The Philosopher's Flight

  Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster ebook.

  * * *

  Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions.

  CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

  Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox.

  FOR ABBY—

  Who once asked why there were so few women in my stories

  AND FOR MY MOM—

  Who read to me every night when I was young

  PROLOGUE

  But you must never call philosophy “magic,” for there is no such thing.

  Traditional

  A FEW WEEKS AGO, my daughter, who is nine years old and learning to fly, asked me the question I’ve been expecting for a long time: Why do so many people hate empirical philosophers?

  She and I were out drawing koru sigils on the tomato plants in the garden, the sun hot on our backs, each of us with a little square of glass in our hand and a mister filled with distilled water. I’d spent so many hours drawing them as a boy that the rhythm came back to me automatically: four sprays to coat the glass, aim at a single seedling, then trace your finger through the beads of water, forming the elaborate curlicue that is a koru sigil. Draw it right and the tomatoes will grow to four pounds each and mature twice as fast as an ordinary plant.

  That sort of miracle is the most common thing in the world to my daughter, who was born down here in Matamoros in 1930, two miles across the Mexican border, raised among malcontents and renegades, women (and a few men, like myself) who were made outlaws in the United States. All of us are empirical philosophers, or sigilrists if you prefer the common term. And what is empirical philosophy—what is sigilry—except a branch of science that we don’t yet fully understand? There’s no dark art to it; it’s nothing more than the movement of energy to produce a physical effect. The human body provides the energy, while the sigil, drawn sometimes with beads of water, sometimes with cornmeal or sand, catalyzes the movement. You can do a thousand useful things with philosophy: make a plant grow larger and faster, send a message a thousand miles in an instant, fly. If you grew up with it, it’s natural. It’s right. Why would anyone want life to be otherwise?

  But, of course, not everyone feels that way. Sigilry only came into widespread use around 1750 and right from the start women were better at it than men. That upset a lot of folks, who thought sigils must be some form of witchcraft. Most people, though, saw the usefulness in empirical philosophy and were content to allow it.

  So it went until 1831, when we get to what every nine-year-old girl calls “the good part.” And that’s Lucretia Cadwallader, who at that same age, hidden away in a remote cabin in Wisconsin, illiterate and with no knowledge of empirical philosophy at all, devised a method for solidifying smoke and shaping it with her bare hands. When she traced the right glyph into a cloud of smoke with her finger, it became docile. She could make it stretch like taffy or fill an entire room or coil itself neatly in a jar. For years, young Cadwallader practiced her trade in secret, until the University of Detroit heard of her extraordinary abilities and invited her to study as a scholarship case.

  Cadwallader spent three decades at the U of D engaged in endless study and experimentation, learning how to combine her smoke with chemical vapors to create complex structures. Her clouds could take on the properties of a spring or harden into a mass that struck like a fist. They could asphyxiate a man or burn away tuberculosis or bring the rain. Because she often used a pocketknife to shape her clouds, Cadwallader named her technique “smokecarving.”

  The leading philosophers of her age called Cadwallader’s discoveries scientific breakthroughs of the highest order. Laypeople called them the Devil’s work. That sort of superstition always infuriated Cadwallader—you could take a man with no notion of chemistry and have him hold a match to gunpowder or breathe ether and he’d call it honest knowledge. But if you accomplished the same physical effects by tracing out a glyph in hot ash or silver filings, he would declare it the lowest form of wickedness.

  Cadwallader took on students, too, the most unusual of whom was a young male sigilrist named Galen Wainwright. Though Wainwright possessed only a fraction of Cadwallader’s power, he was nevertheless quite talented for a man. He had a grand vision of forming the world’s first military unit to fight using smokecarving. Cadwallader always dismissed the idea—smokecarving was a tool of peace and creation, not of destruction.

