Freeze Frames

by Katharine Kerr

  “Just pull into the regular lot, Sergeant,” the lieutenant says. “Down at the far end.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  Potter pulls into the last space at the end of the asphalt strip, then slides out of the car to open doors. Out of the circling ditch materialize sentries in field uniform, rifles at the ready. The lieutenant barks a hasty password. The sentries nod, one salutes, they stand waiting while the generals and the Duke get out. The prime minister needs a little help; Potter smells brandy hanging about him like perfume.

  “Wait with the car,” the lieutenant says.

  “Yes, sir.”

  His cargo delivered, Potter leans against the bonnet and watches the Important People clamber down the side of the wet ditch, re-emerge safely on the other side, and hurry toward the collection of tea tents with two of the sentries trailing behind. This close Potter can see that yes, tea tents are exactly what they are, pink-and-white striped pavilions, lit from within—a cool white light very different than the usual field lanterns and electric torches. The last sentry clambers out of the ditch and strolls over to help him guard the limousine. Potter jerks a thumb at the tents.

  “Wotthehell?”

  The sentry shrugs. Since clouds have darkened the moon, Potter cannot get a good look at his face, but when the man speaks, his voice shakes badly.

  “They called us out of barracks to put the bloody things up,” the sentry says. “Emergency, they told us. Only thing they could find were bloody tea tents. Ours weren’t big enough, they said. Hurry it up, lads. Then they hauled something in on a couple of lorries. Something big. Looked like a tank, maybe, wrapped in canvas. A couple of squads put up another tent around it. To hide it, like, before the wraps came off.”

  “Missiles? Something the sodding Merrkans don’t want us to have?”

  The sentry shakes his head no. Potter waits.

  “After they had it stowed,” the sentry says in a moment, “The captain sends me up there with a message from Field Command to the colonel in charge. He was inside, you see, the colonel. So I handed it over at the door.” He falls silent.

  “Well now, here, if you’re under orders to keep your mouth shut—”

  The sentry shakes his head again. Overhead the moon breaks free and floods them with silver light. Even though he’s a veteran of the Pakistani Border Wars, Potter has never seen a man so terrified as the sentry is now.

  “There’s these creatures in there,” the sentry says. “With wings. Wearing clothes. Aliens, they must be, from outer space.”

  Potter would like to laugh, but he restrains himself in the interests of morale.

  “Uh, now here, you’ve had a few, have you? It’s cold out here, can’t say I blame you, and it’s none of my job to report it, anyway.”

  The sentry laughs, an unpleasant giggle like a teenaged girl’s.

  “I’m not drunk, and I’m not joking.” The sentry’s voice turns hard with near-rage. “I saw these things, I tell you, a couple of meters tall, they were, and they had wings. Blue and green wings. And they were walking back and forth and talking to the colonel.”

  Potter says nothing. The sentry obviously believes that he has seen two-meter-high outer-space monsters with wings. What this may mean will take a bit of thinking about. One of those new VR and hologrammic stress tests would be Potter’s guess. Show the men something strange, see how they react. But why bring two generals, the PM, and the Duke of Kent out here in the middle of the night? He starts to speak, thinks better of it, looks up to find the sentry watching him.

  “I’m not lying,” the fellow snaps.

  “All right, then.”

  The lieutenant emerges from a tent and begins trotting toward them. He pauses at the edge of the ditch, then picks his way down and through. Potter strolls over and gives him a hand up. In the moonlight the lieutenant’s face gleams as pale as death. They walk slowly back to the car and the waiting sentry.

  “What’s wrong, sir?” Potter says.

  The lieutenant lets out his breath in a short sigh.

  “You’ll have to know sooner or later,” the lieutenant says. “Something very odd’s going on, sergeant. We have, um, visitors.”

  “Told you,” the sentry mutters. “With sodding blue wings.”

  The lieutenant ignores him and goes on speaking, much too fast.

  “There’s a radiophone in the limo. Get it for me, Sergeant. And how long will it take someone to drive down from London? Or no, we’d best send a chopper, I think. He’ll prefer that. If he comes. Or no, the PM will see to it that he comes.”

