Ghosts of Columbia

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  “Yes?”

  “You know that David is going to bring up the question of putting a zero cap on registrations on Natural Resources Three B?” Mondriaan eased into my notterribly-capacious office.

  Natural Resources Three B was officially the ecology of wetlands course that all the students hated, because none of them wanted a detailed environmental rationale for preserving wetlands when most of them had a tradition of either developing, filling, or “reclaiming” wetlands. The question of what course to cut back on always came back to wetlands ecology. I just sighed. “Are we back to that again?”

  “I do not believe we ever left it.” Regner Grimaldi stood in the door, chipper as always, in another of his European-cut suits, this one a dark gray chalk stripe accented by a maroon cravat. “Our Doktor David has the persistence of Ferdinand.” Young Grimaldi had little love for Ferdinand, and I suppose I wouldn’t have either, not if my father had died under the panzerwagens when Ferdinand had contemptuously disregarded the older Grimaldi’s surrender of Monaco.

  “I take it that our honored chair is elsewhere this morning?”

  “He is having another tooth faultlessly capped,” added Grimaldi. “But he will return … both to us and the elimination of Three B.”

  “Unlike Gessler to Singapore.” Mondriaan attempted to cultivate a rumbling bass, but a mild baritone was all he could manage.

  How could Gessler have returned to Singapore after Chung Kuo had thrown three million crack troops into the peninsula? The Aussies hadn’t let Columbia use Subic Bay as a staging area against the Chinese assault, not with both Japan and Chung Kuo exerting pressure. Of course, how long Australia itself, let alone its Philippine Protectorate, would last was another question these days.

  Mondriaan looked at Grimaldi. “What is the festive occasion?”

  “Festive? This is conservative for me, Wilhelm.” Grimaldi laughed. “Johan? Will you say anything about the wetlands course?”

  “Me? The chairman’s favorite bête noire?”

  They both waited.

  “I’ll make my usual point that wetlands are the pivot point of any integrated ecology … and I suppose that will get a grudging acceptance that one section will be taught in the spring, and you two can fight over it.”

  They both nodded.

  “I need to finish preparing for my ten o’clock.” Grimaldi vanished from the doorway.

  “You are the only one Doktor Doniger must listen to,” Mondriaan said before he left. “Like the founders had to heed Jefferson. You do know that, do you not?”

  I didn’t know anything of the sort, only that David and I always clashed and probably always would and that he had the dean on his side. I wasn’t sure who or what was on my side, except two assimilated ghosts and Llysette. Having Carolynne as part of my soul hadn’t been too bad, but the ghost of justice I’d created with my equipment was sometimes pretty hard for someone trying to deal with departmental politics that had little reason and less justice.

  In fact, the whole ghosting and de-ghosting business was as confusing as departmental politics. Supposedly, Heisler, the Austro-Hungarian scientist, had developed a system for systematically removing part of the electronic ego field that comprised the human spirit. Of course, that was the part of the spirit that became a ghost under the condition of knowledgeable violent death. Then, under contract to the Spazi, Branston-Hay, the late Babbage researcher at Vanderbraak State, had developed a similar de-ghosting technology that could either remove the entire spirit from a live person, rendering him a zombie, or destroy any disembodied spirit that had become a ghost. A technology that could turn a healthy individual into a zombie wasn’t something I’d wanted to let loose on the world—and I hadn’t.

  After Branston-Hay’s untimely “accidental” death—because the Spazi had discovered he was also selling his knowledge under the table to President Armstrong’s covert operation—I ended up as the sole possessor of all his files on the subject. Of course, I’d had to meddle, not that either the Spazi or the president had given me any choice, and matters had gone from less than sanguine to far worse.

  Reminiscing over what Llysette and I had survived wasn’t going to get papers corrected. So, in the relative quiet that followed my colleagues’ departure, I spent the next hour correcting quizzes from Tuesday’s natural resources intro course—and trying not to think about the ghost of the child in Asten. I muttered a lot with almost every paper, especially when I discovered that a third of the class couldn’t define the water table.

