by Tom Miller
Following the initial burst, each of the glyphs had duplicated itself whenever it came in contact with another surface, which was how it had spread from the paper to Unger’s hands, to the doorknob, to my fingers. After roughly twenty-one minutes, the sigil had ceased to cycle and no longer copied itself onto new surfaces.
“So it’ll just wash off now?” I asked.
Unger shook his head. “There are tertiary cycles, too. You can wash it off, but it reduplicates itself back onto any original surface it imprinted on. So, I could scrub all afternoon and the water will come away gray, but the ink will still be there.”
“It’s permanent?”
“Temporarily. Until the tertiary cycle abates. But that will be at least an order of magnitude longer.” By Freddy’s calculation, somewhere between four days and 326 years before it would wash off.
“Temporary permanent ink,” I said.
Unger cracked a smile. But a moment later Boston’s Philosophical Containment Team pounded on the door and ordered us not to move. Belle Addams might be willing to allow her dean to play field scientist, but she’d also messaged the professionals. The team, protected by full bronze ring mail and carrying a bevy of Trestor devices, swept through our room.
They interrogated us for five hours, eventually reaching the same conclusion that Murchison had in five minutes: the sigil was now rendered harmless. The team confiscated the original sheet of paper and left Unger with clear instructions: under no circumstances should he attempt to re-create his experiment. It would likely lead to a repeat of the afternoon’s drama. Or worse.
On the heels of their departure, Murchison’s patent attorney slipped in—Ms. Addams truly did cover all the bases where novel and potentially lucrative sigils were concerned. Unger diagrammed the glyph (not difficult, given the copy on our tabletop) for the lawyer, who drew up papers. “We’ll file immediately to protect your rights,” she suggested. “When you remember the exact order, we’ll file an addendum.”
And then she, too, was gone. Unger and I sat a long, quiet moment trying to comprehend it all—the scattered papers, the stains on the floor, the legal documents.
“I always dreamed of having my own sigil,” he murmured. “But I never dared imagine it might have any sort of practical import!”
“A tattoo parlor,” I said. “Draw the sigil, dip your paintbrush, and turn your skin into South Seas scrimshaw without so much as a needle. Then change it for a new one in a month. Or fifty years.”
“Printing presses,” said Unger. “Paint it on a plate and run ten thousand newspapers without needing fresh ink.”
“Shoe polish,” I suggested, “house paint, hair dye . . .”
Unger sat right back down and tried the sigil again, this time adding one more line to the glyph—a limiting condition, which would prevent the image from imprinting on every surface below. On his eighth try, Unger put the pieces in the right order, mixing up a batch of temporary permanent ink that, for twenty minutes, went about merrily replicating itself.
“ ‘Don’t try to rediscover it,’ indeed!” Unger scoffed. “They probably want to patent it themselves. See if they don’t try.” He stared at the sheet of paper in front of him and then closed his eyes. Anyone else would have been mentally spending the millions that his sigil would rake in.
“Robert?” he said quietly. “Please don’t tell anyone about this.”
This with ink all over his hands, spotted on his forearms, smudged across his face.
“People may notice,” I said.
“Oh, just tell them old Freddy had a bit of a mishap and it’s not contagious.”
• • •
I’d promised not to breathe a word about it, but Dar hardly counted. She listened with amusement, then incredulity, then amazement.
“Oh, poor Unger!” she said.
“Well, the ink will wash off eventually. In as little as a couple hundred years, he thinks.” (As it turned out, thirteen years, three months, and six minutes.)
“Not that part,” Dar said. “It’s the sort of change that can ruin your life.”
I took her in my arms. “Did Gallipoli ruin your life?” I asked.
“Only for a little while.”
“May I contribute to your further ruination?” I asked.
“Please.”
We thoroughly ruined each other and then lay tangled in the sheets. I stayed over, as I’d taken to doing three or four times a week.
