Freeze Frames

by Katharine Kerr

  “Was she angry?” Leslie says.

  “Frightened. And she wouldn’t even tell me about what.”

  Leslie looks away. Outside a grey cat—that kitten, now grown—strolls over to join the tortoiseshell in the sunlight.

  “Do you want to look at the rest of these?” Maggie says. “Do you want to hear this stuff, or should I just shut up?”

  “I want to hear it. It’s just kind of hard.”

  “Well, sure. Here, let me get us some lunch. We’ve got all afternoon. I’ve got some ham.”

  “Oh, no thank you. I don’t eat meat.”

  “Cheese?”

  “Sure, thanks. I’m sorry to be so fussy, but—”

  “You don’t have to apologize.”

  “Well, I’m being so much trouble—”

  “No, you’re not.” Maggie holds up one hand. “Really.”

  All at once Leslie realizes that she’s perfectly sincere, that she really doesn’t mind, that she’s not about to make some nasty comment about vegetarians. Leslie smiles, wondering why she feels like crying.

  Over cheese sandwiches on homemade bread, salad from the garden, then brownies and more coffee, Maggie talks, hesitating often to get words just right, hedging more than a little, Leslie suspects, to spare the feelings of Laurel’s daughter, forced to hear about her mother’s slide into madness. Leslie finds herself eating too much—a whole sandwich, (the salad doesn’t count, according to her rules), two brownies—while she listens, fitting each incident into the story outlined by the notebooks.

  “Well, it seems pretty clear,” Leslie says finally. “She really thought she was talking with aliens from some planet or something. And the more she thought that, the more she drank.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Maggie says. “She was a scientist. She’d always believed that stuff like psychism and aliens and all that was a lot of crap. When she first moved up here, she used to tease me about my tarot cards all the time. And then all of a sudden she found herself wondering—well, no, she really believed—if it was true after all. She told me once she felt like the earth was moving underneath her. She’d always thought it was solid, and here it was, bucking like a horse. Everything she’d ever believed had gotten itself changed around. If that had happened to me, I’d drink, too.”

  Leslie giggles, then chokes it back. Maggie hands her the manila envelope.

  “Richie copied me that disk of photos, the ones with your mom in them. Before you look at it, I’ll warn you about something. Richie thought we should just give you the nice ones, the early ones, I mean, when she looked like she’d want you to remember her. But I said no, we’d better give you all of them.”

  “The whole truth.”

  “Well, yeah. Now if you want the first disk he made, the nice one, I mean, I’ll give it to you instead.”

  “No, no, you were right. I want them all.”

  “Well, I thought you would.” Maggie smiles and nods. “And there’s a letter in the envelope, too, one she wrote me just before she, well, just before she died.”

  Leslie starts to open the envelope, hesitates, closes the flap again.

  “I’ll read it later.”

  “Good idea. There’s only so much of this you can handle at one time. No reason you have to do it all at once.”

  “Thanks. I just feel I should, you know. My dad always says I put things off too long.”

  “Laurel talked to me some about your dad.” Maggie hesitates, obviously considering how much to say. “I wouldn’t let him get under your skin if I were you.”

  Leslie smiles and looks away. On the wall next to the window hangs a battered and faded print of a Renaissance engraving, within which a pilgrim, his back to a landscape, sticks his head through a starry sky and sees the machinery, all gears and wheels, of the universe.

  When Leslie gets home, she opens the manila envelope. The disk she puts down on the desk near the computer. For a moment she looks at the letter, folded so that she can see only the blank side, then slips it into her shirt pocket. She goes out to the deck and flops into a chair, takes the letter out of her pocket and merely holds it, still folded. In the late afternoon sun the hills drowse. Every now and then a jay flies by, cawing insults to the world; otherwise, silence hangs as warm as the sunlight. Perhaps she doesn’t even need to read the letter. It was written, after all, to someone else. Laurel left no letter for Leslie, her only child, only this note to her neighbor, a woman she’d met a year or so ago. And yet, why would she have left a letter at all, since her death was an accident?

  Leslie opens the letter and reads.

