Time Pressure

by Spider Robinson

  “What the hell’s the difference?”

  “Earth to Snaker: if she isn’t a true telepath, in the sf sense, if she’s just a memory-thief who can ‘put me on hold’ when she wants to, I can walk up to her, smiling pleasantly, and cut her throat.”

  “Huh. I wouldn’t try it. She may not have any facial expressions of her own—but she has gotten very very good at reading other peoples’ in the last two months. I’m beginning to understand why. But I see another implication. You audited a dub of an experience with four people present—but you didn’t play it through to the end. It might have been recorded later, at a time when she and Ruby were alone. It would be useful to know how many minds she can bliss-out at a time.”

  I saluted him. “You anticipate me. Method number one for killing a telepath: go uphill, palm that Egg about fifty times, bring fifty crowns to the Solstice Thing tomorrow and pass them out. You wouldn’t even have to say a word. Rachel could never run far enough fast enough. But you’ve put your finger on the flaw: suppose she can handle fifty at once? Nobody at that party is going to be surprised if they wake up the next day with memory gaps. A lot of them are counting on it.”

  “So what’s method number two?”

  “Number two I wouldn’t use myself, but it’s a beaut. Pick a chump. Boobytrap him without his knowledge. Send him to see the telepath. Apologize profusely to the corpse.”

  “Nasty.”

  “I’m pinning my hopes on method number three. Boobytrap someplace you know the telepath is going to be. Retire well out of her range and stay there until you hear a loud noise.”

  He said nothing, played with his cigarette. I turned away and busied myself with washing the coffee pot. Wisely does Niven say the secret of good coffee is fanatic cleanliness.

  “She’ll be here tomorrow before the Solstice, to help me ferry stuff to the dance. I was thinking of going up the road and borrowing some dynamite from Lester anyway. Make me some scrambled Egg. I could borrow enough for two jobs.” I thought a moment. “Actually, what I’d like to do is kick that damned blue bubble all the way downhill, roll it right inside here and do both jobs with the same blast. But it’d hang up somewhere on the way downtrail, sure as hell—or worse, start sending out SOS signals. Pity.”

  He didn’t answer right away. I turned around and caught him staring out the window, looking off uphill toward the Place of Maples.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” I said. “Knock it the fuck off.”

  He whirled to face me. “Eh?”

  “Don’t try to look innocent. You’re thinking about how much you want to wander up that Mountain and put that sonofabitching crown on your stupid fucking head and find out what it’s really like for Ruby when she comes. You transparent asshole, you’re salivating thinking about it.” I went to him, grabbed his vest with both fists, yanked his face to a position an inch from mine, spoke loudly and firmly. “By your love for your lady, I charge you to forget it. For the honour of your immortal soul, give it up. Love does not give you the right to do that. You don’t have the right to that information. No one does. I shouldn’t have that information. The second most horrid moment in my whole life was when I knew that I could not help myself, that I was going to put that crown back on again.” I shook him gently. “You and Ruby have something special going. Don’t fuck it up.”

  He did not try to pull away or avoid my gaze. “I’ll try, Sam.”

  “You’d better, you—oh, mother of Christ! Look at that—”

  Peripheral vision had alerted me. Through my back window I could see Rachel approaching my back door from the direction of the chicken coop, Nazz walking stiffly and awkwardly behind her.

  I sprang for the woodbox behind the stove, snatched up the big double-bit axe. “Battle stations! Grab down that shotgun, Snake, it’s full of double-ought; dammit, is there no fucking peace anywhere in the jurisdiction of Jesus? she must have come right up over the Mountain through forest, for God’s sake! duck around the corner into the next room, man; I’ll draw her attention, you pop out and try to skrag her—”

  I stopped talking then. Snaker had the shotgun.

  Pointed at my belly—

  “No, she didn’t,” he said quietly. “Come through forest. She was lying flat in the truckbed. You didn’t look close enough.”

