Time Pressure

by Spider Robinson

  I grinned. “Not a moment too soon.”

  Does it seem odd that the Sunrise Gang were planning their garden in late March, when nothing goes in the ground in Nova Scotia before the first of June? Then I haven’t conveyed the Spirit of Sunrise: hot air. The Gang were perfectly capable of spending several weeks debating Whether It Was Far Out To Wear Imitation Leather Since That Too Bought Into The Kharma Of Slaughtering Animals. Something as genuinely involving as The Next Year’s Food—not to mention Three Months Of Backbreaking Labour—could easily take them over two months of constant discussion to thrash out. If D-Day had been as overplanned as a Sunrise Hill garden…it would probably have turned out just as chaotically, I suppose.

  One thing I must admit: they seemed to have learned the secret of arguing without fighting, or wrangling without getting angry. In cabin-fever season, that is one hell of an impressive achievement, when you think about it.

  “Yeah, we’re thinking about adding a third acre. Soybeans.”

  “You’re crazy. Soybeans won’t grow here.”

  “Well…Nazz and Lucas have a theory. And we won’t really be self-sufficient until we grow our own soybeans.”

  “It’s your back, pal. Good luck. Listen, you mind if Rachel and I bum a ride a ways? I want to introduce her to Mona and Truman. She’s been bugging me about it since Mona laid that tire on you the other day.”

  “Sure. She can sit…huh! I started to say, Rachel could be the one who gets to sit in the back, since she doesn’t mind cold. But we’d never explain that to Ruby.”

  “We’ll both ride in back, let you two lovebirds have the cab to yourselves.”

  “Begin redrawing the lines, Sam? Start puttin’ the fences back up?”

  “Isn’t it time?”

  Sigh. “Yeah. Yeah, it is.”

  He started to head back indoors. I stopped him, turned him, hesitated a split second and hugged him, hesitated an intact second and kissed him. He hugged me back and kissed me back without any hesitation.

  It really is hard to manage two beards. Do you suppose that’s why they invented shaving?

  “It was fun,” Snaker said finally, breaking the hug. “Ten years from now we’ll do it again.”

  “Talk about extended foreplay. It’s a deal. Uh…for what it’s worth, you give good head.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “Yeah, I do. I always thought I would, if it was somebody I cared about. So do you.” He grinned. “But Ruby’s better.”

  “You’re a lucky man, Snaker.”

  “I know. I know.”

  CHAPTER 13

  LET ME TELL you about the last time I mistook Rachel for a city person.

  Living in Nova Scotia had encouraged me to divide the human race into city people and country people, and since Rachel came from the future, and it was axiomatic to me that future meant huge population, higher and higher tech, progressive hyperurbanization, I thought of her as a city person. I assumed, for instance, her ignorance of woodstoves and outhouses and gardening, woodcraft and carpentry and such things. In my own time, they seemed already nearly obsolete.

  I think I was often right. But not always. It turned out, for instance, that she knew more about gardening than I’ll ever know.

  But the day I took her to meet the Bents, I finally shook the City Mouse stereotype out of my subconscious.

  On the way over, huddled under a blanket in Blue Meanie’s truckbed with her, I tried to brief her about Mona and Truman Bent. I’ve learned to see, a little bit, since I got here, and I can now see that Mona is very beautiful. But when I first arrived, a city person, my notion of beauty was not mature enough to stretch to encompass Mona’s missing teeth, or her fireplug figure. Similarly, it took me some time to realize that her strident voice could seem mellifluous to some ears. It took me longest of all to understand why the herd of ragamuffin kids she tyrannized so ruthlessly loved her so unreservedly. To be sure, she handed out hugs and kisses and treats liberally to those who earned them, and her weirdly beautiful smiles were not too expensive for a child to earn. But she also enforced a stern and unyielding discipline by lashing them with her harsh voice, once in a while by cracking them across the mouth with a horny hand—and once I saw her kick a little mongoloid boy square in the ass.

