The Philosopher's Flight Page 2

  I weighed out a measure of thin, feathery crystals of silver nitrate and dissolved it in a beaker of hot water. I stirred for several minutes until I had a colorless solution, then did a few calculations and poured in the appropriate amount of common table salt. A whitish precipitate formed, swirling like snow toward the bottom of the beaker. Over the next hour, I laboriously filtered out the solids, washed them, dried them over a flame, and measured the powder into tiny smoked-glass tubes, which I put safely away in their padded box.

  Then I kicked the powder cabinet shut.

  How did Ma think she was going to stop me if I decided to sign up? I was an adult; it wasn’t as if I needed her permission. I could simply go. Tonight even. She could find any old philosopher to replace me.

  I needed advice. I needed my half sister Angela.

  I went back to the kitchen and pulled out my message board. It was quite a large model for the time, an eighteen-inch square of glass with a wooden frame, the underside of which was coated with silver leaf. I took a scoop of milled quartz—highly refined sand—and poured it onto the glass, then smoothed it with my board scraper. Using the four-beat rhythm that the sigil required, I traced Angela’s personal glyph into the sand in the upper right-hand corner with my finger.

  Ma said no, I wrote in the sand. What nxt?

  I countersigned my own glyph in the opposite corner, drew the sigil to send, and wiped the sand level with the scraper. The same message would appear immediately on Angela’s board the next time she set it to receive.

  (A perfectly reasonable person might ask why it should work at all—why should the sand on a slab of glass two thousand miles away shift to form the same words I’d just written? Well, philosophy warps the laws of probability. If you watched a million plates of sand for a million years, eventually the powder on one of them would slip a little and end up resembling the letter A. Philosophical energy just gives it a nudge in the right direction.)

  I drew sigils to bring up the conversation Angela and I had had during the afternoon.

  Hows she tking it? Angela had written.

  Dunno, I’d replied. I havnt askd yet. She’s prbly mad not to be joinng th fun.

  Don’t joke abt tht! 4 wars was plenty. Talk lik that & she might voluntr.

  Wht abt y? I’d asked. Cld be philsphr draft.

  Nevr, Angela had said. If they do, I’ll mov to Mexco.

  Snds warm. I’ll vist.

  Sure, bt when are y vistng me here?

  I wished I could. Six months before, Angela had run off to New York City, where a friend had found her a job as an amanuensis handling the message boards at a bank. It shouldn’t have been a surprise; Angela had entertained fantasies like that for years, one exotic locale after the next. But when she’d actually left in the middle of the night with one of Mother’s old duffels full of clothes and equipment, Ma and I had been stunned.

  Angela’s departure had left Mother in a difficult spot. Angela had been Ma’s field assistant, backing her up on difficult calls and taking care of the simpler ones herself, so that Mother wasn’t exhausted by the end of the day. I was a poor substitute at best, a fact the State Philosophical Board had driven home a few weeks earlier by denying me credentials as an apprentice. They didn’t mind if I tagged along from time to time, but, as they put it, We cannot find any precedent for permitting a man to serve as a state philosophical officer, even in a trainee capacity. Indeed, it seems unwise and inhumane, both for you and potential clients, to allow such a circumstance.

  Which meant Ma now did all the practical philosophy and I was nothing better than her housekeeper.

  “It’s not the women’s work you’d hoped to be doing, is it?” my best friend, Willard, had said on my last visit to Billings, twelve miles up the road. That conversation had turned into our first fistfight in years. (I’d knocked out two of his teeth.) Willard was right, though. Something was going to have to change at home before I got in real trouble or Mother dropped dead from exhaustion.

