Freeze Frames

by Katharine Kerr

  o~O~o

  Rain falls in curtains, twisting across the Thames. In yellow slickers men bend and haul, throw and pile sandbags in a levee six bags across and as high as they can make it. The thin yellow line, Janet thinks to herself. In a slicker of her own she stands on the RiverBus dock and watches a red lorry, heaped with sandbags, drive down the grey street toward the workers. Struggling with a bent umbrella Vi scurries to join her. Drops gleam in her pale blonde hair.

  “Dr. Richards tells me you got your red card.”

  “Yesterday morning, yeah. There apparently wasn’t any problem. Just the usual bureaucracy stuff. The guy who needed to sign the red card was on vacation. That’s all.”

  “That’s super.”

  “Well, yeah. I’m glad, of course.” Janet turns away to watch the men unloading the lorry. “I wasn’t looking forward to being deported and thrown in prison.”

  “We wouldn’t a let that happen. Me and the girls, we’d a thought of something. Hidden you out, y’know? here and there. There’s a lot of us, y’know, all over this bleeding island. Girls like me and Rach and Mary and the lot. We think you’re super, y’know, we really do, and we’re networked.”

  “Do you?” For a moment Janet cannot speak. She recovers herself with a long swallow. “Thanks. I’m kind of glad I don’t have to take you up on that.”

  “Course not. It wouldn’t a been any fun.” Vi grins, a twisted little smile. “But you’ve got the asylum, so it doesn’t matter, right?”

  “Right. But tell everyone I really appreciate it.”

  “I will, don’t worry. Look.” Vi pauses for a glance round. “We’ve got the feed working. Is there anything you want us to search for?”

  I could ask them to get Mandi’s number. I bet they could. Piece of cake, breaking into a military phone book. Yet she cannot ask, her mouth seems paralyzed. What if they find the number, what if she calls only to have Mandi cut her off, what if Mandi makes it dear, undeniably once and for finally all that she never ever wants her mother to call again? Vi is waiting, smiling a little. Janet could ask her. They’d find the number, she and Harry.

  “Well, actually,” Janet says. “What I really need is my notes and stuff, all my research banks. But the military confiscated my computer, I’m sure of that. If it’s not even plugged in, you won’t be able to reach it.”

  “Oh, I dunno. What if they downloaded everything to some central bank, like? I’ll bet they’re like the Inquisition was, filing everything away, keeping all the heresies nice and tidy.”

  “I never thought of that.”

  “But now, that’ll take us a while to figure out. I know, you start writing down everything you can remember, file names, codes, anything at all. That’ll give us something to match, like, if we find their central banks.” Vi grins again. “And that’s what we’ll want, anyway, their central banks.”

  “Yeah, I just bet it is.”

  “And if you think of anything else, you just tell me, and we’ll see what we can do.”

  “I will, Vi. Thanks. Thanks a whole lot.”

  But she knows now that she’ll never ask for Mandi’s number, knows that having it would be too great a temptation to call, to late one night break down and punch code only to hear her daughter hang up as fast as she can.

  “Bleeding cold out here,” Vi says. “Coining inside?”

  “In a minute.”

  She hears the umbrella rustle, hears Vi walk a few steps off. The girl will wait, she supposes, until she decides to go in. Yellow slickers flapping, the workmen turn and swing, heaving the sandbags onto the levee. The Thames slides by, brown under a grey sky.

  “Riverrun,” Janet says. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”

  Resurrection

  For Diane Hendriksen

  Who overcame something too much like this.

  One

  Except for the clammy feel of electrodes pasted to her forehead and the nape of her neck, and the weight of the monitors and boosters slung over her shoulders, Tiffany enjoys the repatterning drills of neuro rehab, a string of video games, especially now that she’s advanced to Stage Two. Stage One got old fast, staring at the holo screen while she tried to slide the red arrow inside the green ring or drop the yellow ball into the blue cup. Here in Stage Two a little purple alien pops in and out of a three-dimensional maze while an assortment of monsters tries to eat him. Every now and then he finds rocks to throw, and every hit scores big points. She has been promised various refinements in this scenario if she can get him out of the maze and into the next section of the game world. So far, he’s been eaten at the exit every time.

