Solaris Rising 2 (16 page)

He consoles himself, staring down, with the thought that it must have been very quick. He calls the chief of campus law enforcement, Detective Morris Ruddle, who in turns calls Morris Ruddle the coroner to come and pronounce the boy dead. None of them sees anything unusual about this. Professor Morris Ruddle wonders if he will be put on trial. He knows a good lawyer – Morris Ruddle – and he has faith that a jury of twelve Morris Ruddles will see it his way.

He sits, and waits.

O
UTSIDE, IN THE
universe, Morris Ruddle expands to fill the available space.

WHEN THOMAS JEFFERSON

DINED ALONE

KRISTINE KATHRYN RUSCH

Kristine Kathryn Rusch has won two Hugos, a few Asimov’s Readers awards, an AnLab award, and a couple of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers awards – and that’s just in recent years. Her novels have hit the USA Today bestseller list, the Wall Street Journal and Publisher’s Weekly lists, and the extended list of the New York Times. She’s also had bestsellers in Great Britain and France. All her fantasy novels, including the seven volumes of the popular Fey series (with more planned) have recently been reissued. She’s currently writing two science fiction series set in the Retrieval Artist universe and the Diving universe respectively, two mystery series as Kris Nelscott, two goofy fantasy romance series as Kristine Grayson, and one strange futuristic romance series as Kris DeLake. She is also editing the new anthology series,
Fiction River
. No wonder she never leaves her house...

1.

“I
SIT HERE
in this old house and work on foreign affairs, read reports, and work on speeches – all the while listening to the ghosts walk up and down the hallway and even right in here in the study. The floors pop and the drapes move back and forth – I can just imagine old Andy [Jackson] and Teddy [Roosevelt] having an argument over Franklin [Roosevelt]. Or James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce deciding which was the more useless to the country. And when Millard Fillmore and Chester Arthur join in for place and show, the din is almost unbearable. But I still get some work done.”

President Harry S. Truman

in a letter to his wife Bess

June 12, 1945

“M
ARY
T
ODD
L
INCOLN
is holding séances in the White House.” Ambra Theeson stood just inside the office door, clutching a small research tablet so hard that her right hand was shaking. “And I think it’s our fault.”

Professor Kimber Lawson looked up from her desk. She pulled off her glasses – an affectation because no one needed glasses any longer, but an affectation she loved. She set them on the three-hundred-year-old partners desk her former husband had bought her on their honeymoon in Maine.

Ambra sounded close to tears, but there was no trace of them on her moon-shaped face. Ambra had always been a bit of a drama queen, even on her very first day of her very first 100-level class, more than eight years ago.

Kimber wished her book-lined office was bigger. Or that she had brought some of the oldest tomes to her apartment, rather than leave them here as an impressive (if out-of-date) tribute to her profession. Because, right now, even with the door open, Ambra was too close.

“Mary Todd Lincoln,” Kimber said in the most patient tone she could muster, “was well-known for her spiritualist tendencies.”

“But there’d been no evidence of séances,” Ambra said.

Kimber wondered if there was evidence of them now. Ambra had passed the personality tests – necessary requirements for someone who wanted to tackle Living History as a discipline. But those tests examined her ability to tolerate delayed gratification. If Ambra hadn’t been able to sustain research over several years with no result whatsoever, she wouldn’t be in this program.

Kimber now believed the tests were inadequate. Ambra was a case in point. She was disciplined, all right, but she was also prone to making wild conclusions based on next to no evidence, something that the department hadn’t thought of testing for, at least not three years ago when Ambra applied full time.

After all, Living History was still a new discipline – less than twenty years old, barely long enough for revisionists to appear. (And, in Kimber’s opinion, those who had didn’t really count.) Everyone was still trying to figure out what was needed, who the best scholars were, and what scholarship actually meant in the modern era.

“Perhaps people knew about the séances, but never made a note about them,” Kimber said. “I mean, why else would we believe that Mary Todd Lincoln had spiritualist tendences?”

