Time Pressure

by Spider Robinson

  “I can’t bring it back—but I can send it back.”

  “You can?” How? With that headband dingus?

  “Certainly I can. You can send data to the future the same way, if you want. Give it to me, and I’ll bury it in the same place I’m going to bury mine. When the time comes, it will be retrieved.”

  “Oh.” Okay, so it did make sense. It was still stupid. This beautiful warm kind funny strange lady had condemned herself to death, for what seemed to be insufficient reason. Never mind that I and everyone I had ever known or heard of lived under the identical sentence of death. We hadn’t chosen it!

  “Do you have any idea how long you could live, here and now?” Snaker asked.

  “With luck and care, about as long as you, I think. There is no way to be sure.”

  I rolled over on my back and closed my eyes. “Jesus Christ. That’s the stupidest—literally the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my life!”

  “Sam—,” Snaker began.

  “No, I mean it, Snake. I’ll concede that anthropology is not worthless, although eighty-five percent of it bores me to my boots and no two anthropologists can agree with each other on the other fifteen. I can imagine, if I strain, someone who would want to be an anthropologist badly enough to kill for it. But have you ever heard of anybody who wanted to be an anthropologist so badly they’d die for it? Especially an immortal, who needn’t die for anything? Who could have saved a great deal of effort and energy by simply consenting to live forever? It’s fucking nuts is what it is, Rachel!”

  My voice was loud and full of anger, but as I turned from Snaker to Rachel on the last sentence all the steam went out of me. She was scared stiff, trying not to flinch away from me. I had two realizations concurrently. The first was that if I were sojourning in the distant past, chatting with a Neanderthal, and he suddenly began to get loud and angry, I’d be scared silly. The second realization was that, in such a situation, I would certainly have fetched along a weapon for such contingencies, and would be fingering it nervously.

  Maybe Rachel was as unarmed as she seemed to me. (Would the Neanderthal have recognized a pistol as a threat?) In the absence of data, it seemed like a good idea, as well as simple politeness to a guest who had just fucked me sweetly, to calm down.

  Well, I don’t know about you, but I had never had much luck in getting anger to go away once established, just because the rational part of me thought it ought to. Trying usually just made me madder.

  And Rachel found the handle. “Why are you angry, Sam?”

  Good question: the first step in dealing with anger is to peel away the artichoke layers of rationalization and get to its true root. But it was just such a perfectly North Mountain Hippie thing to say that it made me laugh.

  The first four answers to her question that occurred to me I rejected as bullshit. Finally I said, “Rachel, every single thing that human beings do, from making love to looking for cancer-cures, comes from the striving for immortality, the wish to live forever. You had immortality, and threw it away, for what seem to me trivial reasons. That makes all the rest of us look like fools.” I snorted and reached down to get the shirt I’d left on the floor. “Everybody wants to be rich and be loved and to live forever. I’ve been rich and it wasn’t all that great. I’ve been loved and it wasn’t all that great. If living forever isn’t worth it, what the hell is the point of life anyway? If you people in the future don’t know, who does? I mean hell, you’ve got unbelievable metabolic control, you wear a computer on your head, somehow I just expected you future folk to be smart. And then you come up with a one-way time machine!” I looked down, realized I had put my shirt on without putting on my undershirt first. I took a deep breath and started over, beginning to shiver slightly.

  “Current theory in my ficton says that two-way time travel is not possible. The device we used can recycle existing reality, ‘reverse the sign’ of its entropic direction—but it cannot explore reality which doesn’t exist yet, cannot create a future for an entire universe. Too many random elements. At any given moment, any number of futures may happen…but only one past has. If you use the device to send a copy of itself back in time, it arrives with the same limitation.”

  “But what was your hurry? You were fucking immortal! If it’d been me, I’d have talked myself into sitting tight for a while. Maybe in only another five hundred years or so somebody’d come up with a better theory of time travel and build a two-way machine, and then I’d make the trip.”