  “Sir?”

  The lieutenant sighs again.

  “Sorry. Our visitors want to see the Archbishop of Canterbury.”

  o~O~o

  In Australia the messengers appear at Hanging Rock; in China, at the Great Wall; in India, at the Temple of Kali in Benares; in the Emirate, on top of the mound of Ur; in Egypt, in front of the Sphinx; in Japan, inside the grounds of the Imperial Palace. What do these places have in common? The commander saw them all in movies it particularly liked. They also lie a long way away from any Merrkan military base. Since the messengers materialize out of transporter beams on shielded frequencies, the commander hopes the Merrkans will know nothing until it’s too late.

  Since the Merrkans have grown careless from their long domination, the commander proves right.

  Four

  A bright sunny day, and on the green lawn stand the big white blocks of plasto-foam, about five feet high and seven long, each marked with a red number scribbled on the side, sixty-four of them drawn up in ranks like a squad of soldiers. Jan Tifnie Gehrens, who was named for a great-grandmother, Janet, and a great-aunt, Tiffany, walks down the line, counting them off on her data tablet, checking for damage to the packaging. The lawn rises to a low hill, and on the crest trees dance in the rising wind. From behind her comes snatches of carousel music, a digital recreation of old tapes. The actual musical mechanism has long resided in a museum in downtown San Francisco with the original wooden horses and the remnants of the gold-trimmed and mirrored panels of the original wood canopy. The brand-new carousel of the recently restored Children’s Playground in Golden Gate Park looks exactly like the old one, but it’s made of longer-lasting stuff than wood—various forms of soy-derived plastics, extruded, molded, formed, carved, puffed out with air and laid down in thin sheets, each component brightly colored, then resinated with acrylics to last for a hundred years. Jan Tifnie takes a moment to admire the carousel housing, the gilded canopy, the mirror panels, the polished floor, the unmoving chariot seats all bright green and red and gold, the shiny brass-colored poles hanging temporarily free. Thanks to the stuff it’s made of, the carousel can stand right out in the sun and glitter. Rain won’t be rotting it away or dimming its gaudy rainbow.

  Whistling along with the music, Jan’s supervisor, Enrico, comes strolling over. He grins at the plasto-crete blocks.

  “They be okay?” he says.

  “Yeah, boss.”

  “What you say we open one?”

  “Bueno, yeah. I gotta knife.”

  From the plastoskin sheath at her belt Jan pulls out a flat-bladed knife with a smoothed-off point. Together they search the closest block, find at last the thin welted seam where the two halves were heat-glued. Carefully, slowly, her tongue tucked into the corner of her mouth, Jan slides the blade into the seam, stops when it touches something solid, pulls it back a fine-judged bit, then runs it round the block from the bottom of one narrow side round to the bottom of the other. The foam creaks and splits with a waft of white powder.

  “Turn it over?” Enrico says.

  “Nah. I think, we just break it off now.”

  While Enrico holds the block steady on his side, Jan digs her fingers into the open seam and pulls. With a crack her half of the foam block splits at its base and comes away clean. Nestled in its white bed the horse gleams a silver grey with dappled flanks. Its white mane curls and tosses round the proud head with the
flaring nostrils and dark deep eyes, the scarlet bridle, trimmed in gold.

  “Oh she-it!” Enrico whispers. “Cool!”

  “Yeah, sure is.” Jan runs an admiring hand over the horse’s smooth, cool flank. “Beautiful stuff, beautiful beautiful stuff.”

  Enrico nods, smiling, but Jan feels more than a little sad. All her life, since leaving school at sixteen the way most kids do these days, she’s worked in construction and assembly, but in all those fifteen years or so, she’s never had a job she liked as much as working on the carousel reconstruction. Soon this job will end, and it’ll be back to the hiring hall, to scrimping pennies, to taking the first job that comes along, whether it’s digging new cable housings or shingling roofs, because a woman with two kids to support can’t be fussy.

  “I betta call in,” Enrico says. “Let ’em know the shipment, she okay.”

