Lifehouse

by Spider Robinson

  And she had obviously remembered her lost FM radio headphones, and somehow deduced what they could accomplish on the mental level.

  The set she wore now had been altered to generate a much more powerful signal than usual. It did not merely mask, but completely shielded her thoughts. Indeed, what had finally triggered the alarm was the sentries’ belated perception that a human-sized animal with a sentience level around that of a bluejay was probably a significant anomaly.

  But Myrna and Johnson absorbed all this information after they perceived the message June meant them to get, so efficiently did she deliver it.

  First, they saw the white flag she was waving in her right hand.

  Next, they took in the modified cellular phone that hung from the belt of her jeans, to which she was speaking continuously.

  And finally they noted the extra-extra-large black tee-shirt she was wearing, big enough to be a Rubenesque sf fan’s convention souvenir. It was gathered and tucked in in back, so the white lettering just below her left breast could be clearly seen. It spelled out the simple words:

  The Place

  because it’s time

  She and Paul wanted to parley.

  Knowing her as they did, they were at once dismally certain that she and her partner had rigged some sort of ingenious stalemate to protect themselves. The Lifehouse Keepers sent their awareness hurtling pessimistically out to trace it as far as they could.

  Somewhat to their surprise, the cell phone’s signal went less than a hundred meters, at first—to a phone Paul wore as a headset with a throat mike, very sophisticated gear indeed for a grifter. So was the high-powered rifle on a tripod, through whose sniperscope he was taking dead aim at the back of June’s skull. (All the gear seemed brand-new; there was still a price tag on the tripod.)

  But from there the phone signal went off on Hell’s own journey. They followed it awhile, but gave up when it crossed its own trail for the third time in Singapore. The point was made: June and Paul had a third confederate Myrna and Johnson could not quickly affect, locate or identify save by overt telepathic conquest.

  Worse: the existence of a third, combined with the fact that neither grifter had ever once been so much as indicted for any felony in any jurisdiction, strongly implied at least a fourth party as well. Both Paul and June were suspenders-and-belt types. Myrna herself was going to die because Paul’s money stash had been doubly booby-trapped; he was clearly a man happiest with an ace up both sleeves at a minimum. He might, for all Myrna or Johnson knew, have enlisted an entire army of grifters, grafters, hucksters and dips, who could communicate in ways even a thousand-year-old layman could not hope to grasp.

  This was very bad.

  A Quaker watching her family tortured could not have felt more profoundly or primitively conflicted. Myrna had seen so much sorry death in her millennium of service that it had been centuries since she had even recreationally fantasized dealing it out to anyone as punishment for their silly human sins. Nonetheless she was a true descendant of a redhanded ape and his bloodthirsty mate, mortal as them now into the bargain, and to hell with the fate of all the sleeping dead and all reality: these clowns were messing with her personal lifeboat! If killing had been of the slightest use to her, she’d have used her teeth and fingernails.

  Johnson, similarly, was descended from two million years of primates who had unanimously felt that anyone who killed their mate should be treated with great rudeness. Since his and Myrna’s comment through the past thousand years, and not merely the last thirty-odd, he had been crafted with a normal amount of male dominance: he was not merely the titular but the effective leader of their team, and knew the ancient commander’s desire to avenge his wounded as strongly as he knew the even more ancient protector’s desire to avenge his mate.

  Dealing with such emotional disturbances would never be impossible for either of them. At times it could be extremely difficult. Myrna, in particular, had lately had to do much more of that sort of thing than usual, as small bodily damages she was no longer able to heal sent chemical messages of unease to her alarm system. Emotional control was somewhat like a muscle that can be worn out to the point of spasm. She managed to master herself, now, but it cost her great effort.

  And the shared knowledge made it that much harder for Johnson to do the same.

  So it was that several seconds passed before they acted.

  Then Johnson enveloped her in his field and flew them together like bullets, and at a similar velocity, through the forest toward June Bellamy.

  There was no deceleration. Their velocity was simply canceled, at a point just out of sight and just out of earshot of June. As smoothly as children stepping off an escalator, they were walking hand in hand toward her at a slow pace, making no effort to muffle their footsteps in the (finally) drying underbrush. Their acute hearing picked up her muttered telephone monologue about the time she became aware they were approaching. They heard her alert Paul, and tell him to stand by.

  “If I come, I die,” she yelled then.

  They had to admire the absolute absence of self-consciousness in her voice. She was stating a fact, and could not care less if some distant hiker thought she was kinky.

  Johnson, who knew there was no other human within earshot, called back, “Understood,” and he and Myrna kept walking.

  They expected June to start visibly when she finally saw them. It was clear that she and Paul had not deduced their antagonists’ cover identities, or they would have come directly to the park caretaker’s cottage. Therefore, however she had been visualizing their pursuers, it could scarcely have been as a pair of snowcapped senior citizens.

  But she betrayed no surprise. Professionally immune to surface appearances, she would not have lost her poker face if they had manifested hand in hand as Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, on fire. Her only reaction was to give target coordinates to Paul, who shifted aim from the back of her head to Johnson’s forehead the moment it entered his field of view.

