Katharine Kerr - Resurrection

VIP免费
2024-12-19 0 0 210.54KB 64 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
TO BE OR NOT TO BE…
In another world a mother has put her loss behind her, or, as much behind her as any mother can ever
put a daughter's loss, and gone on with her life. In that other world a mother no doubt will go to the
opening ceremonies for the base named after her daughter.
Unless, of course, this next story becomes true. In that world a dazed mother, still in something like
shock from being reunited with the daughter that she'd long given up for dead, will put on a pink suit to sit
on the platform, but in a chair slightly behind that of the daughter herself.
Unfortunately, that story also has its logical correlate: in this world, in America, a mother does not know
that she is on the verge of losing her daughter yet again, that some mysterious and utterly unforeseen
event, engineered by the Prince of Lies, is about to sweep her daughter away forever, the same daughter
that was already snatched twice, not once but twice, from the jaws of death.
RESURRECTION
Katharine Kerr
RESURRECTION
A Bantam Spectra Book / published in association with
Pulphouse Publishing, Inc.
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Pulphouse edition published June 1992
Bantam edition / September 1992
SPECTRA and the portrayal of a boxed "s" are trademarks of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam
Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Copyright©1991 by Katharine Kerr.
Cover an copyright©1992 by Paul Youll .
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information address: Pulphouse Publishing, Inc., Box 1227, Eugene, OR 97440.
If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this booh is stolen property. It was
reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received
any payment for this "stripped book."
ISBN 0-553-29834-8
Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada
Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group,
Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words "Bantam Books" and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered
in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 666
Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10103.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
For Diane Henriksen
Who overcame something too much like this.
RESURRECTION
CHAPTER ONE
Except for the clammy feel of electrodes pasted to her forehead and the nape of her neck, and the
weight of the monitors and boosters slung over her shoulders, Tiffany enjoys the repatterning drills of
neuro rehab, a string of video games, especially now that she's advanced to Stage Two. Stage One got
old fast, staring at the holo screen while she tried to slide the red arrow inside the green ring or drop the
yellow ball into the blue cup. Here in Stage Two a little purple alien pops in and out of a
three-dimensional maze while an assortment of monsters tries to eat him. Every now and then he finds
rocks to throw, and every hit scores big points. She has been promised various refinements in this
scenario if she can get him out of the maze and into the next section of the game world. So far, he's been
eaten at the exit every time.
While he runs and finds and throws, the boosters gleam with red numbers or hum to themselves as they
fire bursts of electricity into her nervous system; the monitors beep and click, chasing her neural
responses down endless mazes and cornering the booster pulses at all the dead-ends left in her brain by
the crash, or rather, the ground impaction event, as the Air Force prefers to call it. The purple alien runs
straight into the mouth of a green dragon-ish thing as Tiffany's mind skips and shies.A hot, still day over
the Mediterranean, a hot still day over the desert. She was on patrol. Not ferrying. Patrol. All at once, at
seven o'clock high, screaming out of the sun on a suicide mission over Israel, hostiles . The monitor
produces a cascade of beeps and tinny shrieks as her fingers lie still on the console.Crashed, shot down,
failed, burning, spiraling, failed .
No matter what anyone tells her, she sees herself as a loser, though how she could have possibly won a
dogfight in a half-armed plane she cannot say. She's been told repeatedly that she had no missiles on
board and only enough ammunition for a couple of warning shots; she was never supposed to fight, not
her, a woman, not her, a mere ferryman, flying a new F-47D to a base behind the lines for the men to
take into combat. A perfectly reasonable excuse, this, except that she remembers testing her missile
activation codes when she was preparing for takeoff. Remembers testing her cannon, too. Remembers
them all checking out just fine. Remembers being a combat pilot, not a ferryman. And then remembers —
not defeat, no, not exactly. This part of the story she can never quite explain, not even to herself. She
remembers only lying on the ground dying while seeing the power plant she was trying to guard — not
exploding, no, but in a state of having already exploded.The white pillar. Blazing light blinding. Blind .
"Captain." Someone has grabbed her arm, someone is shaking her arm. "Captain, you're here now. You
arehere now ."
The monitors are shrieking, the voice is sharp but concerned. Tiffany sees a beige face, black eyes,
black bangs, swimming in front of hers. A therapist. With a name of some kind. A manicured hand
reaches out and shuts the monitor blessedly up. The silence brings Tiffany's mind back.
