Тим Пауэрс - Bugs and Known Problems

And he leaped back and nearly fell over, for a black silhouette had swept past him, in fact had moved partly through him.

It was the silhouette of a woman in a long, flapping coat—Scout, certainly, for while living people glowed with that silvery bronze color by this retro-sight, ghosts always appeared pure black.

He turned to watch her. The ghost shape was walking up the cement strip toward the apartment breezeway he had just emerged from, and he knew she was on the course that would lead her to meet him in the freeway-side clearing.

He quickly looked at his watch, squinting to see the second hand; and as he centered his attention on the little jerking black needle, color and sound flooded back around him.

He looked toward the apartment building’s empty breezeway and shivered. He knew that the ghost had not really shared volume with him—he had not physically been here when the ghost had passed this spot, twenty minutes or so ago—but the seeming intimacy had shaken him.

She had been coming east on Washington Boulevard. He walked down the sidewalk to the next intersection west, and then paused, leaning on a light pole. The traffic signal ahead of him had just switched to red, and there were no pedestrians nearby; he could surely afford a few seconds of being oblivious to the smoothed-out present.

He let his vision blur—but when he tried to look beyond the flat view of the street and the cars stopped at the crosswalk lines, nothing happened. This spot right now was evidently in synch with the averaged “now.” He was reminded of times when he’d tried to follow blood drops on pavement, and lost the tracks when they had passed over wide patches of bristling grass.

Try another spot, he thought.

The red light winked out and the green walk sign was lit, and he crossed the street, watching for a place where he could be immobile and inconspicuous for a few seconds.

An empty bus bench stood on the sidewalk in front of a corner pharmacy, and he peered down the street but didn’t see a bus in the sun-glare of approaching traffic. Time, at its finest scale, tended to be especially spiky in populated areas, and in a crowded city like Los Angeles it was unlikely that he would find two places that happened at any moment to be chronologically flat. He walked to the bench and sat down.

But I’ve surely lost her trail, he thought. She might have come from north or south to this intersection, instead of from directly west. And though I can expect to find other time-spikes, they’d be as likely to show me intervals in which she hadn’t yet arrived, or had already passed, as to include a glimpse of her black figure. And if I keep provoking these views into the past, they’ll start happening spontaneously again, in spite of all the coffee I drink.

And what, after all, can I do for her?

Peace sustains you when everything’s gone wrong . Is there anything I can do to help her rest in peace?

He sighed and sat back on the bench, and he wearily relaxed his eyes until all the movement and color in front of him seemed to be just shifting or stationary blobs in a vertical plane; and he willed his vision to step past that… and now he saw the street by the penumbral echo-light of the recent past.

He stood up—carefully, in case someone in the present might have sat down on the bench beside him—and he peered down the street to the west; but none of the pedestrian figures in that direction shone deep black. The view to the north was largely blocked by a bus stopped at the curb on the far side of Washington Boulevard, but there was no sign of her in the areas he could see.

He turned around to look down the cross-street—and felt his elbow bump a softness that was probably a person standing beside him. He would have to quickly stare at the second hand of his watch to resume seeing in flat time, and then apologize—but for a moment he had glimpsed a black silhouette a hundred feet away, on the other side of the street, moving this way behind two parked cars.

And the spike collapsed spontaneously. Vickery blinked in the sudden wash of color and sound—and, only a foot away, a heavy-set man with a moustache was staring at him angrily.

“Sorry, sorry!” said Vickery, backing away. “Uh lo siento!”

“I speak English,” the man growled.

“Fine,” said Vickery, staring past the man now. “Sorry in any language, okay?”

I’ve got to stop doing this, he thought.

He stepped around the bus-bench and hurried to the corner of the pharmacy and began walking quickly down the sidewalk, looking across the street toward the point where he had seen Scout’s ghost walking along in the recent past.

A freeway overpass bridge shadowed the lanes ahead of him, and in the sunlight beyond that he could now see the piercing blue-and-red lights of at least two police cars on the other side of the street.

As he trudged down the sidewalk, bleakly sure of what he would find at the crime scene ahead, he was resolved to drink still more coffee, live on the damn stuff, and never again deliberately provoke his useless vision impairment. What good was it to see things that had already happened, and not be able to participate, interfere, help?

With luck the chronological handicap would eventually wear off. Last year Vickery had been instrumental in closing the conduit between this world and a particularly malignant afterworld, and so ghosts no longer flitted freely back and forth, and the Los Angeles ghost-trafficking trades had pretty much collapsed—and he had been left with his occasional bouts of hyper-perception of time. He had learned, to his cost, that the generally perceived moment of “now” was actually just the blanket average of an infinity of tiny spikes that sprang up and disappeared at the interface of the future crystallizing into the past.

In the shade under the bridge he didn’t have to squint against sunlight reflecting from cars and apartment windows, and the breeze funneling through the underpass was cool on his sweating forehead. He could see ribbons of yellow police tape ahead now, on that side of the street, and a group of bystanders clustered on the sidewalk ahead of him.

They were all rocking their heads to see past the police cars and vans, and when Vickery had joined them he caught the eye of a gray-haired man in overalls.

“What’s up over there?” Vickery asked.

“Woman got shot,” the man answered. “I live right here, I heard five shots, or it might have been six. No telling how many hit her. Paramedics or somebody took her away a while ago.” He shook his head. “I hope she’ll be okay.”

She won’t, thought Vickery. She isn’t.

He shuffled to the back of the crowd and leaned against a bougainvillea-covered chain-link fence. One last time, he thought, and stared at the people in front of him and the apartment building beyond them; and in a few seconds his view lost all depth, and he cast his attention past it.

In the now brassy light, the onlookers and the police cars were gone, and Vickery was looking directly across the street at the windows of the downstairs apartment. He heard the rippling, overlapping drum beats of what must have been several gunshots, and then the apartment door opened and a light-haired man in a sport coat hurried down the walk to a pale-colored Saturn parked at the curb.

As the man opened the car door, Vickery reluctantly took a couple of steps forward across the empty-looking sidewalk—bumping the shoulders of several people he couldn’t see and who were no doubt protesting his rudeness—for he needed to see the license plate of the car; and though he felt an answering shove from one of the unseen bystanders, he had not moved out of the spike and the license plate was visible as the car swung in his direction to turn around on the street.