Time Pressure

by Spider Robinson

  Within those general parameters, it was different each year, and always a good time. There was a swimmin’ hole just within walking distance, and Amos had hay fields enough to accommodate a hundred couples making love under the stars, or fucking as the case might be, and the acoustics in the barn’s top floor were so splendid that even unrehearsed amateurs sounded good. I was particularly looking forward to one of the few things that could have been called a tradition in such a deliberately spontaneous event: to a five-hundred-throat Om. Without Sunrise restraints…yum!

  I was also looking forward to The Jam, of course. To be sure, there would be at least forty musicians who would drive me out of my mind—nice people, doubtless from good families, who through no fault of their own had trouble with Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen songs. Or who insisted on playing nothing else but Dylan and Cohen songs. But I could also expect anywhere from five to twenty real musicians, singly and in bunches.

  Hey, listen, I don’t care where you are, the woods of Nova Scotia, New York, L.A., Minneapolis even—you get a chance to play with twenty real musicians in a year, you’re rich.

  So the day before this Grand Pantechnicon I was sitting in my kitchen, dawdling over the remains of lunch. I was so eager for an excuse not to go back out into the sunshine and split more wood that I decided, quite unnecessarily, to Make Some Plans for the affair. If I had only properly grasped the Hippie ethos of “just let it unfold, man,” it could have saved my life.

  There would be at least two fiddles, a banjo or so, a few harmonicas, congas and bongos and a handful of people who could tease music out of Louis’s beat-up upright piano. I knew for sure of a bass, a clarinet and—most delicious prospect of all—“Fast” Layne Francis from Halifax, the best sax player I ever heard. There was no telling what else would show; I wouldn’t have been surprised by an alp horn or a solar-powered Moog.

  But one thing was sure. There would be a surfeit of guitars.

  I intended to play mine nevertheless. It was my main instrument, the one I was most at home on, the one I could jam best with. But it occurred to me that it would be nice to be able to switch off, from time to time, to some less clichéd, more exotic instruments. Add a little texture to the sound. Challenge myself. Impress folks with my eclecticism.

  Flies buzzed around my kitchen, looking for the egress. I got up and scraped the leftovers into the compost bucket. Thank God the water line had finally unfrozen and the pump was working again. It made cleanup so much less painful. Not to mention morning coffee.

  Let’s see, I thought, I could bring along the autoharp, and the mandolin…say, I could finish up that dulcimer, there was just enough time left before the feast for the glue to—

  Jesus Christ on a Snowmobile.

  Mucus the Moose.

  Abandoned—worse, forgotten—on a frozen hillside. For weeks. Weeks of the usual crazy climate extremes, at that. Temperature change might have already cracked the noble moose. He might be spilling his guts right now—

  Pausing only to grab a shirt, I took off up the hill. I was heartsick at my stupidity. How could I have forgotten Mucus? For so long?

  It was like tugging at the one thread that’s sticking out of your sock. More questions kept getting teased out as I hiked up the trail.

  How can something be important enough to you to bring you out into a blizzard…and so insignificant that you forget it for weeks? Leaving it lying forgotten in the Place of—

  —Maples—

  Jesus in gym shoes! I had completely forgotten the fucking maples!

  The season had been almost over, that night when Rachel had arrived. But only almost. Damn it, I knew what I was going to find when I got up there. Plastic buckets brimful of rain and spoiled sap, dead insects of all kinds floating on top. Reproachful maple trees, their blood wasted, spilling on the ground.

  Oh, the trees wouldn’t really care; nature has no objection to waste, and trees don’t much mind anything. But I would. A waste is a terrible thing to mind.

  The trail leveled out at the garden and I paused to catch my breath. How in the hell could I have spaced out on my maple trees? Why, I had been right up here in the garden dozens of times, rototilling and seeding and weeding and deer-proofing; the Place of Maples was the next place-of-consequence uphill from here. You’d think it would have popped into my head before now.

