Time Pressure

by Spider Robinson

  —Tiresias was right. It is better for them—

  —Bizarre: you can’t “come in in the middle”—there is no middle. In the instant of jacking in, anywhere in the sequence, you know who you are and where you are and what’s going on—just the way the originator of those memories did, at the time. What-Has-Gone-Before is implicit in the Now—

  —This is not right; I shouldn’t be here in my friend’s head, certainly not during such a private—

  —Damn, she’s right: I am a pretty good fuck. Wow, I can feel me coming; I always wondered if they could—

  —oh, really?

  (This last because Ruby had just thought, but my Snaker’s better…)

  —So many layers to this; I expected maybe a top layer of consciousness and then a layer of subconscious murmuring. But this is like a dozen-layer cake with consciousness icing, like a crowd gathered round a computer programmer all shouting instructions at once—

  —God damn, it goes on so long for them! So long, and all over…

  —I’ve Got To Stop This—

  She is hyperaware of Snaker and she isn’t a bit jealous, his ecstasy is prolonging her orgasm, how can that be? It’s like he’s here in her head; he isn’t really, but there’s a little mental model of him that’s very close to the real thing, and there’s a third eye she never takes off of it. She constantly checks it (I Really Ought To Stop This Now) against the real Snaker and uses prediction errors as feedback to refine the model; one day she’ll have a little Snaker in her head indistinguishable from the real one. Is that telepathy?—

  —No! This is telepathy. What she is doing with Snaker is an inadequate substitute for telepathy, is what people do because they cannot be telepathic. In solitary confinement, you make up stories about those whose shouts and moans come distantly from neighboring cells…

  Jesus Christ, isn’t she ever going to stop coming?—

  —!I AM GOING TO STOP THIS RIGHT NOW!—

  I was still lying on my side. There was dirt in my beard, and pine needles. An ant was portaging a piece of maple leaf a few millimeters from my eyes, in the pale shadow of the big Egg. The gold crown was clenched in my left fist. It was quite warm.

  I was in shock. The little monitor sliver of me that took notes decided maybe humour would help.

  Cushlamachree. Congratulations, Meade. You may just be the first living man in the history of the world to actually fuck himself.

  I began to laugh, and in moments was laughing so hard I genuinely thought I might choke.

  But you sure as hell aren’t going to be the last—

  No, humour wasn’t all that helpful. The laughter trailed off. I got wearily to my feet. I realized that I now badly needed to kill at least two people and maybe dozens…and that an invulnerable invincible enemy was, exactly as surely as Hell, going to prevent me. I began to cry, like an infant, in frustration and outrage. With bleak logic I computed that the very best I could hope for was to be permitted to kill one of my targets.

  Myself.

  Might as well find out. The suspense was killing me. I put the gold headband down most carefully on the forest floor, and dried my sweaty palms on my pants, and took my woods knife from its sheath, and the Nazz took it away from me.

  I screamed.

  “I’m sorry, Sam,” he said. “I thought I could stop you in time.”

  There was a terrific bruise coming up in the middle of his forehead, a small cut in the center of it trickling blood; soon there would be a whacking great lump. I remembered tossing a rock over my shoulder and hearing it strike a tree. Now it came to me that there had been no tree close behind me at that time. Tunnel vision.

  Okay, open it out. How many are we? (“You don’t want to count the elevator boy?”) Just the two of us. Okay, iris back in on Nazz. He’s different. How? Start thinking, Sam!

  A forehead wound was a major alteration in a man as hairy as Nazz, his forehead being the majority of his visible face, and for once, he wasn’t grinning. But there was something else. Something subtler, but more profound. This was Nazz, all right—but Nazz was a different man now. How, and how did I know?

  Jesus—his eyes! His eyes!

  For as long as I had known him, for as long as any of us had known him, Nazz had been mad. His behavior was manic and his thoughts were like tumbling kittens: one minute he’d come up with some genuine insight, like that visual-interface notion for computers, and the next minute he’d be apologizing to a chair for farting on it. But mostly it was the eyes that were the tip-off. No one meeting him ever had to wait the five seconds it would take for him to say something totally off the wall to realize that they were dealing with an acid casualty. Equally important, a benign one. Just one look at those sparkling gray eyes and you knew two things: this man was stone crazy, and he was perfectly harmless.