  “I’m sorry to dump this on you but if I don’t come back, would you please lock up the house? I suppose they’ll call my Ex from the hospital. His name and address are on the magstrip on my ID bracelet. They made me put someone down when they made the bracelet up, in case I went into a coma. Diabetes will do that, you know. But anyway, I want the house to stay nice for Leslie. Thanks for everything. Laurel.”

  “Diabetes?” Leslie speaks out loud, then stands, feeling herself shaking.

  Until this moment she had no idea that her mother suffered from diabetes, a disease stubbornly uncured despite millions of dollars’ worth of nanotech research. Although Leslie knows little about it, she does know that diabetics should never drink, much less binge the way everyone said her mother was doing, right before the end. What was Laurel trying to do, kill herself? Leslie trembles so hard that she drops the letter. She stoops and grabs it from the ground. Inside the house the phone begins to ring. Standing where she is, Leslie counts the rings. At nineteen the phone stops. Only then does she go inside.

  The computer holds various medical records. Leslie saw them there some weeks ago, when she first came to take over the house, but she never opened those files, which seemed to have little to do with anything. Now, sitting in the shadowed room, safely away from the sunlight, she calls them up and reads them. No doubt about it—her mother was diagnosed with diabetes mellitus just before she moved to Goldust. The files contain reports of insulin implants and regular checkups, though toward the end it records two missed appointments. Laurel must have started drinking at just that time.

  “Oh, Mama!”

  Leslie rubs her eyes hard with the palms of both hands. Once the tears are dammed, she loads the photodisk, then calls up the viewer utility.

  “Display contents of video drive.”

  One at a time the images of her mother that she has just seen on paper appear on screen, but no longer flat and dull. Although Maggie’s camera must have been a very old model, the computer manages to resolve the images into some semblance of 3-D. Floating upon the monitor the pictures taken outside glow with captured sunlight, while the snapshot in the kitchen loses its shadows and reveals Maggie’s sink off to one side and a cat, lying on the floor. Since she has the screen set for fade transitions, as the picture changes, those shadows return before it vanishes. The screen brightens again to display the snap of Maggie and Laurel by the Christmas tree.

  “Freeze!” Leslie barks.

  Much clearer here on screen, of course, but the picture seems to have changed in another way as well. Standing behind Laurel and off to her left, between her and the tree itself, is a strangely shaped shadow. Neither Laurel nor Maggie could have thrown it.

  “Magnify.”

  Up close the shadow seems more solid than a shadow. Leslie thinks, “Gray jello,” then giggles. The objects across which the shadow falls are strangely blurred, not merely darkened. She gets up and steps sideways, just in case she’s seeing a reflection of her face, but the grey thing doesn’t change.

  Someone knocks on the door. Leslie screams.

  “Les, Les!” Richie’s voice, suddenly urgent. “Les, are you okay?”

  Her hand at her throat, her mouth open, she stares at the door and sees the handle turn with a click. Richie shoves it open and steps in.

  “I’m sorry,” she blurts. “You startled me. When you knocked, I mean.
I must have been half-asleep or something.”

  He grins, walks in, turns to shut the door behind him. He’s a tall kid, Richie, broad in the shoulders, narrow-hipped now, but in time, she figures, he’ll end up with a beer belly like his dad’s. He walks over, smiling, so decent-looking, attractive, really, with his thick brown hair and wide mouth, that she finds herself wishing he were older, just a few years, just her own age instead of still nineteen and fresh out of high school. All at once his smile disappears.

  “What the hell is that?”

  He has seen the picture, still frozen on the monitor.

  “I was just trying to figure that out.”

  Richie walks over, leans onto the back of the chair, and studies the screen.

  “Your grandmother said you took it, so I thought maybe you’d know. Someone’s shadow?”

  “There was nobody else in the room, and the light wasn’t behind me or anything. I’ve never seen it blown up like that before.” He sits down, picks up the mouse, and clicks on the shape. “Isolate.”

  The computer wipes away the rest of the photo, leaving the grey shape sprawled on the screen. It reminds Leslie of a chalk outline, left on the sidewalk after a street shooting.

