Freeze Frames by Katharine Kerr
“Let’s go back to the way you keep feeling disoriented. Tell me, do you ever feel like you come from someplace else?”
“No.”
“What? Not really?”
“I mean, I grew up here. Of course I belong here. It’s just that. Well, sometimes the city’s not right. I mean, things are gone. Other things are there.”
“Aha! A close match but not exact, eh?”
“Match for what?”
“The other city. The one you’ve got mapped in your memories.”
Again she feels words slip away and shatter like so much dropped china.
“The hell with this.” Nick leans across the table. “She doesn’t even need to understand it. Tiff, you’re in the wrong world, that’s all. You remember that explosion? The missiles, hitting that fusion power plant? Did you realize that it was a fusion plant? The Israelis are way ahead of everyone else in this world and yours on that. That’s why the Emirate sent the suicide squad in. To take out that particular plant with nuclear warheads. Yeah, that’s right, forbidden nuclear warheads. And in this world, the one we’re sitting in now, they did it. The force, the energy, that got itself released was . . . was huge, enormous, more than you, more than any of us can understand. If you’d really been in this world when that plant went up, there wouldn’t have been enough left of you to find. You got to have wondered how you coulda survived that explosion.”
“Well, no, I dint, but—I mean, till now—wait a minute. I didn’t survive. Fucking thing killed me, man.”
“No, that was the impact when you bailed out too late. Almost death by natural causes, by comparison. That explosion woulda taken your corpse apart molecule by molecule. That’s what happened to the other pilot. The one with the unarmed plane. The other Tiffany. The other you, sweetheart.”
He sits back, panting a little from the effort of speaking clearly. Her words fail. The rabbi’s questions, the Devil’s talk of other outcomes to the same battle, seem to run together, to swell inside her mind and grow like some greasy bubble, filling all the available space, smashing even the possibility of other thoughts against her skull, cramming and strangling until they die. In her hand the squeezer beeps in protest. She lets it go.
“Don’t bully,” Reb Akiba says to Nick. “She has to understand, so she can make her decision.”
“Decision, hell!” Nick snaps. “She’s got to go back, and that’s that! Look, girl. You don’t belong here. You’re out of place. The other Tiffany, the one who lived here, she was supposed to die, yeah, and she did, blown all to hell. Not enough of her to find. But somehow or other, you got sucked through to take her place, in some kind of backlash after the explosion. That’s all wrong.”
“Wrong? Hell, it’s crazy.” The bubble breaks. “Are you talking about two mes?”
“A very large number of yous, but only two are involved in this.” The rabbi glares at Nick. “I was trying to build up to the truth gently.”
“And getting nowhere, old man. Tiff, you’ve got to go back. The alternate worlds are always trying to snap back together, anyway. It’s like, what? Lemme think. Ever seen a bowl of cake batter, something thick like that? You draw a knife through it, it looks like it’s gonna separate into two parts, but they ooze and sort of smoosh themselves back together. Well, the worlds are kinda like that. All you gotta do is go with the flow.”
“Now wait just a minute! If you think I’m gonna end up where I was a year ago—I couldn’t even stand up, couldn’t even take a piss by myself—you crazy, mister. Dunt care who you are.”
“Who said anything about that?” Nick snaps. “I can’t turn back Time. No one can, not even Akiba. We’re going to take you back to right now. Or what’s now there. But you won’t change any. You’ll be exactly the you you are now.”
“That’s where he comes in.” The rabbi flaps a hand in Nick’s direction. “We’ll have to have some sort of story to explain your return. You’ve been missing there for over a year.”
“The Prince of Lies, that’s me, kid. I’ll think of something. I don’t know what, yet, but once we’re there, back in the stinking desert, I’m sure I’ll get inspired.” He looks down, eyes lowered in creditable modesty. “It’s a gift.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you, fella.” Tiffany stands up. “I mean, like, get stuffed!”
