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Eleven

I WAS WASHING Rachel was drying. I had pointed out to her where a particular bowl belonged, and turned away, then realized I'd misinformed her; I turned back to give a correction. Tommy was at the counter next to Rachel, whacking a stainless steel bowl against the underside of the cupboard to dislodge some sticky food into the compost bucket beneath it. Rachel was looking toward her, away from me. On top of that rickety cupboard were many large mason jars containing grains and beans. Tommy's energetic whanging of the heavy bowl was causing one of the big jars to dance forward on its ledge. I saw it—and saw that Rachel saw it too. I remembered her phenomenal reaction time when the tire had blown, knew she would react faster than I could—which was good because I was off-balance, leaning the wrong way.

And she did. It was over in an instant, but I saw what she did with terrible clarity, as if in slow motion. Her eyes widened slightly as she measured trajectory, realized the falling weight was going to catch Tommy leaning forward and slam her face down against the counter. Rachel's lips tightened as she computed the mass of the load: about three kilos of mung beans and a half-kilo of glass. She clearly understood that the impact could very well be fatal. Her mouth opened and her face began to contort for a shout and her whole body gathered itself to spring—

—and she relaxed. Her features smoothed over and her mouth closed.

She did not know that I could see. I wasted nearly a whole second gaping in disbelief, did not get off my own shout until the jar had actually overbalanced beyond recovery.

"Tommy, duck!"

The woman had a lot of quick; she nearly managed it. She did manage to duck her head enough so that the jar struck her a glancing blow at a favorable angle: her forehead just missed the counter. The jar did not, and broken glass and mung beans flew from hell to breakfast. Tommy straightened at once. In a loud, clear voice she said, "For my next magical trick—" Then her knees let go and she started to go down.

Rachel caught her under the arms.

It was twice as horrible because I understood it at once. I don't think there was an instant in which I blamed Rachel. In the moment that she did what she did—nothing—I realized exactly why she was doing it. I saw clearly that she hated doing it, and felt she had no choice; most horrible of all, I agreed with her. And all this transpired in the space of a second, yet it wrenched all the events of the last twenty-four hours out of my memory banks, and jammed them back into my head at a slightly different angle.

By traveling through time, Rachel had accepted the terrible risk of altering the past. But as an ethical time traveler, she must have a horror of altering the past too much. Reality was stretching to accommodate her existence in my timeline. If she overstressed it, it might tear.

But how much was too much? A good rule of thumb might be to avoid major changes . . . such as altering the birth or death dates of any person. If someone would have died without your presence in that ficton, then die she must—

—but Rachel cared for Tommy, I knew that despite her poker face. They had made eye-contact, they'd touched, they'd joined hands in the Om, it had been clear that they were friends-in-the-making.

—but she'd done it. Done what she had to do, which was (as far as she knew) to watch her new friend Tommy get her brains broken by a jug of mung beans. I totally understood the moral imperative behind this before I even got my own warning shout halfway up my throat . . . but I felt different about Rachel because she had been capable of it. Not blaming, certainly, I told myself. Just different.

It changes your perception of a house-guest, bed-partner, someone you've begun to think of as a friend, to learn that under no circumstances would they do anything to prevent your scheduled death—even at no cost to themselves. Even if you understand and approve the logic, it changes things.

I did not know just how, though, because the entire incident struck much too close to something I never ever even thought about, someone I never ever thought about, and the inner conflict was so painful that I needed the thirty seconds of total confusion which followed Tommy's narrow escape to recover my own equilibrium unnoticed. I wished desperately that I could take Snaker outside or upstairs, alone somewhere, and talk to him, tell him what had happened and ask him how I felt about it. Or Snaker and Ruby would be even better, this tasted like the kind of hurt she was good at mending . . . except that Snaker and I had promised not to tell her Rachel's secret.

I had felt uniquely blessed to be the man on the scene when the time traveler came—now I was realizing that history is made by the unlucky.

 

Before I was ready for it, Tommy was thanking me. I heard myself answer automatically. "Hell, Tommy, anybody would have done the same." And heard internal echoes: anybody who could would have done the same, and: who are you to criticize, pal?

Those echoes must have shown on my face; I saw Tommy frown. Alarm bells went off; the Sunrise Gang all had incredibly sensitive detectors for guilt, conflict and deception. They all firmly believed that when a hassle or a hangup was observed, the thing to do was haul it out on the table and get it straight before anything else was done. Neither politeness nor tact nor respect for personal privacy was allowed to stand in the way. The only things that made this practice forgivable were the remarkable compassion they displayed in rummaging around inside your psyche, the absolute tolerance they had for any honestly held opinion however startling, and their damnably impressive success rate. A person suffering from internal conflict tended to shrink from them the way a man with a stiff neck will avoid the company of a chiropractor. If he learns of your affliction, he will insist on hurting you—and most annoying, when he is done, you will feel better. You will thank him.

