Ghosts of Columbia

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  I spent another hour or so building up the quote files, selectively speaking, and trying to design a structure to create parallel interlocking files that the antennae could project in close to real-time simultaneity.

  Just about the time I thought I had something, the door to my small section of the blockhouse opened and a tall figure stepped inside. He didn’t move far from the booth/shield.

  “You said you needed more disks. Why? Why do you need them to recall a ghost that already exists?”

  I managed to keep my jaw shut while my thoughts whirled. He really meant it.

  “It’s hard to explain,” I temporized. “Let me put it this way. In our world, which is a temporal world and not primarily a spiritual one, we rely on physical structure to hold us together—our skeletons, for example. A ghost is held together by an energy structure, an energy profile. When the profile loses energy, it collapses.” I cleared my throat. “I have to re-create the profile, and that means a lot of storage capacity. Once the profile is re-created and energized, the ghost reappears, but the profile has to be as accurate as possible, in order to ensure that the reenergized ghost is the correct one.” I felt proud of myself—momentarily—until I realized the rest of the implications.

  After a moment of silence, I pointed to the notes and The Book of Mormon. “You can see. I’m using verified statements of the prophet as keys to the profile.”

  After a long silence, the tall man spoke. “How many disks do you need?” He seemed to be the same one who had led me into the blockhouse—that’s what it felt like—and who seemed to be in charge of the group.

  “I might be able to get by with one, but three, in case of problems—”

  “Problems?”

  I did sigh, turning in the chair to face him. “I don’t know what anyone told you, but this is a new and fairly experimental procedure. This is something where some government research laboratories have failed for years. You want me to duplicate that kind of work with minimal equipment.” I didn’t tell him that I wouldn’t have been able to do it at all without the years of work from one of those laboratories—or the genius of the late Professor Branston-Hay.

  “Why aren’t you using the antennae?”

  I frowned at the change of subject. “Because that’s the last stage, when you project the profiles and the fields.”

  “How much delay will this cause?” he asked.

  “Very little if you can get the disks within the next day. I would have liked to load them incrementally, but that’s not absolutely necessary.”

  I had another thought. “If you can get an image scanner and a likeness of the prophet that you think is the most representative, those would also help.”

  Another period of silence, and then the mesh hood nodded and the door opened and he departed.

  As the hours went by, I tended to lose track of time until I checked my watch and found that when I was thinking time sped and when I was wool-gathering, trying to puzzle out vague conceptualizations for the refinements I knew I needed, it dragged.

  Every four hours or so, I got something to eat—basically a slab of meat, some bread, a piece of fruit, and some powdered chocolate in a mug. Another guard delivered it. That is, he set it on the floor, and I got it and had to put it back there when I was done.

  It was close enough to the booth that I probably could have disabled the guard—but why? I still couldn’t have gotten out of the place.

  Someone always watched me from the booth, but seldom the same person for more than a few hours, although each wore a gray jumpsuit with no markings and one of the fine loose mesh hoods.

  In working out the code lines, I made a point of apparently using one of the pens Bruce had provided and the calculator. I wanted both to be familiar to all the Revealed Twelve people.

  I tried not to think about Llysette or much of anything else except what I wanted and needed to do, and that was to create the most powerful ghost image possible—the stronger and more imposing the better. That had been one reason I’d wanted to check the hardware early.

  The graphics images would be the hardest, because all the Saints had an ingrained visual concept of Joseph Smith and I’d never really done that much with that side of ghost file creation. In my previous efforts I’d let the internal substance create the image, and that wouldn’t be enough for a really strong ghost image of the prophet. I hoped that they’d come up with a scanner, but … that remained to be seen.

  I took a deep breath and looked at the third—or fourth—guard. The eyes behind the veiled or mesh hood could have been open, closed, or glaring. I wouldn’t have known.

  After standing and stretching, I sat down again and looked at some of the quotations I had to incorporate into what I would have called the dialogue profile:

  All things unto me are spiritual, and not at any time have I given unto you a law which is temporal… .

  Behold, verily, I say unto you that there are many spirits which are false spirits, which have gone forth in the earth, deceiving the world. And also Satan hath sought to deceive you, that he might overthrow you… .

  Wherefore, for this cause I gave unto you … and I will give unto you my law, and there you shall be endowed with power from on high… .

  Then there were those that I’d modified, that I hoped would be close enough to the structure and yet would reinforce the current “regime” and its efforts. Neither I nor Columbia wanted a government in Deseret controlled by religious fanatics basing their actions on a century-and-a-half-old code that hadn’t been that workable then. Like it or not, I had to support First Speaker Cannon, and I wasn’t thrilled about it. I was just less thrilled about the alternatives.

  As the angel Moroni said, do not anger so exceedingly that you have lost thy love, one towards another. Do not thirst after blood and revenge continually… .

  How can a people delight in abomination—and in killing our neighbors and those who have not lifted a hand against us—how can we expect that God will stay his hand in judgment against us? …

  For behold, a bitter fountain cannot bring forth good water; neither can a bitter man bring forth good works… .