  Neither was true anymore. Somehow, the Nazz had gone sane. And in so doing had reverted to what he had been before he went insane. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised by what that was.

  He was a soldier.

  A good one. I recognized it in the eyes first. The alert, balanced stance, the absence of his usual goofy grin, and the way he had effortlessly taken my knife away before I even knew he was there, all were only confirmation. I knew the look; my father was an admiral. Nazz was wearing his Army camouflage jacket—hell, all Hippies wore those, but now it wasn’t a costume anymore, now I could see that he had not bought it at an Army-Navy store to make mockery of it, now it was his uniform again. He wore a web belt that held a GI canteen, ammo pouches, a coil of rope, a commando knife, and a woods knife like mine. Every few seconds he glanced quickly from side to side, like a cop, or a fugitive.

  A lot of guys who came back from the Viet Namese jungle—the ones who survived—got heavily into acid. And some of them moved north, to a country where nobody called them “babykillers…”

  When two men meet they often—I’m tempted to say, nearly always—make an instant assessment. Even if they don’t expect the question to arise in a million years, they can’t help quietly wondering: if it came to it, could I take him? (Interesting that the same word, “take,” means to beat a man or fuck a woman or steal property…) Their two opinions as to the answer will subtly affect all their future dealings.

  Nazz was one of the few men concerning whom it had never occurred to me to ask that question before. I did now—

  I was candy.

  “Holy shit,” I greeted him.

  “Yeah,” he agreed, “I guess that’s what it is.”

  I was full of many things, especially questions. Too many to sort. I let them pick their own order. “That head hurt much?”

  “Yah. I never saw you move that fast before, Sam,”

  “Something about an alien invasion that pumps you up, I guess.”

  He let that pass. “How’d you know I was behind you?”

  “Then you aren’t reading my mind now?”

  He shook his head. “It doesn’t work that way.” He grimaced. “Unless you were reading mine. I’d swear I never made a sound.”

  “You didn’t. I just figured rocks weren’t going to help me any, so I just threw ’em away.”

  He couldn’t completely suppress a flash of Nazz-like smile. “No shit?” He shook his head. “That’s a relief. Between you dropping flat all of a sudden, and then getting up and surprising me again, I thought maybe I’d lost it.”

  “Junglecraft? No, you haven’t. How’d she get to you, Nazz?”

  “Get to me? I got to her.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, once I figured out what Rachel was—”

  “How?”

  “It was self-evident, Sam. All you had to do was look at her to know she was a stranger in a strange land, and that exchange student story of yours didn’t make it. So I looked closer—and it was pretty easy to see that the body she was wearing wasn’t the one she was born in.”

  I hadn’t guessed that. “How do you figure?” Jesus, even his diction had changed. />
  “Sam, Sam. Not a wrinkle on her from head to foot, not smile-lines or frown-lines or stretch-marks or scars of vaccinations or anything. Nobody is that featureless except babies. Well, that made it obvious. Where do they grow brand-new, adult bodies, and change them like clothes? The future. How could people that smart miss such a glaring giveaway? Because they’re telepaths—they don’t use facial expressions.”

  Hell. I should have figured that out. I even had clues Nazz hadn’t had. If Rachel could take a golden crown through time with her, why not head- or body-hair? Because she hadn’t grown any yet…

  A trained jungle-fighter with a mind like this was about unbeatable.

  No. Very difficult to beat. Rachel was unbeatable. I had managed to surprise Nazz. I was convinced that Rachel would have known I was going to throw those rocks before I did.

  Well, maybe I could find some way to surprise him again. There’s no telling what dumb luck can do for you.

  I nodded. “Smart, man. Mind if I sit down?”

  He sat, without using his hands. I joined him more slowly and stiffly. Jesus, he was in shape.

