prussian cavalry officer?” I asked Ms. Addams. “Or a well-endowed woman?”

  “Unclear,” Addams answered. “But I’m opening thirty letters from sigilrists furious over your participation in the Cup for every threat against you from a Trencher.”

  “Max Gannet is easing up, then?” I asked.

  “On you, yes. I got hold of his latest list of two hundred names. He left you off it entirely.”

  “What!” I said, feeling almost disappointed. “After the fire he called me—”

  “That was three months ago,” Addams said. “Gannet’s half-senile. A male sigilrist
must seem as impossible to him as it does to some of the women in Detroit.”

  • • •

  Someone messaged bomb threats in to the aerodrome every day for a whole week. We evacuated time and again so that Addams and several of Radcliffe’s senior smokecarving instructors could sweep the building, using chemically treated smoke to search for explosives. They found nothing, but it was enough to persuade our second endurance flier to quit. Brock named Frieda as replacement.

  “I’m going to have to modify the whole damn contraption,” Brock complained to me. “But, at least I know that Frieda won’t quit.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  “Because she would only compete if I swore to keep you on the team.”

  It overwhelmed me. Frieda, who’d never had a kind word after pulling me out of the river, just cold professionalism. That anyone would care enough to say it, much less her . . .

  I fought to master myself. One thing to rip your hair out in private or ball up your fists and scream in one of the soundproof practice rooms, but quite another to blubber in front of your professor.

  “Christ, Weekes,” Brock said, and handed me a handkerchief. “If it’s too much, no one would fault you.”

  • • •

  I left Brock’s office in the basement of the Gray Box and walked home through a balmy May afternoon.

  I cursed my own weakness. I cursed the whole world: the hideous flowering cherry trees perfuming the courtyards, the stupid birds singing away, sisterhood and tradition, base male brutishness, and Prussian cavalry officers.

  I couldn’t get the door to my apartment unlocked. Finally, I realized that Unger had dead-bolted it, a precaution we hardly ever took. I turned the bolt and threw the door open.

  Freddy was sitting at the table in just his glasses and shorts, papers and bottles strewn about, a Trestor device humming on the floor. His hands were covered in something. It was streaked across his face, too. Certainly not blood?

  “Don’t come in!” he called out.

  “Freddy, what happened?” I asked.

  “I have a problem. Just back up and wait outside.”

  Not blood. Ink? Practicing manual reduplication, as ever.

  “Freddy, wipe your hands and tell me what’s wrong.”

  “That’s just it! It won’t come off!”

  “Did you try turpentine? Sometimes—”

  “I tried soap and water, turpentine, rubbing alcohol, soda ash solution, and mevalonate. Nothing works.”

  “Well, calm down. Maybe you got a bad batch of ink.”

  “It was coming off ten minutes ago! And then I tried a few improvements to the glyph.”

  I needed a moment to digest that. You didn’t get a sigil to work by changing it, you got it to work by drawing it exactly like everyone else always had. If you altered the glyph there was no telling what it might do.

  “You think this is . . . philosophical?” I asked, taking a step backward.

  Unger raised his splotched hands in consternation.

  To me, the odds of Unger making any sigil work correctly, much less inventing a new one, were roughly equal to Blind Doyle having tea with the Queen of England. But then again, if he were going to suffer a psychotic break, I would have expected it on the day when he calculated it was mathematically impossible for him to pass Essentials II.

  “I’ll message the philosophical containment team,” I suggested. Nothing to bring a man back to reality like the emergency squad crashing into his living room.

  “Please don’t,” he said. “I can’t imagine, I mean, I shouldn’t think it’s dangerous.”

  I could recall several famous philosophical disasters that had involved similar phrases. I took another step backward.

  “Get Murchison instead?” Freddy said. “He’s a theorist. He’ll know what to do.”

  I shut the door behind me and ran to the dean’s office. Addams was sitting at her desk in the outer room, opening a pile of letters.

  “What is it?” she asked, springing to her feet. “Is it her, is she—”

  “It’s Freddy,” I said. “He said get the dean. He thinks there’s been, well, maybe a slight philosophical accident.”

  Addams hissed through her teeth and motioned for me to follow. Murchison was sitting calm and erect at his desk, staring at his window. He had the blinds drawn.

  “Lennox!” shouted Addams. The dean seemed not to notice. She rapped on Murchison’s desk and he looked up. She pointed at me.

  “Sir, it’s about Fred Unger,” I said. “He’s possibly had a bit of an accident.”

  “What a pity,” Murchison said. He resumed staring.

  “A philosophical accident?” I tried. “Involving ink?”

  That caught his attention. “Oh! The same ink you’ve got?”

  “No, I didn’t bring a sample.”

