Freeze Frames by Katharine Kerr
Janet makes the BBC and the silent feed into insets at the top of the screen, punches up the terminal program, then glances round for a more convenient input device than the TV wand. On the dresser, next to the silver tray, lies a remote keyboard. She picks it up, looks under the napkin—croissants, which normally she loves. Today they look disgusting. She sits on the floor with her back against the foot of the bed and rests the keyboard in her lap while she runs a quick search on documents filed under her name. She finds two directories created and set aside, coded for use, asylum and janetswork. Once again, Rosemary proves herself the hostess who thinks of everything.
When Janet brings up the first directory, she finds more than a meg of docs listed, including the full text of the Special Circumstances Immigration Act of 2028 and a subdirectory of material pertaining to the famous Singh case that triggered the writing of said legislation.
“It’s a good thing I’m a lawyer. Hey, I better get used to saying solicitor.”
Janet cannot laugh, wishes she could cry. In her mind sound the words, “Call your daughter.” All morning, as she studies the government-supplied infofiles and readies her application on the official forms, she pauses every ten minutes to try Mandi’s number, but the phone lines stay stubbornly down. While she works, she glances often at the two inset windows, where footage of the States in chaos silently rolls by. Finally, toward noon, she transmits the completed application to the office LOC number listed on the form. As an afterthought, she prints out a copy, wondering if perhaps she should go down and apply in person as well. When she calls Rosemary’s office, she gets Rosemary herself. Even on the tiny phonevid Janet can see dark smudges under her friend’s eyes.
“I’m surprised you’re there.”
“I just popped in to the office for a minute,” Rosemary says, yawning. “Have you transmitted the application?”
“I did, yeah. Yesterday you said something about going down to New Whitehall. Do you think I—”
“No, don’t! I’ve heard that pictures are being taken of Americans entering the building.”
“Taken? By whom? Wait, no, of course you can’t tell me.”
Rosemary’s image smiles, very faintly.
“I’ll just check to make sure the transmission’s been received, then,” Janet says. “And stay here.”
“Yes. That would be best. I’ll be back for dinner. If you’d just tell Thompson?”
“Of course.”
Rosemary smiles again and rings off.
Janet returns the monitor screen to four windows of news. When she runs the search program, she finds one station with taped video from San Francisco, looping while serious voices discuss the news blackout. Colonel Harrison has issued a statement assuring the world media that the blackout is both regretted and temporary, that the telephone service has been disrupted by rebel sabotage and that it will be restored as soon as possible. No one believes him. As the video reels by, about an hour’s worth all told, Janet watches like a huntress, her eyes moving back and forth, studying details, searching desperately for the images of people she knows, seeing none, even though she stays in front of the monitor all day, watching the same loop, over and over.
o~O~o
“Rosemary was quite right,” Jonathan says. “The committee are beside themselves with joy. How soon can you give the first lecture? That was their only question.”
“Wonderful,” Janet says. “In a couple of days, I guess. I’ll have to call Eleanor—that’s my editor—and see if she can send me a copy of the book. I didn’t have one with me, and I don’t have any cash, and I can’t stand asking Rosemary for pocket money. She’s done too much for me already, feeding me and like that. Maybe I can squeeze an advance out of HCM. God knows the book’s been selling like crazy over here.”
“HCM?”
“HarperCollinsMitsubishi. My British publisher.”
Jonathan nods his understanding. On a day streaked with sun and shadow they are walking through the gardens in the center of the condominium complex. Although the trees have dropped their leaves, the grass thrives, stubbornly green. All round the open space rise white buildings, staggered like drunken ziggurats.
“No word from the immigration people yet?” Jonathan says.
“None. But it’s only been a couple of days since I filed the application.”
“They probably haven’t even looked at it, then. The morning news said that over two thousand Americans have applied for political asylum in various countries. Quite a few businesspeople were caught in Europe, I gather. A lot of them have come here.”
“Yeah. I heard that three times that number are just going home.” Janet hears her voice growl with bitterness. “Happy as clams with their new theocracy.”
“Um, well, yes.” Jonathan sighs, hesitates before continuing. “At any rate, I’ve got the University’s contracts for the public series and then for the course of study. I’ll transmit them to you tonight, so you can look them over. We’ll need to get handbills out for the lectures, by the way, and some notice to the media. We’d best start thinking of a general title.”
“That’s true. I wonder if I’ll get hecklers? Oh well, they’ll be easier to handle than the ones back home.”
“Rosemary told me once that you’d—well, had some trouble with thugs.”
“Oh yeah. They beat the hell out of me. It was after an abortion rights rally, maybe what? Thirty years ago now. I had bruises for weeks. And a broken arm.”
“Horrible, absolutely horrible! It’s lucky you weren’t killed.”
“A lot of people were, back in those days. Doctors, nurses. Doctor’s wives, even.” Janet shudders reflexively. She can still remember images of fists swinging toward her face and hear voices shrieking with rage, chanting, “Jesus Jesus Jesus.” “All in the name of God. No, that’s not fair. In the name of the warped little conception of God that these people have.”
