Ghosts of Columbia (51 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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O
utside of the gray steamers that appeared in and around Vanderbraak Centre, especially in the vicinity of Deacon’s Lane, the next complete week after Llysette’s appearance was surprisingly quiet. Both Llysette and I actually managed to catch up on missed teaching and lessons, at least mostly.
No strangers appeared at our door with odd boxes, and the newspapers were temporarily silent on the subject of either Llysette or me.
That lasted until I picked up Llysette the following Friday, a clear late afternoon so cold that her breath was a white fog as she slipped into the Stanley in the twilight.
“I’m glad you don’t have any rehearsals tonight,” I said casually, easing the steamer out and around the square past McArdles’ and toward the Wijk River bridge. “It’s been a long week. Anything interesting happen?”
“Doktor Perkins—he sent me an arrangement, a special arrangement, to see if it would I like.” Llysette’s words ran together, the way she did when she got excited. “And he writes that he looks forward to playing for me, and would I send the arrangements I would prefer… .”
“Doktor Perkins?” I pulled up to wait for a hauler to cross the bridge.
“The composer—he is the one who put Vondel to music. But his art songs, they are so much better. I sang the one.”
I frowned, trying to recall her recital. For only a few weeks ago, it seemed even longer.
“Fragments of a Conversation
?”
“
Exactement!
”
“He’s a Saint?”
“For me, he wishes to play…”
“He should. Who could he play for that would be any better?” I had to smile.
Sometimes she still didn’t realize just how good she’d gotten.
“You are kind.”
“This time, I’m just accurate.” The Stanley slid a bit, and I eased the steamer into four-wheel as we headed up Deacon’s Lane in the dimming light.
Llysette swallowed. “And my concert, they wish to record. There is … an agreement… .”
“A contract?”
“I have it here.” She held up what might have been an envelope, but I was concentrating on driving.
“I’ll look at it when we get home.” I paused as it hit me. “A recording contract? That’s wonderful! Maybe you won’t have to teach Dutch dunderheads for the rest of your life.”
“
Mon cher
…sweet you are, but even I, I know that people, they must buy the recordings, and who will buy the songs of an aging French singer?”
“About half the world, once they hear you. And you’re certainly not aging. I can attest to that.”
Llysette laughed. “You are
impossible
.”
I probably was, in more ways than one, but I had this feeling. Llysette had needed only one break, and she’d gotten it. With her determination, she wouldn’t fail—not unless someone stopped her. And that led to the other feeling—the one that said she needed protecting more than I did.
Once we were inside, and after I’d stoked up the woodstove against the chill created by the cold and the rising wind, I did read the contract while Llysette sat in front of the stove and watched.
“It looks all right to me. Would you mind if I called Eric? I think they have someone in his law firm that does this sort of thing.”
“He would do that for me?”
“I am sure he would be more than happy. More than happy, but I probably can’t get an answer until late Monday or Tuesday.”
While Llysette changed into more casual—and warmer—trousers and a sweater, I went into the kitchen and started on dinner: a ham angel-hair pasta with broccoli that wouldn’t take too long, with biscuits and a small green salad. First came the water, since that took the longest to heat, and then I went to work on the sauce, digging out the butter, a garlic clove, the leftover ham and the horribly expensive broccoli crown. Fresh vegetables were still costly in the winter in New Bruges. Then I got out the milk and the dash of flour I needed.
I had the sauce ready, the biscuits ready to go into the oven, just about the time the kettle was boiling. So in went the angel-hair. I set the kitchen table, but the pasta wasn’t ready—still far too al dente.
Because watched pasta never boiled, not for me, I slipped out of the kitchen and into the study for a moment, taking the mail from my jacket pocket and setting it on the desk.
I looked at the mirror on the wall, with the bosses that opened the concealed storage area that contained not only the old artificial lodestone but also the deghosting equipment and, now, the equipment case from Jerome.
Strange … a year before I hadn’t even known about the hidden area, not until Carolynne—then known only as the silent and enduring family ghost—had pointed it out to me and begun to murmur Shakespeare and art songs. Now, from within me, sometimes I could almost hear the songs in my ears, not just in my thoughts. Llysette, I knew, heard more than I did.
When I’d attempted to develop a copy of Carolynne, assuming that’s what you
could call a difference engine—generated replication of a ghost of a singer who’d been murdered more than a century earlier, I’d failed until I’d used the scanner to replicate her actual being. Did that mean there had been two Carolynnes until each joined with me and with Llysette? Did that mean technology would someday be able to clone bodies and each body’s soul? I wasn’t sure. The metaphysics was beyond me, and I didn’t want to think about it all that closely.
