by Tom Miller
“Mr. Weekes,” she said in a high burbling voice, “since you reached only a hundred sixty miles per hour in your time trial, how do you expect to compensate while flying into a hot landing field?”
Oh, how I burned at that! Left-handed, injured, on my fourth try. I wanted to damn them for a lot of hypocrites and throw the table over. Let me have a fresh run with a fair timekeeper. Then I noticed how intently the general was watching me. I recognized that the question was a wrong one—Gertrude had given me the answer the day I met her.
“Ma’am,” I growled, “every hoverer is going zero miles an hour when she hits the ground. The only time the Huns can take a good shot is during the landing and that has nothing to do with raw aerial speed. I favor a flare and settle. If you like, I’ll have Aileen Macadoo and one hundred thousand witnesses testify I have a pretty sharp one.”
Blandings sniffed. She pointed to the door.
• • •
I struggled back into my harness and flew home.
That was it, then. In the next day or two, they would send a message beginning “Although we appreciate your interest . . .” I couldn’t do anything to change it.
I tried to put the rest of my day in order. Find Dar. Confess. Beg her forgiveness, preferably with a copy of the Washington Post in hand and several apartments circled in the classifieds section. And flowers. Mayweather could advise on what sort you gave when apologizing for being an absolute cad.
Unger was sitting at the table with my quarter and a glazed look, as if he’d just knocked back a stiff drink.
“Robert—” he began. But I wanted none of his careful, wise sympathy.
“They didn’t even give me a chance!” I raged. “Ran me through the sprint left-handed, insulted me in the interview. Then I lost my temper, gave a smart answer—”
“Robert,” Freddy broke in. “I didn’t mean to. You left your board set. I saw it come across. You know I would never deliberately—”
“What are you talking about?”
He turned my message board so I could read it.
Mr. Weekes,
It is with pleasure that the US Sigilry Corps offers you a commission as Sigilwoman Third Class with the Fifth Division of Rescue and Evacuation. You are to report no later than June 14 for advanced flight training at Fort McConnell, South Padre Island, Texas. Details by postal mail will follow your acceptance. Your decision is requested by message to the glyph below within 72 hours.
Sincerely,
Brig. Gen. Tomasina Blandings, USSC
38
Cadwallader delegated the matter of what equipment each corpswoman was to furnish to one of her colleagues at the University of Detroit, a certain Mrs. Peabody, who had lived her entire life within the confines of the city and had many unusual ideas as to what conditions in the field might be like. Her comprehensive list, right down to how many pairs of stockings, bloomers, and sun bonnets each woman should carry, also included a “black parasol of good-quality silk (1)” as well as a “cavalry saber, single-edged with scabbard (1; to be issued upon muster).” While it is difficult to say which item proved less useful, the Corps has since incorporated both into its standard dress uniform.
Victoria Ferris-Smythe, Empirical Philosophy: An American History, 1938
UNGER WAS SAYING SOMETHING, helping me to sit.
I couldn’t remember how I was supposed to feel. What I was supposed to do next.
Unger whooped and danced about the room and thumped me on the back.
They said yes, I messaged to Essie. And Angela. Vivian. Mother. Brock. Gertrude. Addams. Jake. And then, as requested, my acceptance to the glyph below. Then, I called up the message from Gen. Blandings again and stared at it for an hour.
“Robert?” Freddy said. “You have to tell her.”
He went out to fetch me lunch. I continued staring.
Sometime later, I heard thick-soled boots coming up the stairs. I tried to prepare myself.
The door flew open. Danielle looked ashen, unsteady on her feet.
“So say it!” she shouted.
“I went,” I said. “And they took me.”
She was crying openly, which made her furious.
“You promised! You swore to me!”
“Yeah.”
“Write them back. Tell them you didn’t mean to accept. That it was a mistake.”
I shook my head.