“The history of an illusion. Living history, unfortunately.”
“Yeah, very much alive and well in the US of A. I suppose abortion’s the first thing the new government’s going to outlaw.”
“They have already. The Times had a list, this morning, of the various acts they’ve pushed through your Congress. Quite a lot for just a few days’ work. The junta released the list, you see. They’re holding press conferences for official news as well.”
“I should look that over.” Janet tries to muster an ironic laugh, can’t. “Well, there goes my life’s work, right down the drain. What do you bet that I’ve been on the wrong side of every law they’ve just passed?”
“Doesn’t sound like my idea of a fair wager at all.” He hesitates, frowning down at the gravelled walk. “Rosemary said there’s been no word of your daughter.”
“That’s right, yeah. Well, no news is good news. The Red Cross doesn’t have her name on any of the casualty lists. It hasn’t appeared on any of the lists of political prisoners, either.”
“That’s something, then. Some of my young friends are working on getting a network pieced together. Perhaps they’ll run across something.”
“How can they even reach the States with the phone lines down?”
“Satellite feeds of some sort. Military, probably. I’ve asked them not to tell me more. And then they can maybe get in through Canada. Somehow. As I say, I don’t really want to know.”
That evening Janet goes over the contracts from the Free University, finds them fair and the proposed payment generous. Since the money will come from a special fund, the check will no doubt be slow in coming. She decides to call her agent tomorrow and ask him to see about an advance from the publishers.
“But who knows when we’ll get it?” Janet says. “Rosemary, I hate sponging on you like this.”
“Oh please!” Rosemary rolls her eyes heavenward. “Who was it who fed and housed my wretched son when he was going through his loathsome phase? He leeched for absolutely months.”
“Oh, he was no trouble, really, since I wasn’t
They share a laugh at the now-respectable Adrian’s expense.
“Well, you’re not any trouble, either,” Rosemary goes on. “In fact, that reminds me. I had a phonecard made up for you—on my account, that is. It’ll be weeks before you can open your own, and you’ll need access.”
“Well, I will, yeah. Thanks. I wonder when I’ll be able to phone home.”
They both find themselves turning in their chairs, glancing toward Mandi’s picture on the end table.
“Sometimes I’m sorry that I waited so long to have a child,” Janet says. “Here I am in my sixties, and she’s just getting married. God, I hope she’s still getting married. Jack means the world to her.”
“She’s not like us, no.”
In the photo Mandi smiles, tremulous under her mortarboard, the English literature major with no desire to go to graduate school.
“I just hope she’s happy.” Janet’s voice shakes in her throat. “I just hope she’s all right. You know what the worst thing is? Wondering if she hates me, wondering if she hates what I am.”
“Oh, surely not!”
“If they won’t let her marry Jack? If they call her a security risk?”
“Oh God, they wouldn’t!”
“Who knows? Look at the things that happened back in the fifties, with that McCarthy creature. Witch hunts. It could happen again. I won’t know how she feels until I get through.”
Rosemary is watching her carefully, patiently. Janet concentrates upon the changing gardens on the display screen, view after view of Giverny fading one into the other.
“They’ll have to restore the telephones soon,” Rosemary remarks at last. “Businesspeople are howling worldwide. The more centrist Tories are coming round, even. Imagine! Tories actually entertaining thoughts of a commercial boycott! I hear the European Parliament is considering a strong resolution to embargo. It’s supposed to come to a head tonight. Then we’ll take it up tomorrow here, if it passes. Of course, it’s just a call for embargo, not a binding act.”
“The junta won’t care.”
“What? Half of America’s wealth is in trade!”
“I know these people. They’ll be willing to plunge the country into poverty, if that’s what it takes to keep it isolated and under control. Of course, if they do that, they’ll lose a lot of their support among the middle class and the corporate types. So what? It’s a little late for those people to be changing their damn minds now.”
“Yes. Rather.”
“Well, I mean, that’s just my opinion.”
“It’s one of the best we have, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“Well, you have lived there.” Rosemary shakes her head. “It’s so odd—I read your book, and yet I thought you were being something of an alarmist. I suppose I didn’t want, I suppose no one wanted to believe it possible, like that ancient novel, what was it called, the Wells?”
“1984?”
“No, that’s Orwell. Sinclair Lewis. It Can’t Happen Here. That was it. I think.”
“Well, it hasn’t happened here, just there.”
“Yes.” Rosemary hesitates for a long moment, then sighs. “Yes, but that’s quite bad enough.”
Waiting
Janet has always been good at waiting. In discrimination cases waiting served as a weapon, asking the court for a postponement here, a recess there, playing a hard game with powerful opponents who knew that every day they waited without settling was another day for her team to gather evidence, to sway public opinion, to demand another investigation, to serve another writ. But none of those waits ever involved her daughter.