"Sorry, Hazel."
Hazel Weng-Chang smiles but does not release her patient's arm.
"Come sit down, captain. Come have some juice. Time for a rest."
Free of the monitors Tiffany limps into the lounge, all restful blues and lavenders, plus two walls of
windows with a view that any realtor would drool over. Down at the bottom of a steep wooded slope
the San Francisco Bay spreads out blue in the sunlight to the golden hills of Marin County; close by to
her left lies the Pacific Ocean, and, turning back to the right, toward the City itself, she can see the
rusty-orange bridge, gleaming and glinting with windshields as the maglev trains rush back and forth. As
she watches, a white and red grain ship slides under and through, headed out to sea, loaded with
California's new gold, rice for a rich but always hungry Japan.
Inside the lounge, slumped on one of the blue sofas, the two Jasons are talking about the Forty-Niner
game. By the window, wired into his electro-chair sits Pedro, staring at nothing again. Thanks to the chair
he can use both arms, as well as breathe, spit, think, and perform a few other basic functions. Chair or no
he'll never talk again, but the set of his shoulders tells Tiffany to stay away. They all know each other very
well here in the rehab lounge, better than the doctors and the therapists (both physical and neuro) ever
will. The two Jasons, one black, one white, look up, study her face for a brief moment, smile, then leave
her alone. For that gesture she loves them.
In the corner stands the pale blue juice machine, dispensing three flavors, apple, orange, lemon-lime, but
the real juice of course is the mixture of liquid vitamins and drugs that the computer plops into each
pre-mea-sured glass. When Tiffany presses her thumb onto the ID panel, the machine mixes up her
personal formula, dumps it in, then opens the little door. As she takes the paper cup, the machine clears
its mechanical throat.
"Please take a stickette and stir your juice. Please drink slowly. Please dispose of your stickette
properly."
The more advanced patients, like Tiffany, have come to hate the scrape and echo of this perpetual
message, but plenty of people in therapy here at Veteran's Hospital need to be reminded every single
time. Steadying the cup in her good hand, she limps over to an armchair by the other window, to leave
Pedro his space, and sits down with a sigh. Automatically she glances at the clock: 1430 hours. In
another half hour she can leave and go home. She's one of the lucky ones, Tiffany, an out-patient with a
home here in San Francisco. She's one of the very lucky ones. Two months ago she would have looked
at the numbers on the clock read-out and found them utterly meaningless. She could name the numbers:
one four three oh. She merely could not connect them with an idea as abstract as time. Now they have
regained their alchemical power of transforming a moment of time into a point of the virtual space known
as a day. Of course, everyone at this rehab center, the Zombie Ward as they call it, is lucky. All of them
have died at least once, have lain dead for at least a few minutes until frantic doctors could pummel their
hearts back alive and force their blood to start circulating the drugs that jump-started their brains. Tiffany,
in fact, is a twofer, dying once in the desert near the wreckage of her plane and once again on the
operating table of the field hospital. Two termination incidents, two resurrection events. It gives her a
certain status.
As she drinks her juice, she is thinking about her book. That's what she calls it, "her book," though in
fact, the science fiction novel in question, HUNTER'S NIGHT, was written by a man named Albert
Allonsby. Over a year ago now she picked it out of a bin of paper-books in the Athens USO officers'
lounge and carried it round with her for another month, reading a few pages whenever she got a few
minutes. A good book, well-written, set in a vastly important and meaningful war on some other planet in
some other era far far away from the tedious peace maintenance campaign that she was stuck fighting,
and in it there were a couple of really solid alien races and some finely designed starships that even a pilot
like herself could believe in — but she never had the chance to finish the damn thing.
"Only sixty-five lousy pages from the end."
Tiffany often speaks aloud without realizing it these days. Here in the lounge it doesn't matter; on the
street, people do turn and stare. White Jason grins at her.
"You thinking about that fucking book again?"
"Well, jeez, I was just gonna find out who the traitor was, the one who blew up the AI unit, y'know?"
Black Jason rolls his eyes skyward, but there's no malice in his gesture, merely the shared comfort of a
long-standing joke.
"Maybe they gonna make a movie out of it one day. Then you find out."
"Rather find the damn book. They always change stuff for the movies."
The two Jasons nod in unison. Tiffany hauls herself up, judging with a fine ear the creak in her bad leg,
broken in six different places during the ground impac-tion event. She is one of the lucky ones. She
bailed out in time—well, nearly in time.Spinning downward. 'White chute popping, so slaw, so late.
