“You’re telling me that you three screwed all night long and then, in the cold rosy dawn, came over here to get laid?”
“That’s about the size of it,” Snaker agreed.
“Perhaps there is a God. Uh, can I cook you folks breakfast?”
Ruby chuckled, a purring sound. “Rachel and I brought plenty to eat. And I don’t know about her, but mine’s getting cold while you guys are talking.”
I began to roll up onto one elbow, with a view toward walking a few fingers down her belly toward the area under discussion—but she pushed me back down flat on the bed, flung a leg over me and quickly sat astride my chest. I got the palms of my hands on her buttocks and coaxed her forward. “Magnificent,” I said with great sincerity as the sweet knurled pinkness came into view.
Ruby had terrific lips, and this pair were the best. If the genetic cards had been cut the other way and she’d been born male, she’d have been hung like a horse. If—as I did then—you were to reach around her thighs and take each of those lips between thumb and forefinger and tug them gently up and out, opening the orchid, you would understand—as I did then—what that symbol truly is which we call a heart, although a heart looks nothing like that; understand what it is we admire in the butterfly. Like butterfly wings I tugged them down toward me, pursed my own mouth and blew a stream of cool air up and down the channel they formed, heard Ruby’s hiss of pleasure. I heard Rachel murmur something too soft to hear, and Snaker agree. The bouquet was rare, the sauce piquant, the meaty petals delicious, separately and together: I feasted. Ruby’s fingers explored my hair, met behind my head and guided me…
When I felt a mouth on me, on my belly and then on my penis, I wondered vaguely whose it was. But my vision was blocked in that direction, and it didn’t seem important. There were two mouths on me, kissing each other around me, for several minutes before I noticed. Ruby’s clitoris, proportioned to match those labia, was like a miniature penis under my tongue. I experimented; she gulped air. A working miniature. Her thighs clamped my ears, I tasted a trace of my own semen, a gentle finger opened me and I was neither male nor female nor gay nor straight nor even bi but only human—
Breakfast for four is four times easier than breakfast for one. Four pairs of hands—One of the few things I’ve ever really envied the Sunrise Gang, one of the few good points of communal living to my way of thinking, is the division of labour, and the ability to renegotiate that division. If you’ll go chop us some water, and he’ll take care of the chores and critters, and she’ll get the house warm, I will happily rustle up the eggs and flapjacks and crack open the last jar of peach preserves, and breakfast will be a thing of joy instead of the first false step in an infinite cycle of frustrations alternating with disappointments. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll be the one who least minds suiting up and going outside to get the water, and you’ll be in the mood to turn out some johnny-cake or porridge while others feed the stoves and chickens.
In the country, it is so much easier to live with almost anybody than it is to live alone, that a person who does live alone must be very fussy, or very timid, or very undesirable, or just plain stupid. I wondered, that morning, which applied to me. Had I not lived alone too long?
Wood heat, for instance, is remorseless and implacable, worse than bondage to cocaine or tobacco or even one’s own belly and bowels. Every forty-five minutes you must throw a stick of wood on one fire or the other. Think about it. Every forty-five minutes. You must. You can stretch it to an hour, to an hour and a half or more, but you will do so as seldom as possible, because when you do, you catch cold, and sniffle a lot.
So the presence of even one housemate means that you can with some confidence undertake an activity, or a thought train, of as long as an hour’s duration, without having to literally pay through the nose. Luxury! Three companions is wealth.
Never mind three talented sex partners—
“Why don’t you two move in here?” I asked as we sat down to breakfast.
Snaker opened and closed his mouth, Ruby did the same, he looked at her to see why she wasn’t answering, she did the same, he made an “after you” gesture just as she did the same, and the three of us broke into giggles. Rachel watched all this with grave interest.
“Because we’re committed to Sunrise,” Ruby said finally. Snaker said nothing.
“Yeah, but you’d have more fun here.”
“There’s more to life than having fun.”