In the middle of the night, a pounding on the door woke us. Dar grabbed me in a panic.
“Who is it?” I called out, trying to keep the terror out of my voice. Trencher or Hand of the Righteous or—
“Robert!” Freddy yelled. “Robert, get up! I’ve got it! It’s not you, it’s the glyph. You’re drawing it wrong!”
31
CONWAY:
did you succeed where so many before you had perished?
HATCHER:
We flew mad. Mad as hell and scared to pieces.
JIMENEZ:
Better differential equations.
HATCHER:
So, we still agree on that much.
D. Priscilla Conway, “An Interview with Josofea Jimenez and Betsy Hatcher on the Fifth Anniversary of the First Transatlantic Flight,” Detroit Defender Sunday Magazine, September 26, 1907
“HAS HE LOST HIS mind?” Dar whispered to me. She put the lights on and opened the door.
“Freddy,” I said, “do you have any idea what time—”
“It’s four fifteen! I couldn’t wait any longer. You have the problem I was hoping I had: You do have the quanta! You’re losing them to glyph failure.” He thrust a piece of paper covered with handwritten tables at me.
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “Sit down.”
But Unger was bouncing on his heels.
“I should have seen it the moment you said you’d lost twelve pounds and not had any change in speed—if the physics is impossible, that’s a philosophical problem! I ran the numbers from Cocks and Hens. If you convert the quantal transfer rate, you should be hitting three hundred seventy-five miles an hour in the air, not two hundred fifty. So it’s the hover glyph! You’re drawing it wrong.”
“Are you joking?” I asked.
Misdrawing the hover glyph was the kind of mistake a nine-year-old made, not a man who’d been flying for a decade. I would have bristled to hear such a thing even from a seasoned hoverer, much less the world’s most inept practical philosopher. It was like a blind man mocking your handwriting.
“Robert is the most consistent flier in the aerodrome,” Danielle objected. “He’s not up there botching sigils.”
“It’s a consistent botch, then! Or consistently barely hitting! Whichever you prefer.”
“I want you to leave,” Dar said to Unger.
“Of course, I’m intruding, it’s terribly rude! But I can prove it. We just need to run a little experiment on you. Robert, what time will you be training down at the—”
“Nine,” I said. And Freddy departed, mumbling to himself about frequencies and cycles per second.
“He’s cracked up,” Dar said.
• • •
Unger was already down at the landing field when I got there. He was wearing one of my old skysuits, with the cuffs rolled up to fit. Essie was helping him into a harness and securing a large Trestor device to his chest.
“I can’t believe you’re going to permit this,” Gertrude said to Brock, who was rigging to take a passenger.
“Against my better judgment,” Brock said. And then to Unger: “Does Professor Yu know you borrowed that? It cost fifteen hundred dollars.”
“The new model is essential!” Unger insisted. “I’ll need the adjustable subtraction dampers to create a—”
“Oh, let him do it,” I said. “He’s at least as good with that machine as I am at flying.”
We launched, with Freddy strapped to Brock’s chest. She took up station a few feet from my shoulder and rolled so that Fredd
y and his machine were aimed at me. Brock gestured to me and I flew full out for a minute.
“Good?” Brock shouted to Unger as we slowed.
“Clear picture,” he answered, still adjusting dials and making notes on an arm board. “But I need to wring out the scope in both directions. Can you give me another?”
We flew it again. Freddy began cackling madly.
“There it is!” he shouted. “A peak right at nine million cycles.”
We set down.
“It’s thermal bloom!” Freddy explained. “Robert can move eighteen thousand milli-Trestors per minute! He’s losing a third of his energy to heat.”
“Freddy, it’s touching that you want to help him so badly,” Brock said. “But he can’t be losing that much, he’d fall right out of the air. You must be getting an echo off my glyph.”
“Not at nine megahertz! Nothing else lives on that part of the spectrum. It’s sigil failure!”
