Time Pressure

by Spider Robinson

  So disastrous was the projected outcome that there was only one solution. I must climb back on the Great Wheel of Kharma, return to my own time and undo the damage I had caused.

  My father finished speaking. It was time for me to make my reply.

  “Dad,” I said, “are you telling me you want me to go back to that miserable planet and live out another thirty-odd years of being a hermit and not accomplishing anything and not having children and knowing just when and how I’m going to die (it will be quite painful, I grok, not like the last time) and generally being a waste of space? You’re saying that I can alter the basic shape a little—perhaps experiment with loving my friends just a little more—but not much, not enough to risk screwing up the shape of the miserable life I had planned out for myself?”

  “Son,” he said, “I’m saying that I hope it’s what you want. As a voice said to me, once: are you ready yet?”

  I thought about it.

  I could choose as selfishly as I liked. No sanctions could be applied if I chose not to do this thing. No retribution would come to me—not even disapproval, for there would be no one left to disapprove of anything. Not even regret; no self to do the regretting. If I refused to abet this unimaginable Mind, then it and the universe in which it inhered would cease to exist, fade away like the Boojum. I would have what it seemed I had always wanted—death, nonexistence, the peace that passeth all understanding—as well as my ultimate revenge on a world that had failed to love me enough to soothe my fear.

  As I pondered my answer, I contemplated the shimmering green light. Now that I knew it was The Mind, I found that I yearned toward it inexpressibly. Absently, I recognized one of the shadowy forms that floated between me and the light. I knew him by his flickering grin, and knew that I should have been expecting him.

  “It serves me right, I guess,” I told my father. “All things considered, I think I got off lucky, if you want to know the truth. Moses spent longer than that in the wilderness, just outside the city limits of Promised Land. I can do thirty years of solitary confinement standing on my head.”

  Can there be many feelings as good as your father’s warm approval? “Thank you, son. You make me proud.”

  Something came out of the green light and approached me. A body. Not a person, like Barbara and Dad and the others, but a physical human body. I recognized it as it came near, even bald.

  It was me.

  “Sam,” my father said, “don’t forget to tell Rachel she must take tissue samples from your old ruined body and bury them in her Egg, so that this one can have been cloned without causality paradox.”

  “Yes, Dad.”

  “Sam?”

  “Yes, Dad?”

  “If you ever decide to share any of this with your mother…give her my love.”

  “I will, Pop.”

  Something else came out of the light. A Time-Egg, bisected open like a clam to receive me…

  Experimentally I tried on the body. It was familiar, like getting back on your first bicycle. Everything seemed to work right—

  With mild dismay I realized that I could not get back out of it again. I was committed. Dad and Barbara and the others, the timeless tunnel and the green light itself began to fade from my ken as I lost the senses with which I had perceived them.

  Damn, I thought, it would have been good to talk with Frank again. I’d really missed him. I realized too late that the music which had been playing unheeded somewhere in the distant background of my thoughts had been his attempt to soothe me with wry humour: Dylan’s “I Shall be Released.”

  Ah well. He would still be there when I returned. And perhaps by then I would have learned more about how to love him back.

  The Egg closed around me and sealed. It filled with air, and my new body took its first breath.

  Without tears—

  I thought I heard my father say, “We’ll all be waiting for you—”

  And then he was gone and there was a me and a not-me, an up and a down, a sky and an earth, both tinted blue.

  I could see the Place of Maples all around me. My Egg was two meters to the west of the one Nazz had been trying to get buried. I touched the inner surface. The Egg opened, and sunlight and colours seared my brand new eyes. I stepped out onto the forest floor, onto the planet Earth, into my life—which was already in progress.

  I breathed clean country air, smelled the good smells of the woods, felt the cool breeze on my naked body and the pleasant discomfort of twigs and leaves and pine needles under my bare feet. The day was beautiful.

  I checked the sun, decided that I probably could spare the time…and after a brief search, found Mucus the Moose. Rachel, or possibly Nazz, had stood him up in a shady spot where he had a good view of everything. We said hello, and I gave him Frank’s regards.

