Ghosts of Columbia

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  Pale green linen covered the table, and the white bone china and heavy silver glimmered in the muted illumination from the chandeliers. Low voices from the other tables merged, just enough that only a few distinct words emerged, here and there.

  On the surface, I reflected absently, little different from a private club anywhere in Columbia—stolid, heavy, ornate, and relatively tasteful—yet a total illusion. The paneling was a thin veneer over plastics, the hangings lightweight and fireproof fabrics, the tables fragile frames bolted in place over a deck that was more cunning braces than solid polished wood. Even from all the conversations came only a few words rising above the rest.

  Was the Breckinridge a metaphor for all Columbia? I wondered. Or the world? Didn’t Columbia have its conflicts, and was the power struggle between President Armstrong and Speaker Hartpence any different from that apparently beginning between the Twelve Apostles of Deseret and the Revealed Twelve?

  “You are thinking?” In her teal traveling suit with a green scarf and a cream blouse, Llysette looked cool in the salon’s muted light, young, and very beautiful.

  “You are beautiful.” I could only shake my head.

  “Belle … parce que … you said that because you love me.”

  “I do, but that doesn’t mean what I say isn’t true. It is.”

  She shook her head. “Once… .”

  “Now.”

  She finally smiled.

  Always, behind the clink of silver on china, the low drone of merged voices, behind the walls and hangings, was the thin whistling of the turbine airscrews as they pushed the Breckinridge westward across the high plains, through the darkness.

  I definitely felt pushed through the darkness, trying to see what would happen before it did, wishing for a better light.

  But there wasn’t much I could do except enjoy the time. I lifted my wineglass. “To now … to us, all of us.”

  Llysette’s eyes weren’t even puzzled, but clear, and her lips smiled in acknowledgment as she lifted her glass to touch mine.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Llysette and I had a continental breakfast on Monday morning—that was all that was available—at a table on the promenade deck.

  In the night, we’d passed well north of the Kansas Proving Grounds and the legendary White Sands, so called because the first nuclear device tested there had turned the sand hills white. There hadn’t been many atomic tests in Columbia—no place was really suitable, even for the underground tests that had followed.

  That problem hadn’t hindered either Chung Kuo or Ferdinand. Ferdinand had just cordoned off a section of the Sahara and turned it into various forms of glass. I didn’t know exactly what the Chinese had done, but then, few did, even Minister Jerome.

  “Would you like some more chocolate?” The steward, in crisp gray, bowed from the waist yet managed to keep the tray level, a tray containing both a teapot and a chocolate pot.

  “Yes, please.” I glanced toward Llysette. “Chocolate?”

  “Je crois que non.” Her voice was languid, relaxed as I seldom heard it, and I was glad the trip had been relatively leisurely.

  “No more for the lady,” I said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  The mug of chocolate, rimmed in gold, and a butter biscuit went on the lightweight wooden table, anchored to the composite deck beside my lounge chair, and the steward slipped toward the heavyset businessman at the larger table, surrounded by assorted stacks of paper.

  Through the transparent and semipermeable windscreen I could see clouds to the south and feel the slightest hint of a breeze on my face, cooling it from the heat of the winter sun.

  As I sipped the heavy chocolate, reminiscent of my Aunt Anna’s, I leaned forward in the chair and looked over the polished blond wooden railing that circled the Breckinridge’s promenade deck. Below were the dry lands, another of the flat plateaus of eastern Deseret, and a thin strip of green that was a river I didn’t know. In the shaded places and on the north sides of the low hills were patches of snow, apparently remnants of an early winter storm.

  “Are we over Deseret yet, Johan?” asked Llysette sleepily, stretching and rubbing her eyes as she straightened in her chair.

  “I think so. Deseret starts before the Rocky Mountains actually end. In fact,” I pointed back eastward, “all of that is part of Deseret.”

  “It is not a pleasant-looking land.”

  “Not.”