Black smoke. Failure. Black smoke, desert, white light in a blinding burst. Failure .
"Captain." Hazel Weng-Chang stands in the doorway. "Doctor has a few extra minutes. Want to check
out early?"
"Yeah, I do, thanks. Gotta stop at a bookstore on the way home."
Doctor Rosas's office has walls of forest green and restful blue, blank expanses of color, not a picture,
clock, bookshelf, knickknack, not one thing that might confuse the eyes and agitate the torn neurons of
her patients. Her desk, too, spreads out bare, not one thing on it except for the chart or file that she might
need for the appointment at hand. The light filters through diffusion panels near the ceiling. Her gray hair is
short, her doctor's smock pale blue and utterly unadorned; she speaks quietly, she moves her hands
slowly or not at all. When Tiffany comes in, Rosas smiles but sits tombstone still, leaning back in her chair
unmoving until her patient has taken the chair opposite and come toa complete stop herself. Tiffany sees
the white shapes on the polished desk and recognizes them instantly as the printout from her last few
neuro sessions. Just two months ago they would have been white shapes and nothing more.
"You keep on doing very very well, captain. I'm so glad. Don't worry. You'll get the purple guy out of
the maze yet."
Tiffany smiles. Rosas opens a drawer, pulls out a green tennis ball, and tosses it over. Tiffany grabs with
her bad hand and manages to make contact, but claw-like her fingers refuse to close. The ball totters on
her palm, then falls, rolling across the floor.
"It still kinda leaves a streak behind it, when it's rolling, I mean," Tiffany says.
"Kinda?"
"Well, the afterimage is faint, you know? It used to look solid."
Rosas nods and makes a note on one of the sheets.
"The hand still hurt where they reconnected it?"
"Only when it's cold and damp."
Another nod, another note, a pause while she consults the pieces of paper. Tiffany realizes that she's
trying to decipher every gesture the doctor makes as if it were a word, some holy word delivered by a
priest.
"Captain," this said very casually. "What nationality are you, again?"
"Californian. Shit. I mean, American."
"So California's not a sovereign nation."
"Course not. That was weird, when I thought there was a Republic, I mean. I could see how I'd forget
stuff, lots of stuff, but it was just weird to find out I was remembering something that never happened."
"I hear blame in your voice. You cannot blame yourself for the weird things." The doctor smiles, putting
the word weird in invisible quotes. "It's in your wiring. So your memory glitched. Big deal. We've all seen
'California Republic' written on flags thousands of times, haven't we? It has its own logic, when you think
about it. A reasonable mistake."
"Yeah, I know, but…"
"But it's hard not to blame yourself. I know that too. And then you blame yourself for the blame. A
vicious circle. But we'll get you free of it yet. Remember: almost ten minutes total without oxygen to the
brain. Remind yourself of that. Over nine minutes total. Of course you've got problems, but we'll teach
you how to wire around them."
A joke, of course, an often-repeated joke at rehab, this business of "wiring around" various problems.
Tiffany grins, but even as she shares this moment of good humor, she feels like a liar. Caught in her
memory — no, created by the wiring, or so she tells herself — is a mental image, as sharp and clear as
any photo, of a tiny booklet covered in forest-green leatherette and stamped with the California seal in
gold leaf. Along the edge lies gold lettering, illegible in memory image, yet the entire booklet seems so
ominous in the root sense, as well as charged with anxiety (a thing she was always groping for in her
shoulder bag or patting her pockets to confirm its presence), that she knows it must be something crucial,
her passport, perhaps, her officer's identification papers, maybe, something that marked her officially and
legally a California citizen and a member of its Air Services. She feels nothing for the word American
except a faint whisper of connotation: foreigner. That such a concrete picture, so charged with emotion,
could emerge out of a glitch, out of an accident and death and chaos, turns her stomach cold simply
because it's such an irrelevant detail, such a trivial stupid fiction. If she'd forgotten her own name, say, or
what her fiance looked like, she would have been able to accept such lapses more easily, perhaps and
maybe only because those are the things most often forgotten by resurrected war casualties in the
made-for-TV-movies, or maybe because it's the problem she doesn't have. She isn't sure which.
"Tomorrow's Saturday, but the workout room's going to be open from ten till four," Rosas says. "Gonna
come in?"
