Authors: L.E. Modesitt Jr.

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

Ghosts of Columbia (38 page)

BOOK: Ghosts of Columbia

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“I assume you would like some wine. Or would you like something warm like chocolate or tea?”

“The wine, I think, that would be good.”

“Do you want anything to eat?”

Usually she didn’t, at least not right after a performance.

“I think not, but you are kind to ask.”

I opened the bottle—still Sebastopol—and brought down two glasses. “We can go into the study.”

Llysette nodded and followed me.

As I passed the difference engine I flicked it on. I hoped I wouldn’t need it, but a demonstration might not hurt. Then I set her glass on the low table in front of us and half-filled each glass. I bent down and let my lips brush her neck. “I missed you.”

“You also I missed.”

I shook my head. Where could I begin?

Llysette looked somberly at me. “You are serious.”

I nodded. “I’d like to talk about our future. It’s past time we laid the tarot cards down and set our own futures.” I sat next to her. I knew I was rushing things, but if I didn’t, I’d lose my nerve, and I was tired of living lies, even partial lies, that were tearing me apart.

“Tarot cards?”

“Fortune-telling cards. People believe them when they really need to plan their own futures.”

“An illusion that is. It is one all you of Columbia share, that of choice.” Llysette’s voice was sardonic.

“We can choose.” I didn’t want to ask her to marry me, not until I had explained. “Neither one of us is innocent.”

She stiffened.

“I have done terrible deeds, and so have you.” I frowned. “I don’t know whether it’s better to bury the past unrevealed or to face it and then bury it.”

Llysette put down the wine glass. She had not even taken a single sip. “Too much truth, I doubt it is good.”

“In that, we’re different, but I don’t know that I can be other than what I am. When I play at something else … Hell …” I took a deep breath. “All my life I’ve been talking around things, dealing in suggestions and implications, but I want to stop that with you.”

“Why is that?”

“Because neither one of us is innocent, and I don’t want to be tied up with a woman who wonders about my past, and I don’t want you to have to wonder whether something out of your past will separate us.” I could see her lips tightening. “Is honesty so bad?” I asked with a forced smile.

“Honesty? Johan, you do not wish to be honest with me. Yourself you wish to be honest with. An excuse am I. Never have you said you love me, except in the bedroom. That is honest?”

I took a deep breath. “I suppose not. But I am trying to change. And I do love you.”

“So … now it is convenient to admit that?”

I took a deep breath. “I am trying. It’s been hard for me. How do you think I feel about loving someone who committed a murder? You killed Miranda. Why, I don’t know, but I, fool that I am, shielded you. The timing I gave the watch was wrong, and you knew that. Doesn’t that show something? That I care, that I love you?”

“In sex and in murder, you love me?”

“I said I wasn’t perfect.” I tried to force a soft laugh, but my throat was dry.

Llysette stood and so did I.

“You do not understand, Johan.” She half-turned toward the window, to the almost ghostly light of the moon on the lawn outside.

I moved toward the desk, bending and tapping the keys on the difference engine to bring up the program.

“I think I might.” In fact, I was afraid I did understand, all too well, but I did not reach for the Colt in the drawer, the more fool I.

“No. No one understands.” Llysette turned, and I faced a Colt-Luger, a small one but with a long enough barrel to ensure its accuracy. She had it pointed at me, and the barrel was steady.

“Why?” My voice was surprisingly calm. At least the calm was surprising to me, in finding my lover with a gun designed to drill holes in me.

“Because you remember everything and have learned nothing, Johan. Power must be countered with power.”

“So … the poor psychic Miranda knew that you were an agent for the Austro-Hungarians … the convenient fiction of all that money from the Cultural Foundation.”

“The Foundation, it is real.”

I was very careful not to move, even though both my own Colt and the disassociator were almost within reach. I still had hopes. Stupid of me.

“You know I could have …” I swallowed. If I had turned her in, then the blame would have gone to Ferdinand, and if I hadn’t, I would have been framed, and the Speaker would have had a chain of evidence pointing straight to the President’s office. Either way, vanBecton would have gotten me, or Llysette, or both of us.

“You do not comprehend, Johan.”

“I understand everything—except why you agreed to serve Ferdinand.” I knew that, too, but I wanted to hear her explain it.

“Ferdinand’s doctors, they are masters of torture. To the last drop of pain they know what will free the soul and what will leave one tied to a screaming body. This I know. You do not.”

Thinking of those thin white lines on the inside of her thighs and under her pale white arms, I shivered. No wonder she would not speak of the scars or let my fingers linger there. And yet I had said nothing when it could have changed things. Why was I always too late?

“I need to show you something,” I said gently. “After all, that’s what Ferdinand hired you for, and what the New French were blackmailing Miranda to find out.”

“Miranda, she was not just a meddler?”

“Her son is being held in New France. He was an importer. She would have done anything, I think, to get him released. Could I sit down?”

The Colt-Luger wavered for a moment, but only for a moment. I slipped in front of the keyboard, keeping my hands very visible.

“How did you know this?” she demanded.

“Her other son told me about the detention. He also told me that she was a witch-psychic.”

“She was a witch. That I know. She said that she would tell you, and that you would turn me in. Because you were a Spazi agent still. I wanted to love you, Johan. I love you, and you said nothing. Why did you not tell me?”

“I told no one.”

“That, it does not change things.”

“I am trying to be honest. I retired from the Spazi years ago.”

“An agent, he never retires.”