To a babble of protests she slides free of the booth and heads out, forcing the bad leg to move fast by sheer will. Ahead, the door: oblong of grey light, safety. With the good hand she reaches out, grabs the jamb, and pulls herself through, glances back to see Reb Akiba shoving Nick down into his seat while the waitress trots over, frowning and troubled.
“Her choice.” The rabbi’s last words drift her way. “Has to be her choice.”
With a pull Tiffany swings herself out the door and manages, somehow, to run for the first time in over a year. At the intersection the streetcar clangs and trembles, jerks forward, stops, and opens its door. Blessed safety. She stumbles up the steps, slides her FastPass through the slot, and lurches down the car, falling into her favorite seat by the back door just as the car glides forward. On the sidewalk stand Nick and the rabbi. They wave. The car clangs and turns, picking up speed on the open track. They disappear. Tiffany presses her hands to her eyes and wonders why she isn’t crying. The bad leg flames pain, her lungs ache, she has just lived through the most vivid hallucination of her entire recovery, a symptom that stands like a warning buoy marking passage into a whole new ocean of disease. Dr. Rosas warned her that there would be stages, periods of change to be endured like storms. This, she supposes, is the beginning of one of them. Yet, deep in her mind, she feels no fear, not even her usual resolve to endure pain as best she can. A clot of rebel neurons keeps firing, keeps sending a message down lines of traitor brain cells, repeating against all reason and all will: At last, we have answers.
“Not true. Not answers. They weren’t real.”
All around her passengers turn to stare, accusing eyes of women peering over books held up to painted faces or over shopping bags balanced on laps. Crammed in beside them children giggle. Tiffany scrunches down in her seat and stares at the slotted view through the doors across from her: green stripe of trees outside, grey strip of insulation on the window, blue stripe of sky, white strip of door. Strip, stripe. She refuses to think of an imaginary rabbi. No white horses. No brown bears, no California bears on flags in other worlds. None of those. Not even her victory. She refuses to—she must—she will sacrifice the knowledge that she won her last dogfight even if in the end they took her down with them. The eye must not see. Only the door. Window. Her hand, clenching on the tennis ball buried in her pocket, warm pocket, rough-napped ball, the pain in cramped tendons as she squeezes the ball over and over, harder and harder. By the time she reaches her streetcar stop, she has managed to forget many things. Not all, no, but many.
At the door she fumbles for her keys, reassures herself that her wallet still lies deep in the cargo pocket, pulls the keys out and allows the bad hand to hold them for a moment, then transfers them back to the good hand and opens the door. As she steps inside she hears from the kitchen voices, Mark and another man, and the electronic roar and mutter of a sport on TV.
“Yo!” she calls out.
The electronic mutter stops, victim to the mute.
“Tiff?” Mark’s voice. “We got company.”
When Tiffany limps into the kitchen, LoDarryl, one of Mark’s old war buddies, slides out from behind the table so she can have her usual chair. Tall, rangy, the elder by some two years, he’s much lighter than Mark, almost white-looking, really, except for his tight black hair, which he wears in dreadlocks. He also has a perpetual limp, courtesy of a land mine during the Brazilian War, which left him with an artificial left foot. There wasn’t enough left of the original to reattach. Not enough of her to find. Tiffany shakes her head hard.
“Mark, you butthole, turn that box off,” LoDarryl says. “It’s bothering Tiff.”
“It’s only jai alai.” Mark leans back dangerously in his chair and flips the muted TV off. “Sit down, hon. Almost time for your pills.”
“Is it that late? Jeez.”
“Yeah, it is. I was starting to get worried.”
“I’m sorry. I ran into this guy at the streetcar stop. I guess we used to know him. Or I did. Nick, his name is, white dude, blond and flash looking. I can’t remember his last name. Ring a bell?”
Mark and LoDarryl share a blank look and a shrug.
“Someone from school, maybe,” Tiffany goes on. “And I had coffee with another friend, an old man, a rabbi, actually, is what he is. Then I hit a bookstore, but no Hunter’s Night.”