  Condemn not your brother because of his imperfections, neither his father, because of his imperfection, neither them who have written before him, but rather give thanks unto God that he hath made manifest unto you those imperfections that ye may learn to be more wise than we have been… .

  Cursed is he who puts his trust in man. More cursed is he that puts his trust in a man’s false interpretation of what I have said. Trust rather the Revelations of thy Father in heaven than the man who twists my words… .

  Unto each generation cometh the Revelations of God; harken unto them, for the Lord will provide, both counsel and providence for those who listen… .

  I had to hope that no one was going to go through thousands of lines of code, but I had this feeling that they wouldn’t, that any image of the prophet would serve the purposes of the Revealed Twelve.

  I swallowed and looked at the difference engine screen. It was going to be a long day, with at least several more to come.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Tuesdays, I stayed in the blockhouse difference engine room working Babbage code lines until close to midnight. Why? Because the only way out was to create what they wanted, and more. At least, that was the only way I saw it, and worry wouldn’t allow me to sleep until I was exhausted. So why not work?

  I did, and I was so tired that the continual drip from the shower nozzle didn’t keep me from sleeping. Nor did the rock-hard pallet bed, nor the clamminess of the de facto cell, nor just about any of the inconveniences.

  Wednesday morning, I struggled through a cold shower—the nozzle was piped only to a cold water line. I felt grubby enough to suffer through it before shivering dry and pulling back on dirty clothes.

  Still thinking about whether my captors could or would come up with a compatible scanner and the SII-style auxiliary disks, I took The Book of Mormon and began to
read through it.

  Parts of it struck me as strange—strange because I had to wonder. How could a barely literate farm boy who followed a vision from Virginia backcountry to upstate New Ostend ever even transcribe a five-hundred-page printed manuscript, let alone keep it consistent? Or was it consistent? I wasn’t enough of a biblical scholar to tell.

  How did he manage to convert thousands to a new religion—or a new manifestation of the old? Would he have managed it if things had been different? If the English colony at Plymouth had succeeded?

  I pursed my lips and blinked. Those kinds of speculations weren’t exactly useful in my situation.

  I had only read another few pages when the door opened and another of the hooded figures stood there, waiting.

  When the lock clicked on the difference engine room, in addition to a tray with bread, cheese, and fruit on the floor, a number of objects had been added to my occupational prison.

  On the table beside the difference engine was an SII scanner—used, it seemed. In addition to the scanner, the cabling, and the manual, three blank SII disks lay beside the difference engine—as if to suggest that I would have no excuses for failure. In a way, I was more worried about the aftermath of success.

  I picked up the portrait of the prophet—a size that would fit entirely on the screen of the flat-bed scanner, allowing me to get it in one pass, assuming I could make the codes match, and that was a big assumption.

  Although I wanted to shake my head, I didn’t. The heavy gray concrete slab ceiling seemed poised to collapse on me—like everything else. For a moment, I felt very sorry for myself. All I’d really wanted after Elspeth’s and Waltar’s deaths had been to retreat, to gain some quiet. I’d been lucky enough to find love and respect with Llysette—and Carolynne—but my past seemed to dog me … and them.

  Why couldn’t the powers that be leave us alone? Why couldn’t Llysette be allowed to perform without being used as a pawn in a four-sided—or who knew how many-sided—diplomatic and military chess game? Other retired Spazi agents didn’t have their lives turned upside down. Other singers, with less talent than Llysette, got to perform and be recognized and make money without risking life and limb.

  My eyes burned, and I did shake my head. Self-pity wasn’t going to do the slightest for me.

  So I coughed, cleared my throat, and ate most of what was on the tray. Not particularly hungry, I still ate, because I didn’t think well with low blood sugar and I needed to be able to think.

  I definitely needed to think, since what I was attempting was insane. If I succeeded, I’d have to create a ghost that wasn’t too apparently distinguishable from a real ghost. Was there theoretically any difference? I didn’t know. And if I succeeded in my wild scheme, the ghost had to support the doctrine of the current Saint church leaders, and I had to develop that right under the eyes of the leaders of the Revealed Twelve. That wasn’t a problem. Escaping the Twelve would be, and then I’d have to find a way to escape Cannon. Why? Like a lot of things, I couldn’t explain why, but I didn’t trust the First Speaker, and I hadn’t survived all those years as a Spazi agent by ignoring my feelings.

  When I finished eating, I set the tray back on the floor and opened the installation manual for the scanner, ignoring the guard and the reflection of a tired and haggard-looking man who had no business doing what he was doing.

  Physically connecting everything was easy enough, and so was installing the conversion programs—on a disk I hadn’t seen at first.

  Once it looked like the system and scanner worked, I eased the image onto the scanner and toggled the scanner on, waiting until it stopped humming and the codes had been fed to the file. Then I called up the receiving file on the screen. Half of what should have been code lines was gibberish.

  When I ran the file back through a conversion protocol to get a screen image, all that popped into place was something like a blueprint.