“You’re telling me that was a failed flight?” Gertrude scoffed. “He made 249. I’ve only ever seen him miss a sigil with his left.”
“Partial sigil failure. No, but see, he should be much, much faster! Robert did dozens of pushes for me before Cocks and Hens at maximum effort. So, last night I projected out how much energy he should have with the flight sigil.”
“That’s impossible,” Brock said. “Push is a one-dimensional sigil. Hover is three-dimensional. You can’t convert between them.”
“Leonhard Euler devised something like it for wave equations in the 1750s! It’s a second-order partial—”
“No equations,” I said. “If it’s failing, then tell me what part of the glyph I’m drawing wrong.”
“I haven’t the slightest idea!” Unger replied. “If we want a proper forensic glyph analysis we would need a highly skilled cartogramancer.”
• • •
I was marched into the dean’s office in full gear. Murchison covered the floor in butcher paper on which he inscribed a series of fine, gridlike lines. I would launch to a height of two feet, fly across the room, and set down. Based on how the powder fell, Murchison could tell me what was going wrong.
“Draw please,” Murchison said. He was staring with immense concentration at a piece of sandstone that he was etching with a thumbtack.
I flew the length of his office.
“Failed sigil,” Murchison announced.
“Lennox!” said Addams. “You didn’t even look at the powder.”
“Failed sigil!” the dean insisted. “Sit and draw it with a powder pencil.”
A device for a child—an oversized tube filled with red sand with a pointed regulator tip on the end. Addams fetched one. I drew my flight sigil, letting the sand run onto the table.
“Incorrect,” the dean pronounced without looking at it.
“What part?” asked Brock.
“Wrong hand,” the dean said.
“No,” Addams protested. “Correct hand. He’s a righty.”
“Wrong hand!”
We reloaded the pencil and I drew with my left.
Gertrude clicked her tongue at me. “You’re flailing your elbow. You do that flying southpaw, too. Keep it in tight.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“Again,” Murchison instructed.
I drew again, this time keeping my elbow tucked as good form demanded.
“Incorrect,” the dean said.
“Oh for Christ’s sake,” Addams said. “It was a beautiful—”
“Oh, no, no, no!” Brock said. “Do it again.”
I drew again.
Now Gertrude was aghast, too. “Up close with his off hand, it’s plain as day.”
“What?” I asked.
“What are the three most common reasons for hover glyph failure?” asked Brock.
That was catechism, put forth in Mary Grinning Fox’s very first treatise on flying. “Mistiming, hesitation on the vertical-horizontal switch, and burying the edge on the reverse,” I recited.
“You’re burying the edge,” Gertrude said.
“What!”
“You compensate for it by throwing your elbow, but when you don’t, your tip splays. If you do it with your left hand, then you’re almost certainly doing it—”
“Don’t say it,” interrupted Brock. “Robert, don’t think. Draw with your right. Draw as fast as you can.”
I drew three times with my right.
“Wrong, wrong, wrong,” said Murchison, scratching away at his sandstone.
“It’s subtle, but it’s there!” Brock said. “Enough to weaken the sigil, but not to kill it. I never would have seen it except for the left.”
Gertrude put her fingers on the flat of my hand below my pinkie and rotated it one inch. “If you supinate your wrist, you’ll correct it. Practice today. We’ll fly you tomorrow.”
• • •
I sat that night and drew the sigil over and over with the glyph pencil. Two, three, four hundred times. Like a kid in primary school. Flat of the hand down. Hand down.
“I can’t believe you’re trying this,” Dar said.
“It’s just a little change in technique,” I replied.
She shook her head. “You know what happens when you start thinking about your technique? It’s like walking while you’re thinking about it. Or breathing. Or carrying a full glass of water and looking right at it.”
I refilled my glyph pencil and drew again.
“You’re probably right,” I said.
Hand down. Hand down.
• • •
Brock cleared the landing field the next morning except for her, me, and Gertrude.