  “Even for an immortal, Sam, the past keeps receding. It took an immense amount of power and scarce resources to send me back this far. Five hundred years later the trip might not be possible at all.”

  “But why was the game worth the candle? Oh, I understand the value of historical research, but—”

  “Every ficton needs to learn from its past. This place-and-time happens to be an especially interesting one. Here, and now, on this Mountain, for a brief period, First and Second and Third Wave technology all coexist side by side.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  That strange bark of laughter again. “Sorry. Again I’ve used terminology which hasn’t quite been invented yet. First Wave technology was the club and the plow, the Agricultural Revolution, things people could make with their hands. The Second Wave you now call the Industrial Revolution, things made in factories. The Third Wave has just begun—”

  “The Silicon Revolution!” Snaker said excitedly. “The information economy, solid-state technology—”

  “Yes. The coexistence of all three waves is of fascinating historical significance.”

  I picked up my jeans. “But I don’t understand why you had to come study it in corpus. Why weren’t the usual historical channels—” I looked down and realized that I was putting on my pants before my Stanfields. My second stupid move in less than a minute, and one that was literally freezing my ass, before witnesses; my irritation started to boil over, and I drew in breath for a shouted “DAMMIT!”—

  —and before I could release it, a realization came to me, and I understood one of the roots of my anger, and I let that breath go, very slowly and quietly, with a little whistling sound. I shut my eyes for a moment. “Never mind,” I said. I took the jeans off, yanked on my Stanfields and both sets of socks. “I think I just figured it out.” I stood up and pulled on my jeans. Now that I was nearly dressed, I felt much colder than I had naked. More clothes wouldn’t help. The numbing, spreading chill was coming from inside…

  “What is it, man?” Snaker asked. “What’s the matter?”

  I looked at Rachel. She said nothing, poker faced as always. “You’re as smart as I am, brother. Figure it out. This ought to be the best documented age in human history to date. We’ve got record-keeping even the Romans wouldn’t believe. Print. Computer files. Microfilm. Photocopies. Words. Pictures. Moving pictures. Sound. Documentaries, surveys, polls, studies, satellite reconnaissance, censi or whatever the plural of ‘census’ is, newspapers, magazines, film, videotapes, novels, archives, the Library of goddam Congress—this is the best-documented age in the fucking history of the world so far, Snake, and we’re living in what has to be its best-documented culture; now you tell me: why wouldn’t Rachel’s people have access to all that stuff? Why would they have to send a kamikaze back to study the place?”

  The Snaker’s eyes were very wide. He looked at Rachel, and she looked impassively back at him. “Full-scale global thermonuclear war would do it,” he said thoughtfully. “Most of our records are stored in perishable form. If civilization fell, they’d rot with the rest of it. Survivors’d be too busy to preserve them. It might be a long time before record-keeping progressed as far as the papyrus scroll again. Trivial details, like who started the war and why, might well be…lost to history—” He broke off and turned to me. He touched the breast pocket which held his makings. “Sam?”

  I nodded. Ordinarily I didn’t allow tobacco smoking in my house. This was a special occasion. Snaker nodded back and b
egan to roll a cigarette with frowning concentration. I watched him in silence while I finished dressing. Usually he rolled his cigarettes sloppily, like joints, but this time he put a lot of attention into pulling and smoothing at the tobacco, trying to produce a perfect cylinder. Soon he had something that looked like a ready-made. He couldn’t get it to stay lit. Rolling tobacco is finer and moister than the stuff they put in ready-mades; packed to the same consistency it won’t draw right. Snaker knew that, of course.

  I realized that what he was doing was putting on his jeans before he put on his Stanfields. Dithering. In his place I’d have been immensely irritated when I saw what I’d done. He just blinked at the useless cigarette, put it out and began to roll another. In the “night-table” crate on my side of the bed was a pack of Exports my friend Joanie had left behind—Joanie’d just as soon not fuck if she couldn’t have a cigarette after—and I tossed it to him. “Fill your boots.”