  The wind had picked up when I left the office to cross the grounds to Smith, enough that the two university zombies toiling there—Gertrude and Hector—were having trouble raking the fallen and soggy leaves. I smiled at Gertrude, cheerfully struggling with her rake, perhaps because I still recalled her reaction to Heinrich Verruckt the spring before. Zombies were those unfortunate beings who had lost that part of their soul that would have been a ghost, or that part of their soul had left them prematurely to become a ghost. Zombies weren’t supposed to feel strong emotions, but Gertrude had sobbed, zombie or no zombie.

  Hector inclined his head, and I offered him a smile. Hector, one of the few somber zombies, nodded, but it wasn’t quite a smile.

  Wednesday was usually a long day. So were Mondays and Fridays, since I taught the same schedule on all three days, but Wednesday felt longer, particularly with my eleven o’clock Environmental Economics 2A class. Smythe 203 was always hot, even in midwinter, and Mondriaan didn’t help. He had the room before me, and he made sure it was like an oven. Usually I didn’t even have to open the windows because the students had done it first. That was about all they were good for on some days.

  The blank looks on the faces of those in the front row indicated what kind of day it was going to be.

  I forced a smile. “Mister Rastaal, what are the principal diseconomies of a coal-fired power plant, and how can a market economy ensure that they become real costs of production?”

  “Ah, Doktor Eschbach … I was on the korfball trip, and somehow, I didn’t bring the text…”

  I didn’t even sigh. “Miss Raalte?”

  “Doktor… the cost of coal mining?”

  “Mister Nijkerk?”

  “The … ah … um … cost of transporting the coal to the power plant?”

  “Miss Rijssen?”

  Elena Rijssen just looked at the weathered desktop in front of her. I had to call on Martaan deVaal—one of the few who read the material faithfully.

  All this came after an entire class dealing with external diseconomies. Of course, the class had been two weeks earlier, but I tended to forget that retention of material for more than one period was not a strength of the students at Vanderbraak State University. Or any university, I suspected. Why were there so few who really sought an education?

  The combination of difference engines and the videolink had given them all the mistaken idea that everything could be looked up and nothing needed to be retained.

  After deVaal finished I did sigh. Loudly. “We discussed external diseconomies two weeks ago.” I walked to the chalkboard and wrote the question out. Actually, I printed it, because my handwriting is abysmal. “A two-page essay answering this question is due at the next class. It will be counted the same as a quiz.”

  A low muttering groan suffused the classroom, and several students glared at Mister Rastaal and Miss Raalte. One glared at deVaal, as if having the temerity to read the material were a mortal sin. I felt sorry for deVaal, but not enough to let the rest of the class go.

  “Now … Mister Zwolle … would you please define the total pollutant load from a coal-fired power plant?”

  Most of them didn’t know all of that answer, either, except for sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide.

  It was a very long class.

  Afterward, I managed to scurry across the windswept grounds of the university, glad to see that Gertrude and Hector had abandoned their raking, and down toward the square. The post centre cloc
k had struck twelve just as I reached the door.

  “Your table is ready, Doktor Eschbach.” Victor motioned me ahead of several others and toward the table Llysette preferred—close to the woodstove. I was looking at the wine list when my lady arrived, clutching not only a purse but also a large, brown, bulky envelope.

  “Good afternoon, Doktor duBoise.” I couldn’t help grinning at the ritual as I stood.

  “Afternoon, I must concede, Herr Doktor Eschbach. And it is good…”

  “If it is good … some wine to celebrate?”

  At the sound of the word “wine,” Victor appeared.

  “The chocolate, today, I think. And the soup with the croissants.” She smiled.

  “Chocolate, too,” I decided. “The special, chicken and artichoke pasta.”

  Victor shrugged at our rejection of the wine but bowed and took the menus.

  “What is your news? The envelope?”

