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Twelve

SYMMETRICALLY ENOUGH, MY body woke up before my mind.

Have you ever awakened to find that you are making love? And have been for some indeterminate time, under the impression that you were dreaming? An indescribable, blessed experience.

My mind's awakening was a slow, sequential process, a series of cumulative steps. I am fucking. I live. No enemies near. I am a mammal. I'm home. This is nice. I'm a male human being. My head hurts. I don't care. This is good fucking I'm getting. Oh, I remember who I am—

—like that. If one must wake up, that is the way to do it. It was a sweet slow lazy time, a healing and a nourishing. I became aware of Rachel's existence almost in the instant I became aware of my own, and the distance that had been between us when I fell asleep was melted before I was awake enough to recall it.

And when I did recall it, she knew it, by the minute hesitation in my rhythm, and murmured in my ear, "Please forgive me, Sam."

I chuckled. "I forgave you in my sleep. My subconscious sentries passed you through sometime in the night, so you must belong here. Forgive me for sitting in judgment on you?"

Okay, it was a silly question. Her answer was nonverbal but quite emphatic. So I asked a few nonverbal questions, and the dialogue became spirited.

At some point in there we began singing together, literally singing in great rhythmic cadences, in weird harmonies that diverged and converged again—like the lovemaking itself, it had been going on for some time before I noticed it. Briefly she quoted a riff she had sung in last night's Om, and mockingly I answered it with the featureless drone Malachi preferred, and she pinched me. And then we let our voices go free as our bodies, and raised up both in song, and it was good, oh good. . . .

 

Did she really say, in the warm afterflow, "I knew you would understand"? Or did I imagine it?

 

Over breakfast she raised the subject of our Agreement, and we killed several hours refining it. She planned to spend her days traveling around the Mountain, interviewing people for her imaginary book, storing data and impressions in her headband in some fashion I didn't understand. In the mornings and evenings she was willing to lend a hand with chores. She did not know how to cook but was willing to learn, and would take a crack at anything else. She would follow my customs while under my roof. I would not ask her anything about her ficton or near-future events in my own—more accurately, I could ask, but I agreed in advance not to so much as frown if I got a circumscribed answer or none at all. She stated that within a few weeks she would supply me with ten thousand bona fide Canadian dollars, with which I agreed to try and arrange legal residence in Nova Scotia for her. I did not ask where her money was coming from. She offered to pay cash rent in addition to labour, but I refused it. As I was searching for a tantric way to raise the remaining aspects of our Agreement, she charged right in.

"These are all what you call 'material-plane' matters, Sam. Now we must make our emotional, spiritual and sexual Agreements."

I blinked, then grinned. "I've spent my life yearning for a woman who didn't bullshit around. The reality is a little unnerving. Okay, I'll take a hack at it. Would you know what I meant if I said, 'I love you'? I'm not saying it—I'm asking how good a language course you got before you left home."

She looked wary. "Good enough to treat that phrase like an armed bomb. According to my dictionary, it has dozens of mutually exclusive meanings, and guessing the one or ones intended is terribly important."

"That's one reason why I never use the word."

"It can mean, 'I will meet your price for sex,' or 'I am fond of you,' or 'Your happiness is essential to my own,' or 'I claim ownership of you,' or 'I feel that I am or could be your other half.' Are any of these close, Sam?"

I blinked. "Uh—yes to one and two. Emphatic no to three, four and five. I'll have sex with you whenever we both want to. I don't mind if you have sex with others as long as you keep the noise down when I'm trying to sleep. I may have sex with others myself from time to time, although I don't expect it to cause any great traffic problem. I care about you a lot. I don't think anybody's happiness is essential to my own. I don't keep slaves. I don't think half of me is missing. I will be your friend. I'll keep your secrets. I'll teach you anything you need to know about this ficton. I'll keep you from harm if I can, and I know and understand and accept that you can't make the same promises. And I'll help you with your work, even if that means leaving you alone with it and dying of curiosity. Your turn."