“Well, one day maybe.” LoDarryl pulls a rickety stool over to the table and perches on it. “I just stopped by for a minute. Wanted to talk to this man of yours about this idea of mine.”
“Another weird scheme,” Mark breaks in, grinning. “From the World Renowned LoDarryl Think-Tank. You know what that means.”
LoDarryl makes an obscene gesture in his direction, but he too smiles.
“No, this one’s real, Tiff. Honest. I applied for the license and everything. Dump running.”
“Oh God! Mark, you’re not gonna—”
“I already told him no. Dunt worry.”
“Well, hell, you gotta do something, man.” LoDarryl leans forward, the smile gone. “It’s real good money. Nowhere near as dangerous as Brazil.”
“You dunt see me going back to Brazil, neither.”
LoDarryl ignores the comment.
“Not dangerous at all so long as I get the license and stick to the legal areas. Lot of good stuff, man, sitting in them old dumps. They threw away all kindsa good stuff, back in the old days. You get a lot of cash for aluminum. Enough to pay your expenses, and then all the rest is gravy.”
“To cook all them rats they got out there, huh?” Mark lets his grin fade. “I know you, man. Just how long is it gonna be before the restricted areas start calling to you?”
LoDarryl manages, barely, an injured look.
“Nothing like that, man. All on the up and up.”
Yeah sure, Tiffany thinks, oh yeah I just bet.
“Look,” LoDarryl goes on. “I may be greedy but I ain’t dumb. I ain’t gonna go burn bits off myself with toxics, and I ain’t gonna get myself rad poisoning, neither. I dint live through Brazil to die up in Altamont running junk.”
“Not on purpose, no.” Mark’s grin is gone. “You never step in dog shit on purpose, neither.”
LoDarryl sighs and looks away.
“Well, hell,” he says after a moment. “Man’s gotta do something, dunt he? I can’t sign up for the Valley and work the agribiz, not with this foot. I ain’t real keen on living in a barracks again, anyway, even if they ain’t nobody shooting at me this time. What else is there, man? You go to the Army, or you go to the Valley, and if you stay in the city ’cause you can’t do either, well, hell, you gotta do something. I been looking for a job a lot longer’n you have, man. I’m giving up. Gonna make my own damn job.”
Unspoken the thought hangs there: like you’ll have to, one of these days. Mark merely looks at him for an answer.
“Ah well.” LoDarryl gets up, shoving the stool back. “Gonna be running ’long home. Let Tiff take her pills in peace. Tuesday night, now, you guys coming over? We gonna watch the big game on the big screen. Manny Mike, he got it running again.”
“Yeah? Cool. Well, we’ll see, buddy. Depends on how late Tiff gets home, how she feels.”
While Mark walks LoDarryl to the door, Tiffany watches Meebles hunkering over his plate of dry chow. The little crunching sounds he makes as he eats drive into her head like nails, but she refuses to disturb him. No ox in the manger, she tells herself. No, it was the dog in the manger. Ox trying to eat. Ox. Aleph. No imaginary rabbits. Rabbis.
“Tiff?”
Mark is standing in front of her. She has not heard or seen him come back.
“Sorry. I’m just real tired. Long workout, and now the bad leg hurts. I tried running, just a little, but it was too soon.”
“Oh. Well, lemme get you your pills.”
“You dunt mind, do you? I mean, I feel so goddamn guilty, you waiting on me like this.”
“Better me waiting on you than not having you here at all to wait on. Dunt you worry. It gets to be a drag, I’ll tell you.”
“Okay. I just . . . ” She lets the words trail away.
“Something bothering you? LoDarryl? Dunt you worry about that. Even if it wasn’t for you, I ain’t going off dump-running with LoDarryl and his crazy ideas and his crazier friends. Manny Mike—shit! A genius, yeah, sure, the guy can build anything, fix anything. ’Cepting his own brain. A real space case, that dude. Jeez, I just hope to God LoDarryl dunt get himself killed. Lot of guys scrounging for the same damn junk.”
