“Four centuries it is that I’ve been dead,” the Irishman said, “or what passes for death here. As to my name, it’s Corley, and Goedelic’s my great-great-grandson! Degenerate times, when the people let magicians scare them into obeying! But Goedelic fought against them to the last, he with his wyverns, and I’ll not have you tormenting his rest!”
“I don’t think the ghost-to-ghost hookup worked,” Alea said. Gar shrugged. “There’s always interference.”
Corley turned toward him with a menacing glare. “What were you calling me?”
“We didn’t—we called for Goedelic,” Gar answered.
“But now that we have a ghost from such an early time,” Alea said, “maybe you can explain something that’s been troubling me.”
“Now, why should I be doing that?”
“Only out of kindness to a damsel.”
Corley fixed her with a glittering eye. His mouth began to curve in an appreciative smile. “Well, could be I would at that, for one so comely as yourself.”
“Why, thank you,” Alea said, blushing. Gar glanced from her to Corley, frowning.
Surely he couldn’t be jealous of a ghost! But the thought gave Alea a bit of a glow as she said, “This world of Oldeira seems to have had a very promising beginning—”
“Aye, but the promise was broken in my grandfather’s time.”
“I was wondering how that happened,” Alea said. “All your people seemed to be born with the same chances at the start of their lives, or as close to that as any society can manage. Even when they were grown up they treated each other as equals and fellows. Everyone seemed to have been tolerant of everyone else’s views and respected each other’s religions.”
“What would religion be?” asked the Irishman.
Alea stared, then recovered. “The … the worship of a supreme being, and living in accord with the principles that Being revealed.”
“Oh.” Corley rolled his eyes up, rubbing his chin. “No, I don’t think you could say we had religions as such. Philosophies, now, that would be another matter, an understanding of how everything fitted together into a grand whole that might and might not be a Being. Mind you, there were some that worshipped their ancestors—but you can understand that, when those ancestors were apt to come calling any night.”
“Uh, yes, I suppose so,” Alea said, feeling rather numb. “But how could such a free and earnest society have broken down into this patchwork of tyrannies enforced by the ‘magic’ of trickery and a few psi powers?”
“Ah, how does the old saying go?” Corley mused. “ ‘There’s a sucker born every minute.’ ”
“ ‘And two to take him,’ ” Conn and Ranulf chorused. “You wouldn’t be those two, would you?”
The ghostly duo only grinned in response.
“Don’t overreach yourselves, lads,” Corley warned. “That saying is far older than any of us, and you’d have to be rapscallions indeed to be deserving of it.” He turned back to Alea. “I only know what my old grandad told me—that the people lost the habit of skepticism. When you stop testing claims by reason and evidence, you’re apt to believe anything that sounds impressive, and when it’s something you see, well! You’re going to believe it, bad or good.”
“But you had schools, educated people…” Alea’s voice trailed off.
Corley wagged a finger at her. “Don’t confuse education with sound judgment, colleen. Maybe the two should go together, but they don’t when the teacher stops showing proof and the students stop thinking ideas through.”
“Surely that’s too simple an explanation,” Gar objected. “You were cut off from the mother planet, thrown back on your own resources. Didn’t that have anything to do with it?”
“Ah, well, of course it did!” Corley said. “Desperate people will seize hold of anything that promises them a full belly and a safe house—and what are they to do when the man to whom they give power doesn’t keep those promises? But I’m only guessing, you see—I wasn’t there.”
“I … don’t suppose there’s any chance that … you could arrange it so that we could talk to ghosts who lived through it, is there?” Alea asked. She fluttered her eyelashes for good measure.
Corley gave her a knowing grin. “For so pretty a colleen as yourself? Sure and I will! But be wary—what you get may not be what you think you’ve wished for!” He disappeared suddenly and completely.
Alea stared. “Where has he gone?”
“To find a friend who was alive when things fell apart, I expect,” Conn said.
Ranulf said to Gar, “You may have hooked up your ghosts more thoroughly than you knew.”
Corley burst upon the scene like an exploding firecracker, arm in arm with the ghost of an old woman wearing a long skirt and a voluminous shawl over a blouse. Her hair was wrapped in a kerchief, her lean and lined old face was wrinkled and, even in the colorless glow of her spectral form, seemed leathery. “Is this the lass, then?” she demanded in a voice like the cry of a jay.
“I-I am the young woman who asked to speak with one of the oldest ghosts, yes,” Alea said, taken aback by the old woman’s energy. “My name is Alea.”
“Odd name.” The crone sniffed. “Still, mine is Lodicia, so who am I to talk? Corley tells me you wondered how our wonderful world fell apart.”
“I’m curious, yes. So many things about the way you lived seem so very right. Did you live through the collapse?”
“No, but I saw it as a ghost, and disgusting it was, I can tell you!” the old woman said. “Mind you, we had gurus and chelasteachers and students, to you—even when we came here, but there were philosophers, too, and they had great and wonderful debates, teaching us all to think through the issues for ourselves!”
“When you came here?” Alea’s eyes widened. “Are you one of the original colonists?”
“That I was, though I was in the third ship. By the time we came, the streets were laid out and some of the houses already built. The farms were producing, of course—the first ship saw to that.”
“How many ships were there?” Gar asked.
“Twenty there were—one a year, each with five thousand immigrants aboard. Everyone who wanted to go to a world where philosophy was the only king, where cooperation was prized above competition, where people ruled themselves and worked out their differences by talking in councils—well, you’d be surprised how many there were who were eager to leave old Terra to come here.”
Alea stared off into space with a haunted gaze and Gar knew she was remembering the oppression and constant warfare of her home world. “I can believe it,” she said.
Lodicia’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “Then you won’t believe how quick our grandchildren were to turn away from it.”
“Every generation tries to establish its identity by rejecting some of the ideas of its elders,” Gar said with a haunted look of his own.
“Yes, well, it was our children who were the cause of it, really—I shouldn’t blame the grandchildren for listening to them,” Lodicia allowed. “Some of them became gurus in their own turn, of course, we expected that, wanted that—but we didn’t look for a dozen of them to get hungry for power and try to seize it by gathering young lonely ones about them to pay them virtual worship.”
“They rejected reason, then,” Gar said with a frown.
“Yes, and rejected with it the idea that all people are only that, people that there aren’t any prophets or reborn saints,” Lodicia said bitterly. “One of my own grandchildren joined such a cult. Oh, his guru played right smartly on his followers, awing them with fireballs that were no more than flash powder and mind reading that was no more than the old vaudeville mentalists’ tricks! But the worst came when one of them died and sent his ghost to overawe his worshippers. Then his son really had them by the hindbrain, with an actual ghost to conjure!”