Ghosts of Columbia (75 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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THE GHOST BOOKS
The Ghosts of Columbia
(comprising
Of Tangible Ghosts and
The Ghost of the Revelator
)
Ghost of the White Nights
THE COREAN CHRONICLES
Legacies
Darknesses
Scepters
Alector’s Choice
THE SPELLSONG CYCLE
The Soprano Sorceress
The Spellsong War
Darksong Rising
The Shadow Sorceress
Shadowsinger
THE SAGA OF RECLUSE
The Magic of Recluce
The Towers of the Sunset
The Magic Engineer
The Order War
The Death of Chaos
Fall of Angels
The Chaos Balance
The White Order
Colors of Chaos
Magi’i of Cyador
Scion of Cyador
Wellspring of Chaos
Ordermaster
THE ECOLITAN MATTER
Empire & Ecolitan
(comprising
The Ecolitan Operation
and
The Ecologic Secession
)
Ecolitan Prime
(comprising
The Ecolitan Envoy
and
The Ecolitan Enigma
)
The Forever Hero
(comprising
Dawn for a Distant Earth,
The Silent Warrior,
and
In Endless Twilight
)
Timegods’ World
(comprising
The Timegod and
Timediver’s Dawn
)
The Green Progression
The Parafaith War
The Hammer of Darkness
Adiamante
Gravity Dreams
The Octagonal Raven
Archform: Beauty
The Ethos Effect
Flash
The Eternity Artifact
1
Of Tangible Ghosts
“Possibly Modesitt’s best book, it’s certainly highly recommended.”
—
Booklist
“A mystery with an other-worldly difference. Modesitt deftly works out what the political and social consequences might have been had ghosts actually existed. Recommended.”
—Jack McDevitt
“There is excitement and tantalizing near-familiarity on every page.
Of Tangible Ghosts
is a delightful read.”
—Alfred Coppel
The Ghost of the Revelator
“I found it easier to suspend disbelief in this tale, to concentrate on spies, politics, and the intricacies of Modesitt’s alternate history, even to enjoy it more in important ways. May you also.”
—
Analog
“Modesitt’s intriguing, flavorsome alternate-world yarn where ghosts are real and America doesn’t exist … Appealing characters, agreeably labyrinthine plotting, a fascinatingly detailed backdrop.”
—
Kirkus Reviews
The fundamental premise of the “ghost” books is simple and obvious enough: In the alternate reality in which the events in the book occur, ghosts are real and can be seen, as well as measured and verified by scientific instruments. As technology advances, of course, human beings being human beings, scientists are attempting to replicate the effect, to modify it, and even to undo it, as depicted in various sections of the books.
While the basic premise seems simple, it has also become painfully clear in the years since the first publication of
Of Tangible Ghosts
that all of the ramifications of the premise, which seemed so obvious to me, were not nearly so obvious to many readers, and I have received a wide range of inquiries about the alternate history behind the three books. Because of these inquiries, and at the suggestion of David Hartwell and Moshe Feder, I have written this elaboration of some of the underpinnings of the books. I am most certain that it will raise as many questions as it lays to rest, but it will at the least explain the structure and presumptions I used in constructing the world of Johan and Llysette.
In particular, the most common inquiry is a combination of question and complaint from “traditional” alternate history buffs, who are looking for the single “point of departure” that seems to define a great deal of alternate history fiction—if Lincoln or Kennedy had not been assassinated, if Babbage had had the funding to build and apply his full-scale difference engine, if Hitler had not chosen to invade Russia. These kinds of points of departure are always interesting to debate, but the problem of the puzzled individuals who have contacted me is that they cannot find such a point of departure. That is because there is no single point of departure. The differences between Johan Eschbach’s world and ours arise out of the existence of ghosts, and those differences begin as very minor—with some few exceptions—and slowly build as history unfolds. But why should this be?
History is a process of action and reaction, and it is in the reaction where ghosts have their greatest impact, because, while ghosts are real physical manifestations in Johan’s world, their ability to impact the physical world is minimal, but their impact on human beings is far from minimal. Even in our world, virtually all pretechnological and low technological societies have had varying degrees of belief in ghosts, particularly the ghosts of ancestors. Today, all our high technology can find no replicable and verifiable trace of ghosts, but millions of people still believe in them. In older myths and legends, ghosts often have a powerful role and an effect upon conduct. In the world of the ghost books, they still do.
