Ghosts of Columbia

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  “What are you going to do?” Judith asked quietly.

  “Try to survive.” I forced a grin. “Anything on a higher ethical plane is beyond me right now.”

  “You aren’t that cynical, Johan.”

  “I wish I weren’t, sometimes.” I swallowed another half-cup of tea in a single gulp, almost welcoming the burning sensation. “I need to get moving if I want to catch one of the midday trains.” I looked toward the wireset.

  “I’ll drop you off,” said Eric.

  “A cab might be better.”

  “Better for what? We’re family,” Eric insisted. “Anyone who’s after you knows you stayed here. I’ll run you down when you’re ready, and that’s that.”

  “Absolutely,” Judith affirmed.

  After draining the last of the tea, I went upstairs and grabbed the garment bag and my travel case. Both Eric and Judith were standing in the main foyer when I came down the stairs.

  “Ready?” asked Eric.

  I nodded.

  Judith put her arms around me. “Take care, Johan.” Her eyes were wet as she stepped back.

  “I’ll try, but you know how much good that’s done before.”

  She gave me a last hug and turned away quickly.

  Eric and I left and got into the big steamer silently. We were headed down New Bruges Avenue and almost to the Japanese Embassy before he spoke. “This whole business has Judith upset, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Is there any way you can get out of whatever this mess is? I don’t want a brother who’s a zombie. You were pretty close last time.”

  “I’m trying.” I didn’t want to think about that. Was I already sliding off into ghost land? “A big part of the problem is that I don’t know the whole picture. It’s tied up with psychic research, and you know how touchy that’s gotten to be.”

  Eric whistled softly. “I didn’t know, but there have been a number of hints in the press lately, haven’t there?”

  “Where there’s smoke …”

  “Don’t get burned, Johan.”

  “I’ll try not to.”

  He let me out right in front of the B&P Station, which wasn’t too hard, since the morning rush had long since subsided. As soon as I got inside the station, I stopped by the first public wireset and used my account number to call Anna’s.

  “This is the Durrelts’. To whom do you wish to speak?”

  “Anna, this is Johan.”

  “Johan?”

  “Your nephew? The crazy one? The professor?”

  “Oh, Johan. I thought you were trying to be Johan de Waart, and you don’t sound anything like him. Do you want to speak to your mother?”

  “First, will you both be there if I come by this afternoon?”

  “That’s a long drive. Yes, we can be here.”

  “I’ll be there around three, I think.”

  “Don’t you …”

  “I have to run, Aunt Anna. I’ll see you this afternoon.”

  The next stop was the ticket window. Instead of the Quebec Special, I had to take the ten o’clock Montreal Express to get to Schenectady, and, after my visit with Mother and Anna, I would have to take a local from Schenectady northeast across New Ostend and into New Bruges and a good eighty miles into the state to Lebanon. That probably meant arriving home late on Friday night or in the very early hours of Saturday morning. I hoped I’d be able to doze on the trains.

  After I made sure that I had some time before the Montreal Express left, I used a public wireset in the B&P station to call Bruce.

  “LBI.”

  “Bruce, this is Johan. I need a gadget that does the exact opposite of the last two you did. One that can take a program file and project it into one of those fields and into the atmosphere, so to speak. Can you do it?”

  “Johan …” There was a long pause. “I suppose so. Is it … wise?” He laughed. “No, of course not. Not if it’s you. Yes, I’ll do it. Monday?”

  “You’re a saint.”

  “Probably not. It’s against my religion.”

  “All right, a prophet.”

  “You can be both, and have the grief.”

  “Fine. Monday. I’ll still pick up the other gear as we scheduled earlier.”

  “It will be waiting.”

  “Thanks.”

  After replacing the handset, I walked across the green marble floor of the main hall toward the gate for platform six and then down the steps to the platform itself. The cars of the Montreal Express were gleaming silver, freshly washed.

  The conductor studied me, his eyes going from the pinstriped suit to the garment bag and leather case. “Your ticket, sir?”

  I offered it, breathing in the slight odor of oil and hot metal that persists even with the modern expresses.

  “Club car, seats three and four.”

  I nodded and climbed up the steps. The seats were the reclining type, and because the train was a midday, the almost-new club car was but half filled. The odor of new upholstery and the even fainter hint of the almost-new lacquer on the wood panels bolstered my impressions of newness, despite the traditional darkness of the wood and the green hangings.