  He unhooks his callphone from his belt and punches in the number of the project office. Nothing happens. No squawks, no beeps, no answering voice. Just as he looks up, puzzled, the sound hits them. Jan can only think that the biggest quadro speaker in the world has sounded a note too low to hear but loud enough to feel. A vast pulse of energy booms soundlessly in the sky and shoves them with rushing air. Flecks of powdered foam, scraps of paper, dead leaves and twigs—all fly up from the ground and swirl round twice before they settle again. Silence drops from the sky like a shroud. Jan realizes that all the normal traffic noise just outside the park has stopped. She hears none of the normal white sound of a city—not one hiss or swish of an electric trolley or car, not one note of music or one word of a distant talk show on a distant TV.

  “The Rapture.” Trembling, Enrico sinks to his knees. “And we ain’t been taken.”

  For one brief moment Jan thinks the same. Could it be true that Christ has come in all his glory to take away the faithful while she, miserable sinner that she is, has been left behind in the clutches of the Great Beast?

  “Hell, no! That be some kind of bomb. Them pulse bombs, you see ’bout on the news. Oh my God, my kids!”

  Without thinking she is running, knife still in hand. She sprints from the playground, then settles into a smooth-breathing jog on the concrete path that takes her past Hippie Hill and out the entrance to Stanyan Street, where two electrocars sit forlornly in the middle lane. Ain’t gonna be no buses. On the sidewalk she stops, panting a little, and slips the knife back into its sheath. Both drivers sit inside their cars and stare straight ahead, hands clutching steering wheels as if in blind faith that the power will return, any minute now, to the grid beneath the surface and take them onward again. From the shops opposite, though, people are streaming out, looking up in the sky, starting to talk, to gabble, to point up as if there were something to see.

  Jan jogs across the street and heads downhill while around her panic rises. She hears snatches of voices, snatches of news.

  “Mine be off too. Everybody they got no power. Try the batteries, they work, nothing but static, no TV, nothing but static.”

  Jan trots past dead buses, keeps running. More people crowd out of houses and stand watching the sky. On the downhill slope she can run a long way, stops finally at Fillmore to pant for breath while she stares at a tangle of dead buses and pedestrians, standing around, talking always talking.

  “Nothing but static. Last night on the news they said. Things in the sky. Shooting stars. I saw it, I tell you, on the news. Something in the sky. Orbits. One of them Chinese things, that’s all. The government said. They lie. Nothing but static.”

  A man swears, a woman screams. Jan looks up when the screamer points at the sky. Far far up, a smooth grey wedge-shaped thing moves slowly from west to east, soundless in the blue, floating lower and lower as it curves over the city. A huge grey wedge-shaped plane of some kind, dotted with gleams of reflected light that must mean windows, scored and marked with lumps that must mean doors—it sinks toward the eastern horizon and disappears. Everyone in the street gawks after it without saying a word.

  Jan threads her way across the street and takes out running again. Once she hits the flat at Market Street, where buses and streetcars stand mute in dead traffic, she’s forced to slow down. She turns onto Dolores Street and heads toward her children’s school, some thirty blocks away. As she hurries along, she joins a swelling crowd of women, some carrying infants or dragging toddlers, all walking fast, trotting when they can, saying nothing, saving their breath, heading for the school. Since cars can’t run anyway, the women take over the street and spread out, hurrying past the row of ancient palms planted in the middle of the wide boulevard. Unencumbered, Jan can jog faster than most. A bit at a time she weaves her way to the head of the crowd, then leaves it behind, sprinting again when she crosses 24th and reaches the downslope.

  Then stopping. Stopping and staring, simply staring. Hearing the crowd of women coining toward her, hearing screams as they too see. Jan, who never screams at anything, merely stares.

  Coming down Dolores toward them march their children, clutching lunch boxes and paper bags. They march in tidy columns, three abreast, with their teachers walking along beside them. In front and in back are Others. Tall, so very tall, and all spindly arms and legs, but what Jan notices first are the wings, the big scaly blue and green wings, spread out as if to catch the warm sun. Behind a pair of these monsters she spots her two kids, right in front, both of them smiling and laughing. All of the kids are smiling, some skip along, swinging their lunch boxes. The teachers walk silently, their faces white or streaked with tears. As the procession comes close she can see that the creatures are smiling, too—or so she assumes, because their long slits of mouths and the folds of grey skin around them are all curved upward.