  While he runs and finds and throws, the boosters gleam with red numbers or hum to themselves as they fire bursts of electricity into her nervous system; the monitors beep and click, chasing her neural responses down endless mazes and cornering the booster pulses at all the dead ends left in her brain by the crash, or rather, the ground impaction event, as the Air Force prefers to call it. The purple alien runs straight into the mouth of a green dragon-ish thing as Tiffany’s mind skips and shies. A hot, still day over the Mediterranean, a hot still day over the desert. She was on patrol. Not ferrying. Patrol. All at once, at seven o’clock high, screaming out of the sun on a suicide mission over Israel, hostiles. The monitor produces a cascade of beeps and tinny shrieks as her fingers lie still on the console. Crashed, shot down, failed, burning, spiralling, failed.

  No matter what anyone tells her, she sees herself as a loser, though how she could have possibly won a dogfight in a half-armed plane she cannot say. She’s been told repeatedly that she had no missiles on board and only enough ammunition for a couple of warning shots; she was never supposed to fight, not her, a woman, not her, a mere ferryman, flying a new F-47D to a base behind the lines for the men to take into combat. A perfectly reasonable excuse, this, except that she remembers testing her missile activation codes when she was preparing for takeoff. Remembers testing her cannon, too. Remembers them all checking out just fine. Remembers being a combat pilot, not a ferryman. And then remembers—not defeat, no, not exactly. This part of the story she can never quite explain, not even to herself. She remembers only lying on the ground dying while seeing the power plant she was trying to guard—not exploding, no, but in a state of having already exploded. The white pillar. Blazing light blinding. Blind.

  “Captain.” Someone has grabbed her arm, someone is shaking her arm. “Captain, you’re here now. You are here now.”

  The monitors are shrieking, the voice is sharp but concerned. Tiffany sees a beige face, black eyes, black bangs, swimming in front of hers. A therapist. With a name of some kind. A manicured hand reaches out and shuts the monitor blessedly up. The silence brings Tiffany’s mind back.

  “Sorry, Hazel.”

  Hazel Weng-Chang smiles but does not release her patient’s arm.

  “Come sit down, Captain. Come have some juice. Time for a rest.”

  Free of the monitors Tiffany limps into the lounge, all restful blues and lavenders, plus two walls of windows with a view that any realtor would drool over. Down at the bottom of a steep wooded slope the San Francisco Bay spreads out blue in the sunlight to the golden hills of Marin County, close by to her left lies the Pacific Ocean, and, turning back to the right, toward the City itself, she can see the rusty-orange bridge, gleaming and glinting with windshields as the maglev trains rush back and forth. As she watches, a white-and-red grain ship slides under and through, headed out to sea, loaded with California’s new gold, rice for a rich but always hungry Japan.

  Inside the lounge, slumped on one of the blue sofas, the two Jasons are talking about the Forty-Niner game. By the window, wired into his electro-chair sits Pedro, staring at nothing again. Thanks to the chair he can use both arms, as well as breathe, spit, think, and perform a few other basic functions. Chair or no he’ll never talk again, but the set of his shoulders tells Tiffany to stay away. They all know each other very well here in the rehab lounge,
better than the doctors and the therapists (both physical and neuro) ever will. The two Jasons, one black, one white, look up, study her face for a brief moment, smile, then leave her alone. For that gesture she loves them.

  In the corner stands the pale blue juice machine, dispensing three flavors, apple, orange, lemon-lime, but the real juice of course is the mixture of liquid vitamins and drugs that the computer plops into each pre-measured glass. When Tiffany presses her thumb onto the ID panel, the machine mixes up her personal formula, dumps it in, then opens the little door. As she takes the paper cup, the machine clears its mechanical throat.

  “Please take a stickette and stir your juice. Please drink slowly. Please dispose of your stickette properly.”