  Through all this Rachel sat voiceless and expressionless and splendidly nude, that thin golden band around her head like a slipped halo. I looked at her. As long as I was rummaging in the crate anyway, I got the box of kleenex and tossed it to her.

  “What is this for?”

  They probably didn’t get head-colds when she came from. “Wiping yourself.” She still looked puzzled. “Drying your vagina; we just fucked, remember? And you’re sitting on my pillow at the moment.”

  “Oh. It’s not necessary, Sam.”

  I took a closer look, and she was right. Well, if her metabolism could disperse a whole body-surface worth of perspiration in a matter of seconds, five or ten ccs of sperm and seminal fluid probably didn’t strain it any. Perhaps they had improved sex in the future. It sure simplified contraception.

  “Rachel?” Snaker asked, puffing on his smoke. “Is Sam right?”

  Her answer was slow in coming. “I…can neither confirm nor deny his theory.”

  “I know I’m right,” I said bleakly. I met her eyes. “The human race has been tap dancing on the high wire over Armageddon for thirty years now, and the human race just ain’t that graceful. What I want to know is: when? How soon?”

  “Sam, I cannot—I must not—either confirm or deny what you suggest.”

  “Dammit!” I lowered my voice. “Don’t you think we have a right to know?”

  “No. You have already accepted the concept that there are certain things about the future I dare not tell you, for fear of causing changes in the past. Can you not see that this is one of those things? If I give you foreknowledge of the future, I risk altering history. If I alter history, even a little, all the civilizations that ever were, all of reality from the Big Bang up to my own ficton, could vanish into nothingness. Nuclear holocaust would be a trivial event by comparison.

  “And even if I were sure that that would not happen, I would not tell you, whether you were right or wrong. I like you, Sam. Have you never skipped ahead to the ending of a book—and then wished you had not, because it spoiled your enjoyment of the story to know how it was going to come out?”

  “Rachel’s right, Sam,” Snaker said. “Suzuki Roshi said you should live each day as if you’re going to live forever, and as though your boat is about to sink. Knowing the future would make that impossible. If Rachel knew the hour and minute of my own death, I think I might kill her to keep her from telling me. I don’t much want to know the hour and minute of my culture’s death, either. Come to think of it, I wouldn’t want to know the reverse, either, that we’re safe from nuclear catastrophe and there’s really nothing to worry about.

  “Which could be true. You make a good case for your theory, Sam, but you don’t convince me. There could be other reasons why Rachel’s here.”

  I snorted. “Name two.”

  “There could be other reasons,” he insisted.

  “Name one.”

  “Maybe she needs to study something that can’t be squeezed into historical accounts, something we don’t think to keep records of. If you’re trying to build a global weather model and you need data on day by day weather changes in the Middle Ages, you’ll have to go back and get it, because the monks didn’t think that information was worth hand-illuminating.

  “Or maybe Rachel’s people lost the fine distinction between fact and fiction, between history and legend—do you think you know what the Old West was really like? You’ve had a liberal education, you probably know more about the history of Rome than the average Roman citizen did—do you think you have an accurate gestalt of life in the Roman Empire? Are there records of the secret corruption that went on under Caesar’s table, the true facts behind the public pronouncements? History is always written by the winning side, Sam, you know that: suppose you wanted to learn something that only the losers could have taught you?”

  Rachel was still expressionless, taking in everything, putting out nothing whatsoever. I’d never seen such opacity; I made a mental note not to teach her poker.

  “Fine, man,” I said. “You believe what you want to believe. I know what logic tells me.”

  Snaker frowned slightly. “Sam…can you give me a reason why your theory is logically preferable to mine?”

  I said nothing.

  “I think you’re the one who’s believing what he wants to believe.”

  “All right, let’s drop it, okay, Snake? You live as if you’re going to live forever, and I’ll live as if the boat is going to sink in the next ten minutes, and maybe between us we’ll make up a sane human being. Meanwhile, we’ve got other fish to fry.”

