Time Pressure

by Spider Robinson

  Snaker hesitated. “You don’t mind if I stay?”

  “Not if you want to. Three is good. Odd numbers are always good.”

  He smiled apologetically. “My Ruby and I are monogamous. I won’t risk our relationship for anything, even for the thrill of making it with a beautiful time traveler. She’s too important to me.” He swallowed. “But our agreement is, we’re allowed to look.” He met my eyes. “You mind?”

  I thought about it. “I don’t believe I do.” My penis certainly didn’t seem to mind. “But I’m damned if I’m going to do it here. The floor’s cold, and someone might drop in.”

  So we all adjourned to the upstairs bedroom. Snaker forgot to feed the living room fire, carried the armload of wood upstairs because he forgot he had it in his arms, and had to go back down again.

  He hurried back up.

  CHAPTER 7

  RACHEL HAD NO comment on my bedroom. Joel, who owned Heartbreak Hotel and let me live there, had insulated the pup-tent-shaped bedroom in typical North Mountain Hippie fashion: refrigerator-carton cardboard spread flat and nailed to the studs, with crumpled newspaper stuffed down behind. (You could have placed it on the standard insulation-efficiency scale, but you’d have needed three decimal places.) Then he had covered the facing surface of the cardboard with about fifty large Beardsley and Bosch prints. I have to admit I didn’t spend much time up there in daylight. Also, the room’s ceiling was the house’s rooftree; the walls sloped sharply and a person my height could only stand erect within a four-foot-wide corridor. (Snaker couldn’t manage it at all.)

  But she did not seem to notice the prints, and we were not vertical for long. At some indeterminate point on the way upstairs, she had stopped being merely nude and become naked. Snaker came in and sat down as I was slipping my undershirt off; I tipped an imaginary hat, he smiled, and I turned back to Rachel…

  Of all that I’ve had to explain and describe so far, this is one of the hardest parts.

  I don’t suppose it’s ever easy to “explain and describe” making love. Even on a purely surface, physical level, an encyclopedia could be written on what transpired during the least memorable encounter I’ve ever had in my life—much less this one. I remember every detail of what transpired that afternoon—and most of the parts that can be forced into words are the least important ones.

  To begin with, my consciousness was fractured, asymmetrically. The largest portion was on Rachel-and-Me, which of course translates as Mostly Me. A smaller, equally self-conscious portion was on Snaker-and-Me, and that portion tried to make itself as inconspicuous as possible. Another portion was devoted to Rachel-and-Snaker, and still another to Rachel-and-Snaker-and-Me (in constantly shifting order of priority), on the thing we were building in my bedroom, and how it was changing all three of us individually.

  Each of these self-nuggets was further fractured. The portion concentrating on Rachel-and-Me, for example, could not decide whether to focus on our minds or our bodies or our souls. Part of me was learning about Rachel as a person from the way she made love, and telling her of myself; part was concerned with the simple but awkward mechanics of coupling; part was distracted by the weirdly beautiful symmetry of lust spanning time itself, by the notion that the Oldest Mystery stretched both backward and forward through the centuries; yet another part of me was wondering what her people used for contraception and whether she was now using it, wondering how I would feel if she were not.

  And if this was fiction—the kind the author wants you to believe—I would tell you that all these parts were drowned out by the sheerly overwhelming physical sensations of what we were doing together, that the future folk had made unimaginable advances in Sexual Voodoo, perfected unnameable new skills and indescribable new delights, and that Rachel was one of their Olympic champions.

  She was okay.

  For a First Time, on a purely physical level, a little better than okay. None of the usual awkwardness. Well, some at first, all on my part, but I got over it fast; it takes two (or more) to sustain awkwardness. She knew all the things an educated woman of my time would know, and did them about as well. She didn’t do anything to me that startled me (though she most pleasantly surprised me a few times). She was quite direct about asking for what she wanted, using gestures or words, and didn’t ask for anything I didn’t know how to do. (I believe I may have surprised her once or twice myself.) She neither hid nor inflated her enjoyment. She was perhaps less vocal than women of my time tended to be, a little less inhibited than the women I had been sleeping with lately (that is, completely uninhibited), certainly much less self-conscious than any woman I had ever known. She came quickly, but didn’t make a big squealing deal of her orgasms.