“Is there? What?”
“See what I mean, Sam? You’re never serious.”
“I’ve never been more serious. If there is a higher purpose in life than enjoying myself, it has yet to be demonstrated to me.”
“Sam, please. We’ve had this rap. You want to live alone, fine. Snaker and I want to learn how to live with others, without ego or competition or hierarchy. We’re trying to find out if people have to always be strangers, or if it’s just easier. We’re trying to get telepathic, to find out if brotherhood is more than just a word. It’s important to us.”
“And how are you doing?”
“Huh?”
“I say that what happened upstairs awhile ago was the most telepathic, sharing, ego-transcending thing that ever happened to me. How about you? Has anything that telepathic happened at Sunrise lately?”
That generated enough silence for me to get half my breakfast down.
“That last Om,” Snaker said finally.
“And look how it turned out,” I said, and ate the other half of my breakfast.
“Sam,” Ruby said after a while, “why don’t you move in with us?”
The notion startled me; I laughed in self-defense. “I’d sooner have an orchidectomy. Groups aren’t my thing.”
Snaker spoke up. “I wish you would, Sam. The community could use you. I could use you. It’d be nice not being the House Materialist for a change, you know? It’d be comforting to have one other person around who believed in rationality and logic and arithmetic and capitalism and that shit.”
I had a sudden flash of insight. “No, it wouldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Don’t you see, Snake? They tolerate you because you’re the House Materialist, the sole voice of and for reason. If there were two of you, they’d have to throw you out.” I had another flash. “Sooner or later they will anyway.”
“You’re wrong!” Ruby said.
“Maybe so,” I said obligingly. Why make Ruby feel bad when it cost nothing to lie?
But Snaker said nothing. So did Rachel.
As I was thinking about getting up and leaving the shitter, to try again another time, Snaker came in and took the adjacent hole. I grunted a greeting, and he mumbled a reply. Snaker and I had shared an outhouse before, shared a chamber pot—hell, we’d shat in the woods together and wiped our asses with leaves. This time we were uncomfortable. For a while the only sound was Styrofoam creaking under our butts as we shifted our weight.
“Good time, wasn’t it?” he asked at last.
“It sure was. It sure was. Uh…I’d just as soon not repeat it real soon, if you know what I mean.”
Relief was evident in his voice. “I know what you mean. As a regular thing, it’d…” He trailed off.
“Yeah.” I wondered what he meant, what I meant. “That’s one reason why I’ll never move into Sunrise with you guys.”
He looked surprised. “You mean, you think if we were around each other all the time…hell, Sam, that’s just backwards. What happened last night would never have happened at all at Sunrise. The community is monogamous, you know that.”
“Now that Malachi’s satisfied with his partner, yeah. But you don’t understand what I mean. I’m not talking about sex, I’m talking about intimacy.”
“How do you mean?” he asked.
“Look, you and I had our conversation about bisexuality a year and more ago.”
“Yeah. We both felt that if their heads weren’t all full of mahooha, everybody’d be bisexual—which is why aggre
ssive cultures make it their business to fill everybody’s heads with mahooha.”
“And you told me about your couple of experiences—”
“—and you told me about yours, and we agreed that intellectually it all made sense, but emotionally, having been raised in this culture, the best it’d ever been for either of us was Not Totally Awful. That we were both…how did you put it?”
“‘Bisexual in theory, monosexual in practice.’”
Snaker suddenly grinned. “Jesus Christ, I was hinting like crazy, wasn’t I?” He glanced down and to the right, then back up. “Flirting is the fucking word for it, I was flirting.” Down and to the right, back up, still grinning. “Wasn’t I? And you, bless your heart, you played dumb.”
“Yeah, man, I was scared. I hadn’t had a friend as good as you in a long while. I didn’t want to fuck it up. Besides, by then it was shaping up to be you-and-Ruby, and I didn’t want to complicate her life either. Or mine, for that matter—but Ruby’d definitely had all the heartache she needed just then.”