  He hadn’t been thinking of Ruby’s memory-dub when I caught him looking out the window. He’d been wondering what the hell was keeping Rachel and Nazz.

  “Sam,” he said, “cut loose. Give it up, man, and Rachel’ll tell you why she’s doing all this.”

  “Sure,” I snarled, “and any parts that don’t make sense, I forget, right?”

  “Sam, my brother—”

  “When Rachel’s head comes through that door, my brother, I am going to try to bisect it with this here axe. You do what you have to do.” I shouldered the axe.

  He cried out: “Sam, please—”

  The door squeaked open. Rachel entered. The axe left my shoulders, began to swing. “Ah, shit,” Snaker said, and shot me in the chest with both barrels.

  CHAPTER 16

  DO YOU HATE clichés as much as I do? Then perhaps you can imagine how exasperating it was for me to have, as the load of buckshot was traversing the distance from gun to my torso, my whole life pass before my eyes.

  In detail, just like everybody said, the works, z-z-z-ip! The duration and rate of speed of the experience cannot be described in any meaningful way. I can say only that it seemed to go by very quickly, like speeded up Mack Sennett footage, yet not so quickly that I lost a single nuance of emotion or irony. Objectively, of course, it had to be over in considerably less than a second of realtime.

  I did sort of appreciate the second look, although it went by too fast to enjoy. But it was a cliché I had never for a moment believed in—like time travel—and I was vastly irritated by its turning out to be true. For Chrissake, thought the part of me that watched the show, next I’ll find myself floating over my own corpse—

  I caught up to where I had come in.

  WHACK!

  There was no pain; the buckshot killed me, and then I was floating in the air, a few feet above my corpse. I looked like hell. Snaker was having weeping hysterics. Nazz kept saying oh wow man. Rachel was expressionless, saying something preposterous to Snaker. I tried to speak to Snaker myself, but it didn’t work. I didn’t seem to have vocal cords with me.

  Oh, for God’s sake, I thought. Now I rise up through the ceiling, right? And after a while I’ll find myself floating down a tunnel toward a green light?

  I began to rise slowly, passed through the ceiling as though it were made of cobwebs, things began to spin and twist sideways and down, I was rocketing through the air just above the forest like a low-flying missile or a hedge-hopping pilot, my God, I was heading for the Place of Maples, the bubble came up fast and WHACK there was a sense of impact, a wrenching, a stutter in time, then a terrible rising acceleration like the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey like the ending of “A Day in the Life” like both of those there was a crescendo, a peaking, a cataclysmic explosion, then a long slow diminuendo, a gradual return to awareness of my surroundings—

  —and there I was in a damned tunnel, big as the Grand Canyon, drifting with infinite slowness toward a green light at the far end of it…

  It was visually staggering, exhilarating in the way that vastness always exhilarates. It was also infuriating. I had long since settled to my satisfaction that all those Near Death Experiences, the Out-Of-Body reports by those who had briefly been clinically dead, were merely fading consciousness’s last hallucination, the Final Dream, the hindbrain’s last attempt to replay the birth trauma and have it come out all right. I was disgusted to find out that my own subconscious mind didn’t seem to have a better imagination than anybody else’s.

  I thought of a Harlan Ellison collection I had liked once. DEATHBIRD STORIES. Death was giving me the bird, all right.

  Can you hear me, Death? This is boring. I’m
Deathbored. Show a little originality, for God’s sake. Is He around, by the way?

  I say I was infuriated, exhilarated, disgusted, staggered, but all these sensations were only pale shadows of themselves, memories of emotions. I no longer had a limbic system to produce emotions; I continued to “feel” them from force of habit. Already a great sense of detachment was beginning to come upon me. I was no longer worried that my world was being invaded by brain-raping, zombie-making puppet mistresses. It wasn’t my problem anymore. In time, I could tell, the echoes of all passion would fade. I mourned them, while I still could.