She didn't answer right away. Maybe she was thinking over everything I'd said. Maybe she was just looking at me. Whichever, it was nice. Usually I can take it or leave it alone. Being looked at, I mean. When Rachel looked at you she left eyetracks on you. "Part of my mission is to study sexual mores and customs at this pivotal juncture in history. I am surprised and pleased by your non-exclusivity clause."

"Careful! I'm unconventional for this ficton. So, at least in theory, are some of the other Hippies—but almost none of the Locals. As a rule of thumb, I'd suggest you use great discretion in offering sex to any man without both long hair and a beard, or any woman wearing a brassiere. Oh, there are a few sexually conservative Hippies—the Sunrise Gang in particular are strong on monogamy these days, and the Ashram crew down in the Valley are into celibacy—but they're all used to people who feel different, they won't be offended if you ask."

"Thank you, Sam. As for the rest of what you say, I echo most of it and agree to all of it. I care about you a great deal too. I will be the best friend I can be to you. I thank you for your generosity to an uninvited guest. Will you want me to sleep with you?"

"Huh? Oh—" I don't know about you, but when I'm talking with someone, half the time I'm not really listening, I'm thinking of what to say next or where I'd rather be or something. I was getting it through my head that you couldn't do that with Rachel. "Pardon me, the question has never come up before. At least not in this sense. Let's see. It certainly isn't reasonable to expect you to waste a third of your day lying still." Suddenly I felt almost guilty that I would be leaving her to her own devices for such long intervals. "Uh . . . times we make love at night, would you stay with me until I'm asleep, try to leave without waking me? And perhaps curl up with me from time to time when you weren't doing anything else anyway?"

"With great pleasure. And the house will be warmer at night if there is someone to keep the fires fed."

I smiled. "I think we have Agreement."

She smiled. "Shall we seal the bargain?"

I frowned. "The chickens are hungry."

She kept smiling, rose from her chair and stood before me. "Then we must hurry."

"Yes, we must."

That night she called me from Sunrise Hill, to say that she would not be home, as she was going to be having sex with Snaker and Ruby. I wished her joy, and banked my fires and went to bed.

 

And woke, by God, the same way I had the day before. . . .

I am fucking. I live. No enemies near. I am a mammal. I'm home, on my back. This is nice. I'm a male human being. My head hurts. I don't care. This is good fucking I'm getting. Oh, I remember who I am—

Jesus Christ, I'm fucking Ruby!

—she's even better than I thought she'd be—

Jesus Christ, Snaker's lying right beside me!

—Rachel rides him, as Ruby rides me—

Jesus Christ, this is dangerous!

—not necessarily—

Jesus Christ—

I was wide awake. At least three friendships and a marriage were at stake, and the point of no return was near, if not here and gone—quick, Sam, run it through!

An even number, that was good. Genders balanced, that was good. All friends, all reasonably sane, stable types, all grownups, all discreet, all clean. Neither female at risk: one protected, one pregnant. I cared about all three people. . . .

In the soft glow of dawn through layers of plastic, my eyes traveled up Ruby's splendid nude body, and she was wearing the smile of the canary who has swallowed the cat. "Good morning, Sam," she said, moving lazily up and down on me. "I've fantasized about this."

"Uh, me too. Good morning. Morning, Snake, Rachel."

"—mornin', brother—"

"—good morning, Sam—"

"And congratulations, Ruby—Snaker told me the happy news the other night."

She smiled even wider. "Thanks, Sam." We stared together at her naked belly, thinking of the life that lurked inside. Spontaneously we began to rock together.

I giggled suddenly. "Now do you see why folks around here don't lock their doors, Rachel?"

Rachel smiled. She reached over and stroked Ruby's shoulder, undid a snarl in her hair. Ruby turned to her and kissed her. They put an arm around each other. We all synchronized rhythm while they held the kiss. I watched them forever, hypnotized and profoundly aroused. Why are there so few Lesbians? I'll never understand it.

The obvious corollary probably struck me at the same instant that it did Snaker.

We must have looked comical. I turned my head quickly—to find his face a few inches away from mine. His mouth was open too. Both our mouths were open. Almost touching. Our shoulders were touching, our arms. Our hands.

