Time Pressure

by Spider Robinson

  —Ruby hesitated a few seconds and then began to parallel Rachel’s line—

  —and we all looked to Rachel, and at her signal we banked sharply and cut in the afterburners, riding that magic carpet of drone like the Blue Angels, heading for the clouds in perfect wordless communication—

  ∞

  —and a long happy indescribable time later it was over, the statement was made, it hung in the air and in our minds’ ear like a skywritten mandala, hung and spread and drifted and dissipated as the last breath of the last voice—Tommy’s—ran out.

  We all smiled in silence together for a long time, too happy to speak. It was clear to us that God had been here and gone, but that was okay: He’d be falling by again sometime.

  “Wow, that was far out,” Malachi said at last, and from the tone of his voice I knew we were in for a session. Well, Rachel had to meet him sometime or other.

  “It sure was,” Ruby said, ignoring the subtext of his tone with the long practice of an ex-lover. She was smiling dreamily at Snaker. He was going to be very glad he had been a good boy at my place earlier.

  “Right up,” Nazz agreed, also oblivious.

  Malachi pounced. “It’s far out how something can happen spontaneously like that and it’s a stone, that one time, because it’s like perfect for the moment, you know?” Malachi had the mad burning eyes of a born saint or poet or revolutionary, though he was none of these, deep-set eyes smouldering under shelves of forehead like banked coals at the back of deep caves. He could disappear into the woodwork when he wanted, but when he put on his guru voice, he drew attention effortlessly. “Rachel didn’t know our custom about not hamming up the Oms but that’s far out, because she brought good vibes to the party and that’s what counts. Even if we wouldn’t want to Om that way all the time.”

  “I’d like to Om like that all the time,” Snaker said with just a little edge.

  “I think we have Agreement on that,” Malachi said softly.

  To my surprise, Lucas spoke up. “Maybe we should examine the Agreement.” He was staring at Rachel.

  Malachi rolled with it. “Far out, maybe we should.”

  Lucas was wearing weights strapped to his wrists and ankles, for three reasons. Because it was good physical exercise, because it was good spiritual discipline, and because it hurt. Any of the three would have sufficed. “I could dig some more Oms like that. Once in a while, anyway.” He looked away from Rachel suddenly. “I think I’d give my right arm if I could make my voice do that stuff.”

  “Uh huh. Isn’t that kind of why we made the Agreement?” Malachi asked, and one or two people began to nod.

  “What exactly do you mean by ‘agreement’?” Rachel asked.

  Malachi turned those eyes on her. When she didn’t flinch, he seemed to smile slightly. “See, we’re a spiritual community, so we have to make some basic Agreements to live together, and then stick to them. Like, it’s our agreement to be strict vegetarian, and you can rap for days about whether that’s far out or misguided—and we have, still do—but meanwhile it’s our agreement to do that thing, so we do. And if that’s a drag for some of us—” Snaker squirmed. “—well, hopefully the spiritual solidarity from the Agreement is worth the drag. The way you were Om-ing—please don’t think I’m laying blame, it was beautiful and you didn’t know—but we used to Om that way here, and we found that it was easy for it to turn into a kind of exclusive thing, almost an elitist trip. Like it divided us up into the talented and the drones, if you dig. It brought us apart instead of together, and we wanted an Om that was more symbolic that we were all doing the same thing here, so we made that Agreement. You see?”

  I’d been subconsciously expecting something like this for hours. I’d always found Malachi infuriatingly difficult to argue with—as they say around the Mountain, he’s slick as a cup of custard—and I just knew that Rachel was a match for him, that she was going to lay him out, stop his clock with some splendid Zen epigram. And she sideswiped me.

  “I think that is a wise decision for you,” she said. “I will make that Agreement with you all.”

  Snaker’s jaw dropped too. Ruby gave Rachel a Closer Look. Malachi blinked.

  Irritated at how often and easily Malachi could make me irritated, I spoke up. “Look, I have no Agreements at all with you guys except the ones that come under being a good neighbor, but I’ll tell you this: while that Om was happening I was part of God and totally stoned—”

  “Me, too,” Snaker said.