  It seemed appropriate to quote Dick Buckley. “Straighten me, Nazz…’cause I’m ready.”

  “What do you want to know, Sam?”

  Which questions to ask first. “Who is Rachel, and what is she doing here?”

  “‘They,’”

  “Huh?”

  “You mean, ‘who are Rachel, and what are they doing here?’”

  “Repeat: you faded.”

  “Rachel is four people. You didn’t know?”

  “Can they all carry a tune?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Sorry, I’m getting giddy. I was just thinking how nice it would be to sing Mamas and Papas songs by myself. Or Buffalo Bills stuff. You were saying, Rachel is four people—”

  “Yah. Uh, technically they’re personality-fragments, I guess you’d say. Abridged clones, not originals.”

  I let that go by. “Who’s the leader?” Of the club that’s made for you and me—

  “Jacques. The others call him Fader. It’s like an inside joke. What he really is, is—” He broke off, hesitated for several seconds. “I guess you’d have to say he’s…the Saviour. The Founder. The one who brought the New Age.”

  Oh really?

  “His born name is Jacques LeBlanc. A Swiss neuroanatomist—his original incarnation was, I mean. He started everything. A couple of klicks from here, as a matter of fact, a decade from now.”

  “Run that by me again.”

  “He’s going to be a neighbor of yours. The first Jacques LeBlanc, the forerunner of the one that’s one-fourth of Rachel, is going to move into the old DeMarco Place, just up the road from here, in a few years. That’s where it’s going to happen, Sam—isn’t that far out? Right here in Nova Scotia, your neighbour-to-be is going to have the conceptual breakthroughs that let him discover mindwipe, and then mindwrite, and finally true telepathy. That’s why Rachel picked this area for an LZ: this is where the conquest of the world will begin. Amazing, huh?”

  And I’d helped.

  “Gee, Nazz, that’s just keen. Who are the other three Rachels?”

  “The other three parts of her, you mean. Well, there’s Madeleine, the Co-Founder, she’s Jacques’ lady—”

  “There had to be a woman in there somewhere—or a gay man.”

  “Because of how good she is in bed, you mean? Not really. Original gender-of-birth hasn’t got much to do with it. Then there’s Joe—he’s sort of Maddy’s brother, but not quite—and Joe’s lady Karyn. If any one of them is responsible for Rachel being such a good lay, it’s Karyn. She used to be a high-ticket hooker.”

  “Joe is Madeleine’s brother, but not quite.” If I kept on playing straight man, sooner or later this had to start making sense.

  Or maybe not.

  “Well, actually it’s Norman who was Maddy’s brother—but then he thought Jacques had killed Maddy, so he took off after Jacques and tried to kill him. Jacques had to screw up his head so drastically that there wasn’t a Norman anymore, and the personality in that skull became Joe. By the time they got that all straightened out, and he got his memories back, he was happier being Joe than he ever had been being Norman, so he stayed Joe.”

  “Jacques hadn’t killed his sister after all?”

  “No. Just kidnapped her. It might have been smart to kill her, she was on the verge of blowing the whistle on the whole conspiracy. But he loved her. So he took a big chance. He made her his first confidante, his partner, the first person to be invited into the conspiracy. Uh, ‘first’ sequentially, of course, not chronologically.”

  “Of course. Who is the first, chronologically? You?”

  “Why, I really don’t know for sure, Sam. For all I know, my namesake from Bethlehem could have been in it.”

  I was absorbing about one word in ten of this. Mostly I just wanted to keep him talking while I tried to think of some foolproof way to kill him without weapons, skills, or the advantage of surprise. Or failing that, a way to suicide—since he apparently wasn’t going to let me.

  “I mean, they must be into the Bible,” he went on. “That’s where Rachel got her name from. ‘…Rachel, who mourned for her lost children, and would not be comforted, for they were no more.’ Typical Joe sense of humour. This Rachel hurts for her lost ancestors, not her children. Does a lot more about it than mourn, too.”

  This was getting us nowhere. “What are you doing here, Nazz?”