His hand touched my belly, moved to the place where his lady and I were joined. I gasped. I reached blindly, touched his chest. It felt strange, weird, hairy and flat, warm, alive, interesting. My fingers came to a nipple, like a miniature of a woman's nipple. I experimented; he sipped air. A working miniature.

We both glanced up briefly to see Ruby and Rachel caressing as they rode us, and then our eyes met again and we kissed.

I had had two other sexual experiences with males, years before, brief, furtive, unsatisfactory. I had never kissed a man. It was even weirder than I had thought it must be, rough and prickly and peculiar. We did not kiss with our tongues—I had morning breath, he was a smoker—but we did not kiss tentatively or fraternally, and when I decided that it did not hurt, was not intrinsically disgusting, did not seem to leave a stain, and actually kind of felt nice, not only did the skies not fall, but I found myself even harder in Ruby's pelvic clutch. Or was she clutching me tighter? Someone's fingers were in my hair. We all seemed to be heading into the home stretch. Ruby and Rachel were humming, harmonizing; suddenly Snaker and I were too, humming into each other's mouths; we were making a drone, then a harmony; with the women we made a chord of transition that rose and fell as we rose and fell, that sought resolution as we did, that rose, rose, swelled until it was no longer song but shout; Snaker and I broke our kiss and pulled our women down to us and roared against their throats as the world blew up—

 

"Thank you, darling," Ruby said next to my ear awhile later.

"Whuffo?" Snaker asked. (How did he know—how did I know—that he was the darling addressed?)

"For holding off on your cigarette. I appreciate."

"Huh! Never thought of it, love."

The two most awkward moments at an orgy are just before undressing and just after the orgasms. "Uh . . . good morning to you guys, too," I said.

Ruby kissed me. "Sam, how come you and I never got around to this before?"

I thought about it. "Silly reasons at first, and for a while. And then Snaker came and you guys got engaged and decided to be monogamous."

She nodded. "We still are. It's just . . . well, Snaker says there is very little difference between you and him."

"Under the circumstances, I will not contest the slander at this time," I said. "Uh . . . how shall I put this? . . . to what do I owe this pleasure?"

Ruby grinned. "What the hell are we doing here, you mean? Good question." She reached across me and poked her husband in the ribs. "How did this happen, honey?"

On the far side of him, Rachel raised up on one elbow. Snaker is right: you can't compare tits. "It was the effortless unfolding of the universe," she murmured.

"It was like hell effortless," Snaker said, breathing like a smoker. "But they're right, Sam: it wasn't so much planned as discovered. Ruby and I got to talking about me watching you and Rachel ball, and talking about it got us horny, and then we got to talking about that with Rachel, and we learned that Rachel enjoyed watching too, and then we learned that Ruby thought she'd like being watched, and shortly after that we learned Ruby liked watching too, and so when the three of us had been researching the whole phenomenon long enough that I couldn't seem to get another hard-on, Ruby pointed out that you had constituted an entire third of the original Broadway cast and might have interesting data to share—"

"You're telling me that you three screwed all night long and then, in the cold rosy dawn, came over here to get laid?"

"That's about the size of it," Snaker agreed.

"Perhaps there is a God. Uh, can I cook you folks breakfast?"

Ruby chuckled, a purring sound. "Rachel and I brought plenty to eat. And I don't know about her, but mine's getting cold while you guys are talking."

I began to roll up onto one elbow, with a view toward walking a few fingers down her belly toward the area under discussion—but she pushed me back down flat on the bed, flung a leg over me and quickly sat astride my chest. I got the palms of my hands on her buttocks and coaxed her forward. "Magnificent," I said with great sincerity as the sweet knurled pinkness came into view.

Ruby had terrific lips, and this pair were the best. If the genetic cards had been cut the other way and she'd been born male, she'd have been hung like a horse. If—as I did then—you were to reach around her thighs and take each of those lips between thumb and forefinger and tug them gently up and out, opening the orchid, you would understand—as I did then—what that symbol truly is which we call a heart, although a heart looks nothing like that; understand what it is we admire in the butterfly. Like butterfly wings I tugged them down toward me, pursed my own mouth and blew a stream of cool air up and down the channel they formed, heard Ruby's hiss of pleasure. I heard Rachel murmur something too soft to hear, and Snaker agree. The bouquet was rare, the sauce piquant, the meaty petals delicious, separately and together: I feasted. Ruby's fingers explored my hair, met behind my head and guided me. . . .