  When I was halfway down the hill I heard the shotgun go off, and began to hurry…

  CHAPTER 18

  IT WAS A bright and balmy night.

  The huge loft writhed with hundreds of hippies, colorfully costumed and exuberantly high. The air was saturated with sounds and smells and smoke. Sounds of greetings and laughter and music and gossip. Smells of beer and food and the sweat of happy horny hairy people, and, under all, the smells of the cows who customarily lived downstairs (boarded elsewhere for the night). Smoke of grass and hash and tobacco and kerosene. The great hardwood floor shuddered under dancing feet; the ceiling trembled with the roar of chattering throats; the walls quivered from the energy and merriment contained within them.

  On a couple of hay bales, at the east end of the second story of Louis Amys’ fabulous barn, I sat and played my new dulcimer with a dozen other musicians—three guitars I knew and two I was glad to meet, Skipper Beckwith’s standup bass, Norman’s flute, Layne on sax, Bill on electric piano, Eric with his bongos, Jarvis making a fiddle talk in three languages, and a lady I didn’t know with a handmade lute; all of us jamming around a figure in 4/4 that was alternately folk, country, R&B and three different flavours of jazz—and told myself that if this was, as all reports indicated, the Sunset of the Age of Aquarius, it was in many ways as sweet or sweeter than the Dawning. The music was better, the drugs were better, the people just as goodhearted but less naive—even the damned war seemed to be nearing some kind of an end.

  It was looking like a promising year. LBJ had died in January, his hair grown as long as any hippie’s; that same day the U.S. Supreme Court had guaranteed a woman’s right to an abortion in the first trimester; five days later the United States had abolished the draft. The Watergate pack were savaging Nixon like sharks in a feeding frenzy; a month before a black man had been elected mayor of Los Angeles; Brezhnev had that very day signed an agreement not to provoke a nuclear war; the first Skylab crew had splashed down that morning; and next month they were expecting over half a million people at a rock festival in Watkins Glen, New York. (They got ’em, too.) Telesat Canada had launched the Anik 2 satellite in April; the Montreal Canadiens had whipped the Chicago Blackhawks in six to take the Stanley Cup in May; the Canadian government was in the process of withdrawing its cease-fire observers from Viet Nam.

  The ending of the U.S. draft alone would have been sufficient cause for joy in a community of mostly ex-American residents of Canada, and since that had occurred in January this was our first chance to celebrate as a tribe. Between that and Nixon’s public humiliation and the splendidness of the weather, it seemed that this was fated to be the most festive Solstice Gathering ever held on the Mountain.

  But the joy ran deeper than that. There was more to it than that.

  I could see most of the Sunrise Gang from where I sat. Malachi, Tommy, Lucas and two of the summer crew, Roger and Elaine, all were doing an indescribable dance that Sally had made up and taught them, and several dozen others were trying to imitate it with only modest success. You had to have lived with your partners for a year or so; it was that kind of dance. But even those who couldn’t quite get it right were having fun.

&nb
sp; “Fast” Layne finished a solo, and somebody else yelled, “Let’s go home,” and we all jumped in on the final chorus, licks flying like fireworks, harmonies meshing like the gears in the wheel that winds the world. We finished with a barroom walkout, held it, held it, held it, grinning like thieves—then let it resolve, and beat that final chord to death with a stick.

  The room exploded with applause, and we musicians smiled at each other without words or need for any, and people came and gave us homebrewed beer and apple cider pressed that day and joints and pipes of freshly cured homegrown reefer and handshakes and hugs and offers of sex and invitations to come play in their neck of the woods anytime, by Jesus.