“Robert, if you go, I’m never speaking to you again. I’m never saying your name, I’m never thinking of you. Otherwise, every day you’re over there, I’ll cry my guts out. Say you’re not going. Say it!”
I closed my eyes. “I’m going.”
• • •
There followed a string of messages, the comments on my commission indistinguishable from the ones about Dar.
Have you lost your mind?
Why? Why are you doing this?
Congratulations, old boy! I knew you had it in you!
You are making a terrible mistake.
Overwhelming, terrifying silence from Mother.
Not sure if shs maddr at y or the Corps, Angela wrote. She says Cuba & Philipns & Hawaii ruined her. Says same wll happen to y.
Mother, who had called it impossible. Who would have turned down her own son in the field. She could go to hell.
If I set Ma aside, I fell right back into wallowing over Dar: . . . the two of us in Washington, just write the Corps and tell them— but no, she’d been the one to manipulate me, to force me into a decision she knew was unfair, and then accuse me of— no, a clean break was simpler, don’t try to apologize or say good-bye or promise to— no, come back with a whole suitcase full of medals and march into her office and then see who’s too good to— no, I would die over there in some muddy ditch and they’d bury me in an unmarked grave.
Unger found me slumped against the wall, head in hand. Maybe it was the next morning.
“Nope,” Unger said. “No. You don’t get to do this. Get up.”
“Freddy—”
“You won. You’re not allowed to quit. We’ll do an hour of German. Dmitri will do an hour with you in the gym—stretching and deep breathing exercises for your ribs.”
Any distraction. An hour of practice for my stasis practicum. An hour for my smokecarving class. Then I slept and divided the next day into hours too, so that I had something clear and useful to do in each and didn’t think of Dar or the Corps or Washington or anything else.
• • •
I went through the next week in a stupor.
A bevy of messages came in from the Corps, plus letters, contracts, official orders. The whole thing fascinated Unger, though he was as bad as anyone for asking the “typical” questions:
Would I wear the Corps’ famous full pleated skirts as my uniform? No hoverer in the field wore skirts, I explained, it was skysuits all around. For formal occasions, I would wear an army officer’s uniform with Philosophical Corps insignia.
Would I be addressed as Sigilman Third Class or Sigilwoman Third Class? The latter, as a needlessly supercilious lieutenant reminded me by message board, when I used the wrong term. That was the rank, after all. No sense in proving your relative equality only to demand special treatment.
Where would I sleep? Not right alongside the ladies. While I was in training there would be a tent outside the main barracks for my use; at the front, the situation varied by locale, much to the inconvenience of my commanding officer.
When would I be going?
“I’ll go down the day after exams finish,” I told him. “Take the transporter chain to San Antonio, then a local jump to Corpus Christi, or if there isn’t one for a couple days, fly myself the last couple hundred miles.”
Unger looked forty times more excited about it than I felt.
“I’m not supposed to tell you this,” he confessed, “but I’ll be doing war work, too. Professor Yu found me a position with a most intriguing project—mathematical philosophical research. Highly classified. Draft waiver and everything.�
��
“That’s wonderful,” I said. You couldn’t wish that sort of good luck on a more deserving fellow.
“We’re trying to answer a fascinating question,” Freddy mused. “Given a high-energy non-vectored sigil, how would one best increase—”
“Fred, you’re not supposed to talk about it, right?”
“Terribly sorry. It means we’re trying to help bring you home sooner.”
Even Ms. Addams dragged me into her office for one last sentimental go-around. She was wearing her dress uniform—skirts and saber and parasol and all—as was Gertrude. Murchison wore the old-fashioned cavalry blouse, tall shako hat, and jodhpurs that the Corps had issued its cartogramancers in the ’70s.
They rose and saluted.
“Oh, no,” I murmured. I’d walked into my frocking ceremony unshaven and wearing my gym clothes. But they wouldn’t be stopped.
“It is traditional,” Addams intoned, “before reporting for service, that a newly commissioned corpswoman receive the adjuncts to her uniform from a veteran not related to her by blood.”