  “That, what is it?” She pointed to a squat and sprawling complex of buildings that sprawled across the hills just west of the peaks we had skirted in coming down from the north.

  “It’s probably one of the new synthetic fuels plants.”

  She wrinkled her nose.

  The synthetic fuels plants were just another far-reaching result of the unfortunate Colfax incident, or the circumstances that had led to it, really. Prophet Young, the second and apparently greatest Saint prophet, had set up fur-trading stations on the eastern side of Deseret, all along the Colorado River and well into the Kansas territory of Columbia, at least that part of it claimed by Columbia after the Kansas Compromise, which had averted—along with Lincoln’s speeches and maneuverings—a civil war over the slavery issue.

  The Saints had used that time of unrest to consolidate their hold on the wilderness, but Columbia had protested the fur stations.

  The Saints had rejected the protest and sought aid from Santa Anna and his French advisors. They’d obtained, somehow, Brit-built Gatling guns and secretly fortified the so-called fur stations. Columbia then sent Colonel Colfax to rout out the Saint invaders, but Colfax and his troops had disappeared without a trace. So had most of the soldiers in the ill-fated Custer expedition, except for the stragglers who had claimed the Saints and Indians had used a white parley flag as a ruse to lure the Columbians into a Gatling crossfire.

  Looking down on the rugged terrain, I could see how even a large mounted troop could disappear … or fail to see an ambush.

  With the later infusion of the French forces behind Maximilian and the threat of a retaliatory invasion beyond the boundaries of Tejas and into Columbia from what was becoming New France, despite Maximilian’s Austrian origin, the Colfax and Custer incidents were laid aside, if not forgotten, and the Saints retained most of the former Kansas territory west of the Continental Divide—except that Columbia had held onto the headwaters and the first fifty miles or so of the Colorado River.

  At the time, no one had known of the oil, coal, and natural gas held there—and now the area accounted for most of the liquid and gaseous hydrocarbon production of Deseret. The Saints had become pioneers in another way, in the development of producing liquid hydrocarbons from both coal and natural gas.

  Of course, it hadn’t hurt at all that the arms genius John Moses Browning had been a Saint and poured his considerable ingenuity into weapons development.

  “Johan, qu’est-ce que c’est?”

  “Oh, sorry. I’m just thinking about history. How things could have turned out very differently.”

  “You think that Columbia, it might have conquered Deseret?”

  I had to laugh at that. “Non. If New France had been weaker, Deseret might control much of Tejas and all of California. Somehow, I can’t see Deseret and Columbia in the same political system.”

  Llysette shrugged. “One never knows.”

  “That’s true.” There was a lot I’d never anticipated, and that was in a world I knew, or thought I did. “I suppose we should finish repacking. Then we could come back and watch the landing.”

  “I would see the landing.”

  So we abandoned our table and went down to the small but elegant cabin. I had wished it had more than a tiny sink and toilet, but I knew that water had to be limited—it was heavy. Still … after three days, I wanted a good hot shower.

  Once we’d packed, we made our way back up one level to the promenade deck and an unoccupied set of lounge chairs.

  The dirigible had changed course and was approaching
Great Salt Lake City from the south, coming over a long, low ridge. Below were houses, and more houses, all set on streets comprising a pattern largely gridlike, except where precluded by the hills and occasional gullies.

  We stood at the railing of the promenade deck, not more than a meter from the windscreen, as the Breckinridge eased northward. The city lay right under the Wasatch Mountains, far closer than I had realized from my self-gathered briefing materials, and far more polluted, with a thin brownish cloud veiling the city itself. The air pollution bothered me, because it seemed unnecessary. The Saints had advanced water treatment technologies and a chemical industry second to none.

  “The air, it is not clean.”

  “Must be some sort of inversion,” I speculated. “I’d bet it’s more common in the winter.”

  “I must sing … in that?”

  “It looks that way.”

  Llysette frowned slightly.