  All my trials, Lord, soon be over…

  Fat chance.

  I had a lot of time to think, drifting lazily down that most Freudian of tunnels. And a lot to work out.

  I seemed to have a body. It was there if I looked for it; if I concentrated I could make myself turn slowly end over end by flapping my arms. But I could also pass my hands through my trunk if I tried, and when I clapped them together there was no sound…

  I was afraid. I could not have said of what. I certainly did not fear the pains of Hell, nor for that matter anticipate anything like Heaven. The Christian Heaven had always struck me as remarkably like an early Christian martyr’s last fantasy of turning the tables on his Roman torturers. I go to a place where I shall be one of the elect and wear white robes and live in a great white city with big gates and do no work while listening to the screams of sinners being burned for my amusement.

  (I know that harps and haloes are no longer the official position of any modern Christian church, at least not if you work your way up to the top rank of intellectual theologians. But just try and pin one of them down on just exactly what Heaven is like. These people claimed that they had once hung out with God; they’d seen him nailed up, watched him die, three days later the cat showed up for lunch so they knew he was God—or if he wasn’t, anyway he’d been there, he knew all the answers to all the great mysteries—and they’d had him around for thirty days, and nobody thought to ask him what was it like being dead?, or if they did the answer wasn’t worth writing down. How does a story like that last two millennia?)

  Indeed, the only reason I was not intellectually offended to the point of stupefaction by the whole concept of an afterlife was a conversation I’d had with my father once when I was seventeen.

  My father was emphatically not a superstitious man. Unusual, perhaps, for an admiral. He held to his marriage contract and allowed my mother to raise me as a Catholic, but he always tried to see to it that Reason got its innings, too. At seventeen I told him that I had decided I was an atheist, like him. He told me to sit down.

  Three times in his life, he said, he had lain near death, in deep coma. Each time he heard a voice in his head, a deep, warm, compassionate voice as he described it. Each time it asked him, “Are you ready now?”

  Each time, he told me, he had thought about it, and concluded that he was not ready yet. The first time there was too much of the world he had not yet seen, and there were men under his command. The second time there was my mother. The third time I was still too young to do without a father. There may have been other factors he did not name.

  Each time, he said, the voice accepted his decision. And each time he awoke, and a doctor said, “Jesus, you know, for a minute there we thought we were going to lose you.”

  “An atheist,” he told me, “would say I had three dreams. And might be perfectly correct. I have no way to refute the theory. If that voice was a god, it was no god I’ve ever heard of—because it evinced no desire whatever to be worshipped. But son, I am no longer an atheist. I am an agnostic. By all means hate dogma—but I advise you not to be dogmatic about it.”

  Two years after that they diagnosed his cancer—lung cancer, which usually takes so many merciless months of agony before it kills—and in less than a month he was gone. He was retired from active duty. I was grown. Perhaps he calculated that Mother would have a better chance of surviving and remarrying if she did not have to watch him die by slow degrees; in any case, she did both.

  So I was able to tolerate the concept of an afterlife—here it was, big as life. I just didn’t have the slightest idea what it would be like, nor any guesses.

  Nor any way to guess. Insufficient data. With cold rigour I admitted to myself the possibility that in a little while I would come to a vast pair of Hollywood gates and have to account for myself to an old gentleman named Pete, who fronted for a particularly vicious and infantile paranoid-schizophrenic. (I hoped not. The one thing all Christian theologians seemed to agree on was that, whatever Heaven was like, there was no sinning there. It would make for a long eternity.)

  Phooey. It was equally likely that the Buddha waited at the end of the tunnel to show me the Eightfold Path. It was, in fact, precisely as likely that at the end of the tunnel I would find a stupendous, universe-spanning Porky Pig, and he would say “Th-th-th-th-that’s all, folks!”, and I would cease to be. Until you know what the postulates are, all hypotheses are equally unlikely.