  “—and that seems like a silly thing for a spiritual community to turn away from.”

  “That’s the trip, Sam,” Malachi said with exasperating compassion. “You were totally stoned. Not everybody was. We want to all be part of God.”

  I could see myself responding, but we were all stoned, and then going around the table, you were stoned, weren’t you? only by that time half of them would be wondering if they had in fact been stoned, Malachi had that effect on them, and I had climbed these stairs before. So had Snaker; he shot me a look that said, thanks for trying, brother.

  “Far out,” I conceded reluctantly.

  “Clean-up crew,” Ruby said loudly and clearly.

  People began scraping plates, and stacking them. I caught Rachel’s eye and stood up. She took her cue and followed me to the sink. She was supposed to be from the city, so it was okay for me to lecture her on the art of dishwashing without running water. I don’t think she’d ever washed a dish under any circumstances, but she was a very quick study. At one point she should have burned her wrist on the hot water kettle, but the skin declined to burn. Malachi was nearby, scraping leftovers into the compost bucket, but he didn’t seem to notice. She and I traded off washing and drying while others cleared and washed the table and put away the dried dishes and stoked the fires and adjusted the lamps, and Ruby watched in regal contentment. (One of the commune’s more sensible rules is that whoever cooks dinner gets to fuck off the rest of the night.) (Except that Ruby wasn’t fucking off; she was, ninety-five percent certainty, thinking about her next painting.)

  Though she was concentrating on the dishes, Rachel managed to take in the whole scene. One of her rare smiles lit her face. “This is beautiful,” she murmured to me.

  I looked around to see what she meant. I got it at once. Many people working in concert, with no wasted words, moving at high speed but never bumping into each other, a marvelous improvised choreography. Calmness in activity, a perfect Zen dance. It was what attracted me to Sunrise Hill, this quality; if the place had been like that all the time, perhaps I’d have moved in. My irritation with Malachi leaked from me, and I began to enjoy myself again almost as much as I had during the Om. And then a strange and terrible thing happened—

  CHAPTER 11

  I WAS WASHING; Rachel was drying. I had pointed out to her where a particular bowl belonged, and turned away, then realized I’d misinformed her; I turned back to give a correction. Tommy was at the counter next to Rachel, whacking a stainless steel bowl against the underside of the cupboard to dislodge some sticky food into the compost bucket beneath it. Rachel was looking toward her, away from me. On top of that rickety cupboard were many large mason jars containing grains and beans. Tommy’s energetic whanging of the heavy bowl was causing one of the big jars to dance forward on its ledge. I saw it—and saw that Rachel saw it too. I remembered her phenomenal reaction time when the tire had blown, knew she would react faster than I could—which was good because I was off-balance, leaning the wrong way.

  And she did. It was over in an instant, but I saw what she did with terrible clarity, as if in slow motion. Her eyes widened slightly as she measured trajectory, realized the falling weight was going to catch Tommy leaning forward and slam her face down against the counter. Rachel’s lips tightened as she computed the mass of the load: about three kilos of mung beans and a half-kilo of glass. She clearly understood that the impact could very well be fatal. Her mouth opened and her face began to contort for a shout and her who
le body gathered itself to spring—

  —and she relaxed. Her features smoothed over and her mouth closed.

  She did not know that I could see. I wasted nearly a whole second gaping in disbelief, did not get off my own shout until the jar had actually overbalanced beyond recovery.

  “Tommy, duck!”

  The woman had a lot of quick; she nearly managed it. She did manage to duck her head enough so that the jar struck her a glancing blow at a favorable angle: her forehead just missed the counter. The jar did not, and broken glass and mung beans flew from hell to breakfast. Tommy straightened at once. In a loud, clear voice she said, “For my next magical trick—” Then her knees let go and she started to go down.

  Rachel caught her under the arms.

