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Seven

RACHEL HAD NO comment on my bedroom. Joel, who owned Heartbreak Hotel and let me live there, had insulated the puptent-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 for, 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 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 twisted 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?"

"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 up, 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?"

"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, Snaker. 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 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 began 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.

 

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