  I tried to console myself by reading a few pages from my favorite book, Life and Death on San Juan Hill, the memoir of Lt. Col. Yvette Rodgers, who’d commanded the first modern R&E wing during the war in Cuba. Chapter eleven—Lt. Col. Rodgers trying desperately to guide a wounded flier back to the landing field by message after sunset, the woman lost and running low on powder, when the Corps encampment comes under Spanish cannon fire. Rodgers has the clever idea to—

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the sand shift on the message board, which I’d left set to receive under Mother’s glyph. It now read:

  TO: E Weekes

  FR: Montana Philosophical Office, Night Desk

  PRIORITY CALL. Respond immediately.

  “Oh, come on!” I muttered. I didn’t want to haul Ma out of bed.

  Robert Weekes for E Weekes, I replied. Details, pls?

  Original request reads: ‘RA, RA, RA fam,’ the State night desk answered. Unable to reach originator by board. Glyph matches for Klein, Evelyn. Address on record is rural home approx 1.8 miles north of Three Forks.

  That was a mess. So, someone had messaged an RA—a request for assistance—for an entire family and then had failed to reply to any follow-up messages. A sigilrist might do that right before she ran out to fetch the doctor. Or for a fire. Or as a prank. The State Office seemed confident of the location, but I’d never heard of anything called Three Forks.

  Wht county is 3 Forks? I asked.

  Gallatin County. Best estimate of location: latitude N45° 53' 33", longitude W111° 33' 8".

  I pulled out a sheaf of topographical maps and found the spot—175 miles away, well outside Mother’s usual area of responsibility.

  I wrote: Confrm: to Emmaline Weekes?

  Y. No closer CP avail. Tell E sorry from us, Robert.

  “Son of a bitch!” I said. Mother was going to have to cover it and it was going to take the rest of the night. On top of that, she’d be flying in the middle of a rainstorm with only the sketchiest information.

  Acknowledged and accepted for E Weekes at 2:48, I wrote.

  I rapped on her bedroom door. “Mother!” I called. Nothing. I opened the door and shouted her name. She continued snoring. “Flight for you, Major!”

  Without entirely waking, Mother lurched out of bed, wrapped her bathrobe around herself, and shuffled into the kitchen.

  “Did you say something?” she asked.

  I ran back through the messages for her. Ma shook her head in disgust. “I’m supposed to be at the construction site for the hotel in Billings at six! If I’m lucky, I’ll clear this in time to be a couple hours late.”

  Mother was fully awake now and copying the coordinates down. She spread out the large-format Montana topo map on the desk and began lining up a course. “Squeeze through the pass and sight from the church steeple in Bozeman. Roughly west-northwest.” She had a straightedge and compass out and was using a cardboard slide rule to determine flight times and powder expenditure. She stopped and gave me an irritated look.

  “Well, go get dressed!” she said.

  “I am dressed,” I said.

  “Put on your skysuit.”

  “You want me to fly it?” I asked, my voice rising an octave and a half.

  Mother didn’t even look up from her charts. “I need a navigator and a second pair of eyes. This is already a goat rodeo and it’s going to get worse.”

  2

  Spanish conquistadors as early as 1540 mention witnessing a Cherokee fertility ritual in which medicine women drew symbols with corn pollen and were hurled into the air “as if by the hand of God.” However, the hover sigil did not see widespread use until 1870, when Mary Grinning Fox substituted finely milled cornmeal for pollen and mixed in sand as a stabilizer. By redrawing the glyph while in midair, Fox learned to produce continuous thrust; by warping it, she could change speed and position, allowing for aerial maneuvers. After numerous crashes into Lake Ontario, Fox also designed the mechanical regulator to ensure uniform powder flow an
d rigging to secure her equipment tightly to the body.

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

  I SPRINTED UPSTAIRS TO my room. I’d flown high school classmates hundreds of times, but Ma had never taken me along on an emergency case like this.

  I put on long johns and a heavy, winter-weight skysuit—a high-necked set of wool coveralls with padding over the ribs and shoulders to protect against harness burn—two pairs of wool socks, boots, a knit cap, gloves, and my oilskin slicker. I stuck my leather helmet and goggles under my arm.