  Ever so slowly, the Breckinridge eased down into the valley, across the miles of houses, and toward the dark iron pylon that was the Great Salt Lake landing tower.

  In time, a slight shudder ran through the deck, and then lines sprang from everywhere to steady the dirigible.

  Llysette and I exchanged glances.

  “I haven’t been here before either,” I pointed out. “We might as well gather up our luggage.”

  As we walked down the single set of steps to the lower promenade deck and our cabin again, a crackling hiss came from the corridor speakers, followed by silence.

  “We are docked in Great Salt Lake City. Local Deseret time is eleven o’clock. We will be debarking shortly. Please check your seats or cabin to make sure you retain all personal items.”

  I opened the cabin door. The suitcases and Llysette’s long garment bag for her gowns remained as we had left them. Since no porters or stewards appeared, I hoisted three of the bags and managed to tow a fourth.

  Llysette struggled with the garment bag—at least until we reached the promenade deck, where someone had lined up some luggage carts, all bearing a strange logo that was comprised of an intertwined “Z” and “M” within a golden oval.

  I gratefully commandeered a cart, cutting off a pair of commercial travelers, and stacked the luggage on it. The garment bag went on top.

  “First-class passengers are requested to de-board through the left forward doors,” crackled over the airship’s speakers. “Left forward doors for first-class passengers.”

  We headed toward the port side, following a handful of others. I could see that while the first-class debarking doors were open, the starboard side doors were not.

  “Just first class here,” said the steward.

  Llysette favored him with a look somewhere between a sneer and a glare, and he swallowed. I didn’t blame him.

  At the end of the glassed and enclosed ramp to the tower itself, through another set of doors, stood two figures in gray.

  “Non-Deseret citizens to the right for customs and immigration clearance, please. To the right, please. Take your luggage with you. Deseret citizens to the left… .”

  We headed to the right, behind perhaps twenty others, near the rear of the group. We’d taken longer because I’d stopped to load the bags on a luggage cart and because the others traveled lighter. Then they probably weren’t bringing concert clothing either.

  I stopped the luggage cart on the polished brick floor, and we waited behind a short line of several men.

  Llysette had her winter coat, hardly necessary in the warmth of the landing tower, draped over her arm. I was perspiring in mine and took it off, laying it across my arm as we waited. Waiting always reminded me of my time with the government.

  Five flat podiums stood at the end of the long room, and behind each was a gray-uniformed figure. All the customs officers were male, and four had square beards.

  “They do not look happy,” observed Llysette in a low voice.

  “I never met a customs official who did,” I whispered back.

  “You never will,” murmured the short man in front of us without turning. “Especially here.”

  Then, as the Deseret customs types began to ask for the passports of the firsttravelers in each of the five lines, a bearded figure in an antique-looking brown suit stepped up to the customs/immigration officer on the far left, whispered something, and pointed. The officer nodded, and the man stepped forward, past the travelers before us, and bowed to Llysette, then nodded to me. “Fräulein duBoise, Minister Eschbach … if you would come with me.”

  Belatedly I recognized the man and grasped mentally for his name. “Herr … Jensen, is it?”

  “Here it’s Brother Jensen,” he said with a smile. “But I’m gratified that you did recall me.”

  “You were most complimentary,” said Llysette, “at the recital.”

  “You deserved every word,” answered Jensen. “We need to clear your luggage. I have a steamer waiting below.”

  As we were escorted past the other travelers, I could catch a few words.

  “… said there was some opera star on board… .”

  “She looks like an opera star, she does … and to think …”

  “… called him Minister… .”

  “Like to get fancy treatment like that… .”

  Jensen led us out through a side door, and I could sense more than a few eyes on our backs as we followed him into another office with both a desk and chair and a podium, behind which stood an older customs official.

  “Your passports, if you please?”

  We presented them, and the white-haired official compared pictures and faces, then returned the passports.

