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Frameshift
by Robert J. Sawyer
Prologue
It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you
are not.
—Andre Gide, winner of the 1947 Nobel Prize in literature
Berkeley, California
The Present Day
It seemed an unlikely place to die.
During the academic year, twenty-three thousand full-time students
milled about the well-treed grounds of the University of California,
Berkeley. But on this cool June night, the campus was mostly empty.
Pierre Tardivel reached out for the hand of Molly Bond. He was a
good-looking, wiry man of thirty-three, with narrow shoulders, a round
head, and hair the same chocolate brown as his eyes. Molly, who would
turn thirty-three herself in a couple of weeks, was beautiful—stunningly so,
even without makeup. She had high cheekbones, full lips, deep blue eyes,
and naturally blond hair parted in the center and cut short up front but
tumbling to her shoulders in back. Molly squeezed Pierre’s hand, and they
began walking side by side.
The bells in the Campanile had just chimed 11:00 p.m. Molly had been
working late in the psychology department, where she was an assistant
professor. Pierre didn’t like Molly walking home alone at night, so he’d
stayed at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, poised on a hilltop
above the campus, until she’d phoned saying she was ready to leave. It was
no hardship for him; on the contrary, Molly’s usual problem was getting
Pierre to take a break from his research.
Molly had no doubts about Pierre’s feelings for her; that was one of the
few good things about her gift. She did sometimes wish he would put his
arm around her as they walked, but he didn’t like doing that. Not that he
wasn’t affectionate: he was French-Canadian, after all, and had the
demonstrative nature that went with the first part of that hyphenate, and
the desire to cuddle against the cold that came with the second. But he
always said there would be time for helping to hold him up later, with her
arm around his waist and his around hers. For now, while he still could, he
wanted to walk freely.
As they crossed the bridge over the north fork of Strawberry Creek,
Molly said, “How was work today?”
Pierre’s voice was richly accented. “Burian Klimus was being a pain,” he
said.
Molly laughed, a throaty sound. Her speaking voice was high and
feminine, but her laugh had an earthy quality that Pierre had said he
found very sexy. “When isn’t he?” she said.
“Exactly,” replied Pierre. “Klimus wants perfection, and I guess he’s
entitled to it. But the whole point of the Human Genome Project is to find
out what makes us human, and humans sometimes make mistakes.” Molly
was pretty much used to Pierre’s accent, but three utterings of “yooman”
in one sentence was enough to bring a smile to her lips. “He tore quite a
strip off Shari’s hide this afternoon.”
Molly nodded. “I heard someone do an imitation of Burian at the
Faculty Club yesterday.” She cleared her throat and affected a German
accent. “ ‘I’m not only a member of the
Herr
Club for Men—I’m also its
chancellor.’ ”
Pierre laughed.
Up ahead there was a wrought-iron park bench. A burly man in his late
twenties wearing faded jeans and an unzipped leather jacket was sitting
on it. The man had a chin like two small fists protruding from the bottom
of his face and a half inch of dirty-blond hair. Disrespectful, thought
Molly: you come to the very home of the 1960s hippie movement, you
should grow your hair a
little
long.
They continued walking. Normally, Pierre and Molly would have
swerved away from the bench, giving the resting fellow a generous
berth—Molly took pains to keep strangers from entering her zone. But a
lighting standard and a low hedge sharply denned the opposite edge of the
path here, so they ended up passing within a couple of feet of the man,
Molly even closer to him than Pierre—
About fucking time that frog showed up.
Molly’s grip tightened, her short unpainted fingernails digging into the
back of Pierre’s hand.
Too bad he’s not alone
—
but maybe Grozny will like it better this way
.
Molly spoke in a quavering whisper so low it was almost lost on the
breeze: “Let’s get out of here.” Pierre’s eyebrows went up, but he
quickened his pace. Molly stole a glance over her shoulder. “He’s up off the
bench now,” she said softly. “He’s walking toward us.”
She scanned the landscape ahead. A hundred feet in front of them was
the campus’s north gate, with the deserted cafés of Euclid Avenue beyond.
To the left was a fence separating the university from Hearst Avenue. To
the right, more redwoods and Haviland Hall, home of the School of Social
Welfare. Most of its windows were dark. A bus rumbled by outside the
fence— the last bus for a long time, this late. Pierre chewed his lower lip.
Footfalls were approaching softly behind them. He reached into his
pocket, and Molly could hear the soft tinkle of him maneuvering his keys
between his fingers.
Molly opened the zipper on her white leather purse and extracted her
rape whistle. She chanced another glance back, and—Christ, a knife! “
Run
!” she shouted, and veered to the right, bringing the whistle to her lips.
The sound split the night.