Kimber truly couldn’t remember, which only made her more annoyed at Ambra. The chair of the Living History department shouldn’t be seen as ignorant about the Lincolns. Lincoln remained, two centuries after his death, the most studied president in American history.

“Because she kept seeing Willie’s ghost in her bedroom after he died,” Ambra said in that tone people use when they think someone else should know something. “She never tried to summon him.”

Kimber assumed that Willie was the dead son, but she couldn’t remember when or how he died. And wasn’t there another named Tad?

“Do we know for certain that she never tried to contact him?” Kimber asked.

“Yes, we know that for certain,” Ambra said with a little too much force. She still clutched the tablet, but now she was watching Kimber like Kimber had grown two heads. “We know more about Willie’s death and its impact on both Lincolns than we know about almost anything else. I mean, they were in the White House at the time, and the number of servants and assistants and –”

“I mean,” Kimber said, “do we know for certain that Mary Todd Lincoln held no séances?”

“
Yes
,” Ambra said. “We do.”

“Because,” Kimber said over her, “we learn that all sorts of things we thought were true weren’t when we travel back and observe. And vice versa, of course.”

Ambra actually rolled her eyes, which Kimber thought horribly unfair. She’d wanted to roll her eyes at Ambra for nearly eight years now and, so far, she had restrained herself from doing so.

“We’ve been visiting the Lincolns for more than two decades and no one,
no one
, has seen a séance in the White House. And it makes sense.” Ambra was now waving the tablet at Kimber as if the tablet held the truth. “I mean, think about it. If the Lincolns had held séances in the White House during the Civil War, the muckraking press would have been all over them. It would have reflected badly on them and –”

“I understand,” Kimber said as calmly as she could. So she had shown her ignorance. At least she’d shown it to Ambra, whom everyone else found as annoying as she did. “But my earlier comment still remains. Sometimes presidents do manage to keep secrets, even from the press.”

“Not something like this,” Ambra said. “There would’ve been too many people involved.”

Kimber closed her eyes, because otherwise she would look up to the heavens and shake her head. The day had already been a long one – she’d had to organize everything from next year’s schedule to the waiting list for next month’s historical visits – and she really didn’t want to spend time with her most difficult student.

Nor did she want to explain something to Ambra that Ambra should have already known: Presidents kept major secrets all the time, secrets that were closely held by dozens of others, from staff to compatriots to members of the opposition party. A lot of those secrets got lost to history in the days before time travel. Now, those secrets were being recovered and revealed.

Once upon a time, Kimber used to think the revelations were the most exciting part of her work. Now she was so tired, she doubted she would ever use the word ‘exciting’ again.

Kimber made herself open her eyes and pretend interest. “How did you find out about the séances?”

“It showed up in the Wikipedia listings,” Ambra said.

Kimber barely managed to keep from laughing in surprise. “And what were you doing on Wikipedia?”

That old creaky thing had existed as long as Kimber could remember, and no serious scholar used it. It was for school children and the occasional pedant who was giving a speech.

The site would probably vanish sometime soon. It was already losing its importance. People preferred to watch their history live, in snippets, and if they were going to make some kind of presentation, they now clipped the actual scholarly visitation and presented the quote or the moment on screen so that everyone could see both its veracity and its historical beauty.

And Kimber did mean beauty. The elegance of the Living History work kept her in this chair. She loved everything from accurate scholarship to the videos of actual historical events. Young scholars could watch major moments through protected observation portals (
Windows Into The Past
, the manufacturers called them), but the true scholars, the ones who wanted to dedicate their lives to discovering what actually happened during an event or even a war, would show up and observe in real time, unnoticed by the subjects themselves.

“I was checking the listings,” Ambra said. “I volunteered to monitor some of the Wikipedia Living History links last year, remember? You’re the one who assigned it to me.”