  He accepted the impasse at once. “Right. Rachel needs a cover story.”

  “And clothes. And a wig.”

  Snake looked at me as if I had grown an extra nose.

  “Snake, you and I like looking at her naked. So would any sensible human being. But in this weather it’s bound to cause talk, no? Outdoors at least.”

  “Agreed. But I don’t see the problem. You must have a change of clothes to your name.”

  He was right. She wasn’t that much shorter than me, and on the North Mountain a lady in men’s clothes a few sizes too large would draw no comment. Underwear other than Stanfields was optional for either sex in our social set. I had a spare pea coat that was too small for me. Enough socks and she’d fit into my boots. I went to the west end of the room, where a series of mismatched cardboard cartons and a length of rope constituted my closet, and began selecting items for her. “Right. Okay, the other two problems go together: any wig we can buy anywhere closer than Halifax will be a rug, so her cover story has to explain why even a cheap wig is better than—what are you gaping at?” I seemed to have grown a third nose. “Testing. Earth to Snaker. What’d I say?”

  His voice was strange. “You pride yourself on being a pretty observant cat, don’t you, Sam?”

  Baffled, I turned to Rachel. She was poker-faced, of course. “Do you know what this burned-out hippie is talk—,” I began, and stopped. I held a blink, and then bent down and picked up the clothes I had dropped.

  Some changes happen too slowly to perceive. They say there used to be Micmacs on the Mountain who could walk right up to you in broad daylight without being seen, because they could move so preternaturally slowly and smoothly that they failed to trip your motion-detector alarms. All of a sudden they were in front of you. It’s possible to gain on a white-noise signal so slowly from zero that people in the room are actually raising their voices to be heard before they consciously notice the sound.

  Rachel had hair.

  CHAPTER 8

  NOT MUCH HAIR, yet. About two weeks’ growth of beard worth, from what I dimly remembered of shaving, and all of that on her scalp. I like to think that even in my distracted condition I would have noticed groin-bristles. It looked like it would grow up to be red and curly—which didn’t match her complexion. That was okay. Bad taste in hair colour was easier to explain than baldness.

  I felt doubly stupid. First, for missing it at such close quarters (now that I thought back, I could recall stu
bble against my cheek, somehow the sensation had gotten tangled up with thoughts of—I dropped that line of thought hastily.) Second, for being startled when I did twig. First you cure baldness. Then you build time machines.

  “Sorry, Snake. I don’t know what’s wrong with me today.”

  “I’d say the problem is in your software,” he said helpfully.

  I ran a hand over the territory that my hairline had surrendered over the last few years (with far too little resistance, I thought), and sighed. “Rachel, if you can teach that trick, you’ll be able to buy Canada out of petty cash within a few years.”

  “I’m sorry, Sam. I can’t. It’s a stored ROM routine—and you don’t have the I/O ports.”

  I nodded. “I figured.”

  “How long should I let it get, Sam? I have seen no women of this ficton. Like that?” She pointed to a nearby Beardsley of a woman whose hair would have sufficed to secure a Christmas tree to a VW bug. Snaker and I both cracked up involuntarily, and she caught on at once. “As long as yours, then?”

  Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary used to perform with hair shorter than mine was then. Snaker’s was longer than mine. “Sure, that’d be fine. Scale your eyebrows and lashes to mine, too. How long will that take you?”

  She consulted the inside of her head, or maybe that headband computer. “Another hour, if I hurry.”

  I poked my tongue out through my lips, bit down on it, and nodded. “I see. I guess that’ll be satisfactory.” Irony, like puns, was lost on her. “If anybody asks why you never take your headband off, just say it’s a yoga.” Snaker grinned.

  “All right. What does that mean?”

  “It means, there is no rational reason why.”

  Snaker grinned again. “About that cover story,” he said.

  I shrugged. “Well, given a normal head of hair, the problem becomes trivial, doesn’t it? All we have to account for is nosiness and a very slight accent.”