  George and Bert began to play the Beatles’ “Come Together”; half of the room began to sing along. There was no place for a dulcimer, and the vocal was out of my key; I cased my instrument and decided to circulate a little. I greeted and was greeted by twenty people on the way across the room, three on the ladder, half a dozen at the foot of it and perhaps a dozen more on my way past the dairy stalls to the outdoors. As I passed out through the huge double doors I met my host, Louis, a broad-shouldered heavyset man with a pirate’s grin, a philosopher’s soul and the constitution of an ox, and congratulated him on throwing the best party since Christ was a cowboy, an assessment with which he heartily agreed. Louis was going to be a rare and special spice in The Mind one day.

  I was a few yards into the shadows, finishing a piss, when I spotted Snaker and Ruby over by Louis’s house, sitting on a huge chopping block and nuzzling each other. I ambled over and joined them. “Hi, you two. Sorry: you three. How are you?”

  Snaker looked up and smiled. “Growing. Changing. All three of us.”

  “Well, there’s only one way to avoid change.”

  Ruby shook her head. “Even that doesn’t work. We know that now. When you die, you just end up in The Mind—and start going through the biggest changes of all.”

  I shook my own head. “You’re right, but that’s not what I meant.”

  “Oh.” Now Snaker shook his head, violently, but she ignored him. “All right, how do you avoid change?”

  “Never break a dollar.”

  She turned to Snaker. “In the future, my darling, I will place greater reliance on your judgment.”

  He nodded. “It’s in the eyes. When his eyes get big and round and innocent like that, you know he’s going to lay one of those.”

  “I’ll remember.”

  He squinted up at me. Ruby had taken his glasses off. “Jesus, Sam, you look exhausted.”

  “With my factory-new, wrinkle-free face, how can you tell? People have been telling me all night how young I look.”

  “The way your shoulders slump. How do you feel?”

  “Shot,” I said, and then seeing his face, “Hey, I’m sorry, brother. Bad joke.”

  He looked down and to the right, back up, turned red—and shrugged. “It’s okay, man. You’re entitled. I never thought I could shoot at a guy and still be his friend—nevermind I hit the son of a bitch. I grant you the right to break my balls for life. It was just that I thought you were about to ruin everything—”

  “I was.”

  “Rachel had already stashed about five hundred people in the Egg, more than enough to see that The Mind would carry on the task—but you were talking about not just killing Rachel but blowing up the Egg. The experiment wouldn’t have been repeated if it failed, you know? The Mind would have assumed that history had rejected the attempt to mess with it.”

  I put my hand on his shoulder and met his eyes squarely. What passed between us was not a true telepathic exchange, perhaps, but when it was over we both knew that we forgave each other. “This is not something I say a lot, but…thank you for killing me, my friend.”

  That took the sober look off his face. “My pleasure,” he said, and giggled. “Any time.” Ruby smiled approval at me. “Maybe you can do the same for me someday—” We were all laughing now. “—one good turn—” “He’s bleeding terrible,” Ruby cried, quoting a Carry On movie we all knew, and Snaker and I chorused the antiphon: “Never mind his qualifications, is he all right?” and before long we had laughed ourselves into anoxia.

  “Ah God, Sammy,” she said after a while, wiping tears, “it must have been so weird to bury yourself.”

  Sprawled on the ground, I giggled again. “I won’t say it wasn’t. But how many men get to attend their own funeral? Without getting soaked by a mortician for an arm and a leg?”

  “Still,” she said. “I’d be all sentimental about my first body.”

  Snaker snorted laughter. “Sentimental? You know what this fucking ghoul did? He robbed his own body!”

  Ruby looked at me.

  “Well, shit, I was naked. And they were my best Frye boots, I wasn’t going to bury the—”

  I’m not sure just what it was she threw at me; it was dark.

  After a while they got up hand in hand. With his other hand Snaker did his magic trick, took a toke, gave one to Ruby, and passed it to me. “Here you go, Sam. Ruby and I are going to go over by Louis’s lower forty and engage in a small religious ritual together.”

  “Really? Which god?”

  “Pan,” Ruby said demurely.

  I accepted the joint. “Pot and Pan, a good combination. Joy, you two. Don’t drown the baby.”

