Freeze Frames

by Katharine Kerr

  As the curtains stir in the window and mottled shadows drift across the bed, she reminds herself that she, however, is here now, in her mother’s room, in the only world in which she can truly believe. She makes herself be aware of her body. Head. Back of the head. Eye. Mouth. Tooth. Hand. Palm of the hand. Nail. Window. Door. House. Sword. Snake. Ox. Camel. Fish. Fishhook. Water. Field. Tent-peg. Tally mark. And the one I can never remember the name for. Lamed? Yeah, Lamed. Something to do with oxen, dunt it? Dunt matter. The twenty-two letters with which God created the universe. The infinite letters with which It created all the universes.

  For a moment Tiffany wonders if she’s going to scream. Instead, she falls asleep, with the complete suddenness of a combat veteran who knows what it means to grab sleep whenever she can.

  o~O~o

  On Monday morning, when Tiffany reaches the clinic, she finds that she’s been scheduled for neuro rehab first thing, as Gina’s still working with the new arrivals up in diagnostics. Tired as she is from the weekend, she’s just as glad to sit down and play video games, once she gets used to the weight of the monitors and the sticky feel of electrodes. At first the game goes badly, and her mind drifts, thinking of her sister. They would like to spend tomorrow evening together, go out to dinner alone, just the two of them, to talk. Mark has already agreed; he’ll go to LoDarryl’s for the game on TV. Mandi will no doubt feel hurt. When monitors shriek and complain, registering her lack of concentration, she forces herself to pay attention to the small purple alien and his enemies. He seems easier to order around today, moves faster, ducks quicker, dashes through the maze as if he somehow knew that his little electronic life depends on it. All at once she realizes that she has him at the door without a monster in sight. He slams himself against it, the door pops open, the screen changes. The maze lies behind him. What stretches ahead is a long tunnel, grey and cold and seemingly endless, but all along, on either side, there are doors.

  “Captain?”

  “Damn!”

  “Oh no, I’m sorry.” Hazel Weng-Chang stands behind her. “What have I done?”

  “Nothing.” Tiffany hits the save button hard. When the screen freezes, she whistles under her breath and turns to give Hazel a smile. “Sorry. I just got to the next level.”

  “Wonderful! Doctor’s going to be glad to hear that! Which is, by the way, why I’m here. She’s got hospital duty this afternoon. She wants to see you now. Okay?”

  “Sure, fine with me.”

  In her office, Dr. Rosas is sitting behind her desk, cluttered with data disks, a stack of papers, a couple of books. Tiffany realizes that this disorder, left for her to see, is a test of some sort. Most likely Rosas changed the time of their appointment on purpose, too; once such a change would have disoriented her. She smiles, sitting down, glancing at the desktop again. It all makes perfect visual sense.

  “You look good this morning, Captain,” Rosas says. “How was your weekend?”

  Here is the moment of truth, the crux, when Tiffany should tell Rosas about her peculiar hallucinations, her vivid mental creations of the Devil and the Rabbi Akiba, her strange delusion that these figures have spoken to her of other worlds.

  “Well, pretty good, really,” she says instead. “Had a great time with my sister on Sunday. But . . . ” she hesitates only briefly. “But I had a lot of pain in the bad leg on Sunday morning. I kinda gave in to temptation and ran about a block, just to find out what it would feel like.”

  The doctor rolls her eyes to heaven but smiles.

  “Well, now you know what it feels like. Still hurt?”

  “No, it eased up round noon.”

  “Good. But before you try running again, let’s build up some more muscle mass, okay? Gina will let you know when it’s time for track and field.”

  They share a laugh.

  “Anything else?”

  “Well, I was doing some thinking. Everyone says I keep making all this progress, doing better than they ever thought I could, right?”

  “Yeah, that’s sure true. Our star pupil.”

  “But I started thinking about what I’m gonna do next, when I’m not doing therapy anymore. And I know I could still fly, if only I could fly. You know? The data’s still there. It’s the wiring that’s no good.” She holds up the formerly bad hand. “And the meat.”