  Mother was already kitted out when I returned to the office. She was sending and receiving messages at a terrific rate.

  “I don’t like the smell of this,” Mother said. “I knew Evelyn Klein during the Disturbances. She’s a smokecarver—deadly serious woman. She has a couple of children, but I can’t see this as a prank.”

  “Whole family got sick, maybe?” I suggested.

  “Too sick to answer a follow-up message?” Mother answered. She shook her head.

  “It shouldn’t even be your call in the first place,” I said.

  “Well, we’re it for all of Montana right now. A tornado hit the mining camp outside Eureka, with at least forty injured. The State Office pulled the CPs from Helena, Missoula, Bozeman, and Butte to evacuate casualties and left us to cover everywhere else.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “They could have warned me.”

  “They’re still trying to scramble everyone. The problem for us is that we don’t know how many of the Kleins we’ll be flying. If it’s more than two, I’ll need you to carry the lighter ones.”

  “Okay,” I said, but my voice wavered again.

  “You’ll do fine,” Mother said. “I’ll take you as a passenger on the way there so that you’re fresh for the second leg. If you have to carry someone, we’ll put her in stasis. You’ll barely even notice her.”

  I wished I felt as confident as she sounded.

  We gathered equipment. I rolled up a Montana map and put it in a carry tube, adding a slide rule, trigonometric tables, and a pencil in case we needed to plot a new course. We each strapped a portable message board to our right forearm; these had tight, membranous covers over the sand that allowed just enough give for writing. They were small and balky, but good enough to send a couple words to each other or the State Office. In the mudroom, I collected my harness: a heavy leather vest with straps running over the shoulders and across at the waist, plus leg straps that fit around the upper thigh. Four heavy steel carabiners were mounted on the back to clip into a passenger’s harness, with four more carabiners on the front for securing a second passenger.

  We kept several powder bags filled for emergency calls. They looked like oversized pastry bags made of waxed canvas and filled with premixed corn powder and sand. I grabbed an extra-large forty-pound bag, plus a ten-pounder as a backup, and strapped them to my harness. Mother, who needed extra powder to haul me on the first leg of the trip, attached three bags to her harness. She was puffing under the weight of ninety pounds of powder by the time she clipped the last one on.

  On the pointy end of each bag, we attached a regulator—a small clockwork device the size of a child’s fist, which used a thumb lever and a series of baffles to ensure that the corn powder trickled out at a consistent rate while we were in the air. Last, I clipped the carabiners on the back of my harness into the rear of Mother’s and we staggered out of the house, back-to-back, into the driving rain.

  “Tell me when you’re ready,” Mother said.

  “Go!” I called.

  Mother thumbed her regulator open and, holding the tip like a pencil between her fingers, used the stream of powder that flowed out to trace a hover sigil in the air. As she drew, she heaved against the weight of her powder bags and me. Her sigil took and we floated up to ten feet.

  We immediately felt lighter. If you’ve never flown before—and I don’t mean in a hot air balloon or an aeroplane—if you’ve never hovered, then the only comparison to make is that of buoyancy in water, of flotation. You can saddle up on the ground with six hundred pounds of cargo, but once you push off into the air, it feels like almost nothing.

  “Everything in order?” Mother called over her shoulder to me.

  “Fine!” I answered.

  She opened her regulator wider and drew a fresh sigil. We rocketed straight up. It was all I could do to keep from whooping. Ma hadn’t carried me in years, not since I’d learned to fly myself.

  Every few seconds, Mother redrew the sigil, shaping it so that our ascent flattened and we accelerated in the horizontal plane as well. After a couple minutes, we’d reached ten thousand feet. Mother could estimate her altitude by intuition—the thickness of the air, the bite of the breeze on her cheek, the pressure on her eardrums.