  But my father had persuaded me to hedge my bets. Just in case I was going to have to account for myself to Someone or Something…

  Sitting in judgment upon oneself may be a uniquely human pastime; some feel we invented deities at least in part to take the job off our shoulders. (Whereas we always seem to have enough spare time to sit in judgment on others.) Lacking that assistance, I felt that I had, in my life, done a little more self-judgment than most, if less than some. I had tried, at least, to judge myself by my own rules—and accepted the responsibility of constantly judging those rules themselves in the light of experience, and changing them if it seemed necessary.

  But I had never before had so much uninterrupted time in which to consider these questions, or so little emotional attachment to their answers. I had never managed to sustain, for more than the duration of an acid trip, the detached point of reference from which such judgments must be undertaken. And I had certainly never before had such a spectacular and useful visual aid as having my entire life pass before my eyes in a single gestalt, in such detail that I could, for instance, see at once both what my childhood had really been like, and the edited version of it I had allowed myself to carry into adulthood. The lies I had sold myself over my lifetime were made manifest to me, my very best rationalizations crumbled like ice sculpture in boiling water; I looked squarely at my life now past, and judged it. Coldly, dispassionately. Honestly, by my own lights, as they were written in my heart of hearts.

  And if, as some maintain, a life must be judged on a pass-fail basis, then I failed.

  I had loved no one; few had loved me. I had pissed away my talent. I had, in general and with rare exceptions, hated my neighbour. I had left the music business when the folk music market collapsed—not because I didn’t like other kinds of music; I did—but because folk music was the only kind you could play alone. I had never truly learned to stand other people. They seemed to break down into two groups. The overwhelming majority were determinedly stupid, vulgar, cruel, tasteless, superstitious, dull, insensitive and invincibly ignorant. And then there were the neurotic artists and intellectuals. I was just plain too smart and sensitive for anybody, when I came down to it.

  So I had fled my world for the woods of the north country, and there, out of two billion people I had managed to find a bare handful I could tolerate at arm’s length. And I had let them down, failed to protect them from a menace I should have been best equipped to stop, had bungled things so badly that my best friend had killed me and the rest were being mind-raped.

  If Philip José Farmer was right, and I “owed for the flesh,” then I was going to duck out without paying. I had taken nothing with me from life. In no sense and at no time and no place in my life had I ever pulled my weight.

  As that judgment coalesced in my mind, I learned that not all emotions require flesh to support them, for I was suffused with an overwhelming sense of—not shame, not guilt, I was beyond them now, but sorrow. Sorrow i
nsupportable, grief implacable. I had failed, and it was too late to do anything about it. I had wasted my birthright, and now it was gone.

  No wonder I had feared a telepath. This much honesty, back when I was still alive, would have killed me.

  All intervals of time were now measureless; I lacked even heartbeats as a referent. After a measureless interval, I had marinated in my failure for as long as I could bear. I turned my attention to the immense tunnel in which I drifted.

  It seemed, to whatever I was using for senses (probably the same memories I was using for emotions), to be composed of dark billowing smoke shot through with highlights of purple and silver. I thought of a thundercloud somehow constrained into a cylinder. I was equidistant from all sides. My body-image was wearing off; I could see through my hands. The cool green light in the distance was getting closer, but since I did not know its true size I could not tell how quickly. I could not even be sure if it was the end of the tunnel, or a light source suspended in the center.

  It is said that the pessimist sees mostly the overwhelming darkness of the tunnel, and the optimist sees mostly the tiny point of light that promises the end of it…whereas the realist understands that the light is probably an oncoming train.

  All three are shortsighted. The real realist knows the ultimate truth: that if you dodge the train, and reach the end of the tunnel…beyond it lies another tunnel.

  I reviewed what I had read of Near Death Experiences. If this one continued to follow the basic National Enquirer script, shortly I would closely approach the green light, and there be met by my dead loved ones.