"Oh yeah, but I promised my mom I'd take Sunday off. My sister's coming up from San Luis Obispo,
and who knows when they'll get another chance at train tickets."
"Right. You can't miss that, for sure. Okay, come in tomorrow, skip Sunday, and I'll see you on Monday
round bout this time. Any questions you want to ask me?"
There is always a question, but one that Tiffany has yet to get up her nerve to ask.Will I fly again? Will I
ever ever be able to fly again, to do the one thing in life, the only thing in life that I wanted to do badly
enough to risk my life for ?
"No questions, no. Thanks, Doc. See you Monday."
From her locker in the rehab room Tiffany gets her red and tan Forty-Niner jacket, puts it on, then uses
her good hand to slip her bad hand into a side-pocket, because people on the street do tend to stare at
it. Then comes the big step, forcing herself to leave. In the Zombie Ward proper all the corridors are
painted bluish-gray in a matte finish, and all the lights hidden behind diffusion panels, except for the last
hundred yards or so, designed as a transition to the noise and shattered light of the outside world. First
the blue-gray turns shiny; chrome strips appear along the moldings; the lights brighten; the walls change to
glaring yellow. In the big foyer, the world glitters behind double glass doors. Tiffany hesitates just out of
range of the electric eye and takes a deep breath. Going out reminds her of the scuba diving she used to
love so much, a plunge, a dropping down, an immersing into a peculiar world of shattered light and
immeasurable shadow. When she takes a step forward, the doors slide open with a blare of sun like
trumpets. She steps through onto gray walkway. Green spreads out and menaces while white flames rise
in pillars and swell. A fanged mouth gleams in the green.
"Let your eyes adjust. It be just your eyes. And the light."
A passing orderly ignores her comment. She reminds herself, no more talking out loud, and begins her
walk down to the bus shelter at the bottom of the hill. The green resolves itself into ice plant, tufted with
purple flowers, each water-conserving spike somewhat tooth-shaped, and trees, rather typical cypresses,
not twisted vampire forms writhing in sun fire. The white and bloated towers become hospital buildings.
The view makes sense again. It takes a few seconds, at times, for her recently grown axions, the neurons
firing in a new order, to cross-connect and control sensory overload.
Names, which swarmed round her brain like so many tiny flies circling above fruit, have all settled down
again, each in its proper place. She glances back, savoring labels, rejoicing in the ability to label.
Enclosed lawn. Door. Window. And distantly, in the blueness of the bay, water. And nearer by, her own
head. She touches the back of her head. Hand. Takes out the bad hand and looks at it. Palm of her
hand, crisscrossed though it be by scars, paper-cut-thin scars, where the surgeons sliced in to reattach
major nerves. Puts the bad hand back in the pocket of the Forty-Niner jacket.
"My hand." Damn. Speaking again.
But no one hears. The bus shelter, an open hut of plexi-panel and chrome, stands empty beside an
empty street under the overhead wires for the electric buses. By leaving early, she's beaten the change of
shift from the hospital; she'll get a seat on the bus, here near the end of its long run from downtown. It will
trundle a few blocks to the ocean, pause, rum, and then head back along Geary Boulevard, but Tiffany
will transfer off long before it reaches the concrete and glass jumble that used to be the heart of the City.
Across the street the long row of pastel stucco houses, stuck together cheek by jowl, gleam in the warm
November sun. House. Window. Door. About half the houses have their windows boarded up, doors
nailed shut, roofs peeling and crumbling. The rest, judging from the improvised curtains, flowered bed
sheets or the red and yellow stripes that the Brazilians like so much, shelter refugees. On the tiny porches,
behind rusting grates, sit stacks of baskets and cardboard boxes, flowing with things, unrecognizable piles
of cloth and packets. On a couple of porches toddlers, dressed only in dirty diapers or a little shirt, clutch
the safety gates and stare out like prisoners. Tiffany yawns. The sun is too warm, deadly warm. She can
remember cold Novembers, when the fog lay thick on the Bay and the hills, or it would rain, sometimes
even three days in a row. She remembers her mother picking her up at day-care, and how they would
run giggling through the cold rain to their warm house with light glowing in the windows. Her sister would
be home before them, because she was old enough to have her own front door key and let herself in after
school, but not old enough to pick Tiffany up from day-care. Water. Hand. The palm of her hand, stiff
and reluctant to move. She was never left alone to curl her hands round metal bars and stare down empty
streets. Her mother, an Army widow, was never forced to work for near-slave wages as these Brazilian
mothers are.