  “Well, you’re making tremendous progress in physical therapy. I wouldn’t rule out a complete recovery there, no, I certainly wouldn’t.”

  “But the wiring?”

  Rosas sighs, looks down, straightens the edges of the papers.

  “I can’t promise anything.”

  “Tell me something—honest, I mean. Think I’ll ever be able to fly again?”

  “No.” Rosas looks up, her eyes sad pools in the shadowed light. “I really don’t. I can’t see your brain healing enough to take a cybernode, and I can’t see your reflexes ever being as fast, as steady, as they used to be. But Captain, you’ve proved me wrong before, you know. I said you’d never get that hand back, didn’t I?”

  Tiffany smiles and clenches her fingers, but the smile is a sham to ease Rosas’s feelings. When the doctor made her pronouncement about the hand, Tiffany knew, in some deep and wordless way, that the doctor was wrong, that if she fought and clawed her way toward health, she would prove the doctor wrong. Now, she feels only grief for her lost skies.

  She has, however, one more authority to consult. Much later, as she’s leaving the hospital, she remembers that she told Rosas nothing about her hallucinations. There is something she wants to ask them first, before she tells the doctor the truth, before the doctor powers up her comp unit to access ROM graphics and explain these hallucinations away once and for all as symptoms of her condition, as a particularly irksome and detailed glitch in the wiring. She takes it as a given that once the doctor does explain them away, she herself will believe that they don’t exist, no matter how compelling it seems that they do exist, no matter how much sense this story of their existence makes of all her shattered memories, her scattered thoughts. She is, first and foremost, a soldier, and Rosas is now, in this peculiar war of recovery she’s fighting, her commanding officer to be implicitly obeyed. Until then, however, she will fall back on another military rule, a very ancient one: what commanding officers don’t know about, they can’t countermand.

  In another world the powers that be are building Owens Air Services Base out of the ruins of Los Angeles; here, in this non-sovereign California, the same base will exist, but with another name: the two bases, the two names, each a different letter in the long chains that speak the universe. And she, one person, not important enough, really, to be called a letter, some small diacritical mark, maybe, a tiny accent, a rough breathing—she, or so they say, must choose where she will fall in the long discourse of the worlds. So they say.

  As she waits for the bus, she keeps looking round her, expecting Nick and Akiba to come walking up the long slope of street. Once the bus arrives, and she boards, she expects to see them sitting in the back, waiting for her. All during the ride round by the ocean, the turn and the long journey east, she finds herself tensing every time the bus stops to take on passengers, finds herself craning her neck to peer around the standees and check out new arrivals. Logically, she supposes, if Nick and Akiba are hallucinations, she should be able to call them up by thinking about them, to invoke them with their names and images from whatever dark place in her mind it is that they live, but no matter how hard she concentrates, they never appear. All at once she realizes that what she’s managed to conjure up is a missed bus stop, that the trolley is crossing Arguello a good long ways beyond her transfer point. She starts to rise and reach for the cord, remembers Hunter’s Night, sits down again. She finds the card of the EuroFaire Bookshop, restored to the breast pocket of the newly-washed Forty-Niner jacket, and checks the address: just off Geary on Masonic, only a few blocks farther on.

  Since Tiffany hasn’t been in this part of town in years, it takes her a whi
le to orient herself after she leaves the bus. She stands at the crest of one hill, looks east along wide grey Geary Boulevard, which runs downhill through a jumble of stucco-crete cubes, cardboard shacks, temporary shelters of all sorts cluttering round the ruins of an old hospital, then hits a valley green with vegetable gardens and small trees sprouting among rubble. She can just pick out a white-and-orange trolley, trundling across to meet the bus she’s just left. Far far at the edge of the view another hillside rises, patched green and grey with housing and weeds, shacks and gardens, in equal measure. She can remember being a small child and standing at this same bus stop, watching electric cars rush by on the now silent streets, looking east toward downtown and seeing, peeking over the rise of that distant hill, the tops of tall grey buildings, gleaming with windows. Now she sees blue sky and an empty crest. In that other world, could there be money to rebuild downtown, civilian money for investing in a city that here in this world the military no longer needs and thus refuses to repair? Probably not, if there in that world she flew to defend a foreign country. She cannot imagine a world in which American troops fight for some reason other than cash. In that world, if it exists, she, the combat pilot, took even greater risks than the other Tiffany, the mere ferryman, did in this one, and not for love nor duty, but for only the chance to fly. In both worlds, equally desperate for fuel, civilian airlines must no longer exist.

