Ghosts of Columbia (18 page)

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Authors: L.E. Modesitt Jr.

Tags: #Science Fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Alternate History, #United States, #Literature & Fiction

BOOK: Ghosts of Columbia
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“It seemed like a good idea.” I shrugged.
“Was it?”
“I suppose so. It appears I did not have much choice, as things turned out.”
The heat from the stove was drying my suit—thoughtless of me not to have brought a waterproof, or an umbrella, English as that might have been.
“We always have choices, even if none of them are pleasant.” Mother smiled.
“You are so cheerful about it.”
“Johan, you survived the Spazi. I’m certain you could survive a presidential dinner. How is your lady friend, the singer?”
“Llysette? She’s fine. She gave a concert two weeks ago. Unfortunately, the piano professor was murdered—”
“You wrote me about that. Dreadful thing to happen, especially right before she was going to perform.”
“She didn’t find out until after the recital.”
“You see … even terrible occurrences have bright sides.”
I shook my head. “The professor’s ghost did hang around for a while.”
“That happens. Poor soul.”
“I suppose so. Aren’t all ghosts?” I paused. “Speaking of ghosts, who was Carolynne? Really, I mean. Besides a singer who got murdered?”
Mother sat in the heavy rocker, the wide needles in her time-gnarled hands, the yarn still in response to my question. Finally she lifted the needles again. “You needn’t bother with her. She must be gone by now. It was a long time ago.”
“She’s still there. I can see her on the veranda some nights. She quotes obscure sections of Shakespeare and some of the Shakespearean operas.”
Mother kept looking at the red glow behind the mica glass of the stove. I waited, seemingly forever. “I told your father that reading Shakespeare, especially the plays she had performed, was only going to make her linger.”
“I thought she was a singer.”
“In those days, college teachers had to do more. She was a singer—the first real one at the college, according to your father. Sometimes she talked to him. He said she was stabbed to death, but she never talked about it to me. I don’t know as she really said much except those same quotes from Shakespeare, but your father said the quotes made a sort of sense. That’s why he read Shakespeare back.”
“That means she was stabbed at the house.”
“She was supposed to have been the lover of the deacon who built the house. His wife had stayed in Virginia, but she—the wife—finally decided to come to New Bruges. She didn’t bother to tell her husband. I think she suspected, but she stabbed Carolynne when she found her asleep beside her husband late one afternoon.”
I waited for a time, and the needles clicked faintly against each other and the yarn in the ball dwindled slowly as the afghan grew. Finally I ventured a statement. “That had to have been more than a century ago.”
“I thought she would fade.”
“I think she’s as strong as ever.”
“Your father’s meddling, I dare say. Told him no good would come of that.”
“She seems so sad.”
“Most ghosts who linger do, son.” Her tone turned wry, and the needles continued to click. “So do most people who linger.”
“I suppose so.”
“Here’s the chocolate!” announced Anna, bustling in with a huge tray heaped with cakes, cookies, biscuits, and an imposing pot of chocolate.
I slipped up one side of the drop-leaf table for her, then poured out the three cups and served them. Anna took the other straight-backed armchair.
“Cake?” I asked Mother.
“Just a plain one.”
I turned to Anna.
“I’ll have a pair of the oatmeal cookies.”
After serving them, I heaped a sampling of all the baked goods on my plate—about the only lunch and supper I was probably going to get, and far better than the lukewarm fare on the trains.
“We don’t see you enough,” offered Anna after a silence during which we had all eaten and sipped.
“I try, but about half the time when I’m free, you two are off to visit someone else.”
“That’s better than sitting around and watching each other grow old.”
“This is the first time I’ve seen both of you sitting in months.”
“We’re resting up. Tonight we’re going to the Playhouse performance of
Your Town.”
I frowned, not having ever cared for the Pound satire on
Our Town
. Then again, Pound was just another of the thirties crazies who’d never discovered what they had rebelled against.
Your Town
was the only play he wrote, if I recalled it right, and it flopped in Philadelphia just before Pound moved to Vienna. He’d finally ended up writing propaganda scripts for Ferdinand—all justifying the unification of Europe under the Hapsburgs.
“I need to arrange for a cab,” I finally said.
“So soon?” asked Anna.
“I have to meet with an electronics supplier in the morning.”
“What does electronics have to do with your teaching?” asked Mother.
“It’s equipment for my difference engine.”
“Better spend more time with your singer than the machine. Machines don’t exactly love you back,” said Anna.
“No. But they make writing articles and books much easier.”
Mother shook her head. “Just be careful, Johan. These are dangerous times.”
Anna gave her sister a puzzled look, and then glanced at me. “Sometimes you two leave everyone else out of the conversation.”
“I have to wire a cab.” I made my way back to the front parlor and used the wireset to arrange for Schenectady Electrocab to pick me up at six.
“Is it set?” asked Mother when I returned. She had set aside the piece of knitting she had apparently completed and was beginning another section with the same colors.
“Six o’clock.” I poured another cup of chocolate and helped myself to two more oatmeal cookies, promising myself that I’d step up my exercise the next day.
“You never did say much about your singer,” suggested Anna. “That murder business must have upset her.”
My mother grinned and kept knitting.
“We were all somewhat upset—especially the music department. It’s not pleasant to have the ghost of a murdered woman drifting through the halls. Luckily, she didn’t linger too long.”
“Did the watch ever find the murderer?”
