Ghosts of Columbia (17 page)

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Authors: L.E. Modesitt Jr.

Tags: #Science Fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Alternate History, #United States, #Literature & Fiction

BOOK: Ghosts of Columbia
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“How bad is it?” He eased into his chair in the graceful way that only a large athletic man can.
“About as bad as it can get before it really gets bad.”
“No bodies yet?”
“One. A professor at the university was killed for no apparent reason. The Spazi moved in, with just enough presence to advertise to those who might be looking.
There seem to be disproportionate numbers of people whose backgrounds are thin, mine included.”
“What’s the game?”
“Everyone is out to play Pin the Tail on Johan, but I can’t figure out why, at least not for everyone.”
“Deep game?”
I nodded. “It might have been a setup from before I left here.”
“Oh, shit, Johan. Can’t they just leave you alone?”
“It doesn’t look that way.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
“As I told Judith, after tomorrow morning just stay out of the way. I don’t think there’s anything you can do, and … I just can’t have anyone … anyone else …” I swallowed and sat there.
He actually got up and patted my shoulder, and we looked into the darkness for a time before we went to bed. At least he had Judith. Llysette was six hundred fifty miles away physically, and who knew how much further in her mind?
J
udith, dressed in a maroon suit, and Eric, dressed in dark gray pinstripes, were at the kitchen table by the time I managed to stagger through the shower and dressing.
The broad bay window in which the solid-oak kitchen table sat revealed the kind of gray autumn day that had been all too common when I had lived in the Federal District. In a perverse way, it was gratifying to know that some aspects of life didn’t change.
“Good morning, Johan. How was your presidential dinner?” asked Judith, rising gracefully. “Tea?”
“Please.” I bumbled into the empty chair, dodging the knife-edged perfection of the table edge and old memories raised by a sister-in-law in a maroon suit.
After Judith poured the tea, I loaded it with raw sugar, then began to open the banana laid beside the heavy, honeyed, nut-covered sweet roll on my plate. The sweet roll would have to wait.
“The dinner?” prompted Eric.
“You saw the paper? The business about the Japanese sharing their nuclear submersible technology? I presume it was in the paper?”
“Oh, that?” Eric nodded. “It was in the paper. I’d seen some speculations about that earlier, though.”
“Why would the Japanese give us that technology?” asked Judith.
“I doubt that they exactly gave it to us, dear. The question is how President Armstrong thinks he can persuade the Speaker.”
I had to snort at that. “What choice does the Speaker have? With the freetraders after his head, he’s going to turn down a technology that will give us the upper hand over Ferdinand’s navy? At least for a little while.” The tea tasted good, and the sugar definitely helped. I took a small bite of the sweet roll.
“Right,” affirmed Eric. “I’m sure the Austro-Hungarians are working on their own nuclear submersibles.”
“It’s all so pointless.” Sitting across from me, Judith nibbled on her roll, then sipped her tea. “I mean, what’s the purpose in taxing people to raise more money to build better ways to destroy more people? In the end, we’re all either poorer or dead.”
“God, you’re depressing.” Eric finished off the last half of the enormous sweet roll in a single bite.
“The truth sometimes is.” Another small bite of the banana was all I could manage, followed by more tea. “Maybe that’s why it’s hard to live here. You either face the truths and get depressed, or don’t face them and let yourself be deluded.”
“What does where you live have to do with that?” asked Eric as he poured a second cup of tea. “Everyone in the whole country has the same choice.”
“I don’t know that it’s so obvious elsewhere.” I finished the first cup of tea and reached for the pot.
“Then if you’re looking for honesty, isn’t this a better place to live?” asked Judith, her question followed by a bright smile.
I had to nod. “But are most people really looking for honesty?”
Eric snorted again.
“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 gray 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?”

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