“Do you remember when you learned to hover?” Brock asked me. “Your first time?”
“I was nine,” I said. “My sister showed me. I drew the glyph a few times. She said, ‘That looks good.’ We went outside but it didn’t work. So, she told me, ‘Try harder.’ I drew it a thousand times and then it worked. That’s how I’ve done it ever since.”
“I know what I’m asking is impossible,” said Brock. “But something like this happens to lots of fliers who learned informally. Tillie still rotates left-side up and I’m never going to break her of it. I told Francine that she over-points her toes on her streamline, and she called me—well, if I repeat it, the devils will drag me down to Hell. Even Astrid needed three years to fix her finger slide.”
“Her hands are even bigger than mine! How did she ever—”
“The important part is that she fixed it. So, here’s my advice to nine-year-old Robert: try less hard. If you clench, you pronate your hand without realizing it. Relax your grip. Butt of the hand down. Repeat that to yourself every time you draw. Commit to it. And if you lose directional control because you’re thinking too hard, I’ll be flying point.”
I launched and flew a lap around the landing field at low speed. I paid strict attention to my form.
“Are you doing it?” Brock called from her position above me. “It doesn’t look any different.”
“It doesn’t feel any different,” I shouted.
“Well, hit the one-mile course and see if it does anything at speed!”
I dove to accelerate, opened my reg wide, and blazed past the starting gate. Less hard. Less hard. Try less hard.
I knew instantly. I had a hundred tiny sensations that I’d never had while flying before: heat in the back of the calves, a tingle between the shoulder blades, the faintest taste of salt in the back of my mouth. It felt like running for the first time after spending my whole life hopping on one foot.
“Again!” shouted Gertrude, who was working the stopwatch.
I flew it again. Try less hard. Less hard. Hand down.
Gertrude waved me around for a third go. I flew it and landed.
Brock was crying. Big, honking sobs. “How fast?” she demanded. “Gertie!”
Gertrude didn’t answer. She was humming as she showed the watch to Brock. I recognized the tune: Highty, tighty, Christ almighty, who the hell are
we? Rip ram, goddamn: flying R&E.
“That’s 341 miles per hour,” Brock said.
I took a knee before I fell over from shock. Brock did the same.
“You weren’t minding your posture,” she said. “We didn’t have you rigged low drag. And—”
I didn’t hear what came after. Ten years of my life. Ten years! A good flier for a man. Smooth lines, pretty hands, neat form. Just never going to have the quanta—but pretty good for a man!
I was livid. I was ecstatic.
The most basic mistake an empirical philosopher could make. And no one had ever looked close enough to notice.
“All of it,” I growled. “Do all of it.”
Brock removed a strap here and added one there, swapped out my bag for one with an 85/15 corn powder mix, switched my helmet for one with a low-drag coating.
Three hundred forty-eight. Three hundred sixty-one.
“I’m flying to Nova Scotia and back,” I snarled. I needed to do something hard before I burst.
“Save a little for tomorrow,” Brock warned.
“My whole life. My whole goddamn life!”
Some boys can fly.
• • •
Oh lrd, son, Mother messaged. I’m so sry.
Working seventy hours a week to put a roof over my head. And what use did she ever have for flying above two hundred? For honest work, for carrying and hauling and lifting? None. Not her fault, not by a mile.
Really rlly? Angela asked. Did th watch break?
Just a child herself. I would never have been in the air without her, would never have learned any sigils at all except for my half sisters.
“That’s unbelievable, Robert,” Danielle said. “That’s wonderful!” She was smiling like she was afraid to touch me. “Oh, you’re going to have fun at the Cup!”
Fun was so far from my mind that her words barely made sense.
“Freddy, do you understand what you did for me?” I asked Unger that night. “Do you understand what this means to me?”
Unger seemed almost as pleased that his tables were correct as that I had made a breakthrough.
“The pleasure’s in the thing itself, Rob.”