  When the Civil War broke out in ’61, Wainwright went to Washington, where he offered to raise a regiment of smokecarvers and defeat the Confederacy in a week. The Secretary of War laughed him right out of the city. Wainwright then made the same offer to the Confederates in Richmond, who didn’t see any harm in the idea and made Wainwright a colonel. Then from every last corner of the South, Wainwright sought out men who could do empirical philosophy. Most of them were inept practical sigilrists, but they had high spirits and kitted themselves out in the elaborate uniforms of Zouaves. They called themselves the Legion of Confederate Smokecarvers.

  The Legion’s first action came at the Battle of Bull Run, where it brewed up a huge cloud of tear gas, intending to break the Union lines. However, Wainwright miscalculated the wind speed and instead hit a group of picnicking dignitaries who’d come down from Baltimore to watch the fighting. His attack didn’t affect the outcome of the battle, but it did throw the entire North into an uproar over the “philosophical menace.”

  The Legion spent the next ten months fighting in one skirmish after another, putting on overwhelming pyrotechnic displays. They caused only a few dozen casualties while exhausting the South’s supply of strategic chemicals. And yet the mere sight of Wainwright and his men in their baggy, scarlet pantaloons, blue silk jackets, and tasseled fezzes inspired panic in the Union army. Back in Virginia, the Legion was feted as the most ingenious weapon of the Confederacy.

  Until, at last, Mrs. Cadwallader took the field. She led what came to be known as the United States Sigilry Corps: ten thousand women, all practical philosophers. They marched out of Detroit with a vast, silent, slate-gray cyclone that billowed a mile high. “Like the Israelites,” wrote the overawed Detroit Defender, “with a pillar of cloud to lead them by day and a pillar of fire by night.” In reality, it was nothing so biblical, merely a supply of concentrated, premade smoke so they could strike more quickly.

  Galen Wainwright knew a losing proposition when he saw one. He feinted and retreated across the length of Tennessee, before at last the Corps cornered the Legion on the night of Halloween 1862. Wainwright’s display of flash and fire lasted all of fifty-one seconds before Cadwallader’s women brought down a blanket of smoke that pulled the oxygen right out of the air, extinguishing his colorful flames. Nine-tenths of the Legion surrendered on the spot, but Wainwright and his most fervent followers escaped to a nearby gully to make their last stand.

  Cadwallader wished to avoid killing fellow philosophers. Instead of smothering the Legion, the Corps put up smoke streamers impregnated with lead iodide, which seeded the clouds and produced torrential rains. Wainwright’s final attack was washed away. He himself suffered a bad case of pneumonia and was carried back to Richmond, where he spent the remainder of the war writing his memoirs.

  Nevertheless, the South fought on and the huge loss of life on both sides continued. Dismayed at the bloodshed, Cadwallader demanded to be allowed to attack the Confederacy directly. Escorted by William Tecumseh Sherman’s army, Cadwallader and the Corps made their way to Atlanta. She sent ahead a brief note that read: I will
burn the city to the ground on Sunday at four in the morning.

  So fearsome was Mrs. Cadwallader’s reputation that nearly the entire civilian population evacuated. The Corps surrounded the city on Saturday afternoon and all through the night, Cadwallader’s women sent wisps of incendiary vapor creeping through the Confederate lines. Right on schedule, fire erupted, moving west to east, permitting enough time for the stragglers to flee but leveling every building in its wake, sparing not even the churches.

  Cadwallader marched from Atlanta to the sea, burning everything in her path, cutting a swath ten miles wide. Her advance was unstoppable.

  Finally, she arrived at Petersburg, Virginia, the last bastion of Confederate resistance. Besieging the city were Gen. Grant and his army, exhausted after a months-long campaign that had failed to pry forty thousand Confederate defenders from their impenetrable web of trenches.

  On the morning of April 6, 1865, the Southern soldiers watched as tendrils of smoke probed their lines and vanished into the ground. They waited for an ultimatum. Cadwallader had never attacked without warning or killed unnecessarily. Surely they would negotiate a surrender.

  Then, shortly before noon, smoke boiled up around the Confederates, as if from the very soil itself, covering dozens of square miles in an instant. It was a dense, black concoction that blinded men and burned their lungs. A handful of soldiers in the front line of trenches dragged themselves free and staggered toward the Union forces, gasping and screaming for mercy. Their Northern brethren were shocked, too. Cadwallader had not informed them that she was about to attack.