When I felt a mouth on me, on my belly and then on my penis, I wondered vaguely whose it was. But my vision was blocked in that direction, and it didn't seem important. There were two mouths on me, kissing each other around me, for several minutes before I noticed. Ruby's clitoris, proportioned to match those labia, was like a miniature penis under my tongue. I experimented; she gulped air. A working miniature. Her thighs clamped my ears, I tasted a trace of my own semen, a gentle finger opened me and I was neither male nor female nor gay nor straight nor even bi but only human—

Breakfast for four is four times easier than breakfast for one. Four pairs of hands—One of the few things I've ever really envied the Sunrise Gang, one of the few good points of communal living to my way of thinking, is the division of labor, and the ability to renegotiate that division. If you'll go chop us some water, and he'll take care of the chores and critters, and she'll get the house warm, I will happily rustle up the eggs and flapjacks and crack open the last jar of peach preserves, and breakfast will be a thing of joy instead of the first false step in an infinite cycle of frustrations alternating with disappointments. Perhaps tomorrow I'll be the one who least minds suiting up and going outside to get the water, and you'll be in the mood to turn out some johnny-cake or porridge while others feed the stoves and chickens.

In the country, it is so much easier to live with almost anybody than it is to live alone, that a person who does live alone must be very fussy, or very timid, or very undesirable, or just plain stupid. I wondered, that morning, which applied to me. Had I not lived alone too long?

Wood heat, for instance, is remorseless and implacable, worse than bondage to cocaine or tobacco or even one's own belly and bowels. Every forty-five minutes you must throw a stick of wood on one fire or the other. Think about it. Every forty-five minutes. You must. You can stretch it to an hour, to an hour and a half or more, but you will do so as seldom as possible, because when you do, you catch cold, and sniffle a lot.

So the presence of even one housemate means that you can with some confidence undertake an activity, or a thought train, of as long as an hour's duration, without having to literally pay through the nose. Luxury! Three companions is wealth.

Never mind three talented sex partners—

* * *

"Why don't you two move in here?" I asked as we sat down to breakfast.

Snaker opened and closed his mouth, Ruby did the same, he looked at her to see why she wasn't answering, she did the same, he made an "after you" gesture just as she did the same, and the three of us broke into giggles. Rachel watched all this with grave interest.

"Because we're committed to Sunrise," Ruby said finally. Snaker said nothing.

"Yeah, but you'd have more fun here."

"There's more to life than having fun."

"Is there? What?"

"See what I mean, Sam? You're never serious."

"I've never been more serious. If there is a higher purpose in life than enjoying myself, it has yet to be demonstrated to me."

"Sam, please. We've had this rap. You want to live alone, fine. Snaker and I want to learn how to live with others, without ego or competition or hierarchy. We're trying to find out if people have to always be strangers, or if it's just easier. We're trying to get telepathic, to find out if brotherhood is more than just a word. It's important to us."

"And how are you doing?"

"Huh?"

"I say that what happened upstairs awhile ago was the most telepathic, sharing, ego-transcending thing that ever happened to me. How about you? Has anything that telepathic happened at Sunrise lately?"

That generated enough silence for me to get half my breakfast down.

"That last Om," Snaker said finally.

"And look how it turned out," I said, and ate the other half of my breakfast.

"Sam," Ruby said after a while, "why don't you move in with us?"

The notion startled me; I laughed in self-defense. "I'd sooner have an orchidectomy. Groups aren't my thing."

Snaker spoke up. "I wish you would, Sam. The community could use you. I could use you. It'd be nice not being the House Materialist for a change, you know? It'd be comforting to have one other person around who believed in rationality and logic and arithmetic and capitalism and that shit."

I had a sudden flash of insight. "No, it wouldn't."

"Why not?"

"Don't you see, Snake? They tolerate you because you're the House Materialist, the sole voice of and for reason. If there were two of you, they'd have to throw you out." I had another flash. "Sooner or later they will anyway."