Orange and white, the electric bus glides up to the stop. Blue sparks flash as its connector rods tremble,
sway then slip from the overhead wires and fall, bouncing and flaring, onto the roof. Tiffany boards,
sliding her FastPass into the computerized slot, squeezing out of the stout operator's way as she clatters
down the stairs to get the rods back up and power back on. Tiffany spots her favorite seat, a single
jammed in across from the back door, where no one can sit directly beside her, and heads for it. As the
bus shudders and sparks appear outside the back window, the handful of passengers all mutter to
themselves or thek companions.
"Jeez, they can put a man on Mars, but they can't build a decent trolley."
Spoken aloud again, but fortunately she's passing a plump old woman, laden with shopping bags, who
smiles and nods agreement, just as if Tiffany had in fact been speaking to her. Tiffany smiles in return,
hurries to her chosen seat, scrunches down in it, stretching her long legs into the aisle, pulling them back,
stretching them out again since the trolley's mostly empty. Being inside a small metal space can be very
difficult, and today she feels the walls shrinking…or do they swell?
They move somehow, at any rate, and eat up the space around her. She takes a deep breath and stares
across the aisle to the door. And the window. And hospital hill outside the window. Swearing under her
breath the operator hurries up the front steps and into her tiny compartment. The computer beeps once,
announces that the next stop will be Land's End, and signals the operator to begin. Just as the bus swings
out into the street, Tiffany sees a man running, or rather trotting, for the bus. The operator ignores him,
the bus pulls away, he stands waving his arms and calling down half-heard imprecations.
Tiffany turns in her seat to keep him in view a moment longer. A little man, slightly stooped, wearing a
black suit over a white shirt and a black vest, and a plump black hat of great age, he raises one fist and
shakes it in the direction of the fleeing trolley. She cannot see clearly, but she thinks she noticed a long
sidelock of gray hair dangling at either side of a bushy gray beard, and a mass of gray hair sprouting from
under his hat. Since she spent nearly two years stationed in Israel, she can guess that he's one of the last
of the Orthodox, clinging to a way of dress already old-fashioned when his great-grandfather's generation
brought it to the Promised Land. But what, of course, is he doing here in San Francisco, home of all the
world's gentiles, refugees from a hundred countries, gathered over hundreds of years, where nothing
could be less pure, where the very land itself partakes of two mingled natures, water and earth blending
inexorably as the tides rise day by day and chew at the shore, and water and air mix into fog.
Somewhere, no doubt, he has found a place selling kosher food, or at least food that he can convince
himself to be pure enough to eat. She would shrug the problem away, remind herself that it's none of her
business, if his image would only unstick itself from her mind. Yet for a long time, as the bus lumbers
beside the sea-wall that once was Ocean Beach, she can see him in her memory, dressed in black and
yelling curses upon all things too impatient to wait for one old man, his thin arms waving, his hands curled
into fists.
Just at the end of the line, the bus breaks down. In mid-announcement the computer dies, the lights go
off, the rods fall with a thump and pronounced lack of sparks onto the roof. The other passengers sigh
and mutter remarks, thankful that they're transferring to another bus, rise and gather parcels, clatter off
behind the operator, who trots to the rear and begins working the wires again. Tiffany scrunches down
farther in her seat and watches the wires twitch and flutter outside the rear window as the operator raises
the connecting rods, makes contact, settles them onto the wires. Nothing happens. No hum, no lights, no
computerized voice apologizing for the interruption to service. A sudden flash of orange and green
uniform, the operator appears in the back doorway.
"Mights well get on off. Nother bus waiting just ahead anyhow."
"Okay. My transfer still good?"
"Oh yeah. No problem."
Tiffany goes out the back door and steps into the long cold sweep of shadow cast by the sea-wall. Out
across the Pacific the sun is dropping fast toward the horizon, but thanks to the forty-foot high reinforced
concrete wall that runs all the way down San Francisco's western border (continuing on south, as well, to
protect Daly City, Pacifica, Half-Moon Bay, those little towns long since swallowed up by Bay City
sprawl), no one will ever stand on Ocean Beach and watch it set again. The beach lies under ten feet of
water, anyway. Shivering a little she passes the other ex-passengers, walks up the line of buses, neatly
arranged in a half-moon of a turnaround, and finds the other Geary bus at the head of the line. Its door,
though, is shut, and its operator stands conferring with a little clot of Muni people back by the newly
dead bus. Termination incident. Soon a mechanic will arrive, and there will be a resurrection event.