Kimber nodded, even though she had forgotten. She had given Ambra the assignment to keep her busy, to make her think she was actually doing real work when, in fact, she wasn’t.

Kimber kept hoping that Ambra would drop out of the program but, so far, no such luck.

“I followed the link,” Ambra was saying, “and here it is, plain as day. Look.”

She set the tablet on Kimber’s desk, narrowly missing her glasses, and tapped the screen. A tiny little recording of a group of people in nineteenth century garb sat around a large table in near-darkness. Someone was chanting faintly, and in the background, a spectral figure arose.

“See?” Ambra said, poking her finger on the tablet, making the images jump. “That’s Raymond Hall.”

At first, Kimber thought she meant some nickname for a Washington D.C. building that she wasn’t familiar with. Then she realized that Ambra meant Raymond Hall was a person.

“You know him?” Kimber asked.

“We went to high school together,” Ambra said.

“And he’s enrolled here?” Kimber asked.

“Jeez,
no
,” Ambra said. “He’s not smart enough to get in here.”

Sometimes Kimber was astonished that Ambra had possessed the intelligence to get in here. “Then I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”

“That spectral image, that’s Raymond Hall.”

“I got that,” Kimber said, “but how can that be our fault?”

“I didn’t mean
our
as in the university’s. I meant
our
as in the Living History Project’s. As in at all the universities. Now Mary Todd Lincoln is holding séances.”

She said that last as if Mary Todd Lincoln were still alive.

That was another danger of the Living History Project. The lesser scholars often forgot their subject had already lived his life, and had moved on to whatever it was humans moved on to.

“Has it crossed your mind that this image might be faked?” Kimber asked.

Ambra snatched the tablet off Kimber’s desk as if Kimber were going to damage it. She wasn’t, of course. To do damage, she had to care, and at this moment all she cared about was getting Ambra out of her office.

“I
checked
,” Ambra said. “It’s real.”

“How could you check?” Kimber asked. “It takes a lot of technical skill to verify Living History recordings.”

“Okay, I ran it through our immediate checker, the one we use for monographs and presentations,” Ambra said. “And it cleared those.”

The immediate checker was designed for professors who needed to check major presentations from students on a variety of subjects the professors might not know much about. The immediate checker caught flat-out fraud and historical reenactments, but couldn’t tell if a particular piece of actual scholarship was real or not.

Still, Kimber wasn’t going to argue at the moment. No one cared about Wikipedia, least of all her.

“Pull the piece down from Wikipedia as pending review,” Kimber said, “and then give it to one of our techs. I’m sure he’ll figure out that this is some kind of prank.”

Ambra hugged the tablet to her chest. “How can you be so sure?”

Kimber smiled at her, hoping the smile wasn’t too condescending. “We’ve long ago established that the processes we use to observe the past have no impact on that history whatsoever. We can’t touch anything, we can’t move anything, we can’t interact with the environment in any way.”

“You actually believe that?” Ambra asked.

“I do,” Kimber said.

“Then explain Raymond Hall.”

This time, Kimber did roll her eyes. “I already did,” she said.

Ambra scowled at her and left the office, slamming the door behind her. Kimber stared at the blond wood for a moment. Maybe this was enough to expel Ambra from the department.

Kimber certainly hoped so. It was students like Ambra who took all the fun out of Living History.

Okay. That wasn’t true. The fun had left Living History the moment the programs got institutionalized.

Kimber rubbed a hand over her face, then picked up her glasses. Maybe it was just time to retire. She hated the students, she hated the administration, and she hated teaching.

The only reason she stayed was her unlimited opportunities to head to the past, and actually see the people she had admired, living their lives as if they really were unobserved.

Which, of course, they were not.

2.

“G
RACE
C
OOLIDGE, WIFE
of President Calvin Coolidge (1923-29), was the first person to say she had actually seen Lincoln’s ghost. According to her, the lanky former president was standing looking out a window of the Oval Office, across the Potomac to the former Civil War battlefields beyond.”