Pierre surged forward, heading straight for the north gate, but after
eating up a few yards of path, he looked back. Perhaps now that the man
knew the element of surprise was gone, he’d just hightail it in the opposite
direction, but Pierre had to be sure that the guy hadn’t taken off after
Molly—
—and that was Pierre’s mistake. The man had been lagging
behind—Pierre had longer legs and had started running sooner—but
Pierre’s slowing down to look gave the man a chance to close the distance.
From thirty feet away, Molly, who had also stopped running, screamed
Pierre’s name.
The punk had a bowie knife in his right hand. It was difficult to make
out in the darkness except for the reflection of street-lamps off the
fifteen-inch blade. He was holding it underhand, as if he’d intended to
thrust it up into Pierre’s back.
The man lunged. Pierre did what any good Montréal boy who had
grown up wanting to play on the Canadiens would do: he deked left, and
when the guy moved in that direction, Pierre danced to the right and
bodychecked him. The attacker was thrown off balance. Pierre surged
forward, his apartment key wedged between his index and middle fingers.
He smashed his assailant in the face. The man yowled in pain as the key
jabbed into his cheek.
Molly ran toward the man from the rear. She jumped onto his back and
began pummeling him with clenched fists. He tried to spin around, as if
somehow he could catch the woman on top of him, and, as he did so,
Pierre employed another hockey maneuver, tripping him. But instead of
dropping the knife, as Pierre apparently thought he would, the man
gripped it even tighter. As he fell, his arm twisted and his leather jacket
billowed open. The weight of Molly on his back drove the blade’s single
sharpened edge sideways into his belly.
Suddenly blood was everywhere. Molly got off the man, wincing. He
wasn’t moving, and his breathing had taken on a liquid, bubbling sound.
Pierre grabbed Molly’s hand. He started to back away, but suddenly
realized just how severe the attacker’s wound was. The man would bleed to
death without immediate treatment. “Find a phone,” Pierre said to Molly.
“Call nine-one-one.” She ran off toward Haviland Hall.
Pierre rolled the man onto his back, the knife sliding out as he did so.
He picked it up and tossed it as far away as he could, in case he was
underestimating the injury. He then tore open the buttons on the
attacker’s light cotton shirt, which was now sodden with blood, exposing
the laceration. The man was in shock: his complexion, hard to make out in
the wan light, had turned grayish white. Pierre took off his own shirt—a
beige McGill University pullover—and wadded it up to use as a pressure
bandage.
Molly returned several minutes later, panting from running. “An
ambulance is coming, and so are the police,” she said. “How is he?”
Pierre kept pressure on the wadded shirt, but the fabric was squishing
as he leaned on it. “He’s dying,” he said, looking up at her, his voice
anguished.
Molly moved closer, looming over the assailant. “You don’t recognize
him?”
Pierre shook his head. “I’d remember that chin.”
She kneeled next to the man, then closed her eyes, listening to the voice
only she could hear.
Not fair
, thought the man.
I only killed people Grozny said deserved it.
But
I
don’t deserve to die. I’m not a fucking
—
The unspoken voice stopped abruptly. Molly opened her eyes and then
gently took Pierre’s blood-covered hands off the drenched shirt. “He’s
gone,” she said.
Pierre, who was still on bended knee, rocked slowly backward. His face
was bone white and his mouth hung open slightly. Molly recognized the
signs: just as the attacker had been moments ago, Pierre himself was now
in shock. She helped him move away from the body and got him to sit
down on the grass at the base of a redwood tree.
After what seemed an eternity, they at last heard approaching sirens.
The city police arrived first, coming through the north gate, followed a few
moments later by a campus police car that arrived from the direction of
the Moffit Library. The two vehicles pulled up side by side, near where the
stand of redwoods began.
The city cops were a salt-and-pepper team: a wide black man and a
taller, skinnier white woman. The black man seemed to be the senior
officer. He got a sealed package of latex gloves out of his glove
compartment and snapped them onto his beefy hands, then moved in to
examine the body. He checked the body’s wrist for a pulse, then shifted its
head and tried again at the base of the neck. “Christ,” he said. “Karen?”
His partner came closer and played a flashlight beam onto the face. “He
got a good punch in, that’s for sure,” the woman said, indicating the
wound Pierre’s keys had made. Then she blinked. “Say, didn’t we bust him
a few weeks ago?”
The black man nodded. “Chuck Hanratty. Scum.” He shook his head,
but it seemed more in wonder than out of sadness. He rose to his feet,
snapped off his gloves, and looked briefly at the campus cop, a chubby
white-haired Caucasian who was averting his eyes from the body. He then
turned to Pierre and Molly. “Either of you hurt?”
“No,” said Molly, her voice quavering slightly. “Just shaken up.”
The female cop was scanning the area with her flashlight. “That the
knife?” she said, looking at Pierre and pointing at the bowie, which had
landed at the base of another redwood.
Pierre looked up, but didn’t seem to hear.
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