  I sat on the train for nearly half an hour before it smoothly dropped into the north tunnel. We emerged from the darkness in a cut between long rows of brown stone houses, looking almost gray in the late October rain, and glided northward at an increasing pace. I was still holding the unopened case when the express paused in Baltimore, slowing so gently that the conductor’s call came as a surprise.

  “Baltimore. All off for Baltimore.”

  The doors opened, and eventually they closed, and no one sat near me.

  Finally, somewhere north of Baltimore, about the time we crossed the Susquehanna on the new high-speed bridge west of Havre de Grace, I opened my travel case. As I took out the memos I had pilfered from vanBecton, rain began to pelt the car windows, hard and cold as liquid hail.

  Certainly vanBecton knew I had pocketed something with the pratfall, and he had let me get away with it, thinking I would get nothing. What I hoped he didn’t realize was that I wasn’t after anything that concrete.

  He was setting me up for removal, and he was saying, in effect, that I could do nothing about it. My own experiences had taught me one thing he hadn’t learned yet, and I could only hope it would be enough.

  I took out the pilfered memos and began to read. As vanBecton had indicated, they were pretty much all administrative trivia. One dealt with the allocation of administrative support funds. The second, signed by vanBecton, was a clarification of Spazi regional office boundaries. Another was on the subject of the United Charities Fund and the need for supervisors to encourage giving. There was a three-page, detailed exposition on the required procedures for claiming reimbursement for travel and lodging expenses.

  The formats were virtually identical, but what I had wanted was the one with vanBecton’s signature. I read it again and replaced all of them in the case. Then I leaned back and took a nap, trying to ignore the uneven rhythm of the rain.

  Three stops and four hours later, I stepped out into the rain in Schenectady station, a cold rain that slashed across my face and left dark splotches on my coat.

  I found a cab, a New Ostend special that gleamed through the mist and rain. The water beaded up on every painted surface, and the round-faced and white-haired driver smiled.

  “Where to, sir?”

  “Kampen Hills, number forty-three on Hendrik Lane.”

  “Good enough, sir.”

  Even the inside of the cab was spotless, and I leaned back into the seat as the driver wound his way away from the Rotterdam side, along the river road, and into the hills dotted with houses centered on gardens, now mulched for winter and surrounded with snow stands to protect the bushes.

  In the summer, each gray house and its stonework and white-enameled windowsills would be diminished by the trees and the well-tended gardens, the arbors and the trellises. Now, the houses were stolid g
ray presences looming through the rain and mist.

  There is always a price for everything, and that New Ostend special from the Schenectady station out to Anna’s cost more than all the cabs I had taken the day before in the Federal District.

  “Ten, that’ll be, sir.”

  I paid him, with a dollar tip, and then I stood in the rain for far too long before my aunt finally came to the door.

  “Johan, what are you doing out there in the rain? Don’t you know that you come in out of such a downpour before you become a real ghost?”

  I refrained from pointing out that entering unannounced was poor manners, and also impossible when the door was locked.

  “Can you join us for chocolate?”

  “I had hoped to,” I answered honestly. “The local for Lebanon leaves at seven.”

  “Good! That’s settled. Now off to the rear parlor with your mother while I get the chocolate and biscuits.” Anna, more and more like a white-haired gnome with every passing year, shooed me down the hall and past the warmth welling from the kitchen.

  “Your ne’er-do-well son is here, Ria,” my aunt announced. “I’ll be bringing the chocolate in a bit. Let him sit by the fire. He stood in the rain for far too long, silly man.”

  Mother stood up from her rocking chair, and I hugged her, not too long, since I was rather damp.

  “I didn’t expect you.”

  “I wired Anna when I left Columbia.”

  “She gets rather forgetful these days.”

  I took the straight-backed chair and pulled it closer to the woodstove. “Don’t we all?”

  “What were you doing in Columbia, Johan?”

  “I was invited to a presidential dinner. I stayed last night with Eric and Judith.”

  “They’re nice people, unlike so many in the capital. How was your dinner?” She picked up her knitting—red and gold yarn in what seemed to be an afghan. “As I recall, you never enjoyed those functions much. Why did you go?”

  “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.