  “Couldn’t be a person’s shadow,” Richie says. “It’s not a human shape. I mighta left the tripod standing in front of the light. I don’t think I was using it for this shot.”

  “It’s too thick for the tripod.”

  “Maybe it was dust on the lens? Or cat hair? Nah, that would’ve shown up on all of them, all the Christmas snaps, I mean.”

  “A disk glitch?”

  “Now that’s an idea.” Richie considers for a moment. “Some scrambled bits or something. These are pretty cheap disks. All you can get up here these days.”

  For a moment longer they stare at the shape. It’s sort of human-like, Leslie decides, even if Richie doesn’t think so. At least, it has a blob at the top that might be the shadow of a head, and two shadow-tendrils lower down that could have been thrown by arms.

  “Restore,” she says to the computer.

  The original photograph appears in its original size. The grey shape remains visible, but only barely, more like a stain upon the air than an object.

  “Weird.” Richie stands up and shrugs in dismissal. “Anyway, I dropped by to invite you for dinner down at our house.”

  “I can’t. I ate too much at your grandmother’s.”

  Richie looks sharply away, stares at the floor. Leslie realizes he thinks that she’s making excuses.

  “No, really,” she says. “I can’t just sit at the table and not eat, it’d hurt your mom’s feelings, and I’m way over for today.”

  “Way over what?”

  “My diet.”

  “Les.” Richie grins, shaking his head. “You’re damn near skin and bones.”

  His phrasing is too insulting to dismiss as mere politeness. Leslie automatically glances down at her body and for a brief moment sees the truth, that indeed, she is not fat at all. Her panic hits as suddenly as some stranger, rising out of underbrush to attack.

  “I still need to watch it. How am I gonna stay thin if I eat like a pig?”

  He cocks his head a little to one side and frowns, searching for words, a gesture that makes him look a lot like his grandmother.

  “Maybe some other time,” Leslie says hurriedly. “I mean, thank your mother for me. I mean, I really do appreciate it. But I can’t tonight. I just can’t.”

  “Well, okay, if you say so.”

  For a long moment they stare at each other in the failing light. Leslie concentrates on smiling, on looking perfectly normal, smiles and smiles until suddenly he looks away, turns away.

  “Call you real soon,” he says. “See ya.”

  She watches him open the door, walk out the door. Only when the door is nearly shut can she speak.

  “Bye. Seeya.”

  The door closes with a snap. She sits down on the floor and begins to cry.

  Over the next few days Leslie concentrates on organizing her mother’s scientific files, on arranging her days, as well, to leave no room for the notebooks. Every morning she gets up at dawn, works out with her videotape of stretches, then runs for an hour before she sits down in front of the computer. She runs at noon, too, as a break from work, and sometimes at the end of the day. If it’s growing dark by the time she quits, she substitutes her aerobics tape for a run. She hates to be outside in the sight of the stars.

  She’s tackling the big job, going through the backup disks of the stellar analysis data, collating files and transferring them to new, properly ordered disks. There are graphs, screen after screen of equations, most labelled, but some few not, and then paper files, too, pages of scribbled notes laced with statistical constructs and analyses. Leslie can understand little of these. Since her mother jolted a date at the top of each sheet, she can at least put the notes into chronological order and hope that Professor Juarez, back at the university, will be able to figure out what they mean.

  Every night, she falls asleep exhausted after her last workout. The pile of untranscribed notebooks, Cats Three, Moons, Roses Two, and AntiqueCars, lies untouched on the computer desk. On the fifth day Leslie considers getting rid of them. Toward evening she stands by the desk in a shaft of dust-flecked sunlight and looks at the pile. She might find an empty drawer or even a cardboard box to collect them, hide them, leave them untranscribed and unknown forever. If nothing else, they stain her mother’s reputation by their very existence. Leslie would even consider burning them, but unfortunately her mother talked about them, in letters or over the phone, to a number of her colleagues. If Leslie should destroy them, someone might hold her accountable, might blame or indict her for destroying the records of a famous scientist’s work—or so she thinks of it. She lays her hand on the pile, just idly, feeling the smooth cool of the plasticized cardboard.

  you must read them you must finish reading them

  The voice sounds in her mind but as clear as spoken words. Leslie spins round, half-expecting to see someone standing in the doorway. No one there. She waits, hearing only the scrape of her breathing, suddenly fast. The pressure begins to build, warmth spreads and soothes her, as if a soft hand lay on the back of her neck and radiated warmth into her entire body.

