Тим Пауэрс - Bugs and Known Problems

Vickery hesitated, then asked, “Have things gone wrong?”

“Well, I never did get lunch,” she said brightly. “Would you join me, Sebastian? My treat. You can bring your book.”

Vickery cocked his head, wondering about her Eddie. He almost asked about him, then dismissed the idea. And in fact he had not had lunch, or even breakfast. “Sure,” he said, getting to his feet. “And my poor book doesn’t eat anything.”

Her eyes crinkled in a gamin grin as she straightened her legs and stood up. Then she caught his arm for balance and said, “Oh—and can we stop for some Neosporin and Band-Aids?”

“There’s a Rite-Aid on Vermont. Have you got a cut?”

“I wonder if I might even need a tetanus shot.” She let go of his arm and pulled open her coat, then looked up at him, her eyebrows raised questioningly.

Her blouse was white at the collar and in patches on the shoulders, but the rest of the fabric was glistening red, from her breasts down to her belt, and her black skirt gleamed wetly.

Vickery’s ears were ringing, the breath stopped in his throat, and his vision had narrowed down to focus on two—no, three, at least—holes punched in the front of her blood-soaked blouse.

He heard her say, “I wonder if I’m dead.”

She turned her back on him, then spun to face him again, and a moment later she was spinning rapidly, though her hair and coat didn’t extend outward at all, and finally she simply wasn’t there, and Vickery took an involuntary step forward as a soft thump shook the air.

He let his knees bend with the forward motion and turned to sit down heavily on the dirt. He was breathing rapidly now, and his face was chilly with sudden sweat. He quickly looked around at the trees, and the slope down to the parking lot behind him, just to be sure, but he already knew he was alone here.

A ghost, he told himself as he tried to organize his scattered thoughts. Just a ghost!—disappearing in a terminal Y-axis spin, as they often did. The enhanced possibility field cast by the freeway current must be uncharacteristically strong today. And even so, she must be a—have been a—very vivid person, and only recently dead.

Killed. Shot.

How far had her ghost walked, holding her coat closed? From what direction? East or west, she’d have had to stay within the enabling freeway current all the way.

Somewhere, somebody was probably trying to get rid of a gun right now. Vickery had once been a policeman, and he made himself bring back the memory of the moment she had opened her coat, and he tried to estimate the size of the holes he had seen in her blouse; and it seemed to him that they were bigger than .30 caliber, therefore the shots had probably come from a handgun rather than a rifle. Therefore probably up close.

Pleased to meet you, Scout . I’m happy to make your acquaintance, Sebastian .

And he had shaken her hand… and accepted her offer of hospitality.

Probably a handgun. Probably up close.

Vickery sighed and got to his feet; and after a moment’s hesitation he stepped to the parking lot side of the clearing. He had been drinking a dozen cups of coffee a day lately to try to suppress his vision impairment, but now he relaxed and let his vision blur as he faced the acacia and the oleander leaves and the cars that quickly came and went on the close freeway.

Often his out-of-phase vision was spontaneous—and inconvenient!—but he could cause it deliberately by unfocusing his eyes and then “looking past” the things in front of him, like seeing a picture behind the random-looking dots on a stereogram print.

And he did it now.

Soon the tree and leaves and cars seemed to lose their scale and relative distances, as if they were all projected on a flat screen a few yards ahead of him; he flexed his gaze past them—

And in spite of the coffee, his vision warped in the now-familiar way. He could focus on the individual trees and the cars again, but everything now appeared to be in a twilight of metallic sepia. The windy whisper of cars on the freeway was muted almost to inaudibility.

He shuffled carefully out of the clearing in the direction Scout had come from, and he was waving his hands in front of his face because real, tangible branches might not be in exactly the same location as the ones he was seeing. By touch, he slid his book into the pocket of his windbreaker beside his cell phone.

Out past the cluster of trees, he peered along the freeway shoulder, but he didn’t see the figure of Scout on her way to meet him and ask about Eddie and invite him to lunch. Vickery’s chronologically dislocated sight varied unpredictably—the events he saw by it might have happened as much as an hour ago, or just within the last couple of minutes. He turned and took a step back toward the clearing.

Through the leaves he saw himself sitting against the tree, alone, head bent over the book; as always in these glimpses of the past, living bodies glowed faintly with a color that he could only describe, inadequately, as silvery bronze. He suspected that it was infrared, perceived directly by the primary visual cortex rather than through his limited retinas.

It no longer disoriented him to see himself doing things he had recently done, and he simply noted—since he had only been reading there for about twenty minutes before Scout entered the clearing—that this particular fractal time-spike was no more than twenty minutes out of synch with the averaged macro Now.

He hoped there were no people in the ordinary present moment out on the freeway shoulder, for he wouldn’t see them.

Very carefully, again feeling in front of him for obstacles that hadn’t been there in this past segment of time, he shuffled down the slope to the parking lot pavement. No figures were visible, and a breezeway that led through the apartment building to the street beyond was empty.

Then all at once he was in bright afternoon sunlight, and he could see the colors of the parked cars around him and hear the surf-sound of the freeway behind him. He had moved out past the boundary of the time-spike, back into the common Now.

“You hear me?” came a yell from his left. He looked that way and saw a young man in a T-shirt and backward baseball cap standing a dozen yards away beside a blue pickup truck that hadn’t been visible to Vickery a few moments ago. The young man was staring at him.

“Uh… what?” called Vickery.

“You stoned? You come walking down from the freeway like a fuckin’ zombie, lucky I didn’t hit you when I drove in! Go smoke your crack somewhere else, shithead.”

Vickery gave him an embarrassed wave and hurried away through the breezeway toward the street. There was no way he could retrace his steps and hope to unfocus his way back into the time-spike now, even if it hadn’t already collapsed into the broadly equalized present moment, as they always did.

God knows what I looked like, he thought as he felt his face reddening, groping my way down that slope and onto that parking lot, seeing only what had been there ten or twenty minutes earlier! And it’s no use even trying to ask my pal in the T-shirt if he’d seen Scout—normal people couldn’t see ghosts, and he had looked depressingly normal.

Out on the sidewalk, Vickery looked back, but the young man by the pickup truck hadn’t followed him.

Where did you come from, Scout? he thought.

If he just stood still out here, for a few seconds, nobody would think it was odd.

He took a deep breath and let it out, then relaxed and let his eyes unfocus as he faced the palm trees and blocky pastel apartment buildings that receded away down the street to the west.

After a few moments the view once again lost its depth, becoming just a collage of colored shapes, and he focused his eyes past that; and then, in the familiar metallic sepia light, the buildings and trees regained their sizes and distances…