  It was twice as horrible because I understood it at once. I don’t think there was an instant in which I blamed Rachel. In the moment that she did what she did—nothing—I realized exactly why she was doing it. I saw clearly that she hated doing it, and felt she had no choice; most horrible of all, I agreed with her. And all this transpired in the space of a second, yet it wrenched all the events of the last twenty-four hours out of my memory banks, and jammed them back into my head at a slightly different angle.

  By traveling through time, Rachel had accepted the terrible risk of altering the past. But as an ethical time traveler, she must have a horror of altering the past too much. Reality was stretching to accommodate her existence in my timeline. If she overstressed it, it might tear.

  But how much was too much? A good rule of thumb might be to avoid major changes…such as altering the birth or death dates of any person. If someone would have died without your presence in that ficton, then die she must—

  —but Rachel cared for Tommy, I knew that despite her poker face. They had made eye-contact, they’d touched, they’d joined hands in the Om, it had been clear that they were friends-in-the-making.

  —but she’d done it. Done what she had to do, which was (as far as she knew) to watch her new friend Tommy get her brains broken by a jug of mung beans. I totally understood the moral imperative behind this before I even got my own warning shout halfway up my throat…but I felt different about Rachel because she had been capable of it. Not blaming, certainly, I told myself. Just different.

  It changes your perception of a house-guest, bed-partner, someone you’ve begun to think of as a friend, to learn that under no circumstances would they do anything to prevent your scheduled death—even at no cost to themselves. Even if you understand and approve the logic, it changes things.

  I did not know just how, though, because the entire incident struck much too close to something I never ever even thought about, someone I never ever thought about, and the inner conflict was so painful that I needed the thirty seconds of total confusion which followed Tommy’s narrow escape to recover my own equilibrium unnoticed. I wished desperately that I could take Snaker outside or upstairs, alone somewhere, and talk to him, tell him what had happened and ask him how I felt about it. Or Snaker and Ruby would be even better, this tasted like the kind of hurt she was good at mending…except that Snaker and I had promised not to tell her Rachel’s secret.

  I had felt uniquely blessed to be the man on the scene when the time traveler came—now I was realizing that history is made by the unlucky.

  Before I was ready for it, Tommy was thanking me. I heard myself answer automatically. “Hell, Tommy, anybody would have done the same.” And heard internal echoes: anybody who could would have done the same, and: who are you to criticize, pal?

  Those echoes must have shown on my face; I saw Tommy frown. Alarm bells went off; the Sunrise Gang all had incredibly sensitive detectors for guilt, conflict and deception. They all firmly believed that when a hassle or a hang-up was observed, the thing to do was haul it out on the table and get it straight before anything else was done. Neither politeness nor tact nor respect for personal privacy was allowed to stand in the way. The only things that made this practice forgivable were the remarkable compassion they displayed in rummaging around inside your psyche, the absolute tolerance they had for any honestly held opinion however startling, and their damnably impressive success rate. A person suffering from internal conflict tended to shrink from them the way a man with a stiff neck will avoid the company of a chiropractor. If he learns of your affliction, he will insist on hurting you—and most annoying, when he is done, you will feel better. You will thank him.

  By approaching it as a spiritual conditioning exercise, I had learned to appreciate the custom—and as it made me stronger, I had come to enjoy it.

  But I had a secret now. Truth was a contraindicated medicine. I didn’t have the right to take it, for it might kill my friends. Everyone’s friends.

  Which awareness I kept from my face as I set about lying to my friend Tommy. “Whew,” I said, shaking my head briefly but violently. “That shook me up. I saw you dead for a second there.”

  At once she was understanding. “Wow, yeah. Pretty heavy. Your death thing again.”

  “Yeah. ’Scuse me—I’ve got to go visit the shitter.”

  My “death thing” was an old, counterfeit hang-up which had long since been taken as far as it would go. If Tommy insisted, I was willing to haul it out again, as a diversion. But she grinned and cut loose. “You’ve got to get more beans in your diet, Sam. Here, take a lantern.”

  I avoided Rachel’s eyes on the way out. Maybe she avoided mine.