“Huh! You know, maybe that’s why I was flirting with you. I was sensing how heavy it was going to get with Rube—and the part of me that liked being a swinging bachelor started looking around for an escape hatch. What do you know about that?” He had the wild frown of a man for whom many things have suddenly fallen into place.
“Right there,” I said, “is why I’ll never join your group.”
“Huh?”
“It took you a year to be ready to have that insight. But you wouldn’t have been allowed to take that long if the Gang had known about it. The Sunrise Gang believe in flushing every hang-up a person has out of its hiding place and stomping it to death, right now, right away, no excuses or delays, and that is not only intolerable, but wrong.” He looked like he wanted to argue, but he said nothing. “Everybody there insists on messing in your thing, getting into your private hang-ups, knowing all your secrets—” A few things fell into place in my own head. “You remember back when Rachel first arrived, before she woke up? How scared I was of her at first?”
“That business with the shotgun signals and all? Yeah, I guess I thought you were being a little paranoid—”
“And you a sf reader. What I was afraid of—so afraid I damned near cut her throat instead of calling you—was that Rachel might be a telepath. That’s why I wouldn’t join Sunrise Hill in a hundred years. You people are deliberately trying to become telepathic: you say so out loud. To the extent that you succeed you are terrifying and dangerous to me. To the extent that you try you seem insane. Snake, human beings aren’t supposed to be telepathic. There are reasons why our minds are sealed in bone boxes. Look at Malachi. He is telepathic, a little bit—and what does he do with it? Snoops and probes and pries and chivvies and powertrips people, finds your weak-spots and lets you know he knows them, finds your blind-spots and stores the knowledge…Ask anybody, who’s the leader of Sunrise Hill? Oh, we don’t have a leader. But when was the last time the big bald son of a bitch lost an argument he really wanted to win? And he isn’t even really telepathic—that’s just hippie jargon for what he is, which is observant and empathic and clever and insightful and glib. The only reason he’s tolerable is that there is no evil in him. And he can be fooled by someone as clever as himself.
“But a real telepath? Someone who knew your innermost thoughts and feelings and dreams and secrets? If I thought there was one near me, I’d try my best to kill him—and maybe the worst part is that I’d never succeed.”
Snaker was frowning. He was busy. “Kill him why?” he grunted between waves.
“Two reasons, either one sufficient. First, plain old intelligent paranoia. A telepath owns you. You live at his sufferance. If he chooses to kill you, you can’t stop him: he will always be one move ahead of you. Unforgivable. Intolerable. Even if his intentions are utterly benign…they could change. Get outside his effective range fast, whatever it is, and lob grenades at him. It’s your only sensible option. Nobody should be able to see through the bone box. It’s too much power for any human to have.
“And the second reason has to do with, like, intimacy, dignity, privacy, the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure inside your own head. A telepath would be the ultimate Peeping Tom. The ultravoyeur. The eavesdropper and the diary-reader and the unethical hypnotherapist rolled into one and cubed. Invasion of privacy on that big a scale calls for the death penalty; I think so, anyway. I don’t know about you, but I have secrets in my head that I’d kill to protect. Even from you, old buddy. Not even things that could be used against me, necessarily. Just private. Personal.”
Snaker was looking thoughtful.
“It keeps coming back to what I was talking about before. Intimacy. When I moved up here from the States I hadn’t been intimate with anyone or anything in…anyway a long time. Typical uptight city kid.
“Then I come up here. Wham! One by one my walls started tumbling, boundaries crumbling. People up here share a chamber pot and don’t think anything of it. Men don’t turn their backs to the road when they feel like taking a piss, ladies squat with you standing right there. A new kind of intimacy. Nobody locks their doors, or cars, or bedroom doors: another kind of nakedness. People swim and bathe literally naked together, for that matter, and work too, sometimes, I’ve seen the Sunrise women topless in the garden on a hot day just like the men. The hippies and the locals each have their own jungle-drum networks, so interwoven they might as well be left and right hemispheres of the same brain, so efficient that as we sit here there are people down on the South Mountain, back up in the piney woods, who are already working out what they’re going to say to the Chinee Book Writer Lady when she gets around to interviewing them. To live here in the Annapolis Valley is to be naked to everyone else in it.