She was right about that, and I was wrong. Lord, how I’d been wrong. “Let me touch the keyboard. Maybe this will help. First I’m going to make a ghost appear—even around you.”

Llysette raised her eyebrows, and I noticed the sheen of perspiration across her forehead. Damn vanBecton! What I’d done to him hadn’t been near enough. And Ralston—threatening her just to move me around.

“That is supposed to prove what?” The muzzle of the Colt-Luger didn’t waver, and she was standing just far enough away that I wouldn’t have stood a chance.

“If you are going to shoot me, then you should have something to give to Ferdinand. This is what he wants. The way to make and unmake ghosts. I love you enough to give you that.” I lifted my fingers from the keys to the flimsy directional antenna. “Now I need to point this. I won’t direct it anywhere near you.”

“What are you doing?” she asked, adding in a colder tone, “It does not matter.”

“Creating a ghost.” I turned the trapezoidal tetrahedonal antenna in the general direction of the couch and the mirror and punched the last key to bring up the Carolynne duplicate. The white figure in the recital gown appeared before the love
seat, wavering more than I would have liked, but it was only a rough duplicate, a far too simplified version of the real singer, just a caricature of Carolynne.

Llysette looked at me. “I am waiting, Johan.”

“Don’t you see?”

“See what? That mist?”

Partial ghost-blindness? Was Llysette sensitive only to the strongest ghosts? She’d said ghosts didn’t appear around her, but had that just meant she did not sense them? Was that what the torture in Ferdinand’s hands had done? I was in trouble.

“Let me try again.” I swallowed and touched the keys to the difference engine and called up the justice-and-mercy ghost caricature, hoping my latest efforts had made it very strong indeed. My knee rested against the disassociator, but I didn’t want to think about that, not even then.

The wavering figure of justice appeared next to the faint duplicate of Carolynne, and I could feel that one-dimensional sense of justice—almost a cartoon version of the man with the scales in his hand.

“Justice must be done.” The ghost voice was a whisper, but a strong whisper. “Justice must be done.”

“Something there is. You make images … How will they help?”

I wasn’t sure anything would help. Was she programmed to kill me as a form of suicide? Or herself? Neither alternative was going to help us.

The justice figure drifted toward Llysette.

“Justice must be done …”

She edged back, as though even she could feel the merciless singleness of that judicial caricature.

“No! Stay away! Johan, I will kill you!”

I ducked and snatched for the disassociator.

“Johan!”

I swung the disassociator toward her and twisted out of the chair, just as a third flash of white appeared behind Llysette.

Crack
. I could feel the first small-caliber shell rip through my jacket shoulder. I tried to drop behind the difference engine, but Llysette kept firing the damned Colt.

Crack! Crack!

“Llysette!”

“No! No one’s puppet … will I … be.”

Crack!

I pulled the spring trigger on the disassociator and held it, then jerked it sideways. Not another murder. Not another lover dying because of me. My head felt like it was splitting apart, like a crowbar was being jammed into my skull and twisted.

The lights went out, of course, even as the disassociator slewed sideways at the mirror and the huge lodestone behind it.

But even in the dimness I could see the stiffening of Llysette’s face, the faint flash of white as something—something vital?—left.

“Johan. Why have you killed me?”

The dead tone in the voice hammered at me in the darkness, and I looked at the barrel of the Colt.

Crack!

Her hand dropped, and another line of fire went through me, like the blade of a knife. Her Colt dropped on the floor with a muffled thump.

“No … no …” Llysette’s cry was more of a plea than a command. “Please, no … NO!!!”

I lost my grip on the disassociator, and I half tripped and half fell into darkness, my hands skidding across the carpet.

That darkness was punctuated with images: Elspeth lying pale between paler sheets and choking up blood; Waltar’s closed coffin; two zombie watch officers looking at me; Ralston sprawled across his steps; Gertrude sobbing at the end of the last act of
Heinrich Verrückt;
Llysette’s pale face and deader voice.

And the images spun, twirled on the spindle of that single line spoken by the caricature ghost of justice: “Justice must be done. Justice must be done.”

I lay there for a long time. A very long time.

“Johan … Johan …”

In the flickering light of a single candle, Llysette was bent over me, tears dropping across my face and bare shoulder, shivering even as she bound my wound. I did not recall turning over, and I shuddered. My shoulder seared with the movement.

“Johan, do not leave us …” Another tear cascaded across my cheek.

Us? My head ached. Why had I done it all? Had I really had to kill Warbeck? Or zombie all those people, especially the watch officers? But they would have killed me, and their guns had been ready. Why hadn’t I just told Llysette I loved her? Did I, or had it just been sexual attraction?

A stabbing sensation, almost burning as much as the gunshot wound, throbbed in my skull, behind my eyes. My head burned, ached, and the images flared …

… standing on a varnished wooden stage, limelights flooding past me, looking out into a square-faced audience, seeing not a single smile …

… the glint of an oil lamp on cold steel, and the heavy knife slicing through my shoulder, once, then again, and a man wrestling the blade away, trying to rise, watching blood well across a pale nightgown …

… drifting through an empty house, watching, waiting …

… a blond boy sitting before the bookshelves, slowly turning pages, his eyes flickering eagerly across the words, my eyes straining to follow …

… a man winding copper wire, glancing nervously toward the setting sun, fingers deftly working …

… a woman staring at me, and saying, “Leave the boy alone, or you’ll regret it. You understand, ghost hussy?”

BOOK: Ghosts of Columbia

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