  When the children see the crowd of women, the tidy lines break into a wave of running kids, dashing forward, calling out, laughing and dancing. Jan darts forward as Maradee, her older girl, hurries up, dragging little Amber behind her. Jan drops to one knee and folds the children into her arms. She can feel herself shaking on the edge of tears.

  “Mom, Mom!” Maradee is laughing at her. “It be okay, Mom. Cool dudes, all of them.”

  Jan forces a smile, but she cannot stop shaking.

  “Mom!” Maradee pulls away and points. “They got faces like us.”

  Jan looks up and finds one of the monsters hovering nearby.

  Upon his grey and scaly face, a thing of horizontal slits and folds, she can comprehend, she can match up to some internal pattern and say to herself, “there, that makes sense,” only one feature, his pair of blue eyes, perfectly round, shining like glass beads, but still eyes.

  “They no look like us to me,” Jan says.

  Maradee considers the tall creature, who considers her in return. When the child smiles, it smiles.

  “See?” Maradee says. “Faces like us.”

  L’Envoi, Without the Roses

  On top of Mt. Davidson in San Francisco there once stood an enormous concrete cross, visible from most of the city as it rose out of a grove of eucalyptus trees. During the Great Quake of 2047, it cracked at the base and fell, shattering into three enormous pieces and smashing the trees all round it. Even for an officially Christian government, money was too short to set it back up again. Over the years grass and oxalis grew up around it, then lost the struggle for sun when the eucalyptus trees reasserted their claim to the slopes. Now, some seventy years after the earthquake, although the earth below buckles and strains yet once again and new tension builds on the fault, the broken cross lies in a grove once more.

  By positioning himself just right on the concrete stump, Nick Harrison can sit in the shade and look out between two trees to the western slope of the city below, edged with a high seawall and beyond that at the end of his view, a silver strip of ocean. He wears the sleek grey uniform of the pan-European occupying forces, currently operating under the direct command of the Masters, and of course, he’s chosen the persona of a field-grade officer. Being a subordinate has never appealed to Nick
. As he contemplates the view, he smiles, luxuriating in his victory.

  “They all converted to Catholicism. Is that cool or what? There’s millions of those scaly little bastards out there, all itching to hang a cross around their necks and believe. So they believe in It. Big deal. They also believe in me.”

  With a crow of triumph he leaps to his feet.

  “In me, they believe in me, I come with the deal, though the stupid bastards don’t even know it yet! Shit, for a while there I was scared stiff, thinking their stupid church was gonna die on me.” Nick hesitates, suddenly cold. “That’s always the question, isn’t it? Suppose no one believed in me. I mean, hey, what would happen to me? Am I immortal? Shit,last thing I want is to get that answered the wrong way. Doesn’t matter now, anyway. Millions of ’em, and they believe in me.”

  Another crow, another strut.

  “And hey, those Masters know how to whip people into shape. This is gonna be fun to watch. Lousy messy rotten human race gonna have to shape up fast now. But I dunno. What if the Masters get corrupted? I don’t see how anyone can stay efficient on this crummy planet. I better think about that, or everything will start going wrong again. It’s just not fair. It always cheats, you know.”

  “You’re a fine one to talk, creature.”

  With a yelp Nick spins around to find Rabbi Akiba, standing in a patch of sun and smiling at him. Nick clenches both fists.

  “What do you want, old man? Come to gloat, I’ll bet, about your precious Israel. All safe and sound by order of the lousy Pope himself.”

  “So why shouldn’t I be pleased? And I’ll tell you something else. All the synagogues in America—they’ll be open again.”

  “What? Why? The slimy little bastard! Wait a minute. You had something to do with this, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”

  “And what could I do, one old man like me?”

  With one last snarl Nick disappears. Rabbi Akiba smiles and addresses no one in particular.