  Hypothesis: the psychological impact of Rachel’s explosive appearance, that night, had been sufficient to drive anything associated with it out of my awareness and keep it out. The hypothesis covered both the maples and Mucus the Moose.

  But it didn’t feel right. I replayed my memories of that night. It was unquestionably the most memorable night of my life so far. I had to admit on reflection that I had not replayed that memory tape very often, not as often as I had replayed other memorable events in the past. But I couldn’t find anything exactly traumatic in the memory, nothing I shuddered to recall. Oh, the trek back down to the Palace carrying Rachel had been pretty grim: not the sort of memory one kept handy for repeat playing. But it wasn’t the sort of thing you walled away from awareness either. I had enough of those to know the difference.

  Alternate hypothesis: years of occasional drug abuse were finally taking their toll on my brain; I had simply spaced out on moose and pancake-paint. A familiar hypothesis for many Sixties Survivors. It accounts for absolutely any weirdness in your life, and can neither be proved nor disproved.

  But you never play with it for very long. No point. Assuming it leaves you with nothing to do. Except maybe regret.

  Maybe you’re a city person, and think that this was like forgetting to water the houseplants; no big deal. City people can afford to space out on things. The technical term for a country person who is absent-minded and lives alone is “corpse.” If I could space out on my maples, I could space out on my fires.

  Okay, the first step to solving any problem was defining the problem and its extent. Were there any other inconsistencies in my behaviour that might shed light on this pair of lapses?

  How the hell would I know? How would I go about testing for them? How do you debug your head?

  Forgetting Mucus, now that was irresponsible. But forgetting the maple sap, that was dumb. All that flapjack juice gone to waste—not to mention how hard it was going to be to extract taps that had been so long in the living wood.

  What did the two screw-ups have in common?

  Only location—and Rachel.

  My stomach started to tighten up. I left the garden, turned left and headed up the trail.

  How was it that I had taken so long to remember my unfinished dulcimer? I’d been looking forward to finishing it, that night I had gone out into the blizzard…and then I hadn’t given it another thought until the Solstice Jam wedged it into my head again. Or had I? I couldn’t be sure.

  It was much cooler up here in the trees than it had been down by the chopping block; I was glad I had fetched the shirt. Cold sweat glued it to me. If you are like most people, the scariest, most starkly horrifying thing you can imagine is probably some exotic kind of harm to your body. My ultimate nightmare is damage to the integrity of my mind. As Buckley said, “The frame doesn’t matter, if the brain is bent.” I stopped suddenly and urinated to one side of the trail, copiously and with great force. My hands shook as I rezipped my jeans. I noticed that I was breathing high in my chest; tried to force it lower, breathe deeper; failed.

  I remembered the mood of inexplicable optimism that had accompanied me up this trail the last time. This was the backwards of it. I knew perfectly well that I was going to my doom. I know now why I kept going—but I didn’t, then, and it was killing me. Feeling foolish, I picked up two stones, one softball-size, one tennis ball. I knew they would not help me. I needed garlic. A cross. Wolfbane. Automatic weapons and a ninja sidekick. But I did not throw the stones away.

  Why, I asked myself, didn’t you think all this through when you were within arm’s reach of a perfectly good shotgun?

  I thi
nk, I answered, because someone has been stirring my brains. Someone I trusted…

  The sense of foreboding increased as I climbed. Twice I stopped to try and control my breath and pulse. Each time nervous energy forced me on again before I could. I was going to see something I didn’t like. Might as well get it over with.

  But still I stopped when the Place of Maples was just around the last bend ahead. It wasn’t too late to reconsider. I wasn’t committed yet. I could turn around and go home. If Mucus had survived this long, he’d live through Summer. Perhaps the deer had drunk the sap…

  I actually turned and took two steps downhill. But it didn’t help any; nothing eased. Sometimes the only way to avoid pain is to get past it. I spun on my heel and continued uphill.