I shook my head, eyes refocusing on the mirror and the equipment it hid. The Colt-Luger from Jerome wouldn’t help at all, but some of the other items might, such as the detector-transparent rope. I had my own plastique, but there was no point in turning down some from Minister Jerome, and the miniature homing beacons might come in useful somehow. I’d have to consider what to take to Deseret—and how I could conceal it, although most of the equipment was radar- and scan-transparent.
My hand brushed the difference engine as I turned. Was it warm? I frowned, checking the desk. I hadn’t recalled the stack of papers beside the console being quite so neat.
After the screen cleared, I ran a check, but there was no sign that the machine had been used since the night before. I shook my head. If strange agents with deghosters didn’t get me, paranoia would. I switched off the SII machine.
With the hiss and smell of pasta water that had boiled over, I hurried back to the kitchen. I still hadn’t managed handling both cooking and worrying simultaneously, and I doubted that I ever would, all Llysette’s comments about my being a chef to the contrary.
A
fter another week of chill and occasional snow flurries, the temperature had climbed again until it was nearly springlike, although the scent of damp fallen leaves permeated the entire campus. My nose itched. The clock had struck four o’clock as I’d left Smythe after my last class for the week, and the wind—suddenly colder—gusted around me as I walked downhill toward the post centre.
Most of the parking spaces on the square were taken, and the small car lot beside McArdles’ was filled with the steamers of those who wished to do no grocery shopping on the weekend.
“Good afternoon, Constable.” I nodded to Gerhardt as I passed the Watch station and turned up the walk.
“Afternoon, Doktor. A good one.” He looked to the fast-moving clouds coming in from the north. “So far, but the clouds look nasty.”
“They do. Maybe I’ll get home before they get here.”
The post centre lobby was deserted, and my dress boots echoed hollowly on the stone floor. In our box were three envelopes, and one was manila. The manila envelope was exactly the same as the earlier ones postmarked in the Federal District. From Jerome, I suspected more and more. I shook my head and put it and the two bills into my inside jacket pocket.
On the way back to my office from the post centre, I took a detour. I walked by the Science building, noting that the blackened windows remained where Gerald’s concealed laboratory had been. I’d seen the equipment lugged out and even toured the empty spaces that had been refurbished for a new difference engine center for the students.
I’d been so concerned about de-ghosting, but what about creating psychic proliferation, as Minister Jerome had put it? Was there a military application to creating ghosts?
I snorted. There had to be. The military could pervert anything. Then it struck me, and I swallowed. He’d mentioned it. I never had to anyone in the Spazi—ever.
The sky darkened, and I looked up as stiff gusts of cold wind buffeted me. The clouds had swept in and covered all but the lowest part of the western horizon.
Branston-Hay’s equipment hadn’t been destroyed, no matter what Speaker Hartpence had said. It was doubtless somewhere else, with some other Babbage type attempting to refine the selective de-ghosting procedure already adopted and implemented for Ferdinand’s crack commando troops.
Pellets of ice bounced off the stone walk as I headed back to the Natural Resources building.
I also wondered who or what branch of government might be working on Gerald’s project to create ghosts. So far as I knew, I’d been the only one to actually implement that feature of his research, but if Bruce and I could, it certainly wouldn’t be a problem for any number of researchers, assuming anyone had the material … and that was the question. I’d erased the files from Gerald’s difference engine, and his backup disks had supposedly gone up in flames with his house. Had anyone else seen his material—all of it? I just didn’t know, and wouldn’t if or until strange ghosts started popping up places where they shouldn’t be.
My own efforts had indicated that matters didn’t usually turn out as planned, and while Llysette and I had survived, we certainly weren’t the same people we’d once been. Still, those considerations wouldn’t stop others, and both Harlaan and Jerome were hinting that they hadn’t.
Hunched up in my overcoat, I trudged through the intermittent ice pellets and
wind gusts to the Natural Resources building. Gilda’s desk was empty, and David’s door was shut and locked—not surprising on a Friday afternoon.
I sat at my desk and extracted the manila envelope that held a single clipping:
GREAT SALT LAKE CITY, DESERET (WNS). Denying reports that New France had sent a strongly worded note protesting the planned diversion of more than 10 percent of the annual flow of the Colorado River, First Counselor Cannon reemphasized the close and continuing ties between Deseret and New France. “Allies in the past, and allies in the future … there is no room and no reason for discord in a world haunted by the spectre of Austro-Hungarian imperialism.”