  We traveled at two hundred miles per hour, following the Yellowstone River Valley as it wound westward. Below us, the flat, scrubby land gave way to hillier terrain and then to the Rocky Mountains themselves. Mother had flown the first part of our route hundreds of times, so I didn’t feel especially nervous about plowing into a mountain, which happened with frightening regularity to hoverers stupid enough to be out at night in bad weather. What I was feeling, however, were the seven biscuits, three bowls of stew, mug of cocoa, and ham sandwich I’d consumed during my night watch. That, combined with the persistent, irregular sway as I hung from Mother’s harness, was conspiring to churn my stomach.

  I tried breathing through my nose and closing my eyes, but that only made things worse. I had the sensation of running down a flight of stairs and missing the last step endlessly, stuck perpetually in the first two inches of a six-inch fall. My cheeks flushed hot. Rivulets of water streamed down my face and into my mouth.

  I turned my head and upchucked, managing simultaneously to get vomit down the neck of my rain slicker and spin us off course. Mother drew sigils furiously, trying to point us back in the right direction. If we missed Bozeman, it was going to be a very dark night on which to be lost. Mother leaned forward to fly more headfirst, which caused my harness to dig into my armpits till my fingers went numb. I tried to reposition myself.

  “Quit it!” Mother barked. Many a flier has been knocked off the level by a fidgety passenger—a poorly timed squirm followed by a long plunge.

  I resigned myself to holding as still as I could. But it was cold at our high altitude and the wind buffeted me fiercely, though not half so badly as it must have my mother. I tried to tense my body to avoid shivering, but I shook all the same. Every movement nudged us farther off course.

  After a miserable hour of flying, Mother broke through the cloud cover and descended over what we presumed to be Bozeman. We couldn’t see a damn thing. Ma began a series of gradually widening turns, searching for the city lights or the church steeple, which was lit at night with a handful of cold chemical flares, partially for the glory of God, but more practically so that hoverers would have a fixed navigation point. We needed twenty minutes before Mother spotted the steeple’s distant blue glow and took us to it.

  “Look sharp,” Mother called. “You’re navigating.”

  Mother was perfectly capable of keeping time and watching the compass herself but it never hurts to give an airsick passenger something to occupy his mind.

  “Come about to 284 degrees,” I called. She began a slow yawing turn, the sort of maneuver that looks as if it ought to be one of the first lessons a hoverer learns, but is fantastically difficult without setting your body spinning in a second plane of motion. When the needle hit 284 I yelled for a stop, though trying to read a compass to within one degree of accuracy was questionable even under the best of conditions. Mother leveled and adjusted until we were both satisfied, then pulled above the clouds to get us out of the rain.

  “Set your speed to two hundred miles per hour and we’ll fly for 395 seconds,” I said.

  Mother charged forward again. She flew crisply, but I was worried we might never find our destination. We
’d nearly missed an entire town—spotting a single house, based on rough coordinates from the State Office, in the dark, in the rain, would be almost impossible.

  As we raced through the darkness, I squinted at my wristwatch and compass in the starlight. A couple of times I instructed Mother to ease back a degree or two when we started to drift. When I called time, Mother put us into a turn to bleed off speed and dove beneath the clouds. We couldn’t see anything promising. Mother circled wider and lower. By the time we’d come down to eight hundred feet, we were losing hope that the folks who’d originated the call had bothered to light a signal for us.

  “I swear to God,” Mother said. “If these idiots didn’t mark a landing field . . .”

  “Do you smell smoke?” I asked.

  We blundered lower still. Ma caught sight of something burning with writhing, flickering green flashes.

  “Looks like a sheet of smokecarved insulation,” Mother said. “It burns that color for hours. But that’s an odd choice for a marker.”

  She flew us closer. The piece of insulation was pinned under a collapsed roof beam. We could make out embers hissing in the rain. The house had burned nearly to its foundation.

  “How does a smokecarver’s home burn down?” I asked. A good smokecarver could throw blankets of anoxic smoke over a burning building to smother the flames—there was no one you’d rather have at a fire. Unless she’d never made it out.