  With a shrug she pulls out the card again, checks the address, turns and walks down Masonic, leaving the Geary view behind for a welter of shops and offices, eking out a marginal business in the stucco-crete cubes left from the downtown relocation after the quake. She finds the bookshop on the top floor of an old wooden house. At the head of a chipped and dusty mahogany staircase she lingers on a landing piled with wooden crates of sale books, glances at the tides while she pants and finally catches her breath. Most of the books are French, German, Italian, or one of the many languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet, which she can’t read. Scattered throughout, though, are Euro-English titles, mysteries, cookbooks, romances, serious-looking histories, and even a bird guide. The books look so promising that she’s afraid to go in. For so long now she’s searched for Hunter’s Night that finding it would make a rip through the fabric of her daily life.

  Before she can turn and head down the stairs, a young black woman, dressed in a blue and green dashiki, her head wrapped in matching cloth, appears in the open door.

  “Help you with something, ma’am?”

  Tiffany finds herself caught by the demands of civility.

  “Well, yeah. I’m looking for a science fiction novel that’s probably a Euro book. You guys carry something like that?”

  “We got some SF, yeah. Come on in.”

  Tiffany limps into the store, and for a moment the only open space that she can see is the narrow strip in front of the counter. The rest of the room appears to her sight as solid walls and towers of books, looming and leaning. The clerk shoves a box to one side with her foot, then slips behind the counter.

  “What’s the name?”

  “Oh. Uh, here. I got it written down.” Tiffany fishes through the cargo pockets of her pants, finds the slip of paper, and hands it over.

  “I’ll just run it through ROM. I seen that name, Allonsby, but I dint know he wrote a novel.”

  The comp unit hums, sighs, throws words onto a screen.

  “That’s weird,” the clerk says. “No book by that name in print. Not in Europe, not here, not anywhere. We got the global service—everything that’s been in print for ten years back shows up right here.”

  “Damn. Well, look, maybe I’m misremembering. I started reading it over a year ago now, got it from a USO in Greece, and maybe I just got the title wrong.”

  “Could be, for sure. Lemme run a check on Allonsby for you.” She waits, chewing her lower lip, then shakes her head at the screen. “Good news, bad news. Only book by Allonsby listed is Collected Stories. Good news is we got a copy. Thirty bucks.”

  “Swell. I’ll take it. That’ll be something, anyway.”

  The clerk sidles out to navigate through the shoals and towers of books while Tiffany searches her cargo pockets and finds her debit card, down at the bottom where she shoved it last Saturday at the cafe. Collected Stories turns out to be a fat paper-book bound in slick pressboard. While the clerk transmits the sale, Tiffany stares at the cover. She remembers this picture, a dramatically cropped shot of a silver-grey fighter in the foreground, a golden planet looming in the middle in front of a vast reach of black and starry space. She remembers, however, a very different title embossed in silver over that view. This is the cover for Hunter’s Night. She knows it, she’s sure of it, she can’t talk herself out of it. Or it was the cover, back in some other world.

  “Ma’am? Your card?”

  Tiffany realizes that the clerk’s been holding her debit card out to her for some seconds. She takes it with a forced smile.

  “Thanks. Sorry. Uh, nice store you got here. Have to come back sometime.”

  “Thank you, and please do.”