Addams put a crown woven from daisies on my head. “Daughter, we who came before call you to defend your fellow women and your country. The philosopher’s war has no beginning or end.”
Gertrude placed a peppermint on my tongue. “Fortune’s blows are bitter but the amity of the service is sweet.”
Murchison stepped forward and slapped me with his gloved left hand hard enough to leave my cheek stinging.
“Wake, daughter,” he spoke. “And strike under cover of darkness.”
He handed me his dress parasol. The mahogany handle was cracked, the silk panels battered, the lace trim moth-eaten.
He slapped me on the other cheek, took the saber and scabbard from his belt, and presented them to me, too.
“Wake, daughter, and stay your hand.”
They saluted again.
I was trying as hard as I could not to burst into tears.
“Good grief, Lennox!” Addams said. “You’re supposed to tap him, not hit him. Get that boy a chair before he collapses.”
Addams was the ranking officer present, a fact not lost on Sigilwoman Third Class Murchison, who assisted me into a seat.
Brock opened the door from inside the dean’s inner office to sit with us—not a servicewoman to be included in the ceremony itself, but an intimate nevertheless. She had worn her academic robes for the occasion, her velvet tam and piping in the deep purple of the University of Detroit, where she’d done her D.Em.Phil.
Brock bowed. “Congratulations, Sigilwoman. On behalf of Radcliffe College and your many admirers at Northwest Aero, may I also offer a small token? Something more practical than the baubles the Corps carries for formal occasions.”
She gave me a cardboard shirt box that weighed about four pounds. I knew even before I opened it. A near twin to the first harness Northwest had made me. In beautiful thick brown leather. An unsigned note, too—I hovered thirty feet under my own power yesterday. I can’t ever thank you enough.
“Oh my God,” I whispered.
“If you think Steven’s improbable, we’ve had a dozen men write the college to inquire about enrolling,” Brock said. “One was turned down by Sacramento and Detroit. He’d never considered Radcliffe before he read about you—he’s the best male flier in Japan, from what I understand. He’s going to crush you in the long course when you get back.”
I grinned at the thought.
“You impressed Gen. Blandings, too,” Addams said. “You kept your composure through the whole morning and showed just the right amount of fight. ‘Aileen Macadoo and a hundred thousand witnesses,’ was that the line?”
“She did a good job of hiding it,” I said.
“She hides a great deal,” Addams said, turning more serious. “Blandings is an ally of this office. She shares our concerns.”
“We worry about how the war will end,” Brock said. “That the Germans will become desperate and attack with their Korps des Philosophs. And that we’ll strike back, using our own smokecarvers.”
“It’ll make Manila look like a church picnic,” Gertrude said.
“It will make the war after this one the last that humanity fights,” Murchison added.
“So, a few of us have taken it upon ourselves to come up with more innovative solutions,” said Brock.
“Blandings is one of the few in the Corps we trust,” said Addams. “One of the few who cares about something larger than her career. You’re one of those, too.”
“We would never ask you to act against your conscience,” Brock said. “But if Blandings needs your help—counting supply wagons, moving unusual persons, observing positions—we would take it as a favor.”
“Like spying on the Huns?” I asked.
Addams smirked. “Your German’s not good enough for that.”
“On our own people?”
The four of them shared a look.
“Robert, the Corps killed half a million in the Philippines with the barest provocation,” Addams said. “I did a lot of it myself, to my everlasting regret. But if we kill ten million in Europe—if we depopulate Berlin or wipe out Vienna—what future will philosophy have? It would be the best gift we could give Maxwell Gannet.”
“Pray that peace breaks out,” Brock said. “But if it doesn’t, we’ll see you in France.”
“Belgium,” Murchison muttered.
We all looked at him for some further explanation, but the dean only took off one of his gloves and began turning the fingers inside out.