By approaching it as a spiritual conditioning exercise, I had learned to appreciate the custom—and as it made me stronger, I had come to enjoy it.

But I had a secret now. Truth was a contraindicated medicine. I didn't have the right to take it, for it might kill my friends. Everyone's friends.

Which awareness I kept from my face as I set about lying to my friend Tommy. "Whew," I said, shaking my head briefly but violently. "That shook me up. I saw you dead for a second there."

At once she was understanding. "Wow, yeah. Pretty heavy. Your death thing again."

"Yeah. 'Scuse me—I've got to go visit the shitter."

My "death thing" was an old, counterfeit hangup which had long since been taken as far as it would go. If Tommy insisted, I was willing to haul it out again, as a diversion. But she grinned and cut loose. "You've got to get more beans in your diet, Sam. Here, take a lantern."

I avoided Rachel's eyes on the way out. Maybe she avoided mine.

 

The Sunrise shitter was more than fifty meters down a sloping, well-trodden path from the Big House, both to keep it downhill of the well, and to make it as handy to the fields as to the house. Instead of following the path to it, I veered left as I exited the house and took an equally well-trod path through the snow to The Chapel. The Chapel is nothing but a ledge, where the land drops abruptly away perhaps fifteen or twenty meters. It is a chapel because from there you have an unobstructed view of the Bay in the distance. It is the origin of the name Sunrise Hill, and it is a good place to be at sunrise.

It was a good place to be at night, too. Saint John glowed on the horizon. The Moon was up. The sky was spattered with stars, vast and glorious. What wind there was came from the north, from the Bay into my face: no snow tomorrow.

The assumption Rachel was working under was very close to the hippie-borrowed concept of karma. Karma is subtly different from predestination—it says that you make your own predestination—but it has that same unpleasant taste of inexorability, implacable fate. You will pay for every sin, sooner or later; you will have to earn every lucky break; each new disaster is only what you deserve. Combined with the doctrine of reincarnation, it becomes predestination, for the bad choices you make in this life are a result of bad karma earned in an earlier life. It's sort of the spiritual equivalent of There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, eternity as a zero-sum game.

But what does it do to your karma to watch a friend die?

That was a question to which I badly wanted an answer myself . . . so badly that I could not remember why . . .

If it had been a movie scenario, and the same choice set up, the screenwriter would have had to have Rachel opt to save Tommy, and to hell with the fate of all reality, or else the audience would have hated the picture. The choice she made was artistically unsatisfying. Unpalatable. Did that make it wrong? Her logic was remorseless. There's a classic story called "The Cold Equations" . . .

I was out there for a long time.

When I heard approaching footcrunch I guessed Rachel. But it was Snaker who came to me out there in The Chapel, and silently stood and shared it with me for a few minutes.

"What a night," he said at last.

Whatever he meant, I agreed with it.

"I got Ruby aside and talked with her privately."

"You didn't—"

"Naw. She wouldn't want me to have told her about Rachel's secret if I did. If I had. If you follow. But I had to tell her about watching you guys ball."

"Oh. Yeah. Uh . . . how did it go?"

"Amazingly well. I found an extraordinary woman, Sam. Get this: she didn't interrupt. She let me tell her how it was, and she didn't say a word until I was done. Then she ran it through intellectually and decided she had no reason to be jealous, looked me in the eye and decided emotionally she had no need to be jealous, and cut loose of jealousy: I could see it happen. She asked me what it'd been like, and I told her. Her pupils dilated. Finally, she validated my judgment, that what I'd done, and not done, was within the spirit of our Agreement, and she said she admired Rachel's courage. I think we're going to fuck our brains out later tonight."

"You lucked out, brother."

"Seem-so. But that was just for openers. Once we'd dispensed with the trivial distraction I'd brought up, Ruby dropped her own bomb."

I closed my eyes briefly. "Yeah?"

"The test results came back from Halifax. She's pregnant."

"No shit? Wow, that's great! Congratulations, man, that's the best news I've heard all winter. It couldn't have happened to two nicer people, really."

I was saying all the right things, and I did feel joy for my friend. But I was sort of sorry he had told me then. A large part of me was numb. Too much had happened to me in the last while, and I had no room left in my brain. Snaker and Ruby were pregnant; neat. Love was great. For those who could believe in it. Or were capable of it.

"It's a real stoner," he agreed happily. "Anyway, the long and short of it is, I am virtually certain we are going to spend tonight fucking our brains out. Which leads gracefully to why I am suddenly in a hurry to put Mona's old tire on the Meanie and get you two back to Heartbreak Hotel. You grok?"

"Oh." I thought about it. "Listen, Snake: a long walk rolling a tire through the snow, changing it, a half-hour round trip on bad roads in the dark with an undependable vehicle, and all the while your woman is cooling off back at home . . . fuggit. We can crash here."

"Uh—" Snaker began, and hesitated.

