Solaris Rising 2 (19 page)

“He’s right,” Hsia said. “Four references to séances and a few mentions of ghosts don’t mean anything. I can show you more than that in
Arabian Nights
.”

“That’s a story,” Wolfson said.

“So’s the Bible,” Hsia said.

“Some would argue –”

“All right.” Kimber shook her head. She wasn’t going to get anything from them, and they didn’t see it as a problem. Or, at least, as a problem that they had to think about yet.

Either she made decisions on her own that would have an impact on the entire scholarly world, or she had to acquiesce to an academic timeline.

She was an academic, after all. She acquiesced.

“If we call for more study,” she said, “who does it?”

“I think we set up an international committee with quite a few experts,” Wolfson said. “Let’s put out the call, bring in people from other disciplines, see what the historical record produces, see if anyone can show harm that a belief in ghosts engenders, and go from there.”

Brenner and McKinty nodded. Hsia, for once, looked a bit shocked. “That’ll take years.”

“I think that’s the point,” Kimber said. Her frustration level had gone up, something she hadn’t thought possible.

There must have been some kind of change on her face, because McKinty patted her hand.

“Kimber,” he said gently, “what you’re missing is this: if the changes have already occurred, I have no idea how they could get worse.”

Maybe this was where they needed Ambra.
She
would have no trouble imagining how things would get worse. She would probably have some this-is-the-end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it scenario that would stop everyone in their tracks.

Of course, no one would believe the scenario because Ambra came up with it. Which simply echoed Kimber’s experience with this topic so far.

“I don’t have a dog in this hunt,” Brenner said, using a phrase Kimber hadn’t heard since her grandmother died. “I don’t care if your programs continue or not, but here’s what I think, Dr. Lawson. We’re discussing a what-if that could take away your life’s work. It would definitely take away Dr. McKinty’s life’s work. Don’t we owe it to both of you and everyone else who works in Time Travel and Living History to be absolutely certain of two things – one: that our methods actually cause ghosts to appear in the past, and two: that those ghosts actually cause harm?”

“Ghosts have an impact,” Hsia said. “The
past
has an impact on the present. Don’t we owe it to history to preserve it?”

“Do we really know what history is?” Wolfson asked. “Nothing is certain. If we look at chaos theory –”

“If we look at all theories, we’ll be here all day.” Kimber couldn’t quite keep the annoyance out of her voice. She had thought these people would help her.

She should have known better.

“‘All day’ is what we owe the past,” Hsia said in a prim little voice.

Kimber hadn’t thought there could be someone on the planet more annoying than Ambra, but Hsia had proven that theory wrong in less than two hours.

And that alone made Kimber want to finish this meeting. She turned to Hsia.

“I think you’re right,” Kimber said to her. “We owe the past a great deal. Perhaps you can set up this international committee? It will take a grant or two to establish, and someone – perhaps Dr. McKinty here – will need to set up the research guidelines, but I think it’s necessary.”

“What about you?” Hsia asked, her eyes bright. She probably saw the forward momentum of her entire career in this one assignment. “This is your idea, after all.”

Kimber nodded. “It is, and I’d be happy to sit on the committee if you need me. Otherwise, I’d prefer to let someone else take point on this. I’m almost six months behind on my research, and I’d like to finish before the year’s out.”

Everyone else chimed in about the state of their own research, and Kimber tuned out.

She had done what she could, hadn’t she? After all, did she owe history a debt? Was history an entity that actually could be owed a debt? Or was it simply a construct that many people refused to believe in?

Like ghosts.

5.

“I
THINK THIS
is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”

John F. Kennedy

Remarks at a dinner honoring

Nobel Prize winners of the Western Hemisphere

April 29, 1962

K
IMBER NEVER SPOKE
the word “séance” again, but she did think it, and in the most unlikely place. Or perhaps it was too likely.

For she was in the White House dining room designed by Thomas Jefferson, with its circular shelves that turned with the touch of a spring. The shelves really worked the way the history books said they would: covered dishes, filled with the finest food, prepared under the supervision of steward Etienne Lemaire, hid in each cabinet, so that the notoriously private Jefferson could dine alone.

In his own time, Jefferson’s public meals had been famous, written up in every single journal, and by many guests – particularly female guests, who had no idea that the Third President of the United States had a live-in lover who was also his slave. The entire country thought him an eligible bachelor.

Time travel, Living History, whatever anyone wanted to call it, had proven that Jefferson and Sally Hemings had indeed been intimate, and that Hemings did indeed look like her white half-sister, Jefferson’s late wife, Martha.

But those things hadn’t interested Kimber, at least not when she had made her grant proposal. She wanted to recreate the meals, the recipes, write about the grand conversations, once thought lost to time.

And she also wanted to know if Jefferson truly did dine alone, like John F. Kennedy, the 35
^th
President of the United States, used to imagine.

Kimber had planned this trip for a long, long time. She’d researched the schedule, looked at guest diaries, researched the weather, and figured if Jefferson would ever dine alone it would be on this night. So she went back, to see not just the dining room, but the meal itself, and what he read while eating – if he read anything.

Instead, she found herself beside his chair, looking at one of the handsomest men to ever sit in the White House – red-headed, freckled, with a friendly face and lively blue eyes, more than six feet tall, and without an ounce of fat on a frame that was “straight as a gun barrel” (as Edmund Bacon once described him).

The table, like the shelves, was circular and, at this moment, littered with almonds and cut apples, an empty claret glass to one side, and some warm tea steaming near an open book.

The candles in the chandelier burned low, so another candle sat near the book itself, illuminating the text.

But Jefferson wasn’t looking at the book. He was staring at the other side of the table as if he saw people. His face had paled and his lips were parted. He said nothing.