  And yet, while she was not self-conscious, she was to some extent self-involved, removed. My ego might have liked it better if she had made a bigger deal of her orgasms. If I had expected some kind of magical union, some rapture of telepathic transport, I was disappointed.

  I had; I was.

  I had been prepared, had been half expecting, to “lose my ego,” as we were so fond of saying on the Mountain in those days, to mingle identities with her in some way, to be taken out of myself. We’ve spent a million years trying to learn to leave the prison of our skull through lovemaking, with the same perpetually promising results, and I had hoped that the people of the future had made some dramatic breakthrough in that direction, and that I was equipped to learn it.

  No such luck. As intimately as we joined, part of us was separate, just like always. She missed subtle clues. Some of the clues she gave must have been too subtle for me to follow. Twice my penis slipped out of her vagina because she zigged when I zagged. I could not leave my skull, my body, my identity—partly because I could tell that she was still in hers. I could feel it in a barely perceptible tension of her skin, and see it in her eyes. I could almost see her straining against the insides of those eyes, trying to break out. They reminded me of the eyes of a wolf I had seen once, born free but long in captivity. Resignation.

  In some odd way lovemaking defined the barrier between us, and so made us further apart than we had been when we started.

  And at the same time I learned a great many things about her in a short period. Some were of small consequence, like the highest note that her alto voice could reach. Others were of more importance, things that would have taken much longer to learn or intuit without the lovemaking, things that she might not have known herself.

  Such as the fact that underneath a very professionally manufactured calm, she was terrified, scared right down to her bones. Scared of what, I could not say, but she needed good sex, to calm her nerves. And it wasn’t helping as much as she’d hoped it would.

  This was not a simple linear learning; I was simply going in too many directions at once. The age-old question I Wonder What This Is Like For Her was complicated by I Wonder What This Is Like For Him. Since he was male, I could empathize more directly with Snaker. (But Rachel was closer.) And since he was a friend of mine, I couldn’t help wondering What This Would Be Like For Ruby when she heard about it, and What That Would Be Like For Him. And for me; Ruby was my friend, too. Making all thought difficult were the four restrained but quite emphatic orgasms Rachel had while I was on my way to my first, each seeming strangely to ease her fear and compound her sadness…

  What with six things and another, it seemed to go on for countless hours and be over before it had begun. Compared to hers, my own completion was thunderous and abrupt. The “afterglow” period of delicious brainlessness was measurable in microseconds, and then, wham, I was back inside my skull, brain buzzing, chewing on well, that wasn’t as good as I hoped nor as bad as I feared and Jeez I’ve got my back to Snaker and my legs spread, will he think I? and all that perfect skin-temperature control and she still sweats like crazy when it’s time to be slippery and I wonder what in hell she’s so scared of? and God it’s good to get laid again and so forth.

  A long exhalation came from Snaker. I twi
sted round to see him. He was smiling hugely, a skinny stoned Buddha. He was also sweating a lot. Wood chips on his flannel shirt. Visible bulge below. Dilated pupils. Little orange bunnies woven into his outer pair of socks. Happy maniac.

  “That was beautiful,” he said simply.

  I reached down and pulled the blankets back up over me again; even the warmth of energetic sex was only briefly equal to the cold of my bedroom in late Winter. Rachel, of course, did not need the protection and stayed uncovered; as I watched, the perspiration on her skin seemed to evaporate, or perhaps be reabsorbed.

  I read about a character in a book once who could make knives appear as if by magic at need, from no apparent source; they just seemed to materialize in his hand. The Snaker does that trick with joints. They appear, lit, in his hand as he passes them to you. I accepted it from him and toked, being careful not to drip ashes on Rachel, then offered it to her. She passed. As she did I realized I didn’t want another toke myself.