  There was a tool on my belt that I used half a dozen times a day, that hung there so permanently I was not truly aware of it anymore; just about every adult male on the Mountain wore one at his hip. Five inches of Sheffield steel with a handle on one end, it was technically known as a “knife,” and it dawned on me at this last possible instant that the tool could be adapted for use as a weapon. Why, between it and my two rocks, I was a walking arsenal…

  Please, I said to whoever it is I’m talking to when I say things like that, let there be nothing to see around that bend. Let me find only Mucus the Moose and plastic pails of sour sap and a squashed looking place where a birch tree used to stand until it was pulverized by a blue Egg.

  I rounded the last bend.

  Things certainly had changed. It took a few seconds to sort things out.

  The first thing that impressed itself on my attention, of course, was the new Egg.

  Double bubble, toil and trouble…

  Just like the one that Rachel had arrived in, huge and blue, except that it wasn’t glowing and emitting loud noise and threatening to disintegrate—fair enough; it wasn’t trying to digest the total energy of the total conversion of the total mass of a large tree—and it was translucent, almost transparent. It didn’t have a beautiful naked woman inside it. Rather a disappointment all told. What it did have inside it was a bunch of things I did not recognize even vaguely but which I took to be machines or tools of some kind, though I could not have said why. I cannot describe them even roughly, nor name the material of which they were fashioned, nor the method of their fashioning; they certainly weren’t machined or cast or carved. They filled the person-sized Egg over two thirds full. I disliked them on sight, whatever they were.

  The shape of the landscape around the Egg was wrong. How?

  There were trees missing. A dozen or more. But they had not been completely pulverized like the one Rachel had destroyed. I could see stumps and trimmings, and shortly I spotted where the trunks had been stacked, a ways off in the woods. With them was a damned big old-fashioned bow saw. Like a tall capital D, the straight line being the sawblade—the kind of saw that takes either a man on both ends or a hero on one. Someone had deliberately, and at great expense of effort, cleared the area.

  Why use such a backbreaking tool? Oh, of course. A chainsaw or an axe might have been heard, downhill, by the chump whose land this nominally was. I might have come to investigate.

  So what if I had? It was becoming increasingly apparent that Rachel had the ability to erase specific memories at will, without leaving a detectable gap. To do so could not be more difficult than felling several mature trees with a two-man handsaw, could it? So why not borrow my Stihl chainsaw, mow down as many trees as needed in a matter of minutes, and edit the memory from my personal tape?

  For that matter, why had the saw blade not rusted out here?

  What else was wrong with this picture?

  No sap pails hanging forgotten from taps, after all. Pails and taps collected and stacked over by the fireplace. Big boiling bucket lidded. Probably full of salvaged sap, waiting to be reduced.

  Huh. Shape of land wrong over there. A pile of turned earth. Jesus, a large excavation! A fucking hole in the ground. Easily distinguished from my ass, in this light.

  Steady, boy, don’t get giddy. Get a grip on—

  What the fuck is that?

  I dropped flat to the ground and covered my head with my arms. I waited. Wind ruffled my hair. In the distance a crow did a Joan Rivers impression. A blackfly tried to bite my ear. I thought about what I thought I had seen, and lifted my head and peeked. It still looked a lot like a weapon—but a dopey one, so it probably wasn’t.

  What it looked like was a mortar, or a starter’s cannon, as modified by the prop department of a typical sci fi movie. It was not pointing at me or even especially near the trail, and it had not, as I’d hallucinated, swiveled instantly to track me, and now that I calmed down enough to look I saw that it could not, that its odd armature did not allow it enough traverse.

  A satellite-tracking antenna—

  I got up, feeling stupid. Crows laughed at me. I looked at the transparent blue spheroid full of high-tech artifacts, and down at the rocks in my hands, and suddenly I was angry. I tossed the rocks blindly back over my shoulders, hard; one hit a tree with a gratifying home-run thunk and the other started a small avalanche in a pile of alder slash. I walked slowly toward the blue Egg, feeling the anger build. If I couldn’t find an access hatch or a zipper or a seam, I’d chew my way into the damned thing…

  It was my own damned fault, I knew. I had done exactly what all my favorite science fiction writers preached against. I had made unwarranted assumptions.