  Paul was largely visually concealed from them by undergrowth, though not of course from their sentries. He was a memorable sight. His headset phone sat atop a bright skull-hugging helmet of some sort of crinkly golden metal foil, almost a metal-maché, with small holes for eyes and mouth and absurd sculpted ears that came to Vulcan points (the phone’s earbead cord disappeared into the one on his right), and to whose preposterous appearance he was plainly as indifferent as any holdup man in a Nixon mask. It shielded his thoughts even better than June’s radio headphones did hers: the sentries rated him a rather bright shrub on the sentience scale. He seemed to sense that he was under remote surveillance of some kind—and didn’t give a damn.

  Johnson kept his own face blank, maintained his leisurely pace, and shifted their course slightly so that Paul could continue to track him without needing to move the tripod.

  Myrna’s grip was tight in his. They both knew a bad shot or a bad ricochet could kill her. They also knew if one did, it would be his immediate task—before he could so much as say goodbye—to try to reason with her killers.

  They stepped out of the woods and onto the path together, stopped six meters from June, and perhaps ten meters from the great tree under which the Lifehouse lay hidden.

  “I’ll bet you can force your way through this,” June said, pointing at her headset. “But I bet you can’t take me over instantly.” She pointed to the cell phone at her hip. “If anything makes Paul suspect a struggle for control of my mind is taking place, he will try to kill one of you, and failing that will take me out with the second slug.”

  Johnson nodded.

  “If that happens,” June went on quietly, “someone else far from here—someone who doesn’t even know where he is himself—will make a single mouse-click, and spam the planet with everything we know about you time travelers. Every science fiction or fantasy writer or fan, every scientist, science writer, news medium and national security agency with an Internet address will know everything we knew up to the moment of t
he mouse-click.”

  Determined to keep his features expressionless, Johnson found that his eyes had closed of their own volition. It took immense effort to force them open again. He did have the power to take over the minds of both June and Paul by brute force, despite radio headphones or metallic masquerade masks, whenever he wanted to badly enough to permanently lower their IQs by fifty or sixty points—but no longer dared use it, whatever the need. This was Armageddon. Here. Now.

  “You understand that would make a hole in history too big to mend,” he said softly. “Even if not one person believed you.”

  It wasn’t quite a question, but she nodded superfluous agreement, “That’s how little I’m prepared to tolerate another hole in my mind.”

  “Do you have a proposal?” Myrna asked.

  “Do we have a truce?”

  Again, Johnson nearly showed surprise. “You will accept our word?”

  June nodded. “What choice do we have? If your word is no good, there’s no point in bargaining. Besides, if you are time travelers without honor, everything is already fucked…and the problems of two little people don’t amount to a hill of beans.”

  He exchanged a glance with Myrna. June was emphatically not a science fiction reader, and Paul only a recreational one, like a social drinker: that last sentence was reasoning more sophisticated than expected for either of them. At once the Lifehouse Keepers began to suspect who the pair’s new allies might be. A pity that when they’d last read June’s mind, she had not then known the specific names or addresses of the sf fans Paul was about to sting—or that Paul had not left any useful clues even in the encrypted partition of his hard drive. If only the couple had trusted each other a little more, been a little less paranoid by nature, the Keepers might now have a lead on their new antagonists.

  The absurdity of that last thought caused them to spend a precious half-second smiling ruefully at each other. (Inside only.)

  “We have a truce,” Johnson said then.

  June insisted on spelling it out. “You won’t try to monkey with our memories any more?”

  She was too good a liar to lie to. Johnson shrugged and spread his hands. “We must try, or die in the attempt. But we won’t do it now. If this parley is unsuccessful, we’ll give you an hour for a head start.”

  “A lot more than you needed the last time,” Myrna pointed out. There was just a hint of an edge to her voice.

  June nodded, and gave her just a touch of the eye of power in return. “If it goes that way, we’ll suspend our upload for the same period.” Wanna play hardball, Granny? said her gaze.

  “Agreed,” Johnson said. With eyes locked, both women said it together, and Paul’s echo came in stereo, from June’s hip and from a hundred meters away.

  When he emerged from his place of concealment, his hands were empty, and he no longer wore the comedy space-monster mask. But his phone now rode directly on his own bristly scalp, and its circuit was still open. Johnson counted two hidden weapons (lethal to a human—such as his wife), and wondered how many he was overlooking.

  Being impressed by an opponent was, for him, a novel and not utterly unpleasant sensation.

  As Paul joined them there was a brief subtle dance that ended with the men confronting each other directly, each with his mate slightly behind him and to his left. Neither male consciously noticed it happen; neither female missed it.

  “Had you actually already stung them?” Johnson asked.

  Paul took his meaning at once, and if he found it an odd opening, he showed no surprise. “Yes,” he said. “Ninety-eight thousand Canadian.”

  Johnson allowed his own surprise to show, in the form of a lifted eyebrow, and tried another gambit. “So that’s, what, seventy-five in real money?”

  Again Paul was impervious. “Call it seventy-three five American.”