Cannon refused to discuss specifics of the so-called Green River revitalization program, only saying that the amount of water involved was “vastly overstated”… .
Usually reliable sources indicated that the First Counselor was delicately suggesting that Deseret needed calm relations with both New France and Columbia.
In a related development, scientists in the water reuse program at the University of Deseret announced an improved metering technology for drip irrigation systems.
Water, diplomacy, and strained relations between Deseret and New France. The clipping seemed to be something that Deputy Minister Habicht would be more interested in than Jerome or Oakes—but the envelope had come from Jerome’s operation, and that still bothered me.
Then, everything about Llysette’s scheduled performance in Deseret was beginning to bother me, and we still had another three weeks before we got on the dirigible for Great Salt Lake City.
Still … there wasn’t too much I could do that I hadn’t already done, and I had papers to grade. There were always papers to grade. Papers, tests, and quizzes. I almost didn’t know which stack to tackle, but I settled on the quizzes from Environmental Politics 2B. That was because I could make a dent in that stack before I was due to pick up Llysette at five o’clock.
By then, we’d be the last on campus. We usually were.
I actually got through the quizzes, but I didn’t have time to record the scores in my grade book, so both grade book and quizzes went into my case, as did the other ungraded materials. I had to lock the building and turn out the lights, and that meant it was slightly after five before I pulled the Stanley up to the Music and Theatre building.
Even so, I waited almost ten minutes before Llysette arrived, preceded a few minutes earlier by the dejected form of a student I did not know. I never knew who the first-year students were until close to Christmas.
“That was a discouraged student,” I observed as Llysette hoisted herself and two large bags full of papers and books into the front seat.
“Discouraged she is? Ha! I should be the one discouraged.”
“Oh?” I waited as she settled herself.
“To sing, that she wishes with but two hours of practice a week.”
“Don’t they know better?”
“They think they are busy, too busy to practice, yet to learn music, to major … they say that they desire.” Llysette snorted. “So few understand.”
“Most young people have to learn about work,” I temporized.
“Work …
non
… I have talked of school too much… .” She shook her head. “So much warmer it was this morning, but now… .”
“It didn’t last long,” I observed. “All of a day and a half. It feels like it’s going to get colder, a lot colder, and soon.”
Llysette shivered at the thought, even while ice pellets resumed their pinging on the Stanley’s thermal finish and glass. The square was half-deserted by the time I drove the steamer past McArdles’ and the post centre. Truly amazing how a good ice storm emptied the square so quickly.
After we crossed the river bridge, I glanced at Llysette. “I think we ought to ask Bruce up for dinner.”
“
Pourquoi?
You have need of his services?”
“No. I don’t need anything. Not that I know of. But I’ve always contacted him when I wanted something, and that’s really not fair or right. Besides, he’s got a good sense of humor, and he likes music.” I eased the Stanley up Deacon’s Lane, taking a little extra care in the heavy gusting winds.
I let Llysette out by the door, then opened the car barn and put the Stanley away. I definitely didn’t want to expose the thermal finish to the ravages of an ice storm.
While Llysette changed, I went into the study and lifted the wireset. There was a good chance Bruce was still at the shop. He always was.
“LBI Difference Designers.”
“Bruce, this is Johan.”
“Don’t tell me.”
“I’m not telling you anything. Llysette and I wondered if you’d like to come up for dinner on next Friday or Saturday. Not tomorrow… . I wouldn’t drop an invitation on you with no notice.”
“It must be worse than I’d thought.” His voice was dry.
Had I been that inconsiderate? Probably. “It’s not bad at all. I don’t need anything. No one’s attacked anyone. No strange messages.”
“That might be worse.”
“Bruce, it’s a dinner invitation. Good food, and I hope good company.”
“Saturday would be better.”
“Good. We’ll see you at seven a week from tomorrow.” After I hung up the wireset, I glanced around the study. I swore I could feel heat from the SII machine, but when I checked it, it was cool, although not so cool as I would have thought.
With a sigh, I fired it up and checked the accesses. Nothing. Then, on an off thought, I checked the backups. One was something I hadn’t recalled accessing in a while, some notes on the wetlands course. In a moment of whimsy, I’d entitled the notes: “Politics.”
Maybe I’d called it up, but I didn’t recall it. Besides, how could anyone even get into the house without Jerome’s people noticing? And they wouldn’t be interested in ecology notes.
I shook my head. Paranoia? Or was Jerome playing a deeper game? Probably, but what, and what could I do about it at the moment?
With a snort, I walked back to the kitchen, wondering what I would fix for dinner. I hadn’t really given it the faintest thought.

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