"You're wrong!" Ruby said.

"Maybe so," I said obligingly. Why make Ruby feel bad when it cost nothing to lie?

But Snaker said nothing. So did Rachel.

 

As I was thinking about getting up and leaving the shitter, to try again another time, Snaker came in and took the adjacent hole. I grunted a greeting, and he mumbled a reply. Snaker and I had shared an outhouse before, shared a chamber pot—hell, we'd shat in the woods together and wiped our asses with leaves. This time we were uncomfortable. For a while the only sound was Styrofoam creaking under our butts as we shifted our weight.

"Good time, wasn't it?" he asked at last.

"It sure was. It sure was. Uh . . . I'd just as soon not repeat it real soon, if you know what I mean."

Relief was evident in his voice. "I know what you mean. As a regular thing, it'd . . ." He trailed off.

"Yeah." I wondered what he meant, what I meant. "That's one reason why I'll never move into Sunrise with you guys."

He looked surprised. "You mean, you think if we were around each other all the time . . . hell, Sam, that's just backwards. What happened last night would never have happened at all at Sunrise. The community is monogamous, you know that."

"Now that Malachi's satisfied with his partner, yeah. But you don't understand what I mean. I'm not talking about sex, I'm talking about intimacy."

"How do you mean?" he asked.

"Look, you and I had our conversation about bisexuality a year and more ago."

"Yeah. We both felt that if their heads weren't all full of mahooha, everybody'd be bisexual—which is why aggressive cultures make it their business to fill everybody's heads with mahooha."

"And you told me about your couple of experiences—"

"—and you told me about yours, and we agreed that intellectually it all made sense, but emotionally, having been raised in this culture, the best it'd ever been for either of us was Not Totally Awful. That we were both . . . how did you put it?"

" 'Bisexual in theory, monosexual in practice.' "

Snaker suddenly grinned. "Jesus Christ, I was hinting like crazy, wasn't I?" He glanced down and to the right, then back up. "Flirting is the fucking word for it, I was flirting." Down and to the right, back up, still grinning. "Wasn't I? And you, bless your heart, you played dumb."

"Yeah, man, I was scared. I hadn't had a friend as good as you in a long while. I didn't want to fuck it up. Besides, by then it was shaping up to be you-and-Ruby, and I didn't want to complicate her life either. Or mine, for that matter—but Ruby'd definitely had all the heartache she needed just then."

"Huh! You know, maybe that's why I was flirting with you. I was sensing how heavy it was going to get with Rube—and the part of me that liked being a swinging bachelor started looking around for an escape hatch. What do you know about that?" He had the wild frown of a man for whom many things have suddenly fallen into place.

"Right there," I said, "is why I'll never join your group."

"Huh?"

"It took you a year to be ready to have that insight. But you wouldn't have been allowed to take that long if the Gang had known about it. The Sunrise Gang believe in flushing every hang-up a person has out of its hiding place and stomping it to death, right now, right away, no excuses or delays, and that is not only intolerable, but wrong." He looked like he wanted to argue, but he said nothing. "Everybody there insists on messing in your thing, getting into your private hang-ups, knowing all your secrets—" A few things fell into place in my own head. "You remember back when Rachel first arrived, before she woke up? How scared I was of her at first?"

"That business with the shotgun signals and all? Yeah, I guess I thought you were being a little paranoid—"

"And you an sf reader. What I was afraid of—so afraid I damned near cut her throat instead of calling you—was that Rachel might be a telepath. That's why I wouldn't join Sunrise Hill in a hundred years. You people are deliberately trying to become telepathic: you say so out loud. To the extent that you succeed you are terrifying and dangerous to me. To the extent that you try you seem insane. Snake, human beings aren't supposed to be telepathic. There are reasons why our minds are sealed in bone boxes. Look at Malachi. He is telepathic, a little bit—and what does he do with it? Snoops and probes and pries and chivvies and powertrips people, finds your weak-spots and lets you know he knows them, finds your blind-spots and stores the knowledge . . . Ask anybody, who's the leader of Sunrise Hill? Oh, we don't have a leader. But when was the last time the big bald son of a bitch lost an argument he really wanted to win? And he isn't even really telepathic—that's just hippie jargon for what he is, which is observant and empathic and clever and insightful and glib. The only reason he's tolerable is that there is no evil in him. And he can be fooled by someone as clever as himself.