  The soldiers trapped inside the cloud tried desperately to indicate their surrender, setting off flares, striking flags, firing cannons into the air. But within a minute or two, the city and trenches encircling it had gone quiet.

  A horrified Gen. Grant found Mrs. Cadwallader and begged her to lift the smoke. She agreed and with one sigil made the entire cloud disintegrate.

  The Union soldiers picked their way into the city. The streets were littered with bodies, red, foamy blood on their lips and the whites of their eyes turned gray. Forty thousand of them.

  The entire world was aghast at the slaughter.

  Cadwallader declined to explain her actions at Petersburg as long as she lived. Historians have wondered if she underestimated the power of her own weapons. Was there a miscommunication among her captains? Perhaps the warm temperatures that morning caused the chemical reactions to run at an unexpectedly rapid rate?

  But ordinary sigilrists have always understood the truth: Cadwallader intended to win the war with a single blow. No more bloodless “demonstrations” that might allow the fighting to drag on with hundreds of thousands more dead on both sides. No, she would inspire such fear that further resistance was impossible.

  She proved only too successful. During my youth, when unphilosophical folks thought about sigilry, they imagined the carnage at Petersburg. And they wondered what would protect them if philosophers ever turned on the common man.

  • • •

  All that sounded like ancient history to my daughter. But she admitted that there are plenty of people around the settlement here who, if you didn’t know them, might seem frightening: old Dr. Synge, who has canisters of smoke in her clinic that can kill a man in ten seconds flat; Ms. Pitcairn, who teaches hovering at the school but did bad things during the Great War (and is rumored to be quite a good shot with a machine gun); and Grandma Weekes, any time she looks at you over her glasses.

  “And you, Dad.”

  She’s right. You can’t blame everything on Cadwallader. You have to lay some of it at the feet of the modern heroes, the ones I knew and fought beside: Danielle Hardin and Janet Brock and Freddy Unger. And me. Because all of us made terrible mistakes—and that’s a story I’d better learn to tell, too.

  ROBERT A. CANDERELLI WEEKES

  Field Commander,

  Free North American Air Cavalry

  Matamoros, Mexico

  January 1, 1939

  PART 1

  EMMALINE’S SON

  1

  APRIL 1917

  Though he was a famously incompetent sigilrist, Benjamin Franklin included five practical glyphs that he had learned from the women of Philadelphia in an early edition of Poor Richard’s Almanack, as well as a simple design for a message board. In less than an hour, a woman could build a Franklin sand table using a silver penny, pane of window glass, hammer, and broom handle. This was to prove vital to the Continental Army during the Revolution.

  Victoria Ferris-Smythe, Empirical Philosophy: An American History, 1938

  A LITTLE MORE THAN five decades after Mrs. Cadwallader ended the Civil War, I was eighteen years old and lived in Guille’s Run, Montana, with my mother, Maj. Emmaline Weekes, who served as our county philosopher. In her official capacity, Ma responded to all manner of accidents and natural disasters. The rest of the time, she earned a decent living doing the kind of dull, ordinary sigilry that was in constant demand—short-haul passenger flights, koru glyphs for enlarging crops, simple smokecarving cures for asthma and pleurisy.

  Much as I would have liked to help her in the field, Mother only rarely gave me the chance. I had the typical male lack of philosophical aptitude and so instead of going on emergency calls, I did the work of a philosopher’s son: I kept the books, ordered supplies, cooked, and stood night watches.

  On the night of April 6, 1917, I was engaged in the thrilling task of organizing handwritten invoices from the previous year when Mother stormed into the house at nine o’clock, dripping wet from the rain.

  “What kept you?” I called.

  “Don’t even start, Boober!” she shouted. “Those cattle were scattered clear across Teller’s Nook. I must have put in four hundred miles trying to track down the last ones. Mr. Collins is going to be mad as hell when he gets the bill.”