  It was that particular episode that triggered understanding at last, brought me to realize that orphaned inbred diseased retarded rejected foster children who had been shuffled around for months and years by bad luck and bureaucracy before landing at the Bents’ might require a special kind of loving, and that unsophisticated uneducated Mona might just know more about it than I did. Seeing her kick that kid had reminded me of something.

  When I was a teenager I did a couple of weekends of volunteer work. They sent three of us to an orphanage in Far Rockaway; we were supposed to take groups of orphans on outings, to see the Hayden Planetarium and the Statue of Liberty and so forth. Boys, aged seven to twelve, from the mean streets—the toughest little sons of bitches I’ve ever met in my life. Orphaned by murder or overdose or suicide or the electric chair or Castro’s revolution, they were the kind of inner-city gutter rats you patted down for shanks before leaving the grounds. We were dumbass future-liberals from Long Island. The first day, a nine-year-old with his leg in a cast to the hip, a kid with the kind of sweet, almost effeminate features that make grandmothers swoon, asked my friend Petey for a cigarette. Petey told him he was too young to smoke. The adorable little kid hauled off and broke Petey’s shin with his cast. The other kids fell down laughing.

  While the staff liaison was taking Petey off to the Infirmary, my only remaining partner Mike approached the kid with the cast. The boy put a hand into his pocket and left it there. Mike smiled at him, held up his hands in a conciliatory gesture, and with no windup at all kicked the kid in the balls so hard his cast banged back down on the floor. Mike took the kid’s knife, turned to me and smiled and said, “The first step in training a mule is to get the mule’s attention,” and we had an uneventful visit to the Empire State Building that day…

  So when, years later, I saw Mona kick slack-jawed, almond-eyed Joey because he had deliberately hurt a smaller child, I swallowed my liberal instincts and watched to see how Joey took it. Like that sweet-faced thug with the cast, he acted not with anger or fear, but with something like respect, something oddly like satisfaction, relief, as though the essential order and correctness of the universe had been reaffirmed.

  I tried to tell Rachel all of this and more, on her way to meet Mona and Truman for the first time, to prepare her, because I was thinking of Rachel as a city person and city people sometimes disapproved of Mona on first meeting. (It was usually three or four visits before people got enough sense of Truman to know whether they liked him or not.)

  Rachel cut me off. “Sam, I must not allow your opinions to colour my observations. I know you mean well, but please, let me form my own impressions.” Exasperated, I agreed, and spent the rest of the trip worrying.

  And of course, within ten seconds of the introduction, Mona and Rachel had established a rapport deeper and wider than I had managed in three years.

  It wasn’t anything they said. If I quoted you their dialogue it would bore you to tears. What happened was simply this: that in the moment their eyes met for the first time they knew each other. Recognition signals were exchanged, mutual respect was acknowledged, in some way I could dimly perceive but not even dimly understand. They forgot to pretend I was there.

  I went out back and tried talking with Truman, which of course didn’t work. Truman was a very pleasant man. He looked like Raymond Massey with three teeth missing. He never had any more or less than two days’ growth of beard, and the beard was white even though his hair was brown. Truman didn’t talk much. He hadn’t learned how until he was fifteen. Mona had just plain bullied him into it. He never would learn to read, he simply wasn’t equipped, but she wouldn’t stop trying to teach him until one of them died. He was probably the nicest, most loving man I knew. Certain
ly the strongest: I once saw him carry a rock the size of a beer-fridge ten meters, his boots sinking ankle-deep in unturned soil. Like the kids, he worshipped Mona.

  I found him splitting firewood. I got his spare axe and joined him, spent twenty minutes in “conversation” with him across the chopping block. As always I wondered if he appreciated the courtesy or dreaded the ordeal. Most of his vocabulary was “Guess so,” and “I don’t s’pose, naw.”