  “This…It arrived just before noon. I cannot believe it.”

  “Just now? This noon?”

  She smiled and nodded again. “An invitation, a contract … to sing in the great concert hall of Deseret. Six weeks from now … because Dame Brightman has been hospitalized. That is what I have been asked. Did you know that it is one of the largest … perhaps like the Arena di Verona…”

  I’d never heard of the Arena di Verona, and my face showed it.

  “Perhaps, it is not that large … but it is certainly as large as Covent Garden.” Her eyes glazed over for a moment, and I wondered which singer within that body—Carolynne the ghost soprano or Llysette the former songbird of fallen France—was reminiscing.

  “Deseret?”

  “The man who came to see me sing—the one in the ancient coat… I think he signed the letter.”

  “Are they paying?” I asked, all too imprudently, but lately all too many organizations in New Bruges had been requesting that Llysette perform either gratis or for nominal fees.

  “You, you should look.” She thrust the stack of papers at me.

  So I did, while she edged her chair slightly closer to the woodstove and watched. Being married hadn’t made her any less susceptible to the chill of New Bruges, but perhaps more willing to let me know. The cover letter praised her performance in New Bruges and extended the invitation to perform in Great Salt Lake City. It was signed by a Bishop Jacob Jensen, on behalf of the Prophets’ Foundation for the Arts in Deseret.

  I’d never cared much for the Saints of Deseret, even as I’d admired their ability to carve an independent nation out in the western wilderness between New France and Columbia. These days … Deseret scarcely qualified as a wilderness, not with its coal and iron, its synthetic fuels technology developed from the northern European refugees, and with its carefully guarded monopoly on naturally colored cottons that needed no dyes.

  The political problem was that polygamy, even as restrained as it had become in the last few generations, had not set well with Columbia from the beginning. Nor had Deseret done much to allay my concerns about their not-always-so-environmental actions, but I tried not to let my past as a Subminister for Environmental Protection intrude upon Llysette’s career.

  The contract seemed generous, very generous—$ 10,000 for three performances at the Salt Palace Concert Hall and two master classes for the University of Deseret. A $5,000 cheque—Columbian dollars—was included as a retainer, drawn on the Bank of the Federal District of Columbia, plus all transportation, including the offer of a first-class cabin on the Breckinridge, of the Columbian Speaker Line.

  There was another sheet: “Standard Requirements for Female Performers in Deseret.” I read it and then handed it to Llysette.

  “Mais non! Too much it is…I must have a husband … as a …”

  “Chaperon?” I suggested.

  “And the gowns … no uncovered arms above the elbow, and the covered shoulders? Do they come out of … a seraglio?” She jammed the requirements sheet back into my hand. “This … I will not do!”

  “You certainly don’t have to. I did hear somewhere that the Salt Palace Concert Hall is the largest and most prestigious concert hall in Deseret,” I said quietly. “If not in the western part of North America.”

  “My own words you do not have to throw at me.” Llysette thrust out her lower lip in the exaggerated pout that indicated she wasn’t totally serious … not totally.

  Victor hovered in the background with the chocolate, and I nodded. The two mugs of heavy and steaming chocolate were followed with Llysette’s soup and my pasta and with the hot, plain, and flaky croissants.

  I took a sip of the chocolate. “And you could have a recital gown made to their standards from the retainer cheque—”

  “Johan!” sputtered Llysette over her mug.

  “You did tell me that once your gowns—”

  “You mock me!”

  “I am sorry. I didn’t mean that. I was teasing you, but … sometimes you are even more serious than I am.” I offered a long face, and that got a bit of a smile. The pasta wasn’t up to Victor’s normal standards, too heavy by half, but the sauce was good, and I was hungry.

  So was Llysette, and we ate silently for a time.

  The contract for Llysette bothered me, though. Yes, she had been one of the top divas in France before it fell to the Austro-Hungarians. Yes, there were few singers in Columbia who could match the performance I had heard on Friday. And yes, the rate offered was probably even a shade cheap for a world-class diva. And yes, it would do her ego, her reputation, her status at the university, and her pocketbook good. But no one had been offering Llysette contracts, ostensibly because of her unsettled status. Why now?