“That’s why he wanted you, ain’t it? For a rifleman.”
Mark winces sharply.
“Yep. All them medals, he says. Let’s put ’em back to work, huh? No way. No fucking way.”
Mark gets the bottles, begins arranging on the table in tidy rows blue pills, red, green, white, and the big clear capsules that she always gets out of the way first. Merely looking at the array makes her throat tighten, her stomach churn.
“You need to eat something first?”
“Maybe so, yeah. Mark, I been thinking. If it wasn’t for me you could get your own farm. You been decorated, you made it up to master sergeant, you got the record they’re looking for. They’d give you one, somewhere out in the Heartland. You wouldn’t end up working the agribiz in the Valley at all. I’m the one who’s holding you back. Me and my damn wreck of a body. I could never work a farm with you.”
“What?” Mark spins on her in honest rage. “Who you been talking to? Where this come from?”
She can only shake her head in numb misery.
“I dunt wanna hear it. You understand me? I dunt wanna hear it.” He grabs her shoulders. “Tiff, I ain’t going nowhere without you. I dunt even want to go nowhere without you. Understand me?”
Tears slide, burn in manic relief. He clutches her close, so hard, so tight, that she can barely breathe between his grasp and her own crying.
“Oh jeezuz God,” Mark says. “Tiff, Tiff, why you work yourself up into these things! Come on, honey, come on. Let’s go sit on the sofa, okay? And I’ll bring you some soup or something in there. Where it’s comfortable.”
Still sobbing she lets him lead her to the soft cushions and the calm of blue and green walls, lets him sit her down like a child and wipe her face like one, too, while Meebles watches, his ears pricked forward to catch a sound he’s never heard before: Tiffany crying.
“Besides,” Mark says at last. “What the fuck would I want with some damn farm? All that mud and way the hell out in Hicksville. I’m a city man, honey. Last thing I want is pigs and a bunch of plants.”
And that she can believe, and believing, laugh.
Three
Grey dawn comes in slits round the one window in the bedroom. Tiffany has been dreaming of flying, a precise pilot’s dream of taking off in an old F39C and climbing in wide spirals over the eastern Mediterranean. In the dream she radioed a flight plan back to some unnamed base, then headed for Tel Aviv to keep a dinner date with Mark, on guard at the embassy there, (as he indeed was when she first met him) as casually as if she were taking the bus back in the real world, but long before her scanner showed the familiar Israeli coastline, the hostiles appeared, screaming out of the sun at seven o’clock, to fight a dream-battle over open sea. She wakes, drenched in sweat, knowing that she shot them down, knowing that she couldn’t possibly have shot them down. She breathes slowly, deeply, concentrates on the throbbing of her bad leg, the ache in the formerly bad hand, watches the room surface from the sea of night, each object dripping darkness as it rises into silver—a lump of clothes on the
Moving around eases the ache in her leg, eases the pain of shoving forbidden memories away from her mind, too, so much so that she decides to walk down to the store and buy a surprise for Mark. At eight o’clock, which it almost is, the neighborhood catch-all will open, and by nine, the line for everything but actual food will stretch halfway around the block, too long a wait for her to manage. When she opens the door, fog greets her. She grabs the Forty-Niner jacket, shoves the spent news cartridge into one pocket and her string bag into the other, and slips out fast before Meebles can escape to the dangerous outside world. Without a shred of evidence, everyone in San Francisco is convinced that the Brazilians eat dogs and cats when they can catch them. On the sidewalk she pauses, blinking hard, struggling to get the jacket on as the formerly bad hand stiffens in the cool damp. The wind strikes chill, even though off to the south, the fog is already breaking up in long streamers. Through the scattering mist she can see Mt. Davidson, with its crumbling concrete cross rising from the last few trees at its very crest, and on its lower flanks the dazzling-white walled compounds of the rich.