  The more advanced patients, like Tiffany, have come to hate the scrape and echo of this perpetual message, but plenty of people in therapy here at Veterans’ Hospital need to be reminded every single time. Steadying the cup in her good hand, she limps over to an armchair by the other window, to leave Pedro his space, and sits down with a sigh. Automatically she glances at the clock: 1430 hours. In another half an hour she can leave and go home. She’s one of the lucky ones, Tiffany, an outpatient with a home here in San Francisco. She’s one of the very lucky ones. Two months ago she would have looked at the numbers on the clock readout and found them utterly meaningless. She could name the numbers: one four three oh. She merely could not connect them with an idea as abstract as time. Now they have regained their alchemical power of transforming a moment of time into a point of the virtual space known as a day. Of course, everyone at this rehab center, the Zombie Ward as they call it, is lucky. All of them have died at least once, have lain dead for at least a few minutes until frantic doctors could pummel their hearts back alive and force their blood to start circulating the drugs that jump-started their brains. Tiffany, in fact, is a twofer, dying once in the desert near the wreckage of her plane and once again on the operating table of the field hospital. Two termination incidents, two resurrection events. It gives her a certain status.

  As she drinks her juice, she is thinking about her book. That’s what she calls it, “her book,” though in fact the science fiction novel in question, Hunter’s Night, was written by a man named Albert Allonsby. Over a year ago now she picked it out of a bin of paper-books in the Athens USO officers’ lounge and carried it round with her for another month, reading a few pages whenever she got a few minutes. A good book, well-written, set in a vastly important and meaningful war on some other planet in some other era far far away from the tedious peace maintenance campaign that she was stuck fighting, and in it there were a couple of really solid alien races and some finely designed starships that even a pilot like herself could believe in—but she never had the chance to finish the damn thing.

  “Only sixty-five lousy pages from the end.”

  Tiffany often speaks aloud without realizing it these days.

  Here in the lounge it doesn’t matter; on the street, people do turn and stare. White Jason grins at her.

  “You thinking ’bout that fucking book again?”

  “Well, jeez, I was just gonna find out who the traitor was, the one who blew up the AI unit, y’know?”

  Black Jason rolls his eyes skyward, but there’s no malice in his gesture, merely the shared comfort of a long-standing joke.

  “Maybe they gonna make a movie out of it one day. Then you find out.”

  “Rather find the damn book. They always change stuff for the movies.”

  The two Jasons nod in unison. Tiffany hauls herself up, judging with a fine ear the creak in her bad leg, broken in six different places during the ground impaction event. She is one of the lucky ones. She bailed out in time—well, nearly in time. Spiralling downward. White chute popping, so slow, so late. Black smoke. Failure. Black smoke, desert, white light in a blinding burst. Failure.

  “Captain.” Hazel Weng-Chang stands in the doorway. “Doctor has a few extra minutes. Want to check out early?”

  “Yeah, I do, thanks. Gotta stop at a bookstore on the way home.”

  Doctor Rosas’s office has walls of forest green and restful blue, blank expanses of color, not a picture, clock, bookshelf, knick-knack, not one thing that might confuse the eyes and agitate the torn neurons of her patients. Her desk, too, spreads out bare, not one thing on it except for the chart or file that she might need for the appointment at hand. The light filters through diffusion panels near the ceiling. Her grey hair is short, her doctor’s smock pale blue and utterly unadorned; she speaks quietly, she moves her hands slowly or not at all. When Tiffany comes in, Rosas smiles but sits tombstone still, leaning back in her chair unmoving until her patient has taken the chair opposite and come to a complete stop herself. Tiffany sees the white shapes on the polished desk and recognizes them instantly as printout from her last few neuro sessions. Just two months ago they would have been white shapes and nothing more.

  “You keep on doing very very well, Captain. I’m so glad. Don’t worry. You’ll get the purple guy out of the maze yet.”

  Tiffany smiles. Rosas opens a drawer, pulls out a green tennis ball, and tosses it over. Tiffany grabs with her bad hand and manages to make contact, but, claw-like, her fingers refuse to close. The ball totters on her palm, then falls, rolling across the floor.

  “It still kinda leaves a streak behind it, when it’s rolling, I mean,” Tiffany says.

  “Kinda?”

  “Well, the afterimage is faint, you know? It used to look solid.”