"Really, man, I'd just as soon let my stoves go out; I've been meaning to shovel out the ashes and—"

"Think it through, man. If you crash here, where do you crash?"

"Ah." Either in the same upstairs with Snaker and Ruby, or on bedrolls on the floor immediately underneath their room. The huge vent in their floor, designed to let warm air come up, would easily pass sound. In either direction. Lucas slept in the Big House, but he didn't count; his room was the only airtight, relatively soundproof one in the structure; he liked it that way because it was colder. The point was that if we stayed, Snaker and Ruby would have no privacy to celebrate their happy news.

"I think Ruby finds the idea of someone watching while she's making love stimulating. But I'm sure she's not ready to deal with the actuality just now. Some shit like that went down around the time she and Malachi were breaking up, before I got here. I gather it was pretty intense for her." I could well imagine. Malachi had put her and Sally through a horrid long time when he could not decide which he wanted to live with, and so lived with both to see if that would shed any light on the matter. It eventually did, but with the light came much waste heat, and Ruby was badly burned. Snaker had come to the Mountain just as I was nerving myself up to move her into my place, on an emergency first-aid basis.

"Snake, I'll try to say this just right. I like you and Ruby. I would be honored to be present sometime while you two made love, as observer or . . . whatever. But you don't owe me anything, okay? You two have something special and private to celebrate. Just because I showed you mine doesn't mean you have to show me hers."

"Or my own. I hear you, Sam. Thanks. For myself, I'd be happy to reciprocate if Ruby were willing. Maybe it'll happen some day. Meanwhile, I know I'll be thinking of you and Rachel at several points this evening."

" 'If it's a good lick, use it,' as Buckley used to say."

"Pun intended, of course."

We went back indoors, collected Rachel, said our goodbyes and set off on the journey back home. As the three of us walked along the Wellington Road, he told Rachel his and Ruby's happy news. She congratulated him gravely, breaking out one of her rare smiles for the occasion. I searched her features in vain for any sign of the kind of inner turmoil that was chewing me up. But how much could be accurately read from that stone face by moonlight?

I wondered why I had passed up the opportunity to discuss my own emotional turmoil with Snaker. He had missed Rachel's failure to prevent Tommy's accident, and I couldn't bring it up then, with Rachel walking along beside us. Slowly I realized I was never going to bring it up. Maybe it was like the secret he hadn't told Ruby: he wouldn't have wanted me to have told him, if I had. Still, I thought briefly, I ought to warn him, not to think of Rachel as someone he could depend on to get him out of a bad fix. But I did not.

In retrospect, I think I did not bring my problem to Snaker for the same reason I did not bring it before the whole rest of the Sunrise Hill Gang. Like them, he would have solved it—that is, have seen to the heart of it, forced me to solve it. And I was not willing to give it up, would have died to keep it . . .

The tire-change went smoothly. There was some idle chatter on the drive home, praise for Ruby's chili, anecdotes about some of the people Rachel had met and some of the more spectacularly tangled chains of relationships. She asked good questions. She had seen some of Ruby's paintings, and praised them intelligently. When we got to Heartbreak Hotel, Rachel asked Snaker if he would come in for a while. He grinned and gunned the engine. "Darlin'," he said, "it's too complicated to explain, but if I get right back home tonight, I'll wake a happy man, and if I'm two minutes late I'll have to cut my throat. It's a pleasure to know you, and I'll see you sometime again." I got out of the cab—

—and she leaned over and kissed him for a full minute, while I stood there as discreetly as I could—

—and she sprang from the cab and slammed the door, and "There goes my margin," Snaker said dizzily and was gone in a shower of slush and gravel. Blue Meanie dwindled in the dark, roaring at both ends, like a flatulent lion.

The Ashley was still going; I packed it full and damped it down for the night. The kitchen fire was dead; I lit the Kemac oil-jet in the back of the firebox, filled the firebox with softwood for a quick blast of heat to warm the bedroom above, and refilled the hot-water well. At my direction, Rachel replenished both stacks of wood from the shed. I came upon her in the living room, looking over the books and records. I wondered if any of the names could mean anything to her. I offered to show her how to use the stereo, and she politely declined. (I suppose if you dropped me back into Edison's home, even politeness and great respect could not make me sit through more than one or two of those damned scratchy cylinders.) I said that I was very tired.

She nodded. "Do you want me to sleep with you?"

I remembered she had once implied that she did not make a habit of sleeping. Or did she mean—?

I did not know what she meant, what she wanted. So I had to fall back on what I wanted. What I wanted was for her to decide. "Suit yourself," I said, and gave her a hug.

She pulled back far enough to look at me. "Sam? You have brought me much joy today. I have many new friends, I have learned so much."

"My pleasure."

She kissed me, more thoroughly than she had Snaker since we were not squeezed into a truck seat, and then let me go. I went upstairs and the last thing I remember is walking through the bedroom doorway. My mind must have fallen asleep before my body did.

 

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