  Mother ran a towel over her face and graying hair. She’d taken ten emergency calls over the previous fourteen hours—a very busy day—in the midst of terrible weather.

  “There’s beef stew on the stove,” I said.

  Mother dished herself a bowl and collapsed in a chair. I’d eaten hours before.

  “You’ve heard the news, I expect?” Mother said.

  I had. After months of prodding, President Wilson had convinced Congress to declare war on the German Empire. So now America, too, would be part of the fighting that had racked Europe since 1914.

  I’d decided I wanted to join up the second I heard. The army or the navy; one was as good as the other. A uniform, a chance to see the world while fighting next to the boys I’d grown up with, a real man’s job.

  But I knew Mother was going to be a problem. She’d spent three decades with the Rescue and Evacuation Department of the US Sigilry Corps, flying wounded and dying soldiers from the front lines back to the field hospitals. She’d done tours of duty in the Franco-Prussian Intervention, the war with Cuba, the Philippine Insurrection, and the Hawaiian Rebellion. As a result, she tended not to approve of America involving itself in other people’s wars. She wasn’t going to like the idea of me enlisting.

  “Is there any chance you could be called up?” I asked, trying to position the conversation just so.

  “Never,” Mother said. “They’ll mobilize a few of the younger reservists and move more active-duty women overseas. But they’re not going to call a sixty-year-old lady, even if my name is still on the lists. It would be an embarrassment. No, what I’m worried about is when Wilson calls for a draft for the army.”

  And there was my chance.

  I regretted it a little. If I’d had my pick of careers, I would have done as Mother had and served with Rescue and Evac—the best fliers in the world, saving lives instead of taking them. But that was impossible. R&E was the Corps’ most elite unit. They’d never commissioned a man. And while I was a fine hoverer for a boy, the least R&E woman could fly circles around me. So, the army didn’t seem a bad second choice.

  “I spoke with
the State Philosophical Office,” Mother continued. “They expect to get two draft exemptions for essential support personnel. One of those is for you.”

  This was going wrong already. She must have spent months laying the groundwork for that.

  “Well, that’s good to know,” I said. “But what I was thinking is that Willard Gunch dropped by this afternoon. He and Jack are talking about riding into town, maybe on Monday. To sign up.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Roddy Hutch is going with them,” I continued. “Probably Eliot Newton, too. And—”

  “No! How can you even think it?”

  “Mother, listen—if you sign up, you get to choose. You don’t have to go in the infantry.”

  “It’s all of them that get blown to hell and flinders! In the cavalry and the artillery and the merchant marine. I could tell you stories about the burns on the sailors at Manila Bay that would make your teeth sweat.”

  “Jesus, Ma! I’m going to be the only man my age in Montana sitting at home. You joined the Corps when you were only thirteen years—”

  “I don’t care if you’re the last man in the world sitting at home! You’re not going, and I’m not discussing this.” She swept up her bowl and spoon, went to her bedroom, and slammed the door.

  • • •

  Midnight came and went. Outside, the rain picked up and battered at the shutters. I fixed myself a cold ham sandwich and sat glumly back down in our little laboratory behind the kitchen.

  Essential support personnel. I should have seen it coming. I should have rehearsed my speech better, with all its fine sentiments about duty and loyalty to one’s friends and adventure. Maybe I would broach the idea of enlisting again tomorrow after Mother had had time to get used to it.

  I tried to set my feelings aside as I settled in to mix up a batch of silver chloride, which we used for stasis sigilry. It was a godsend for flying when you had to strap a sick or nervous passenger to your back—draw a stasis sigil with powdered silver chloride on a client’s chest and she went stiff as a corpse. No breathing, no bleeding, no experience of what was going on around her. Most important, she didn’t try to help you hover by flapping her arms and throwing off your center of gravity. We were down to our last three tubes. I’d already put an order in with Harnemon’s Philosophical Supplies, America’s finest purveyor of philosophical powders, but they needed a couple weeks to arrange a shipment to a place as remote as Guille’s Run. I would have to mix up a batch of homemade stuff to last until their delivery arrived.