  Rosas nods and makes a note on one of the sheets.

  “The hand still hurt where they reconnected it?”

  “Only when it’s cold and damp.”

  Another nod, another note, a pause while she consults the pieces of paper. Tiffany realizes that she’s trying to decipher every gesture the doctor makes as if it were a word, some holy word delivered by a priest.

  “Captain,” this said very casually. “What nationality are you, again?”

  “Californian. Shit. I mean, American.”

  “So California’s not a sovereign nation.”

  “Course not. That was weird, when I thought there was a Republic, I mean. I could see how I’d forget stuff, lots of stuff, but it was just weird to find out I was remembering something that never happened.”

  “I hear blame in your voice. You cannot blame yourself for the weird things.” The doctor smiles, putting the word weird in invisible quotes. “It’s in your wiring. So your memory glitched. Big deal. We’ve all seen ‘California Republic’ written on flags thousands of times, haven’t we? It has its own logic, when you think about it. A reasonable mistake.”

  “Yeah, I know, but . . . ”

  “But it’s hard not to blame yourself. I know that too. And then you blame yourself for the blame. A vicious circle. But we’ll get you free of it yet. Remember: almost ten minutes total without oxygen to the brain. Remind yourself of that. Over nine minutes total. Of course you’ve got problems, but we’ll teach you how to wire around them.”

  A joke, of course, an often-repeated joke at rehab, this business of “wiring around” various problems. Tiffany grins, but even as she shares this moment of good humor, she feels like a liar. Caught in her memory—no, created by the wiring, or so she tells herself—is a mental image, as sharp and clear as any photo, of a tiny booklet covered in forest-green leatherette and stamped with the California seal in gold leaf. Along the edge lies gold lettering, illegible in the memory image, yet the entire booklet seems so ominous in the root sense, as well as charged with anxiety, (a thing that she was always groping for in her shoulder bag or patting her pockets to confirm its presence) that she knows it must be something crucial, her passport, perhaps, her officer’s identification papers, maybe, something that marked her officially and legally a California citizen and a member of its Air Services. She feels nothing for the word, American, except a faint whisper of connotation: foreigner. That such a concrete picture, so charged with emotion, could emerge out of a glitch,
out of an accident and death and chaos, turns her stomach cold simply because it’s such an irrelevant detail, such a trivial stupid fiction. If she’d forgotten her own name, say, or what her fiancé looked like, she would have been able to accept such lapses more easily, perhaps and maybe only because those are the things most often forgotten by resurrected war casualties in the made-for-TV movies, or maybe because it’s the problem she doesn’t have. She isn’t sure which.

  “Tomorrow’s Saturday, but the workout room’s going to be open from ten till four,” Rosas says. “Gonna come in?”

  “Oh yeah, but I promised my mom I’d take Sunday off. My sister’s coming up from San Luis Obispo, and who knows when they’ll get another chance at train tickets.”

  “Right. You can’t miss that, for sure. Okay, come in tomorrow, skip Sunday, and I’ll see you on Monday, round ’bout this time. Any questions you want to ask me?”

  There is always a question, but one that Tiffany has yet to get up her nerve to ask. Will I fly again? Will I ever ever be able to fly again, to do the one thing in life, the only thing in life that I wanted to do badly enough to risk my life for?

  “No questions, no. Thanks, Doc. See you Monday.”

  From her locker in the rehab room Tiffany gets her red and tan Forty-Niner jacket, puts it on, then uses her good hand to slip her bad hand into a side-pocket, because people on the street do tend to stare at it. Then comes the big step, forcing herself to leave. In the Zombie Ward proper all the corridors are painted bluish-grey in a matte finish, and all the lights hidden behind diffusion panels, except for the last hundred yards or so, designed as a transition to the noise and shattered light of the outside world. First the blue-grey turns shiny, chrome strips appear along the mouldings; the lights brighten; the walls change to glaring yellow. Then on one wall hangs the crucifix, all bronze and gleam, Jesus twisted on a cross, his mouth open, his eyes rolled back in his head. Tiffany cannot bear to look at it for more than a moment.