  Because Rachel had arrived naked, and said that she must come naked or not at all through the membrane of time, I had assumed that whatever method of time travel her people had developed would work only on organic matter, would only transmit a living thing or something which, like the crown, was part of a living thing’s bioelectrical field—

  —whereas it was just as reasonable to suppose that the system could handle either organic or inorganic matter equally well, as long as they weren’t both in the same load.

  There was no telling whether this Egg was the second, or the twenty-second, no way to be sure just how advanced and dug-in the alien invasion of my ficton presently was, how big a beachhead my colossal stupidity had let them establish. Was Rachel still the only time traveler around these parts?

  Or had I met dozens of her friends and colleagues…and forgotten?

  Angry makes you bigger, and heartsick makes you smaller, and both at once was as bad as I’d ever felt. Yet I knew it would be even worse if they went away and left me with scared shitless. I wanted to kill a lion with my teeth, and then beat myself to death with the bones.

  The Egg had no hatch or seam I could discern. Up close, the things inside were still just…things inside, quite unidentifiable. Parts seemed fixed, others seemed to wave in a way that made me wonder if the Egg could be full of some viscous liquid. I touched its surface with both my hands. Though the day was quite warm, the big spheroid was distinctly, strikingly cold to the touch. Yet there was no condensation, no exhaust heat.

  I was beyond surprise or curiosity. I was going to bust this fucking egg open. Should have held onto the rocks; maybe my knife would—

  I started to remove my hands from the surface of the Egg, felt something happen, clutched instinctively…and found that I was holding a gold headband. It had apparently been synthesized by the chilly surface of the Egg and gently pressed into my hands. It was warm.

  I whistled an intricate little scrap of melody from Chick Corea’s My Spanish Heart, and examined the thing carefully.

  It was not exactly like Rachel’s headband. It lacked the three retractable locking-pins that anchored hers into her skull, although there were knurled discontinuities like knotholes in their places. It was thinner in two dimensions, and the microengraving on it was an order of magnitude less complex. The gold seemed less pure. It looked like the Taiwanese knockoff copy.

  I decided that nothing could possibly hurt me more than I hurt already, and that nothing could happen to me that I didn’t deserve, and that I didn�
��t even care if I was wrong. Strike three. I put the headband on my head and was Ruby—

  —am Ruby fucking Sam feeling the unfamiliar dick up inside me and liking it (always thought I would) but feeling the touch of Snaker’s nearby eyes more vividly than the touch of Sam’s hands here on my tits (fingertips on right tit heavily callused) seeing Snaker’s unseen staring face more clearly than Sam’s wide-eyed here before me (Sam’s mouth is beautiful) hearing the catch in Snaker’s breathing beside me more clearly than Sam’s happy growl (God, Sam’s a good fuck) what joy to help my lover make love to his friend, I hope this isn’t a big mistake but I’ll worry about it later, unnnnh-yes, like that, like that, like that, I like that, just like that, YEAH-YEAH-YEAH-YEAH-YEAH!—

  I ripped the headband from my head; clumps of hair came away with it. I was on my side, in fetal position. My whole body trembled, my calves threatened to cramp, my vagina pulsed rhythmically, my teeth were novocaine-numb—

  Oh…my…God…

  I looked down at the gold oval in my hands. I wanted to throw it as far from me as I could. Farther than I could. I wanted it in the heart of the sun, or passing the orbit of Neptune at System escape velocity—

  Did anyone ever leave the theater during the rape scene? Did anyone ever voluntarily stop fucking in the middle of an orgasm? Even if they wanted to?

  I watched my hands come close, put the headband back on—

  No sense trying to reproduce more of it. I reentered Ruby’s head at the exact instant I had left it, between the fifth and sixth yeahs of her orgasm. It was like teleporting into the heart of an explosion. I hung on for dear life, trying to keep from being destroyed utterly by the primal fire of Shiva, and all the while the little sliver of myself that is never asleep or drunk or stoned or unconscious was taking notes.