“Not so far. I think they suspect about half the university.” I was beginning to feel sleepy, with the fullness in my stomach and the warmth of the second cup of chocolate, and I yawned.
“You’re not getting enough sleep.”
“Too much traveling.”
“Well, I say it’s a shame,” offered Anna. “Might I have some more chocolate?”
I refilled her cup. “It certainly is.”
“Universities are almost as bad as government.”
“It’s hard to tell the difference.” I stifled a yawn, and munched another oatmeal
cookie. “Except universities don’t have to be petty and are, while almost no one in government means to be petty, but the results almost always are.”
“He’s still cynical,” Anna said after lifting her cup for a refill.
I understood why her chocolate pot was so large.
“He’s still alive,” added Mother.
What could I add to that? Mother had been the practical one, my father the dreamer, and I probably had gotten the worst of each trait.
After arriving right at six, the cab made it through the rain and back to the station by six-thirty. There I joined a small queue of dampened souls at the ticket window and purchased my twenty-one-dollar fare to Lebanon.
The seven-fifteen local back to Lebanon whined its way out of New Ostend into western New Bruges and into the hills that comprised the southern Grunbergs. As the slow train wound north and east through the continuing rain, I sat on a hard coach bench and tried to think it all through.
I’m not exactly a political genius when it comes to unraveling the intrigues of the Federal District, but one thing seemed clear enough. A lot of defense projects in Babbage centers were ostensibly out to destroy the ghosts and the basis of ghosts in our world. On the surface, it seemed plausible. Why not destroy ghosts? You know, put them out of their misery. Save them from lingering eternally and poisoning the present with their haunting gloom.
Was that bad? I thought so.
Wasn’t it just possible that the slow progress of conquest was due in part to the inability of soldiers to accept ghosts on a massive basis? Supposedly the horrors of Hastings almost undid the armies of William the Unfortunate, so much so that it was three generations before his heir fully grasped even England.
Firearms had helped dispel that ghostly influence, especially for those armies with sharpshooters, like the assassin regiments of Ferdinand VI. But sometimes a good general can use horrors, as the New French general Santa Anna did at the Alamo. He was really a Mexican then, but that’s not what the New French histories state. On balance, it seemed as though modern technology and medicine were slowly destroying ghosts, except in warfare, which is barbarous by nature.
But all the ghost-related projects were being fired and/or having difficulty—and that went for projects in Europe as well as in Columbia. Except there was something wrong with my logic, and I couldn’t put my finger on it.
I leaned back in the hard seat of the local and tried to fall asleep in the dim light, with the
click, clickedy
, click of the rails in one ear and the snoring of the heavyset woman two seats back in the other.
In the end, I neither slept nor thought, but sat there in a semidaze until I reached Lebanon.
In the station parking lot, the dowager-sleek lines of the Stanley waited for me, half concealed in the mist created by the cold rain that had fallen on warmer pavement.
Even after two days the Stanley lit off easily, and I drove eastward through the darkness, alert for moose. The big animals had been making a comeback, and any collision between one and a steamer would favor the moose.
The rain had been warm enough that it had not formed ice on the roads, and steady enough that few were out, even on a late Friday evening.
The only real signs of life were at the Dutch Reformed Church in Alexandria, where a handful of hardy souls were leaving a lecture on “The Growth and Heritage of the Leisure Class” by some doktor. At least, that’s what I thought the raindamped poster stated. A leisure class of Dutch heritage? I almost laughed.
Marie, bless her Dutch soul, had not only left on the light, but had left a small beef pie in the refrigerator. I wolfed down all of it cold, even before I carried my garment bag up to the bedroom.
I knew I couldn’t sleep until I rechecked Branston-Hay’s files, the ones I had pirated, but I did change into dry exercise sweats before I returned to the study to fire up the difference engine.
Carolynne hovered by the desk.
I bowed to her. “Good evening, Carolynne.”
“Good evening, sweet prince.”
“My mother was surprised that you were still around.”
“No more but so?”
“Were you in love with my father?” I asked, hoping her words, twisted as they might be, would prove illuminating.
“Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.”
“My father, unkind?”
“O, help him, sweet heavens!”
I tried not to shake my head. “Why do you disappear so much?”
“To have seen what I have seen, to see what I see. Thy madness be paid by weight ‘til our scale turn the beam and’til our brief candle weighs out.”
I pursed my lips. What did she mean, if anything? “Brief candle weighs out?”
“The more seen I, the less to see.”
Was that it? The more visible a ghost, the shorter its lingering. “But where do you go?”
“Nature is fine in love, and where’tis fine it sends some precious instance of itself.”
I shook my head. “What do you do? Being a ghost has to be boring.”
“There’s rue for you, and here’s some for me. Fennel and kennel and the old bitch went mad.” She gave me a smile, not exactly one of innocence. “Impatience does become a dog that’s mad. Yet your father left me some rare and precious effects, such as reading …”
Ghosts committing suicide? That was what Ophelia’s lines were about, but where had the other lines come from and what did they mean? Reading? Did she read when she was invisible?
“You like company?”
“Wishers were ever fools. All’s but naught.”
Since she was talking, more than we had since I was a small boy, I asked another question. “Some people talk about ghosts taking over people’s bodies. Could that happen?”
“The grave’s a fine and crowded place, and none but do there embrace.” Carolynne laughed. “Mad thou art to say it, but not without ambition.”

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