  If you are City-Folk, you may have the idea that Truman was stupid. Once I came upon him in the midst of a disassembled combine. It is so complicated a machine I despair of describing it; its very complexity stuns the eye. He was wearing it, slick with grease and sweat. It looked as though some hideous insect lifeform had him half swallowed. “Figure you can get that thing back together again, Truman?” I asked.

  He blinked at me and thought about it. “A man made it,” he said, and went back to work. And had it running before nightfall.

  You may suffer from the delusion that you know what intelligence is. I don’t. Illiterate Truman owned his own home, owned (and maintained) the one-ton truck with which he earned enough to feed and clothe and warm a whole brood of raggedy kids, owned a great deal of land and other shrewd investments. I had a liberal arts education, sophisticated musical skills and a glib tongue—and I owned a guitar and some books and records. Talking with him always made me feel like a moron.

  In the background I could hear Mona and Rachel talking a mile a minute, two kindred souls.

  I left after half an hour and they never noticed. Rachel was standing behind Mona, kneading her shoulders; they were deep in conversation, thick as thieves. I wandered up the road to Sunrise and ate soyburger and got into the argument about their garden, a waste of time if there ever was one.

  In the end, my stock with Mona went up because I was the one who had introduced her to Rachel.

  “Sam,” Rachel said to me after we got home that night, “you are exasperated about something. What is it?”

  I’d been thinking about that very thing. “I think I’m jealous.”

  She looked surprised. For her. “Really?”

  “Yeah. Of you and Mona. You and Sunrise Hill, for that matter.”

  Now she looked surprised even for a human being. “I don’t understand, Sam.”

  “I’m not sure I do either. I’m working this out as I speak.” We were in the living room, sharing the warmth of the fire before I went upstairs to sleep. It really was turning out to be nice, having someone to keep the fire going all night long, sometimes, waking up to a warm house. Well, a less cold one. “It’s just that…that…dammit, I’m a science fiction reader, all my life I’ve been training to meet a time-traveler, here you are, I meet you…and people who’ve never read anything seem to know you better than I do, in ways that I can see, but will never understand. It just isn’t right. If anyone on this goddam Mountain ought to know you, ought to have rapport with you, it’s me. Snaker’s the only other sf fan for a hundred miles, except maybe Nazz. And there is something between you and Mona for Chrissake Bent that is deeper and stronger than anything I’ve managed to build with her in three years’ acquaintance. Sometimes I think you have more in common with the superstitious anti-tech clowns at Sunrise Hill than you do with me. You spend as much time over there as you do here, and whenever they start running down science and reason and I argue with them, like tonight when you came in on the Garden Meeting, goddammit, you won’t fucking back me up!” I was pacing around the living room now, gesturing with the cast-iron poker. “I thought we’d have something special in common and we don’t really seem to; you and Mona shouldn’t have anything in common, but you do anyway. And I don’t even understand what it is. Why did you hit it off so quickly with her?”

  Sprawled gracefully in my recliner chair, Rachel watched me pace and gesticulate with grave interest. “What I love in Mona is her need to love.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We talked about you a lot, Sam. She thinks you badly need someone to love. Do you think she is right?”

  The question came from left field; I answered automatically and honestly. “I have never been in love. I have successfully faked it eight times since I was sixteen years old—half those times in order to secure a steady sex partner, and the other half because I felt a need to convince myself that I was capable of loving. I gave up doing it for either reason. Not soon enough. Not when I realized how much pain I was causing to innocent ladies; considerably after that. Considerably. To my certain knowledge, I have not loved anyone since my mother. I have been sexually fixated for brief periods. I’ve been jealous of a mate, like, stingy with a possession. But I’ve never felt that thunderbolt they talk of, that dizzy compulsion to be with someone else constantly and make them happy and tear down all the walls between us. There has never been anyone in my life that I would die for.

  “If love is what Robert Heinlein said, the condition in which the welfare and happiness of another are essential to your own, then I have never loved. The welfare and happiness of another have often been relevant to my own…but never really essential. I’m still undecided whether I’m a monster, or everyone else is kidding themselves.”