  The Sunrise shitter was more than fifty meters down a sloping, well-trodden path from the Big House, both to keep it downhill of the well, and to make it as handy to the fields as to the house. Instead of following the path to it, I veered left as I exited the house and took an equally well-trod path through the snow to The Chapel. The Chapel is nothing but a ledge, where the land drops abruptly away perhaps fifteen or twenty meters. It is a chapel because from there you have an unobstructed view of the Bay in the distance. It is the origin of the name Sunrise Hill, and it is a good place to be at sunrise.

  It was a good place to be at night, too. Saint John glowed on the horizon. The Moon was up. The sky was spattered with stars, vast and glorious. What wind there was came from the north, from the Bay into my face: no snow tomorrow.

  The assumption Rachel was working under was very close to the hippie-borrowed concept of kharma. Kharma is subtly different from predestination—it says that you make your own predestination—but it has that same unpleasant taste of inexorability, implacable fate. You will pay for every sin, sooner or later; you will have to earn every lucky break; each new disaster is only what you deserve. Combined with the doctrine of reincarnation, it becomes predestination, for the bad choices you make in this life are a result of bad kharma earned in an earlier life. It’s sort of the spiritual equivalent of There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, eternity as a zero-sum game.

  But what does it do to your kharma to watch a friend die?

  That was a question to which I badly wanted an answer myself…so badly that I could not remember why…

  If it had been a movie scenario, and the same choice set up, the screenwriter would have had to have Rachel opt to save Tommy, and to hell with the fate of all reality, or else the audience would have hated the picture. The choice she made was artistically unsatisfying. Unpalatable. Did that make it wrong? Her logic was remorseless. There’s a classic story called “The Cold Equations”…

  I was out there for a long time.

  When I heard approaching footcrunch I guessed Rachel. But it was Snaker who came to me out there in The Chapel, and silently stood and shared it with me for a few minutes.

  “What a night,” he said at last.

  Whatever he meant, I agreed with it.

  “I got Ruby aside and talked with her privately.”

  “You didn’t—”

  “Naw. She wouldn’t want me to have told her about Rachel’s secret if I did. If I had. If you follow. But I had to tell her about watching you guys ball.”

  �
��Oh. Yeah. Uh…how did it go?”

  “Amazingly well. I found an extraordinary woman, Sam. Get this: she didn’t interrupt. She let me tell her how it was, and she didn’t say a word until I was done. Then she ran it through intellectually and decided she had no reason to be jealous, looked me in the eye and decided emotionally she had no need to be jealous, and cut loose of jealousy: I could see it happen. She asked me what it’d been like, and I told her. Her pupils dilated. Finally, she validated my judgment, that what I’d done, and not done, was within the spirit of our Agreement, and she said she admired Rachel’s courage. I think we’re going to fuck our brains out later tonight.”

  “You lucked out, brother.”

  “Seem-so. But that was just for openers. Once we’d dispensed with the trivial distraction I’d brought up, Ruby dropped her own bomb.”

  I closed my eyes briefly. “Yeah?”

  “The test results came back from Halifax. She’s pregnant.”

  “No shit? Wow, that’s great! Congratulations, man, that’s the best news I’ve heard all winter. It couldn’t have happened to two nicer people, really.”

  I was saying all the right things, and I did feel joy for my friend. But I was sort of sorry he had told me then. A large part of me was numb. Too much had happened to me in the last while, and I had no room left in my brain. Snaker and Ruby were pregnant; neat. Love was great. For those who could believe in it. Or were capable of it.

  “It’s a real stoner,” he agreed happily. “Anyway, the long and short of it is, I am virtually certain we are going to spend tonight fucking our brains out. Which leads gracefully to why I am suddenly in a hurry to put Mona’s old tire on the Meanie and get you two back to Heartbreak Hotel. You grok?”

  “Oh.” I thought about it. “Listen, Snake: a long walk rolling a tire through the snow, changing it, a half-hour round trip on bad roads in the dark with an undependable vehicle, and all the while your woman is cooling off back at home…fuggit. We can crash here.”