  “Mr. Throtmanian, I am impressed. Even for you, conceiving of enlisting your victims as allies was uncharacteristically brilliant. Pulling it off was…As I say, I’m impressed.”

  “And I’m impressed by how well you know me, okay? As the saying goes, you must be reading my mail. Can we move on?”

  “Certainly. My name is Johnson Stevens, and this is my wife Myrna. I’m afraid we don’t have ‘real names’—but we’ve been using those for nearly two centuries now.”

  June spoke up. “You’re old: we get it.” Her eyes were still locked on Myrna’s. “We knew that anyway. We would not have gone to all this trouble if we were not impressed with you, alright?” She switched off her eye of power. “You’re Myrna and Johnson; we’re June and Paul. Like he said, can we move on now?”

  Myrna bunked her own tired old eyes for the first time in a long while, and shivered slightly as if throwing off a chill. “Please go ahead, Paul,” she said. The edge was gone from her voice now.

  “In Minneapolis,” Paul said, “in a joint called Palmer’s Bar, I heard a guy sing a verse once that stuck in my head. It went:

  Very old man with money in his hand

  Lookin for a place to hide

  Along come a young man,

  a gun in his hand

  They both sat down and cried

  Cryin all they had in this world

  done gone.”

  Johnson nodded. “Neither side in this matter much likes the role fate has cast them in. We don’t want to edit your memories by force. You don’t want to risk paradox to prevent us. Neither side can see a choice. But you did not come here to suggest we sit down and weep together, Paul.”

  “We came to see if there is any give in your position,” Paul said.

  “Is there any in yours?”

  For the first time, Paul betrayed surprise.

  “Can you conceive of circumstances under which you would consent to specifically limited memory-edit?”

  “Cover me,” Paul said softly, and closed his eyes to help him visualize. At the cue, June increased her own alertness, expanded her peripheral vision to encompass Johnson, and moved her right hand fractionally away from her own hidden weapon…presumably toward one the sentries could not detect.

  “I can think of only one case,” Paul said, reopening his eyes, “and it doesn’t seem to pertain here. Can you conceive of circumstances under which you would consent to let us keep our present memories?”

  “I’m afraid my answer is the same,” Johnson said, allowing as much of his own sadness as they would find credible to come through in his voice.

  “Then we have two choices,” Paul said. “Say goodbye now, and start fighting to the death in an hour…or try and persuade each other that the unique solution we each find imaginable might somehow be made to exist. I would prefer the latter. I assume you feel the same.”

  “Very well,” Johnson said. “I will go first.”

  He held a hasty telepathic conference with Myrna. They had no contingency plan for negotiation; had not until this minute considered it a possibility. But their minimum requirements seemed clear—and highly unlikely to be acceptable. No point in pulling punches.

  “I would let you and June and your allies walk the earth unedited under the following circumstances: you permit me to enter each of your minds, satisfy me that you will never voluntarily divulge any datum I label critical, to anyone under any circumstances, and permit me to insure you against drug or hypno interrogation. Not lethally—but any such attempt would leave you a very happy fellow with no memory of anything at all, for life. I realize that could be a significant hazard for you and June, given the nature of your profession, but after all you both have gone undetected by the authorities up to this—”

  “That part’s not a factor,” Paul said. “My fiancée and I are retired. For good.”

  Johnson’s face did not pale; it never did unless he told it to. But he was shocked. His superb and trusty Bullshit Detector told him Paul was not lying…but if this was a true statement, then he and Myrna did not know June or Paul nearly as well as they’d thought they did, could not hope to reliably predict what they migh
t do. This might actually work! “Congratulations, twice,” he said automatically, while his mind raced. “Then I see no problem. Our minimum requirements are, one, absolute assurance of your sincere will to be permanently discreet; two, assurance that you cannot be compelled to spill what you know of us against your own will; and three, your promise that when our business is concluded, you will never have anything to do with this park again as long as you live, or cause others to do so. We will trust you to keep the most important secret we know, our existence—if you will prove you can be trusted by opening your minds. In all candor, we might not require this of ordinary civilians…but I hope you’ll take it as the compliment it’s intended to be if I say that, for you two and your allies, nothing less will serve: you are two of the greatest liars we’ve ever encountered. Your turn.”

  Paul inclined his head. “Thank you. Coming from thieves of your caliber it is indeed flattering. I would permit you to enter my mind under the following conditions. One, you must first restore every second of the memories you stole from my fiancée.”

  Johnson nodded. “Acceptable.” June had never learned anything more damaging than the simple fact that something was buried here.

  “Two, you must give me your word that neither of you will ever use anything you learn from my mind in any way that, in my opinion, would harm me or anyone I care about. I don’t have to define that any closer, because you’ll know. And the same for the others.”

  Johnson nodded again.

  “Three, it must be two-way.”

  “In what sense?”

  “I get to walk around inside your head too.”

  Johnson shook his head sadly. “I’m sorry. That’s impossible.”

  Paul’s voice went flat. “Gosh, that’s a real pity.”

  “Please!” Johnson said quickly. “I do not mean that word as a euphemism for ‘unacceptable’—it literally is not possible.”