  “On your hand?”

  “I didn’t . . .” Then I looked at my right hand. I had ink on my index and middle fingers. Unger and I had both touched the doorknob.

  “Oh, shit,” I whispered.

  Murchison took me by the wrist and pressed my index finger against a sheet of paper. It left a mark behind. He poured out a little of his own ink and drew glyphs, causing it to spider out across the page, forming a fine network of lines that played over my fingerprint.

  After a moment, Murchison clapped his hands and laughed. At least, I assumed it was a laugh; it was more like the sound that someone who’d only ever heard a secondhand description of laughter would make.

  “How droll!” said Murchison. “Did he intend for this to happen?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  Murchison took a wide-brimmed hat and battered leather vest from his coat rack.

  “The dean will be out the remainder of the day,” he called to Addams. He grabbed a satchel from the bottom drawer of his desk and strode out the door. I hurried to keep up. It was easy to forget that the man was a physical specimen—forty years hiking through the wilderness making all those maps.

  Outside my apartment, Murchison pulled on a pair of gauntlets made from fine bronze rings. “Good afternoon, Karl Friedrich!” he called as we entered. “Describe, please, the glyph that you drew.”

  Freddy was standing behind the table trying to hold as still as possible. “I was attempting manual reduplication, but I couldn’t move enough quanta. I never can. I noticed I was hitting almost precisely one-sixty-fourth the lower limit, so I thought maybe if I doubled the initiation sequence and added a recursive suggestion, plus a couple dam lines, I could increase the gain and get it to take.”

  Despite having drawn the sigil in question thousands of times, I understood almost none of what Freddy had just said.

  “In what order did you draw the parts?” asked Murchison.

  “I can’t remember,” said Unger. “I was so excited when the Trestor device spiked that I didn’t record it.”

  Murchison examined the sheet of paper on which Unger had drawn the reduplication glyph. In addition to the original figure, it was also covered in inky black fingerprints, as were the table, the chair, the Trestor device, and Unger’s face.

  Murchison lifted the sheet of paper bearing the sigil and looked at the table. The figure was replicated there, directly beneath where the paper had been.

  “That’s peculiar,” said Unger. “I didn’t put a setup trace there and it can’t very well have just . . .”

  Murchison dropped to his knees and crawled under the table, peering at its underside and then the floor. The sigil was repeated in black ink in both those places, too.

  “I didn’t draw those!” Unger objected.

  Murchison went down one flight of stairs and pounded on Mayweather’s door with his mailed fist. A minute later, Mayweather stumbled out, securing the belt on his dressing gown. When he saw the dean he went bug-eyed.

  “Hello!” he said. “Is this . . . What is this about?”

  Mayweather’s rooms were thick with cigarette smoke, as well as
something else—a thick, vegetal smell. My first thought was that he was smokecarving, which was ridiculous. My second thought was hashish, which, as Mayweather furtively cleared away a couple of pipes and a lighter, seemed likely.

  Murchison found the glyph inked on the ceiling in Mayweather’s living room, right below where our table was. It was also imprinted on the expensive-looking rug on the floor. Murchison lifted the rug’s edge with the toe of his boot. The figure was on the wooden floor beneath, too.

  Mayweather joined us. “What is that?”

  “Don’t touch it,” I said, unnecessarily. Mayweather was already backing away.

  Murchison exited the room and I scrambled to rejoin him. Same story in the basement—ceiling and floor. Satisfied, Murchison led me back to my room. He used the Trestor device for a moment and asked for a logarithm table. Murchison made a few calculations and then put away his gauntlets with a look of satisfaction. He rose to leave.

  “Sir?” asked Unger.

  “Limiting condition on the recursive suggestion?” Murchison asked.

  Unger’s face fell. “Oh God!” he said. I could tell he wanted to hit himself in the head, but he had ink all over both hands and didn’t want to risk further discoloration.

  Murchison looked surprised at such a display of emotion. “It’s safe, now,” he said. He pressed his thumb down against Unger’s original sigil, and lifted it away, clean and pink.

  “As you drew it, the period was 0.991 seconds and it lasted 1,024 cycles.”

  He turned to me. “Would you be so good as to inform everyone it’s harmless?”

  And with that he left, humming an old sentimental tune.

  I turned to Unger. “How does he know it’s safe?”

  In the simplest language he could manage, Unger explained that his modified reduplication sigil had continued copying itself on each available surface in line with the original glyph—the table, floor, ceiling, and presumably any pipes, earthworms, or caves that had gotten in its way. The Indian Ocean was on the opposite side of the Earth, so even if it had continued all the way through the planet’s interior, we could be reasonably sure it hadn’t ended up stenciled across someone’s foot.