  Clutching the book in both hands Tiffany hurries out and clatters down the stairs, takes the wrong turn on the sidewalk, keeps walking anyway, away from Geary Boulevard, in the somewhat muddled thought of picking up the Fulton trolley on Fell Street, over by the Panhandle section of the park. After a couple of blocks she slows down and shifts the book to the formerly bad hand, tucking the fingers round, cradling it against her body. Although her fast pace has made her break out into a sweat, when she glances at the sky she sees fog coming, wisping out grey and rolling over the city with a slap of cold wind. She zips the Forty-Niner jacket up and wonders if she should go back, but her panicked dash has left her just about halfway between bus lines. Ahead down the empty street, she can see the dark line of trees marking the Panhandle; a clock in a launderette window tells her that it’s only 1533. Mark won’t even expect her home for another couple of hours. She might as well go for a walk in the park on the way, she decides, but by the time she reaches the narrow strip of grass and trees, she’s exhausted. Next to a children’s rusty swing-set and slide stands a concrete bench, painted over with graffiti, speckled with pigeon-white. She finds a reasonably clean spot, sits down, stretches out the bad leg, and sighs in sheer relief.

  When she settles the book on her lap, she sees the cover again. For a long time she merely stares at it, then forces herself to pick the book up, open it, hunt through the advertisements in front until she can finally locate the title page, but nowhere does she find one of those usual listings, “By the same author.” She does read, however, an introduction that explains the lack. A brilliant author, Allonsby (or so his friend, writing in memorial, describes him) the author of these pitiably few short stories, each one a gem, full of a promise broken. Allonsby was killed by a “tragically senseless and random act of terrorism in London when a street bomb exploded” some four years earlier, long before he could have written the novel Tiffany’s been remembering. In fact, the friend goes on to state that when she sorted through his tapes and perma-disk after his death, she found notes, a few scattered pages, of a book he was planning on calling, there in its beginning stages, Night of the Hunter, “too few, too brief, too rough, alas, for me to think of publishing them here.” She even remarks that of course, if indeed he’d lived to finish the project, Allonsby would have had to revise that title, reminiscent as it is of a tape dating from the so-called Golden Age of Video.

  Tiffany slams the book shut and gets to her feet, tucking it back into the formerly bad hand again. Logically she knows that her wiring must have knitted itself together in some random way to produce another set of false memories. She can make up a new story, if she works at it, that will explain everything. Perhaps she was reading this very book, or perhaps one of his stories in a magazine. She could have seen a picture of the cover in an advert in that magazine, too. Later, in the Athens USO she picked up a novel by someone else and attached the now-sinister name of Albert Al
lonsby to that book, which was the one she never did finish and has been thinking of ever since. Even as she recites the logic of the thing, she knows deep in her heart and mind that she never heard of the little British bastard before she picked up Hunter’s Night. She can see the cover in her mind, the same cover that graces this book of stories but with the other title embossed right at the top, and in the memory image she’s holding an entire paper-book, not looking at an advert in some magazine on a screen. All at once she hates Albert Allonsby and his stupidly random death. Why couldn’t he have stayed out of Harrod’s, or avoided Hyde Park, or kept away from Buckingham Palace, or restrained himself from going on whatever trivial walk, errand, or adventure it was that had taken him into the arms of exploding flame and steel?

  “You butthole, Allonsby!”

  She’s spoken aloud again. She feels the accusing blood rising in her face and looks round, but no one’s near her in the park to hear. At that point she realizes that she’s left the Panhandle behind, that quite unconsciously she’s been walking, crossing the street without looking, wandering into Golden Gate Park proper and far away from the bus line again.

  “Ah shit!”

  Eucalyptus rustles in a rising wind, spice in fog scent, silver-green on grey light. A long lawn stretches silent. She pulls the good hand, a balled fist, from her jacket pocket, makes herself open it, finds red lint in her palm and the crushed slip of paper, wipes the lint off on her pants and smooths the paper out. Hunter’s Night, Albert Allonsby. Her talisman. Spent and broken.