  Admittedly, she’d finally gotten her citizenship and gotten married, both of which made her more acceptable to Deseret, but how would the Saints have known that? Or had someone alerted them to it? And why?

  None of it made sense, and from the time I’d been a junior pilot in the Republic Naval Air Corps I’d known that coincidences just didn’t occur.

  “You are thoughtful.”

  “I wondered about the contract … why it arrived now.”

  Llysette shrugged, then smiled. “Perhaps …”

  “Perhaps what?”

  “You recall the seminars last summer?”

  “The ones where all those singers came in?” I did remember them. We’d barely been married a month when dozens of young singers had arrived for Dean Er Recchus’s MusikFest, and I’d barely seen Llysette for two weeks.

  “A young man there was from the University of Deseret. He was a Saint missionary, but a good bass. The arrangement of the Perkins piece ‘Lord of Sand,’ he provided that, and I wrote Doktor Perkins. You remember, n’est-ce pas?”

  I nodded. Perkins had written a note back, sending several other arrangements and professing enthusiasm about her singing his work.

  “This Doktor Perkins, he is well known everywhere.”

  “Well known enough to get you a contract, or to want to?”

  “Non … but could he not recommend?”

  A noted Saint composer—yes, he could recommend, and the Saints were so hidebound they probably had sent someone to double-check. I nodded. Put in that light, it made some sense, especially with a performer hospitalized. But I wondered. Then, after what we’d been through, I wondered about everything.

  I wanted to chide myself. After everything we’d been through? Llysette had been through far more—imprisonment and torture under Ferdinand after the fall of France, a struggle to get to Columbia even after the interventions of the Japanese ambassador who had loved opera and Llysette’s performances, and then the unspoken Spazi injunctions against her performing too publicly.

  Llysette glanced out through the window toward the post centre clock, then took a last sip of chocolate.

  “Late it is. Notes … more notes must I beat.”

  “Don’t you have … the good one?”

  “Marlena vanHoff … she is a joy … mais apres ….” Llysette
shook her head.

  I motioned to Victor, thrust the banknotes upon him, and we were off—me to prepare for my two o’clock and Llysette for yet another lesson of studio voice.

  The wind was stiffer and colder, foreshadowing another storm, probably of ice, rather than snow, the way the winter was beginning.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Llysette didn’t run with me before breakfast, and she wasn’t exactly a morning person, even on Saturdays when we slept in—except sleeping in for me was eight o’clock, still a relatively ungodly hour for Llysette.

  After the strenuous efforts required during the previous year, I’d vowed I’d never let myself lapse back into the sedentary professor I’d almost become after I’d been involuntarily retired as Subminister for Environmental Protection. Of course, my nervous overeating didn’t help. Still, at times, it hadn’t seemed that long since I’d been a flying officer in the Republic Air Corps, and my assignments in the Sedition Prevention and Security Service had certainly required conditioning. Especially with Llysette beside me, though, it took great willpower to lever myself out of bed, not that I was sleepy.

  But I ran—hard—up past Benjamin’s frosted fields and well over the top of the hill through the second-growth forest that was beginning to resemble what had existed when the Dutch had reached the area from New Amsterdam.

  I was still sweating long after I got back to the house and kitchen, even somewhat by the time the coffee and chocolate were ready and I called up the stairs, “Your coffee awaits you, young woman!”

  “You wake too early, Johan.” After a time, she stumbled down the steps wrapped in a thick natural cotton robe, disarrayed, yet lovely, and slumped into the chair, looking blankly at the coffee.

  “I’ve already been—”

  “Johan …”

  I sipped my chocolate, then started on finishing up, preparing the rest of breakfast—some scones, with small omelets, not exactly Dutch, but tasty, and my cooking has always been eclectic.