  “May I ask you about your feelings, Snaker?” she asked.

  He glanced quickly down and to his right, then back again at once. I’d been his friend long enough to know that little eye gesture was what he did when he wanted to reconsider, perhaps edit, the first answer that popped into his mind. But his smile never flickered. “Sure.”

  “Why did you not masturbate?”

  Down and to the right; back up. “I’m not sure.” Pause. “I want to be straight with you because I know you’re an anthropologist and you learn a lot about a culture from its sex mores, but I’m really not sure myself, Rachel. I mean, I’ve been trying to understand my own sex mores for almost a quarter of a century, and I’m still confused.”

  “Would Ruby have considered it an act of infidelity if you had pleasured yourself while you watched us?”

  Down and to the right; back up. “Again, I’m not sure. I think perhaps not. Maybe when I tell her about this she’ll say I should have gone ahead. But I hadn’t thought it through beforehand…and I can’t rely on any judgment I make while I have a hard-on.”

  “Would you have considered it an act of infidelity?”

  “Again, I’m not sure. But I think so. Especially since we haven’t defined our agreement in this area yet. Uh…frankly, I don’t think either of us ever expected the situation to come up.”

  “People of your time never witness the lovemaking of others?”

  “Frequently, but almost always second-hand. On film, not in person.”

  Briefly it occurred to me to be jealous. I mean, if any woman of my own time, lying in my arms in afterglow, had initiated a complex discussion with a third party, I’d have read it a certain way. But I couldn’t manage to be jealous. It just felt natural. She and Snaker hadn’t touched, so they had to use words, was all.

  She pressed the point. “But you said you had a mutual agreement that it was okay to look.”

  He looked sheepish. “That was sort of a sophistry. What we meant by that was, if you see a sexy stranger go by, a temptation, it’s okay to look and be aroused by it—as long as you bring the arousal home to your partner. And as long as you don’t play with it, start flirting and talk yourself into a place where you might get tempted beyond your ability to control. I construed the word ‘look’ to cover this situation, a slippery extension—so I guess that’s why I construed ‘don’t play with it’ to mean literally don’t play with it.” He looked even more sheepish. “There’s a chance Ruby might be angry or hurt when I tell her about this, and I guess I wanted to be able to cop a plea if I had to.”

  “Cop a plea?”

  “Sorry. Wanted something to say in mitigation of my offense if necessary. And it might be necessary. I think if Ruby’d been here, we might well have masturbated each other while we watched you. But she isn’t. I guess I’ve got it worked out in my head that if you don’t come, you’re not being unfaithful. If Ruby’s as smart as I think she is, she’ll accept the big charge of sexual energy that I’m going to be bringing home as a delightful gift from the gods, and we’ll put it to good use together. For which I thank you. Both of you.”

  I smiled what was probably a pretty fatuous smile and nodded. “Our pleasure.”

  “You are welcome, Snaker,” Rachel said. “And thank you for answering my questions. For trusting me.”

  “Don’t thank me. I don’t trust people by conscious choice. It happens, or it doesn’t. Do people usually make love in public when you come from, Rachel?”

  She started to answer, and then her face smoothed over.

  “If I’m crowding some taboo—,” Snaker began.

  “No, no. It’s just that your question doesn’t quite translate into meaningful terms. If I take it literally, I cannot answer it, and I’d rather not get into a discussion of why not. But if I analogize its concepts, extrapolate, and translate back into your terms, the answer is, yes, we do.”

  “Everyone does?” I asked.

  “Everyone,” she assured me, patting my ass.

  It had been a very long time since anyone patted my ass. I liked it. “Without self-consciousness?”

  She looked momentarily puzzled, then smiled. “I’ve warned you about those multiple-meanings, Sam. The way you mean that term, yes, without self-consciousness. Without shame or fear or guilt or anxiety.”

  “When does the next bus leave?” Maybe I was half kidding. Maybe a quarter.