Kimber followed his gaze, and saw half a dozen Jeffersonian scholars, her colleagues and rivals, all staring at Jefferson as if expecting him to say something profound.

She could see them, but they didn’t seem to notice her. Could she see them because she had expected them? Or had she conjured them herself like a medium at a séance?

She bowed her head, then cursed softly.

It was all gone for her now, the feeling of discovery, of aloneness, of
scholarship
. Now she truly felt like she was invading someone’s privacy.

All Thomas Jefferson wanted to do on this evening – on
that
evening, now hundreds of years in the past – was dine alone.

He had failed at that. And he had an inkling that he had failed.

He smiled a little sardonically, picked up his claret glass and peered at it in the manner of a man who thought he had had too much.

Then he shook his head and returned to his book.

Kimber let out a small breath. She wanted to ask his forgiveness, but she didn’t dare speak to him. What if her voice remained in the room, like poor Mr. Burns’ voice had?

She didn’t need this part of the White House to be haunted by a perpetual sorry attitude. Not that it probably would have, considering. After all, the British would burn this section of the building to the ground in less than a decade.

Still, she couldn’t resist. She looked at Jefferson’s bowed head, and mouthed her apology, realizing the apology wasn’t just to him, but to all residents of this magnificent house.

Because it would become – it already was – the most haunted place in America.

And she now knew she had contributed to its growing collection of ghosts.

BONDS

ROBERT REED

Robert Reed is the author of eleven novels and a big quivering mass of shorter works. His novella, “A Billion Eves”, won the Hugo in 2007. Reed is now at work on a trilogy of narrow novels set in his Marrow/Great Ship universe. The first book, now titled
The Slayer’s Son
, should be published in mid-2013 from Prime Books. The author lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, with his wife and daughter.

The Article

A
N INTESTINAL AILMENT
led to post-surgical complications, and the young man had to spend three or four months in a long-term care facility. Or it was a sick gall bladder and half a year of recovery. Or the patient began with a sexual correction or enhancement and perhaps has never fully recovered. There must be a true story, and maybe it is illuminating. But Desmond Allegato seems to prefer opacity and rumor. The only detail common to every account is Havenwood – a small private institution where the twenty-five-year-old language arts student could heal in peace, contemplating life and his place in a universe awash with profound forces and tiny people.

Havenwood is famous for its professional, trustworthy staff. Desmond Allegato’s case has never been discussed by any employee, present or past. But that seamless secrecy allows pretenders to step forward, each claiming to have been a patient during the right months, and to have met the genius long before he defined our century.

As a rule, you can spot liars and charlatans; they are ones full of self-affirming details.

The casual, inadequate witness rarely gets much of an audience. But they are the most reliable voices to us. Those people describe a handsome but dangerously skinny, very pale young man. Most never knew his name. Desmond took his meals in a room that he shared with an old laptop. His days and long evenings were spent playing first-person shooter games and FreeCell. Nobody remembers visiting family or friends, though it was understood that he was riding his parents’ health insurance. On those rare occasions when he emerged from his quarters, the gaunt youngster spent his breath complaining about the awful food and his cheap computer and how poor he was, and bored, and if only there was some way to make fat money fast.

These are the stories that appeal to a cynical, scientifically schooled audience. Allegato is our shared obsession, and we have a favorite story – an anecdote that broke while
The Bonds That Free
became a runaway bestseller. An elderly gentleman was living in a nursing home. His family was visiting when a stock photo of Allegato appeared on Fox News, and he announced that he knew that face. Then after pulling together his thoughts, he explained how he met “the kid” at Havenwood. They were neighbors and shared a nurse, some middle-aged black gal, and thinking about the nurse brought a wide, appreciative smile.

It seems their nurse had quite a few things to say on the subject of Allegato. “Mr. Locked Away,” as she called him. She never offered medical details, but she insisted that he was an odd broken child, and broken in ways no doctor could fix. Mr. Locked Away didn’t want people. He preferred to sit alone, which was unnatural. The boy didn’t have one friend in the world, and that’s what he deserved. And while every patient had his sickness and his special burdens, that idiot white boy was in such a miserable place, and he didn’t even know it.

Then came a morning when some unspecified incident put her over the brink. Entering the old man’s room, she announced that she’d had enough of Mr. Locked Away. Several years later, sitting with his daughters and grandchildren, the witness described how the nurse railed against the waste of being alone so much, never being touched in good ways. Then she stopped talking. Which was an unusual event, he mentioned. Silence was peculiar. The nurse worked quickly with him, and then, glancing at the time, she broke into a dreamy smile, and he asked what she was thinking, and that’s when she winked in a conspiratorial fashion.

“I’ve got a fix,” she said. “I know just how.” And with that, she returned to Allegato’s room.

The old man made a few assumptions. He didn’t confess his state of mind, not with the little grandkids sitting close, but he had made no secret of liking his nurse, particularly her “well-built” qualities. It was easy to imagine his mind – a frank firm woman in her forties would seem like a wish answered, and there sat that eighty year-old fellow with his new knee and happy visions about what was happening down the hall. His hearing wasn’t the best, but he listened. He thought he heard voices and then he definitely heard something fall, and that was followed by larger crunching sounds. An attendant jogged past the room. Another door opened. Then the Allegato kid was shouting about the unfairness and why did she do that, and the nurse said she was sorry but accidents happen. Except Allegato would have none of that. “Then why did you pick it up and throw it down a second time, if it was a damned accident?”

More attendants arrived. The nurse was standing in the hallway, telling her supervisor how sorry she was and she would replace the machine.

From his room, Allegato cried out, “When?”

“When you listen to what I’ve been telling you,” she said. And with that she walked away, not smiling but definitely proud, her posture full of certainty, her fine full chest carried up high where it belonged.