History is not just based upon what happened, but upon what we believe and what we believe occurred. Until several centuries ago, the belief in ghosts was strong even in Western cultures. Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
is
not
a ghost story. It is a drama based on a revelation by a being who is as real to Hamlet as any other actor upon the stage, and Hamlet is moved—eventually—to act by his father’s ghost. In our own past history, and still in the world of Johan and Llysette, it is the reaction inspired by these ghosts that changes history.
Once science began to suggest in our world that ghosts did not have a physical reality, the strength of belief in ghosts began to wane, and there was a greater emphasis on the physical and verifiable. In Johan’s world, ghosts remain an influence, because they are indeed physical and verifiable.
Wars and massacres are fewer, not because humans in Johan’s world are better, but because, while you can hide the bodies, you cannot hide the ghosts—at least not until the late twentieth century. This reduces the ability of a ruler to murder large numbers of his subjects undetected and also retain their affection or their tolerance—because the ghosts are there all the time. It does not change the impacts of barbarians and raiders like Tamerlane, Genghis Khan, or many of the Vikings who wanted to plunder and create terror at times, rather than conquer and rule.
Ghosts are visible and often verbal reminders of death and tragedy, and they take years, if not longer, to fade from view. It becomes harder to escape unpleasant history. Thus, ghost formation affects the entire culture because it makes violence, whether created by war or crime, more obvious and harder to conceal. Successful murders and other forms of lethal skullduggery have to be far more indirect, or at least staged so that the victim cannot be in a position to know he or she is being murdered and by whom. Because the ghost is tied relatively closely to the physical place of death, it is far easier to discover certain types of spontaneous murder and far harder to conceal them.
There is also a greater sense of being watched. All of these factors lead to all cultures being far less direct than our Western cultures today and to institutionalizing deviousness, while overtly recognizing and praising directness and peacefulness. Conquest must be plotted more carefully, and bold strokes are less often successful. Even when they are, the trail of evidence is longer and more visible.
Another significant difference between Johan and Llysette’s world and ours is displayed indirectly, but never mentioned or explained. The cities are smaller, and the population of all countries tends to be lower than in our world. The reason, of course, lies in the ghosts and the means of their creation and manifestation. Ghosts are naturally created by the knowledgeable and violent death of an aware individual. As explained in the books, this is why there are few ghosts of children below a certain age. The full awareness of what is happening does not exist. This is also the reason for a lower population growth, particularly in more economically and technically advanced countries in the period prior to roughly 1900.
Statistics are rough and only general, but surveys of medical records indicate that prior to the twentieth century, the leading cause of death among women, accounting for perhaps as much as 60 percent of all female deaths, was childbirth. Childbirth is, according to all the women in my life and from my own personal observations, both an exceedingly painful process, and one in which the woman would be particularly self-aware prior to the development of anesthetics. Therefore, death in and from childbirth would result in large numbers of ghosts of wives. Since the majority of births took place at home in this historical period, the high mortality rate would result in a fair number of dwellings being haunted by former wives. My own experiences at having been married more than once suggested most strongly that second and/or third wives would be rather reluctant to move into a house haunted by a former inhabitant, at least until the ghost faded enough to appear infrequently. Since very few individuals could afford to build or move to new houses, and since most houses were small enough that it was impossible to close off the haunted chambers, this ghosting effect reduced the birth rate. It also led to a great deal more domestic strife for those men unwise enough to marry too soon after the death of their first wife.
There are also a number of specific historical references about which many have asked for greater explanation than occurs in the book, and I will briefly address some of those.
The failure of the Plymouth Colony is mentioned but never fully explained. Recent historical studies suggest that the captain of the
Mayflower
was paid to land those troublesome Puritans in New England—or at least somewhere a goodly distance from the English colonies in the more southern areas of North America. However, excerpts from diaries of the colonists indicate that the beaches of Cape Cod were littered with bones—bones from those Indians who died in the deadly measles epidemic roughly a year before, an epidemic beginning with exposures from the colonists in Virginia. Measles in an unprotected Native American (or Hawaiian) population is deadly, with a fever so high that any source of coolness is welcome, including the cold waters off Massachusetts. When the Indians died, their ghosts remained. The ghosts made Massachusetts far less hospitable, and they also made the remaining Indians far less helpful toward the settlers. In our world, the colony barely survived. In Johan and Llysette’s, it did not, and in time, the Dutch settlers in the Hudson Valley moved eastward and northward, making the northeast New Bruges, rather than New England.