  As I had feared, obtaining a graphics image compatible with the ghost file protocols was going to be the problem. In my earlier efforts, the internal substance had effectively created the image, and that wouldn’t be enough for a really strong ghost image of the prophet that resembled his image.

  In the end, I reverted to doing it by trial and error, using the image scanner on gray-scale and edging the contrast as high as possible. Then I started jiggering the codes into a matrix of sorts.

  By the time the midday tray arrived with beef, bread, fruit, and fifth-rate chocolate, I was still working on the codes for the top third of the image.

  Midafternoon found me, after two breaks to use the facilities in my cell, with a complete set of codes for the image profile, but codes probably not defined enough. Still, I saved the file on one of the auxiliary disks, then called the image onto the screen.

  What I got was a ghostly image on the screen. I compared it to the copy of the painting and shook my head. I needed more definition, and I wasn’t sure how to get it.

  “How are you doing?”

  I jumped a foot from the chair. I hadn’t even heard the tall man enter.

  “You work hard.”

  “It’s hard work.”

  “Why is the image so important?” He actually sounded curious.

  “Because I have to recall the entire ghost,” I answered, trying not to lie too egregiously. “It’s hard in the case of the prophet because so many others have spoken his words.” That was certainly true enough.

  The hood bobbed as though he had nodded. Then he took the tray and left, and the lock clicked. I hadn’t even noticed, but a new and shorter guard had taken the place of the former guard.

  Sometime after what might have been dinnertime, I ran a second image. Clearer, but still, I felt, not strong enough to carry what I had to load onto it and into it.

  I tried second subroutines below the codes, cross-linked, and that improved the image, but the improvement in the areas that were double-coded showed the deficiencies where I hadn’t tried subroutines.

  By then, my eyes burned and my head ached and I couldn’t even think.

  I glanced toward the guard. “I can’t do anything more.”

  There was no response. I just put my head down on the table and closed my eyes.

  Within minutes, the lock clicked and the tall figure was back.

  “What have you accomplished?”

  “I’ve got a basic image to which I can tie the recall programs.” My voice was hoarse, even if I hadn’t spoken much. Maybe it was rusty from disuse.

  “How do we know this will work?”

  “When I’ve got everything ready, I’ll give you a test run.” I took a deep breath. “Look at the screen. Is this beginning to look like Prophet Smith?”

  I called up the image.

  “It is similar.”

  “But not close enough. Well, that’s what I need to work more on, but I can’t even see the screen in front of me at the moment. I’m calling it a night.”

  He didn’t object as he led me back to my cell-like quarters, and that confirmed, in my mind, a few more suspicions. I was too tired to examine the implications in any depth, and once I was on the pallet bed, my eyes closed despite the dripping from the shower nozzle, despite the odor of oil and dusty concrete.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  I lurched awake, drenched in sweat from running through endless corridors papered in difference engine printouts, banging at doors that were only images plastered over steel walls, blood running from fingers raw from trying to claw my way through solid steel.

  Sitting, breathing heavily, on the edge of the pallet bed, I rubbed my eyes and looked at my hands. No blood. Then, I studied the four walls again.

  Nothing had changed. The bulb over the gray metal door still bathed my cell quarters in dim light. The shower nozzle dripped. I still smelled old oil and cement dust. My datacase stood by the side of the bed, and my head ached.

  Finally I checked my watch—six o’clock Thursday morning, less than three days, and I was both exhausted and re
ady to murder the whole lot of them. Llysette was safe, at least, provided Second Secretary Trumbull-Hull hadn’t reneged, provided … provided … I didn’t want to think about all the things that could have gone wrong. That way lay even greater insanity.

  Instead, I took a cold shower and washed away the worst of the stink of my own fears.

  Then I forced myself to write out more codes and ideas while I waited to be retrieved for more work.

  It was becoming clear, all too clear, that unless I could resolve this problem, the next one would be worse—I wouldn’t stand a chance because I’d simply get potted with a sniper rifle. Then everyone would deny everything, wonder publicly, and I’d be an entry on the obituary page. Llysette would mourn—for awhile—but no one mourns forever.

  That line of thought made me even angrier, especially at those who had set me up, and the list included the oh-so-helpful Minister Jerome—for who else could have allowed a search of my house?—Speaker Cannon, Brother Jensen, and possibly even Harlaan Oakes. I was convinced, for some reason I couldn’t nail down yet, that Cannon wanted me in the hands of the Revealed Twelve. If they killed me, then he had a civil hook, so to speak, to eliminate them. If I succeeded in somehow disrupting their plans or escaping, then that proved that God was not on their side—at the very least. And … miracle of miracles, if I pulled off creating a ghost that supported the existing order, all would be well for Cannon, Deseret, and Columbia … and who would care about the wear and tear on the poor Eschbachs?

  I went back to work, grimly, and had three pages in longhand before they got me at eight o’clock. The timing confirmed yet other suspicions about their status and class—all good family men maintaining a hidden retreat manned by younger disciples. I wouldn’t have been totally surprised if the entire place were locked and deserted while I slept—except for one or two of the new faithful—but I really didn’t see the point in trying to escape, not yet.