Wiring. All in the wiring.
The sea-wall makes Tiffany nervous, it looms so high and cold, splattered with red graffiti, black
obscenities, green and purple tags from one gang or another. How they get up so high to scribble and
paint amazes her, as does their determination. As she studies the wall, she thinks she might see a couple
of cracks in it, down near the bottom where it counts. When she looks at the ground immediately below
the cracks, she finds depressions, as if the asphalt were just starting to sink, as if a rift were just starting
to develop. She steps to one side, squints: the depressions exist, all right, still shallow but an inexorable
sign that the sea is eating away at the base of the wall. No doubt it can be patched or propped to give
this boulevard and the public housing on its far side a stay of execution. For how long? She prefers not to
think of that.
She walks a little way forward out of the shadow, but the sun hurts her eyes; she paces back, scowling
at the clot of trolley operators, wishing someone would open the door and let her sit down, paces into the
sun again and turns to look up the boulevard. The old man in black is heading toward them, trotting along
all stoop-shouldered, one arm crooked so he can keep one hand firmly on his hat. A short block away
he stops, stares at the bus, does a visible double-take at the clot of operators and the grumbling
passengers. She can see him abruptly hunch his thin shoulders, waggle his head, then turn and hurry off,
dashing up a side-street and disappearing into the public housing, a sprawl of beige stucco ziggurats,
brindled with graffiti.
"Almost like he ripped something off or something." Damn. Did it again.
No one notices. The operators have progressed to waving their hands and swearing over the dead bus;
the ex-passengers have migrated closer to listen. Tiffany shifts her weight from one foot to another,
breathes slowly and deeply, wonders if she's too warm, decides against taking the jacket off, shifts her
weight again. She feels the rage starting, a sliver of glass deep in her mind, pushing and slicing its way
toward the surface, forcing the long tendons in her neck to tighten and her jaw to clench. She refuses to
give in. It's all in the wiring. She is not truly angry. She turns and strides back along the line of buses,
walks fast, whips around and strides down the street on the outside of the line, where no one can see her
fighting the rage. All in the wiring. Not their fault. All in the…
Suddenly she realizes that her bad hand is clenching. The rage vanishes into a whoop of delight that she
turns into a cough. For a long moment she stand in the middle of the empty street and smiles, merely grins
at the sunlight, at the sky, the asphalt, the beige ziggurats, the dead bus. The hand aches, the fingers
straighten; she ignores the ache, clenches her fist again. Hurts, a stab of fire along the nerves, a tingling.
She laughs and strides back to the sidewalk, where the operator is opening the doors of the bus at the
head of the line. The clot of passengers are staring at her. She gives them all a brilliant, impartial smile and
takes her place at the end of the line. Door. Window. Behind her, wall. In her pocket, hand. Clenched
fist. Palm of the hand. Pain. Who cares?
She finds her favorite seat, scrunches down into it, and makes an effort to stop smiling, to assume the
polite mask of indrawn attention that people wear, sitting on buses. The hand tingles, then subsides into
an ache.
She remembers the last cup of juice that she drank at the hospital, realizes that in the random way they
have, the drugs have finally blasted through the blocked connections or knit up the raveled sleeve of
neural tissue or whatever it is, exactly, that they do do. Months ago Dr. Rosas explained the drugs, drew
little pictures, brought better pictures up on screen from video files, spent a patient hour repeating her
explanations, but although Tiffany heard the words, although they even at that moment made a kind of
sense, especially associated with the pictures, she cannot remember the information now. Only the
words, protein sheath, dangle in her mind, disconnected yet profoundly meaningful. She will ask again on
Monday, she decides. If, of course, she can remember.