Over that first fortnight of exile, Janet evolves a ritual. Every morning she scans the news, both media and hard copy, for information about the American telephone shutdown, as the papers have taken to calling it. Then, on the off-chance that she missed something, she calls Mandi’s number four times a day, mid-morning, mid-afternoon, dinner hour, late night. She never gets through. Since the junta has stopped all outgoing calls, Mandi cannot call her. Janet assumes her daughter knows where she is, that she must realize, by now, that her mother will be sheltering with the woman Mandi’s always considered her aunt. Every now and then some military spokesman announces that service will be restored soon, very soon. Oddly enough, the infamous Colonel Harrison has disappeared, and a new chief of public security appears now and again on the news. Janet assumes that Harrison has fallen victim to some sort of internal purge; fascists always do fall out among themselves, sooner or later.
Some news does get released: the names of casualties, the names of those imprisoned. Unlike South American dictatorships, which at least realize their crimes to be unspeakable, this junta sees no reason to conceal their victims in silences and mass graves, not when they believe themselves the agents of God on earth. Amanda Elizabeth Hansen-Corey never appears among the names, not on either list. Janet reads each three times through, very slowly, to be absolutely certain of it. By doing so she finally spots Eddie’s name, spelled out formally as José Eduardo Rodriguez, who has been sentenced to six months’ imprisonment for assisting an enemy of the state.
“Oh, Eddie! How horrible, how unfair!”
Only much later does Janet realize the full significance of the charge. She herself, of course, is the enemy of the state to whom they referred. She has now been publicly branded as a criminal.
Hacking
The students at the Free University call their building Major’s Last Erection, a name that’s been handed down for the last forty years or so, even though few people remember who the major in question was. A prime minister, Janet tells them, not an army officer at all. Few seem to care. Several times a week she goes down to Canary Wharf, ostensibly to meet with Jonathan and the Curriculum Committee, but in reality to sit around and drink tea with a group of women students. Like most of the students at the university, Rachel, Mary, Vi, and Sherry come from working-class backgrounds; indeed, they all work, waitressing part-time, mostly, to keep themselves in school.
Vi—small, skinny, and very pale, with ash-blonde hair and watery blue eyes—always wears black, black jeans, black shirts, black cloth jackets, since she can’t afford leather. Unlike the rest, she knows computers from the inside rather than merely being able to use what BritLink offers the average citizen. Her father was a repairman for the computer end of the Underground; he helped his daughter put together her own system from obsolete parts when she was seven years old.
“It was for my birthday, like,” Vi tells Janet. “I was ever so pleased with it, too, all those lovely games it could play. Course, I’d never seen a real system then, mind.” She grins with a flash of gold tooth. “But it was a good time, anyway, and it got me off to a good start.”
Good start, indeed. When the other girls leave for their jobs, Vi takes Janet up to the thirteenth floor of the office building and a room officially labelled, “Computer Laboratory.” They march through the ranks of official students learning programming and pass through a door into a smaller room, where Vi’s boyfriend, Harry, has put together another system from spare parts—but these, state of art and pilfered, probably. Janet never asks. Vi is installing a remote feed to a satellite hookup in the pub where Rachel works over in Southwark, just a few blocks from the cathedral. This particular pub features sports on television and thus owns its weak linkup quite legitimately, but it’s also close to various corporate offices with strong links and remote feeds to other satellite systems.
“Piece of cake,” Vi says. “Once we link up to the Goal Posts’ feed, we can bleed into anything within a couple of kills.”
“Kills?”
“Sorry. Kilometers. And then.” Vi smiles with a flash of gold. “And then we’ll see. You don’t want to know any more.”
“That’s very true.” Janet grins at her. “I don’t.”
Paranoia
At Janet’s first public lecture so many people turn up to buy tickets that the University Audio/Visu
“The Foreign Office thought you’d best have some protection,” Ford remarks. “You never know these days, do you now?”
“Ah, well, no, I suppose not.” Janet is annoyed to find her hands shaking. She shoves them into the pockets of her blue blazer. “You’re from the Foreign Office?”
“No, ma’am. Scotland Yard. They just had a word with us, like.”
“I see. Well, thank you.”
During the lecture Ford sits on the platform while Patel stands at the back of the hall. After the lecture they follow, staying close but not too close, as she goes to lunch with Jonathan and several students. When she returns to the condominium, Patel escorts her while Ford follows in an unmarked car. At the gate to the complex, Patel has a few murmured words with a new security guard. Janet has never seen security guards at the gate before. From then on, she sees guards every day.
Catch 22
On the seventeenth day of her exile Janet receives a telephone call from the Immigration Office. Her application for political asylum is being processed. If her application is accepted, she will be issued a “red card”, a visa allowing employment, good for a two years’ stay in Britain, at which point her case will need to be reviewed. Janet, who knows all this, senses trouble.
“Is something missing on the application?”
“Well, not exactly.” The blonde and pink-cheeked girl on the phonevid looks sorrowful. “It would be a good thing, you see, if you had a bank account or some sort of financial arrangement. We can’t legally require this, but —”
Janet has heard many such “buts,” fading with a dying fall, in her career.
“I understand. Thank you very much. I’ll attend to it.”