“So I have—dubiously, reluctantly, suspiciously—taken off several layers of armor that I carried around with me for years. And on the whole it has been good for me. It’s pretty safe around here without armor.
“But enough is enough. I have reached my limit. What happened between us last night is the most intimate I ever want to get with anyone, and I don’t want to do that very often.”
I reached up and touched Snaker’s face, touched his left cheek above the beardline with three fingers of my right hand. He backed away. “You see? You flinch. So do I. Whether it’s instinct or learned behavior, what’s the difference? Even friends or lovers need at least a little bit of distance. There’s a use for layers of formality, restraint, inhibition, that prevent telepathic exchange, that bottle up the moment-by-moment unpleasantnesses and uglinesses of consciousness and give us time to edit ourselves into tolerability.” I stood up and adjusted my clothing, ladled a couple of scoops of stove ashes and lime into the hole, and handed the ladle to Snaker.
“I need you for a friend, Sam,” he said, finishing his own ablutions.
“And I need you for a friend. If we lived together maybe we’d become more than that, and I don’t know that I need that. If you do, you have Ruby for it. Everything doesn’t always progress naturally toward blissful unity. Snake. Your problem is, you want to marry everybody. If you could get all your best friends and loved ones and soul mates in one room, and give us some new drug that made us all be telepathic together…we’d probably go for each others’ throats.”
Snaker was frowning and nodding, zipping up his overalls. “If my thought-dreams could be seen…Yeah, I read that Poul Anderson story, too, man. ‘…Get out! I hate your bloody guts!’ said the only two telepaths in the world to each other. Is it really that disgusting inside a human head?”
“Isn’t it?”
He hung the ladle, put the wooden lid down over number two hole and straightened up. I popped the hook-and-eye, the door flew open, and we stepped out into the cold wind. By tacit mutual agreement we walked past the house and halfway down the driveway to where we had a good view of the Bay and the sky. We shared it in silence for a few minutes. He had some ready-mades, Players, and
smoked one. Being around smokers bothers me. It seems to comfort them so, the times it isn’t just a reflex. I resent a crutch that I can’t use, to the extent that it works. It’s only fair that it should kill them.
“Yeah, I guess it is,” he said softly at last.
He fieldstripped the butt and pocketed the filter. I watched the sun dance on the water.
“There’s a hole in your logic, Sam. I can smell it.” He sighed. “But I can’t find it.”
“You’re a romantic, man. You want life to be perfectible. It ain’t.”
“What’s the harm in trying? You know that old chestnut about the two frogs that fell into the bucket of cream.”
“The Persistent Frog survived only because it was cream in that bucket. A bucket of shit, for instance, gets softer when you churn it. And the smell becomes more offensive. The thing about blind optimism, man, it’s blind.”
“Your pessimism is just as blind, brother.”
“Granted. But I know which way to bet. It’d be nice if the human race could all get telepathic and all love one another one day—but it ain’t gonna happen. If, God forbid, some dedicated researcher does stumble across true telepathy, the race will be extinct in a generation. The handful who survive the Total War won’t dare get close enough to anyone else to reproduce.”
“Jesus!” He took out another ready-made. Eight matches later it was lit. “That’s a hell of a story idea, you know. Creepy, but interesting.”
“It’s yours. If you sell it, buy me a flat of beer.”
He looked thoughtful—then frowned. “No. It’d be a good story: I mean, it’d sell. But it’s not the kind of story I want to write. Listen, Ruby and I have to get back—there’s a meeting today, to start planning the garden.”
Time Pressure Page 14