  When they left I took over their seat and contemplated the great barn full of party, blazing against the night, radiating happy sounds and good vibes. People passing in and out of the big doors seemed to move in groups of at least two. I saw no other singletons. Vehicles came and went. Mosquitoes sang, stoned to the eyebrows. The sound of Layne’s sax drifted across the clear Summer night. Maybe a distant train whistle in the night is as poignant as a distant sax, and then again maybe it isn’t. Ah, there was a singleton—

  She looked around, saw me, and came to me. “There you are, Sam. Your hair and beard look good.”

  I’d been growing them all night. “Thanks, Rachel. What’s happening?”

  A smile was getting to look more and more natural on her face these days. She didn’t have smile wrinkles yet, but maybe she was developing creases. “I’m having a wonderful time. I have met so many people, Sam! I understand people better when I see them in a large group, interacting in harmony.”

  I sighed. “You must really miss The Mind.”

  Her smile wavered slightly, then firmed. “I left behind most of my memories of it. Had to. I remember enough to know that it will be very good to rejoin it. Worth dying for. Yes, I miss it.”

  “So do I.”

  I relit the roach of Snaker’s joint. Now that she no longer had to keep track of a complex lie around me, she could afford to toke with me, and did so.

  After a little silence I said, “Rachel?”

  “Yes?”

  “It seems like I’ve got decades more of this shit to live through. It’s going to be real hard, trying to live it just exactly as if I were the same jackass I was the day before yesterday.”

  “It doesn’t have to be ‘just exactly,’ Sam. History can heal itself around small things, or else I could not be here. You must not—since you did not/have not/will not—marry or have children, and you must not die until your fate kills you. And it would be a good idea not to become famous if you can help it. But I don’t think even natural law can command a man to be a fool.” She took my hand.

  “Huh.” I pondered that for a while.

  “Sam?”

  “Uh?”

  “I’ve been invited to so many communities around the province tonight that you will not be seeing a lot of me in the next year.”

  “Well, sure. That was the plan. The Task—”

  “There’s a ride leaving for Cape Breton next week.”

  “Oh. That soon, eh?”

  “I can put it off if you need me. You’ve been through a lot.”

  “And you help. But a week should be plenty. Thank you for asking.”

  “I’m grateful
to you, Sam. For everything.”

  “Well, I hate to think of some guy dying in Cape Breton next week and missing the boat because you were hung up on the North Mountain holding my hand.”

  She shook her head. “It would just mean that the second team would get him—or the one after that. The next stage of the plan calls for recruiting obstetricians and midwives as we move back through the centuries. We’re not going to miss anyone if we can help it, Sam!”

  “I believe you.”

  I tilted back my head and looked at the stars. “Rachel…do you suppose there are other Minds out there?”

  “I think there must be. I wonder sometimes: if we could find them, and learn to bond with them as we have with ourselves—if a billion Minds become neurons in a SuperMind—would we become The User? Would we go all the way back and begin and end everything with a Bang?”

  “Wow.” I watched the stars and thought about that one. A shooting star fell; I made a wish.

  “Sam?”

  “Yes?”

  “Would you like to walk out under the stars with me now and make love?”

  “Very much. But there’s something else I have to do first before it gets too late. Come with?”

  “Of course.”

  When we got upstairs the crowd was still doing mass sing-along, songs to which everybody knew the words, and most of the musicians had drifted away to readjust their bloodsugar. The Sunrise Gang were still where I’d left them. I brought Rachel over to the hay bale I’d been sitting on earlier, sat on an adjacent one facing her. The group singers were into the final mantra section of “Hey, Jude,” and Rachel and I scatted with it until it was dissolved by common consent.

  And then I began to Om.

  She joined me with her strong smoky alto at once, and others nearby picked it up immediately. The Sunrise Gang came in with the particularly pure tone I had expected of them, and were reinforced by dozens of others. The note hunted, then steadied, tonic and dominant, a drone that grew and swelled and filled the barn, filled my head, filled the world—