"But a real telepath? Someone who knew your innermost thoughts and feelings and dreams and secrets? If I thought there was one near me, I'd try my best to kill him—and maybe the worst part is that I'd never succeed."

Snaker was frowning. He was busy. "Kill him why?" he grunted between waves.

"Two reasons, either one sufficient. First, plain old intelligent paranoia. A telepath owns you. You live at his sufferance. If he chooses to kill you, you can't stop him: he will always be one move ahead of you. Unforgivable. Intolerable. Even if his intentions are utterly benign . . . they could change. Get outside his effective range fast, whatever it is, and lob grenades at him. It's your only sensible option. Nobody should be able to see through the bone box. It's too much power for any human to have.

"And the second reason has to do with, like, intimacy, dignity, privacy, the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure inside your own head. A telepath would be the ultimate Peeping Tom. The ultravoyeur. The eavesdropper and the diary-reader and the unethical hypnotherapist rolled into one and cubed. Invasion of privacy on that big a scale calls for the death penalty; I think so, anyway. I don't know about you, but I have secrets in my head that I'd kill to protect. Even from you, old buddy. Not even things that could be used against me, necessarily. Just private. Personal."

Snaker was looking thoughtful.

"It keeps coming back to what I was talking about before. Intimacy. When I moved up here from the States I hadn't been intimate with anyone or anything in . . . anyway a long time. Typical uptight city kid.

"Then I come up here. Wham! One by one my walls started tumbling, boundaries crumbling. People up here share a chamber pot and don't think anything of it. Men don't turn their backs to the road when they feel like taking a piss, ladies squat with you standing right there. A new kind of intimacy. Nobody locks their doors, or cars, or bedroom doors: another kind of nakedness. People swim and bathe literally naked together, for that matter, and work too, sometimes, I've seen the Sunrise women topless in the garden on a hot day just like the men. The hippies and the locals each have their own jungledrum networks, so interwoven they might as well be left and right hemispheres of the same brain, so efficient that as we sit here there are people down on the South Mountain, back up in the piney woods, who are already working out what they're going to say to the Chinee Book Writer Lady when she gets around to interviewing them. To live here in the Annapolis Valley is to be naked to everyone else in it.

"So I have—dubiously, reluctantly, suspiciously—taken off several layers of armor that I carried around with me for years. And on the whole it has been good for me. It's pretty safe around here without armor.

"But enough is enough. I have reached my limit. What happened between us last night is the most intimate I ever want to get with anyone, and I don't want to do that very often."

I reached up and touched Snaker's face, touched his left cheek above the beardline with three fingers of my right hand. He backed away. "You see? You flinch. So do I. Whether it's instinct or learned behavior, what's the difference? Even friends or lovers need at least a little bit of distance. There's a use for layers of formality, restraint, inhibition, that prevent telepathic exchange, that bottle up the moment-by-moment unpleasantnesses and uglinesses of consciousness and give us time to edit ourselves into tolerability." I stood up and adjusted my clothing, ladled a couple of scoops of stove ashes and lime into the hole, and handed the ladle to Snaker.

"I need you for a friend, Sam," he said, finishing his own ablutions.

"And I need you for a friend. If we lived together maybe we'd become more than that, and I don't know that I need that. If you do, you have Ruby for it. Everything doesn't always progress naturally toward blissful unity. Snake. Your problem is, you want to marry everybody. If you could get all your best friends and loved ones and soul mates in one room, and give us some new drug that made us all be telepathic together . . . we'd probably go for each others' throats."

Snaker was frowning and nodding, zipping up his overalls. "If my thought-dreams could be seen . . . Yeah, I read that Poul Anderson story, too, man. '. . . Get out! I hate your bloody guts!' said the only two telepaths in the world to each other. Is it really that disgusting inside a human head?"