  “You aren’t carrying any firearms, are you? Any religious materials that are not meant for personal use?”

  I must have frowned.

  “You can bring in a Bible or Koran or that sort of thing for your own use, but commerce in religious publications is restricted,” the official explained.

  “Music … that is all,” Llysette said.

  A faint smile crossed the white-haired man’s lips. “If you would open your bags?”

  We might be getting special treatment, but even opera stars apparently weren’t exempted from customs. Or maybe opera stars whose husbands were former spies weren’t.

  The inspection wasn’t quite cursory, but the inspector probably felt it didn’t have to be more than that, since the platform was actually a scanner of some sort. I didn’t worry—not too much—since the valises had passed Columbian scanners of a more sophisticated nature and since every single item I’d brought was scan-transparent.

  “Thank you.”

  The scanners passed us. I managed to keep the same bland smile in place.

  “Thank you, Brother Harrison.” Jensen smiled, and Harrison smiled back.

  “Now … to get you settled.”

  We followed the stocky Jensen down the dull red-carpeted spiral ramp and through the nearly deserted main level and out under a portico. I pushed all the luggage on the cart, walking behind Llysette and Jensen and drawing up when the Saint stopped. The wind was chill, if not quite so cold as it had been in Vanderbraak Centre when we’d left, and bore the faint odor of chemicals.

  “Here we are.” The Deseret official gestured to a shiny brown steamer.

  It was a make I’d not seen before, a Browning, and far more square and angular than my Stanley, but effectively the size of a limousine, even if Brother Jensen hadn’t called it that. Was it named after another development from the arms makers? I didn’t know. I wondered what else I didn’t know and would find out.

  Jensen opened the square rear door and helped me load the bags. I laid the garment bag on top.

  “Performing clothes, I’d wager.”

  “To Deseret standards,” I added.

  “Good. Some folks have trouble with that.”

  “When in Rome …”

  Jensen closed the rear door. I turned, wondering what to do with the cart, but a man in a brown jumpsuit had already collect
ed it and several others and was wheeling them back inside.

  A clean-shaven young man sat behind the steamer’s wheel. He wore a dark green jacket, almost a military blouse, but with no brass and no insignia.

  Jensen opened the door and inclined his head to Llysette for her to enter.

  “Mercy.”

  The Browning had bench seats in the section behind the driver, the kind facing each other. I sat by Llysette, and Jensen sat across from us.

  “I’m afraid that the route to the city isn’t the most scenic,” apologized Brother Jensen. “The aerodrome has to be here in the flat south of the lake. Because of the winds, I’m told.” He smiled. “I understand that neither of you has been here before.”

  “You understand correctly.”

  “I’d like to go over a few basics. It avoids misunderstandings. I assume you read the background materials I sent with the contract.”

  “Mais oui,” said Llysette politely, not quite coldly.

  “Yes.”

  Jensen turned and nodded to the driver. The Browning eased away from the aerodrome building.

  “Good. We won’t have to go over those. You’ll see women with hats—that’s a tradition, but not a requirement.”

  “Unlike the business of no bare shoulders?”

  Jensen nodded. “I should also point out a few other things. Profane language bothers people here, even if it’s casual and accepted language elsewhere. Also, although it’s common in Columbia, it would be better if”—he inclined his head to Llysette—“you were accompanied in public, by either Minister Eschbach or Doktor Perkins or myself, if they’re unavailable.”

  Llysette’s face hardened ever so slightly, although she merely nodded.

  “Now.” Jensen cleared his throat. “On to a few more mundane items. The city is on a grid system. All the towns and cities in Deseret are. The main north-south street is always Main Street, and the main east-west street is Center Street.” Jensen laughed. “Except here in Great Salt Lake. The north-south street is Temple, and the part north of the Temple is North Temple and the part south—”

  “Is South Temple?”

  “That’s right. So if an address is two hundred west, two hundred south, you can tell that it’s two blocks south of the center of the city and two blocks west.”