There was a revolution in which Columbia wrested independence from England, because even the Dutch of New Bruges distrusted the British, and the British still wanted to exploit their new world colonies. The Dutch Columbians were better generals, as were the French of the north, and when the smoke cleared, there was no remaining British presence in North America. The Columbians took Newfoundland and the Maritimes, while Quebec took the remainder of eastern Canada.
The aftermath of the revolution was different, however, since George Washington died of pneumonia before taking office as president, an illness to which he was more susceptible because of an earlier bout with influenza in the last days of the Continental Congress. Because of the changes in the slave trade discussed below, Alexander Hamilton never appeared in Columbia, and Washington had to take a more active—and less effective—role in the debates in the Continental Congress over the emerging nation’s financial structure and policies.
There was a President Adams, but from Philadelphia, and ineffectual. He was followed by Thomas Jefferson, who was adamantly opposed to a strong executive. Since the Columbian culture was always more conducive to a less direct exercise of power, Columbia effectively and practically adopted a more parliamentary form of representative democracy with a largely ceremonial presidency.
Slavery existed in Columbia, as it did in our world, but it never took hold as deeply for several reasons. First, the deplorable conditions of the slave ships were less miserable because, when the first slavers arrived off the coasts of Virginia and the Carolinas, their decks crowded with ghosts, planters tended to worry about the health of the slaves. That reduced prices, and in turn encouraged the slavers not to crowd their vessels so much, which reduced the mortality. The numbers of slaves imported were less, and they were better treated in most cases, because the most violent forms of mistreatment resulted in ghosts, and human beings always are more cruel when they do not have to confront the results of their cruelty.
With the slightly later development of the north industrially and a population in the northern states of Columbia more spread out, including the eastern sections of what is Canada in our world, and the French-dominated Quebec, as well as British interests in southern cotton, there was less pressure toward immediate abolition of slavery and more for an indirect political solution. That pressure intensified when a slave ship—the
Sally Wright
—ported in Charleston with so many ghosts that they could not be accurately counted—and no living slaves. While this was an exception, the
Wright
incident was reported all across Columbia and the world, and the reaction was outrage. This outrage was compounded by Speaker Calhoun’s failure to deal immediately with the incident, and the popular dissatisfaction resulted in such a substantial loss of seats in the House that Calhoun’s position as Speaker was jeopardized. He engineered the so-called Calhoun compromise that limited the number of slaves that could be imported and established a significant tariff on all numbers above that. Although the tariff was often evaded, it did reduce slave trading. The facet of the compromise that had a greater long-run effect were the provisions that required “humane treatment” of slaves. Again, although these provisions were initially widely ignored, abolitionists began to infiltrate the South and document abuses. After a number of Pennsylvania Quakers were murdered in 1859 while investigating slave conditions in Alabama, their ghosts identified the son of one of the largest planters in the state as the murderer. Senator Lincoln used the murders as a vehicle to national prominence and, by focusing on
the need to stop slave abuse, avoided a civil war over the slavery issue. Eventually, nearly ten years later, before his later assassination by Booth, he was able to push through the amendments to the national charter that led to the phasing out of slavery in Columbia, otherwise called the Codification of the Rights of Man.
With a lower population in Columbia, pressure for westward and southern settlement was lower and later. Likewise, the ghost “pressure” in Mexico resulted in a slightly less violent conquest and settlement and a somewhat stronger central government, allowing more effective Mexican consolidation in Tejas and the southwest. Not only did Santa Anna take the Alamo, but he crushed all opposition in Tejas because settlers from Columbia were fewer and less organized than in our world. In the disastrous Mexican War, Columbia sent a small force into northern Tejas, but the force was annihilated by Santa Anna, with the aid of some very effective French artillery. The Mexicans early on ceded their claims to West Kansas (Colorado east of the continental divide) and in northern California to Columbia in order to strengthen their hold on what they thought most valuable. Taking advantage of the stronger Mexican position in the southwest, Brigham Young brought his followers to the Great Basin area of the west, obtained a treaty and firm borders with the Mexican government to the south and west, and established the sovereign nation of Deseret.
Despite being faced with a growing threat of Quebec in the north and increasing French influence in the southwest, Columbia attempted several undersupplied, underfunded—and unsuccessful—invasions of Deseret in the Saint Wars of 1860 and 1862. When those failed, Columbia adopted a policy of containment, establishing military posts and settlements all along the eastern and northern borders of Deseret and then sending troops and money to seize western Canada before Quebec could.

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