"Isn't it?"

He hung the ladle, put the wooden lid down over number two hole and straightened up. I popped the hook-and-eye, the door flew open, and we stepped out into the cold wind. By tacit mutual agreement we walked past the house and halfway down the driveway to where we had a good view of the Bay and the sky. We shared it in silence for a few minutes. He had some ready-mades, Players, and smoked one. Being around smokers bothers me. It seems to comfort them so, the times it isn't just a reflex. I resent a crutch that I can't use, to the extent that it works. It's only fair that it should kill them.

"Yeah, I guess it is," he said softly at last.

He fieldstripped the butt and pocketed the filter. I watched the sun dance on the water.

"There's a hole in your logic, Sam. I can smell it." He sighed. "But I can't find it."

"You're a romantic, man. You want life to be perfectible. It ain't."

"What's the harm in trying? You know that old chestnut about the two frogs that fell into the bucket of cream."

"The Persistent Frog survived only because it was cream in that bucket. A bucket of shit, for instance, gets softer when you churn it. And the smell becomes more offensive. The thing about blind optimism, man, it's blind."

"Your pessimism is just as blind, brother."

"Granted. But I know which way to bet. It'd be nice if the human race could all get telepathic and all love one another one day—but it ain't gonna happen. If, God forbid, some dedicated researcher does stumble across true telepathy, the race will be extinct in a generation. The handful who survive the Total War won't dare get close enough to anyone else to reproduce."

"Jesus!" He took out another ready-made. Eight matches later it was lit. "That's a hell of a story idea, you know. Creepy, but interesting."

"It's yours. If you sell it, buy me a flat of beer."

He looked thoughtful—then frowned. "No. It'd be a good story: I mean, it'd sell. But it's not the kind of story I want to write. Listen, Ruby and I have to get back—there's a meeting today, to start planning the garden."

I grinned. "Not a moment too soon."

Does it seem odd that the Sunrise Gang were planning their garden in late March, when nothing goes in the ground in Nova Scotia before the first of June? Then I haven't conveyed the Spirit of Sunrise: hot air. The Gang were perfectly capable of spending several weeks debating Whether It Was Far Out To Wear Imitation Leather Since That Too Bought Into The Karma Of Slaughtering Animals. Something as genuinely involving as The Next Year's Food—not to mention Three Months Of Backbreaking Labor—could easily take them over two months of constant discussion to thrash out. If D-Day had been as overplanned as a Sunrise Hill garden . . . it would probably have turned out just as chaotically, I suppose.

One thing I must admit: they seemed to have learned the secret of arguing without fighting, or wrangling without getting angry. In cabin-fever season, that is one hell of an impressive achievement, when you think about it.

"Yeah, we're thinking about adding a third acre. Soybeans."

"You're crazy. Soybeans won't grow here."

"Well . . . Nazz and Lucas have a theory. And we won't really be self-sufficient until we grow our own soybeans."

"It's your back, pal. Good luck. Listen, you mind if Rachel and I bum a ride a ways? I want to introduce her to Mona and Truman. She's been bugging me about it since Mona laid that tire on you the other day."

"Sure. She can sit . . . huh! I started to say, Rachel could be the one who gets to sit in the back, since she doesn't mind cold. But we'd never explain that to Ruby."

"We'll both ride in back, let you two lovebirds have the cab to yourselves."

"Begin redrawing the lines, Sam? Start puttin' the fences back up?"

"Isn't it time?"

Sigh. "Yeah. Yeah, it is."

He started to head back indoors. I stopped him, turned him, hesitated a split second and hugged him, hesitated an intact second and kissed him. He hugged me back and kissed me back without any hesitation.

It really is hard to manage two beards. Do you suppose that's why they invented shaving?

"It was fun," Snaker said finally, breaking the hug. "Ten years from now we'll do it again."

"Talk about extended foreplay. It's a deal. Uh . . . for what it's worth, you give good head."

"Yeah," he agreed. "Yeah, I do. I always thought I would, if it was somebody I cared about. So do you." He grinned. "But Ruby's better."

"You're a lucky man, Snaker."

"I know. I know."

 

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Framed