Even though other passengers pile on at every stop, even though people soon crowd in front of her and
close to her, the wave of good feeling carries Tiffany all the way through the trolley ride, sweeps her off
the bus at Sixth Avenue and in a warm mental foams floats her down the cross-street, one long block, to
the bookstore just around the corner on Clement. As she lingers in front of the bins of cheap used
paper-books, though, the wave recedes. This bookstore has existed longer than she has; her mother
shopped for story-books here when she herself was a little girl. That, Tiffany knows. But in her memories
from before the war, the store stands right on the corner, not several doors down. It looks much the
same as this store does now; the memory-store is merely a corner store, not a flush-to-the-sidewalk
store. The discrepancy makes her shake her head hard, She turns and looks back at the broad street,
crammed with pedestrians hurrying along between the bus lanes, and at the sidewalks, packed with the
bins and barrows of the various peddlers — a woman selling shao mai here, a man with sausage rolls
there, a table of cheap clothes, wooden crates of spatulas and ladles. Overhead1 the sky is darkening to
the velvet blue that means sunset and night, when white lights will stab and shatter the world. She should
take her transfer to the stop on Sixth and get the streetcar for home. On the other hand, the bookstore
seems to invite her in with its yellow light and a quilt of colors beyond the windows: the shelves inside, all
stacked with book cartridges and paper-books, red and blue and yellow. She walks through the door.
In this particular store the science fiction section lies all the way to the back. As she makes her way
through the narrow aisles, past heaped and jumbled sensations of bright covers, holograph scenes of far
places, the shiny three-dee portraits of authors, the occasional poster talking at her in a tinny voice, and
as other customers cross her path or block her way, women burdened with shopping bags and one
precious novel to take them to some better place in their minds, children clutching shiny comics to their
chests, old men holding news cartridges that need refilling, she begins to breathe a little fast, to feel sweat
form and bead on her back and upper lip, but she forces herself to walk slowly, to breathe slowly, to
concentrate on keeping her bad hand in its pocket and the good hand from knocking stacks of cartridges
to the floor, until she reaches a relatively open space in front of the correct shelves, where she can let the
tension ease and round up the pieces of her mind again.
The nearby posters start talking as soon as they sense a warm organic presence in front of them.
Although she automatically ignores the babble of tinkling blurbs, Tiffany stares at the pictures for a long
time. Starships against dark Galactic skies, aliens holding beautiful artifacts, landscapes never seen,
washed by strangely colored seas, stretching out to jagged mountains, dotted with trees that never grew
— they all glow with fascinations that swarming Earth and the barren dullness of Mars and Moon will
never match. If she cannot find HUNTER'S NIGHT, she decides, she will buy a new book and see how
well she can follow it. Since she's always loved reading, every few weeks she buys a new book, takes it
home, spends an hour or so making slow sense out of letters that used to form words automatically,
trying to make the words once deciphered form into mental pictures and meanings and sounds, the way
they always used to before, easily and magically. So far she's always given up after two or three pages or
two or three screens. Dr. Rosas suggests that she buy kids' books, but the doings of clothed animals and
small children have not yet been able to hold the interest of a woman back from four years of war. If she
could only find HUNTER'S NIGHT. She's sure that it would be different, reading again the one book
that she can remember reading, and this time she would find out how the damn thing ended.
Since she cannot just remember and match the name she carries in her head with the names she finds on
the cartridge labels or the spines of paper-books, she fishes in the cargo pocket of her pants for the slip
of paper she always carries. Some weeks ago she printed out Allonsby's name and the book title in big
blocky letters with black ink, a template of sorts. She finds the slots allotted to the "A's" on the shelves
and goes through them slowly, hesitantly, dreading the disappointment which does indeed come. A-D
A-L-L A-L-L-E A-N. She holds the paper up, squints back and forth between her own printing and the
long line of names on label and spine. No A-L-L-O's at all. Not one. No Allonsby, no nobody.
"Damn!"
"Help you, Miz?"
Tiffany yelps, spins, sees a young man, slender, black, hands up over his face as he steps back fast.
With a gulp for air she catches herself, stands still, gulps again, feels sweat run down the small of her
back, lowers her good hand.
"Jesus god I'm sorry. Dint see you come up, dint see you at all, kid."
摘要：

TOBEORNOTTOBE…Inanotherworldamotherhasputherlossbehindher,or,asmuchbehindherasanymothercaneverputadaughter'sloss,andgoneonwithherlife.Inthatotherworldamothernodoubtwillgototheopeningceremoniesforthebasenamedafterherdaughter.Unless,ofcourse,thisnextstorybecomestrue.Inthatworldadazedmother,stillinsome...

展开>> 收起<<
Katharine Kerr - Resurrection.pdf

共64页,预览13页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：64 页 大小：210.54KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-19

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 配电装置 动力学连接体 力的合成 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 64
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注