  She smiled again. It was a perfectly ordinary smile, physically identical to the previous one, nothing measurable changed in the placement of lips or eyes or anything I could see, your basic garden variety smile. Somehow it hauled more freight than a smile can carry unassisted. I read in it fear and regret and determination, read them so clearly that I still believed in them when they were totally absent from her voice as she said:

  “Never.”

  Snaker looks down and to the right; I hold a blink for a few extra beats. I held a blink for a few extra beats, and said, “There’s no way you can take anybody back with you?”

  “Analogizing to make the question meaningful again, no, I cannot. I cannot ‘go back’ myself in the sense you mean.”

  This time I held my eyelids shut for a period measurable in seconds. When I opened them again, she still had that smile. “You’re telling me that you’re stuck here. That you can’t go back to when you came from.”

  “Yes.”

  “Jesus,” the Snaker said.

  I was thunderstruck. Energy fought for expression; I wanted to jump up and pace the room. Some instinct made me hug her instead. Some impulse made me gesture to Snaker before her arms locked tight around me. He was there at once, swarmed into our embrace without disturbing it, and we hugged us.

  She had come God knew how many hundreds of years—on a one-way ticket. My opinion of her courage—already high—rose astronomically. And at the same time a little paranoia-voice made a soft hmm sound. This woman was in greater psychic stress than I had imagined, was doubtless in need of a great deal of emotional support, represented therefore a potential burden…

  Every year you live you learn a little more about yourself. It had been quite a few years since I had learned much of anything I liked.

  “Rachel?” Snaker murmured in my ear, in a voice that said I’ve Just Had A Dreadful Thought.

  “Yes, Snaker?”

  “In your world—I mean, your time, when/where you came from—”

  “My ficton,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Ficton. It is the word for what you mean. I’m surprised—” She interrupted herself with a bark of laughter, and all three of us backed off a few inches.

  “What’s funny?” I asked.

  She hesitated, then smiled. “I was about to say that I was surprised you didn’t know the word, since it will be coined less than a decade from now.” She gave that single small shout of laughter again, and Snaker and I both chuckled too. Let’s face it: time travel makes funny problems. I remembered back to high school Latin when I had thought I had had my tenses mixed u
p, and laughed even harder.

  A three-way laughing hug is a very nice thing to have had in your life.

  But when our giggles subsided, Snaker still had his I’ve Had A Dreadful voice. “In your ficton, Rachel—”

  See now, there again. Just the damndest thing. I was looking right at her from point-blank range, and not a muscle twitched in her head, and one minute it was just a smile, and the next it was that other thing that looked like one and was full of pain.

  “—do people die?”

  Snaker looks down and to the right; I hold a blink; Rachel does nothing at all. She did that for a few seconds. I think I stopped breathing.

  “Analogously speaking, of course,” Snaker added.

  Suddenly, shockingly, moisture appeared in those striking eyes, welled over and spilled down her placid expression. She did not cry; she simply leaked saline water down her face.

  “No,” she said. “They do not.”

  “I didn’t think they did,” Snaker said softly. “But you’ll die, now that you’ve come here, won’t you?”

  Her voice was nearly inaudible. “Yes, Snaker.”

  I held that blink a long time. When I finally opened my eyes, my pupils had contracted and the dim light that came through double-paned glass and three layers of plastic insulation seemed too bright.

  “Rachel,” I said very quietly, “let me get this straight. You were an immortal, and you gave it up? For the glorious privilege of inhabiting, for a short while, this wonderful ‘ficton’ of ours?”

  “Yes, Sam.”

  Loud: “Why?”

  “Because it needed doing. Because someone had to, and I wanted to the most.”

  “But—but—” I couldn’t make it make sense. “Why did it need doing?”

  “It became necessary to study this ficton—”

  “Wh—”

  “—for good and sufficient reasons I will not explain. You lack certain concepts; you lack even the words to form them.”

  “But for Christ’s sake, Rachel—” I was aware that I was becoming furiously angry. I couldn’t help it. “What the hell good is your research if you can’t bring the data back?”