  “No!” Leslie screams aloud. “No!”

  She takes a few steps toward the door, staggers, feels the pressure turn intense, hovering on the edge of pain. Stumbling, screaming, she gropes her way to the sofa and fells onto it, twists over to her back and hauls her feet up until she can lie flat. The pressure lifts, the warmth fades to clammy sweat, rivering down her back and between her breasts. Only a sense of alien remorse remains, as if she were remembering some other person’s sincere and grovelling apology for hurting her feelings.

  She hovers on the edge of accepting it. If they regret the pain they cause her, can they be such bad sorts, after all? They. For the first time she felt accompanied by more than one mind. Had that ever happened to her mother? In the gathering twilight the covers of the notebooks seem to gleam with significance, just like in the movies. Laurel would have recorded it, if it had happened to her. Leslie hesitates on the edge of getting up to fetch the books, then grabs the remote control from the floor. Flicking on the TV floods the room with music and colored light. She forces herself to watch the screen, to think of nothing but making sense of a game show, half-over, summoned randomly by the remote, until at last the temptation vanishes.

  Yet that night Leslie dreams of the notebooks, and in the morning, of course, they are still there, lying on the desk. Her headache lingers, too. She feels it as a tenderness, apparently centered over her left eye, though that, no doubt, is some kind of neurological ghost. Very carefully she rubs the sore spot, trying to ease the cramp with her fingertips. After a few moments the soreness does lessen. She realizes that she should go to the doctor, who brings his medi-van into Goldust for two days every week, or even drive down to Auburn to get
her eyes checked. What if she needs her eyes adjusted? She’s never had the surgery or any need for new lenses before, but she’s been spending a lot of time staring at the screen, staring at the paper files and the notebooks. The headaches most likely are eyestrain and nothing else.

  While she eats, standing up, the last carton of yogurt in the house, Leslie finds herself thinking of that feeling, that surety that at least two beings were capturing her mind. In the sunshine and fresh air of a mountain day, with birds calling outside the open door, the idea of alien mind-reading beings seems so ridiculous, so impossible, that she can sit down and open Cats Three, the next notebook in line to be transcribed. While she eats raw carrots, she flips the pages and finds about halfway through more evidence of her mother’s madness.

  “Two minds. Tonight the accompanying ones resolved into two, like focusing a scope. Two minds, one’s the master, one’s a slave, and it’s the slave who always feels sorry. Like the master’s making him contact other minds, using him like a tool to search out sentient beings, psychic beings, whether he wants to or not. Well, I say he, but who knows what sex he is, they may not even have gender like we do.”

  “Oh, that’s too weird.” Leslie speaks aloud.

  She Frisbees the notebook back onto the desk and looks at the disordered stack, Moons and Roses and AntiqueCars. Some alien master race searching for worlds to conquer like in one of those pie-pan flying saucer movies from the old-timey days, and the poor slave mind wishing it didn’t have to locate them, locate us, Earth, the home planet, and the human race, our race, like fodder, ripe for the harvest—Leslie giggles with a toss of her head, an ill-advised gesture because the room spins sharply to the left.

  She feels minds like fingers clamp on to her consciousness. They have her now, good and proper; she feels them like two sets of hot hands, hears them murmuring words she cannot understand, sees pictures of crystalline shapes flitting past her inner eyes. Never once does she see any of these pictures as being outside of her mind; they are like memory images, recalled by a chance word or scent. None of them make any sense whatsoever. Pear shapes, blob shapes, all shiny and glittering, float in some sort of liquid air. Dimly she’s aware of the room around her, of the view of Sierra hills outside the window, dimly she hears the jays calling, dimly sees the shadows changing. A car backfires and growls by on the road—those sounds penetrate.