  (Jesus, the last time I had spoken thoughts like this aloud to anyone had been…Finals Week, to Frank. Which reminded me of something, but I couldn’t pin it down.)

  I opened up the Ashley and made elaborate unnecessary adjustments to the logs inside, banging and clanking and swearing under my breath as much as possible. Rachel watched in silence until I had closed it up and reset the damper. The only place I had ever seen faces that expressionless, not even a wrinkle to show that an expression had ever been there, was in a—

  “Sam? When was the last time you pretended to be in love?”

  I waited, honestly curious to know whether or not I would tell her; heard my voice decide: “No. That I won’t talk about.”

  “That bad?”

  “Look.” My face was warm. “Look. You have things you won’t talk about, right? Questions I have that aren’t just idle curiosity or being polite, questions that really matter to me that you won’t answer, right? Well, this is one of those for me.”

  “I’m not being polite, Sam—”

  “—damn right you’re not—”

  “—or idly curious. Are the cases parallel? Do you say that reality itself might crumble if you answered my question?”

  “No. I mean I don’t want to talk about it, and I won’t.”

  Very softly she said, “You’ll have to talk about Barbara some day to someone—”

  “How do you know her name?” I roared, the hair standing up on the back of my neck.

  “Because what your conscious mind refuses to touch, your unconscious cannot leave alone. You cry out her name at night sometimes. Sometimes you talk to her.”

  I did like hell talk in my sleep! And if I did, it wouldn’t be to Barbara. I started to say so—

  —and paused. How did I know? How long had it been since anyone but Rachel had stayed the night? Could she possibly be right?

  But Barbara was dead. Asleep or awake, I didn’t believe in ghosts, and calling out someone’s name in my sleep was just too corny. I could not believe it of myself.

  But how else would Rachel have known her name?

  I thought of a way, and it wasn’t just the back of my neck now, my whole scalp was crawling. Either I wasn’t nearly as tightly wrapped as I thought—

  —or Rachel was a telepath after all…

  “What did I say to her in my sleep?”

  “I can’t say. You mumble. Uh, you apologize to her a lot.”

  “What for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I searched and searched that unreadable face of hers. How much did I trust Rachel, after all? I had never caught her in a lie.

  It came to me that if she were a telepath, I never would…

  —which suggested the thought that if she were a telepath, I was thinking thoughts that could g
et me killed…

  —which suggested that since I was still breathing, she was not a telepath…

  —or she was a very clever one…

  My head began to hurt. I looked away from her almond eyes and opened the Ashley’s damper a quarter turn to inspire the fire. “Let’s change the subject.”

  “All right. Why did you come to Nova Scotia?”

  The damper spun in three complete circles, sending smoke puffing out from under the lid of the stove, and the heavy iron poker dropped to the floor with a crash. I used the time it took me to pick it up to think hard.

  Suppose that Rachel was a telepath. Surely, then, she knew that the moment I became convinced of that, there would be a death struggle between us. Was she now trying to provoke it?

  Suppose she was not a telepath. How, then, in the hell did she know that “Who is Barbara?” and “Why did you come to Nova Scotia?” were the same question? I refused to believe that I could have talked enough in my sleep for that.

  Or could it be total coincidence, one of those improbable synchronistic ironies that happen to everyone at times? At various times I had heard her ask the same question of Ruby, Tommy, Nazz, Malachi and others. It was a logical question for a cultural anthropologist to ask an immigrant; only a matter of time until she’d gotten around to me.

  It was just the timing that was so hard to swallow. It could easily be read as a refusal to change the subject. Malachi did that sometimes; he would “drop a subject” by approaching it from another direction. It was just the sort of thing Malachi would be doing now if he had a hint that I had a hang-up called Barbara, if he ever suspected that my avowed reason for being here was a lie.

  So there were only two ways to go. Make a break for the shotgun that hung over the back door, two rooms distant—and if I were right, die on the way. Or assume that Rachel was not privy to my secret thoughts, that her question was innocent, and give my avowed reason for being here.