• • •
Final exams brought me only partway back to earth. Even with the distraction of my impending departure, I could still reel off basic stases and rudimentary smokecarving techniques.
I went back to my room in the early evening after my last exam and began packing. The first southbound transporter service the following morning would leave at six. I intended to take it, much to Unger’s dismay.
“You’re not required to report for another week,” Unger cajoled. “We never even went out to celebrate. Stay a few days.”
“I want to get there ahead of time,” I said. “Get the lay of the land.”
“That’s stupid talk,” said Jake, whom Unger had invited over to help change my mind. “You’re going to sit in Texas for a week with your thumb in your ear? That does nothing but mark you out as an oddity.” Then, realizing the inevitability of that, “—as an even bigger oddity. If you’re not going out, you could at least make yourself useful. Tonight’s the final night-landing clinic at the aerodrome. The veterans are letting the Threes run it for once. They could use another set of hands.”
“I almost got expelled the last time I helped with that.”
Jake looked sideways and cleared her throat. “All right, then. Danielle messaged me this afternoon. She asked me to drop by and if I could, I should bring you.”
“No.”
“She asked to see you.”
“I don’t care,” I said. “I’m going to bed.”
“No,” said Jake. “You’re coming with me. If she’s mean to you, I’ll hit her. And I swear to God, if you start crying in front of her, I’m going to hit you. Besides, she has your necklace.”
I’d taken it off while she was tending to my bruised ribs after the Cup. I’d been dreading messaging her to ask for it back.
“So, get it for me,” I said.
“I’m not going unless you come.”
I plunged my hands into my pockets. “Just for the necklace.”
Jake knew enough not to try to make me talk as we trudged over to Dar’s. My favorite of Belle Addams’s men was standing guard outside the building. He put two fingers to the brim of his hat in salute. “You’re a brave man to go up there, Mr. Weekes.”
I fought back a wave of nausea as I climbed the half flight of stairs to the first-floor landing and the second flight up to her room. Jake put a hand on my shoulder to steady me. She knocked and the door swung open.
Dan
ielle was less beautiful than I remembered. Her face was blunter, her lips dry and cracked, her eyes the wrong color brown. She fumbled with her hands like she wanted to fold them and had forgotten how.
She found her voice before I did.
“Would you— won’t you both come and sit for a minute?” Danielle asked.
Her room was bare, with only her table, chairs, and bed remaining. We sat.
“You’re already packed?” Jake asked.
“Yes,” Danielle said, looking relieved to hear such a banal observation. “I sent my things on to Washington. Dad’s coming out tomorrow to ride the transporter chain with me. He’ll help me get settled, trap the rats out of my new apartment, all that.”
Danielle shifted her attention to me and the strength ran right out of my legs. I would have fallen if I weren’t sitting.
“Robert . . .” she said. “Robert, I can’t leave things between us like this.”
“I don’t know what to say,” I managed.
“Tell me you’ll message every once in a while so I know you’re alive.”
“Okay.” I wanted to offer something beyond that, to give her some better parting words, but I couldn’t.
She handed me the necklace strung with the crystal vial. “I thought you’d want this back.”
I nodded and slipped it over my head.
Danielle coughed, as if to cover a noise she didn’t want me to hear, and turned back to Jake. They talked about some inanity—a fancy box of chocolates that a supporter had sent and could Jake take it to the aerodrome because it was unethical for Danielle to accept gifts.
“Of course,” said Jake. “It’ll last about ten minutes down there.”
I closed my eyes. I wanted to be gone. Go to Texas and not have to nurse a broken heart or say good-bye to Unger or summon up the courage to message Mother again. Be alone.
We heard a knock—another well-wisher, probably. Jake and I rose to go while Danielle opened the door.
It was a youthful, clean-shaven man in a Harnemon’s uniform. He had a box wrapped in glossy gray and silver paper, about a foot long.
Jake put a hand on my thigh and pushed me back into my chair.