  “The Egg here—” He reached out and touched it gently, caressingly, “—arrived a week ago. Ever since, I’ve been trying to get it safely into the ground, and guarding it in the meantime.”

  “Guarding it? Here? Against what, the deer?”

  “You know how it is with woods trails. Deerjackers, hikers, lovers, berry-pickers, kids playing, horse people out riding, you never know who’s gonna come by when. They all tend to follow existing trails. But mostly I’ve been keeping watch for you, Sam.”

  “For me?”

  “Rachel told me to expect you. Uh…this is the second time you’ve been up here in the last few days.”

  Aw, shit. Really?

  I had no recollection of having been here since the night Rachel arrived.

  “How did Rachel know I’d be coming?”

  “That moose gadget of yours. You thought of coming back up here for it last week, for the dozenth time—and Rachel stopped you, took the memory of that thought out of your head. But she knew it’d recur, and she had pressing business elsewhere. She couldn’t erase the moose altogether, the memory was rooted pretty deep and there would’ve been holes big enough for you to notice. Besides, your most recent memories of it were integral to your memory of Rachel’s own arrival here. She didn’t want to leave any suspicious holes in that sequence.

  “But she knew that the Solstice Thing coming up would keep putting the moose back in your mind. So she told me to keep an eye and ear out for you.”

  “Wouldn’t it have been simpler to ferry Mucus down to the house and plant a false memory that I’d retrieved him myself?”

  He shook his head. “Doesn’t work that way. I don’t think anyone could put a convincing false memory into a man’s head except himself. The mind knows its own handwriting.”

  So I had to be allowed to keep climbing up the damned Mountain, loop and replay—like Sisyphus. Like a robot with a faulty action program. Like a bird blindly banging its head against the window, trying to escape…

  My voice sounded odd to me. “What happened the last time I got this far, Nazz? We fought, didn’t we?”

  “Yes, Sam.”

  “And I lost, and you cut out some of my memory. Jesus, you did a good job. There isn’t the slightest sense of déjà vu.”

  “Not me, Sam. I’m not even really a novice at this stuff. Hell, I’m just barely a postulant. All I could do was put you on hold and call in Rachel—she did the surgery.”

  “‘Put me on hold’?”
/>
  “Yeah, it’s not hard. The crown generates a phased induction field that hyperstimulates your septum. Your pleasure center, just over your hypothalamus. You sort of supersaturate with pleasure, and your mind goes away. Like, samadhi. Nirvana.”

  “Mother of God.” I was trembling. No, shivering. “‘Death by Ecstasy’—”

  He nodded. “That Niven story, yeah, it’s a lot like that.”

  “Oh Christ.” That story had figured prominently in some of my worst nightmares. A man’s brain is wired up to a wall socket. Enslaved by ecstasy, he starves to death with a broad grin—because the cord isn’t long enough to reach the kitchen without pulling out the plug…

  “It could be worse, Sam.”

  It echoed through the forest, stilled wildlife. “HOW?”

  He waited until the echoes had faded. Then he said softly, “You could get the identical effect by supersaturating the pain center.”

  I sat and thought for a while. He seemed willing to let me. Nothing productive came to me. Just bitterness and regret and fury and profound terror.

  “I’m really surprised that you joined the Pod People, Nazz. I’d have sworn that you’d be the last person on Earth vulnerable to a mental assault. Why haven’t you tried to convert me?”

  “I gave it my best shot last time. Didn’t work.”

  I held up the golden crown I still had in my hand. “Not after what this thing showed me. Is this what you’re going to…‘put me on hold’ with?”

  “Not that one, no. The Egg made it for you, for one thing, it wouldn’t interface with my mind properly. Calibrated all wrong. And that’ll be a Read-Only crown you’ve got there, a passive playback-module. It hasn’t got tasp circuits. But the Egg knows I’m authorized for a Command Crown—”

  He was wearing an ordinary cloth headband; he took it off and set it down on the ground, shaking his head to tousle his hair. He turned away from me, reached both hands palm first toward the Egg, closed his eyes momentarily—