THE SUMMER SOLSTICE part was sort of Woodstock Nation's Last Gasp, the sort of jamboree that, cynical travelers assured us, could no longer occur within the borders of the United States of America. There was nothing particularly structured, certainly nothing remotely commercial or professional about it. No organizers, no steering committee, no Board of Directors. No tickets; no steenkin bodges. It just seemed to happen every year: the annual Gathering of the Nova Scotia Hippies.
Primarily, of course, it was a gathering of Annapolis Valley Hippies, for that was where the province's hippie-density was highest. But New Age people came from as far away as Yarmouth, over a hundred kilometers west; from Barrington Passage, a hundred and fifty klicks south; from Amherst, nearly three hundred klicks' drive away up around the Minas Basin; and from Glace Bay four hundred and fifty klicks to the east, out where Cape Breton Island thrusts its jaw truculently out into the cold North Atlantic. For that matter, random travelers came from all over the planet—but the above parameters roughly defined the boundaries of the Hippie Grapevine, and incorporated most of the people who could expect to be recognized, by reputation if nothing else, when they arrived.
I remember an early Solstice with no more than fifty or sixty folks, held in a half-acre field out behind the Big House at Sunrise Hill. The year before this, there'd been well over five hundred, overflowing even Louis Amys' stupendous dairy barn, the pride of six counties. (Unlike Max Yasgur—and possibly because North Mountain Hippies as a group still felt collective guilt over that poor Woodstock farmer—Louis swore he'd never had such a good time in his life; he had not so much agreed, as demanded, to host it again this year, and in all future years. No one had any objection. A merry soul, Louis.)
What happened at a Solstice Festival (or Celebration, or Feast, or Party, or Thing—it's indicative that the name was not fixed) was simply that several hundred Aquarian flower children got together and ate immense quantities of each others' organically grown holistically prepared food, and drank immense quantities of each others' organic cider and beer and wine, and smoked immense quantities of each others' organic dope, and talked and sang and talked and danced and talked and laughed and talked and cried and talked and gave each other things. Two things perennially baffled the locals, who observed from a polite distance: that we did not break anything, and that there were never any fights.
Within those general parameters, it was different each year, and always a good time. There was a swimmin' hole just within walking distance, and Louis had hay fields enough to accommodate a hundred couples making love under the stars, or fucking as the case might be, and the acoustics in the barn's top floor were so splendid that even unrehearsed amateurs sounded good. I was particularly looking forward to one of the few things that could have been called a tradition in such a deliberately spontaneous event: to a five-hundred-throat Om. Without Sunrise restraints . . . yum!
I was also looking forward to The Jam, of course. To be sure, there would be at least forty musicians who would drive me out of my mind—nice people, doubtless from good families, who through no fault of their own had trouble with Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen songs. Or who insisted on playing nothing else but Dylan and Cohen songs. But I could also expect anywhere from five to twenty real musicians, singly and in bunches.
Hey, listen, I don't care where you are, the woods of Nova Scotia, New York, L.A., Minneapolis even—you get a chance to play with twenty real musicians in a year, you're rich.
So the day before this Grand Pantechnicon I was sitting in my kitchen, dawdling over the remains of lunch. I was so eager for an excuse not to go back out into the sunshine and split more wood that I decided, quite unnecessarily, to Make Some Plans for the affair. If I had only properly grasped the Hippie ethos of "just let it unfold, man," it could have saved my life.
There would be at least two fiddles, a banjo or so, a few harmonicas, congas and bongos and a handful of people who could tease music out of Louis's beat-up upright piano. I knew for sure of a bass, a clarinet and—most delicious prospect of all—"Fast" Layne Francis from Halifax, the best sax player I ever heard. There was no telling what else would show; I wouldn't have been surprised by an alp horn or a solar-powered Moog.
But one thing was sure. There would be a surfeit of guitars.
I intended to play mine nevertheless. It was my main instrument, the one I was most at home on, the one I could jam best with. But it occurred to me that it would be nice to be able to switch off, from time to time, to some less clichéd, more exotic instruments. Add a little texture to the sound. Challenge myself. Impress folks with my eclecticism.
Flies buzzed around my kitchen, looking for the egress. I got up and scraped the leftovers into the compost bucket. Thank God the water line had finally unfrozen and the pump was working again. It made cleanup so much less painful. Not to mention morning coffee.
Let's see, I thought, I could bring along the autoharp, and the mandolin . . . say, I could finish up that dulcimer, there was just enough time left before the feast for the glue to—
Jesus Christ on a Snowmobile.
Mucus the Moose.
Abandoned—worse, forgotten—on a frozen hillside. For weeks. Weeks of the usual crazy climate extremes, at that. Temperature change might have already cracked the noble moose. He might be spilling his guts right now—
Pausing only to grab a shirt, I took off up the hill. I was heartsick at my stupidity. How could I have forgotten Mucus? For so long?
It was like tugging at the one thread that's sticking out of your sock. More questions kept getting teased out as I hiked up the trail.
How can something be important enough to you to bring you out into a blizzard . . . and so insignificant that you forget it for weeks? Leaving it lying forgotten in the Place of—
—Maples—
Jesus in gym shoes! I had completely forgotten the fucking maples!
The season had been almost over, that night when Rachel had arrived. But only almost. Damn it, I knew what I was going to find when I got up there. Plastic buckets brimful of rain and spoiled sap, dead insects of all kinds floating on top. Reproachful maple trees, their blood wasted, spilling on the ground.
Oh, the trees wouldn't really care; nature has no objection to waste, and trees don't much mind anything. But I would. A waste is a terrible thing to mind.
The trail leveled out at the garden and I paused to catch my breath. How in the hell could I have spaced out on my maple trees? Why, I had been right up here in the garden dozens of times, rototilling and seeding and weeding and deer-proofing; the Place of Maples was the next place-of-consequence uphill from here. You'd think it would have popped into my head before now.
Hypothesis: the psychological impact of Rachel's explosive appearance, that night, had been sufficient to drive anything associated with it out of my awareness and keep it out. The hypothesis covered both the maples and Mucus the Moose.
But it didn't feel right. I replayed my memories of that night. It was unquestionably the most memorable night of my life so far. I had to admit on reflection that I had not replayed that memory tape very often, not as often as I had replayed other memorable events in the past. But I couldn't find anything exactly traumatic in the memory, nothing I shuddered to recall. Oh, the trek back down to the Palace carrying Rachel had been pretty grim: not the sort of memory one kept handy for repeat playing. But it wasn't the sort of thing you walled away from awareness either. I had enough of those to know the difference.
Alternate hypothesis: years of occasional drug abuse were finally taking their toll on my brain; I had simply spaced out on moose and pancake-paint. A familiar hypothesis for many Sixties Survivors. It accounts for absolutely any weirdness in your life, and can neither be proved nor disproved.
But you never play with it for very long. No point. Assuming it leaves you with nothing to do. Except maybe regret.
Maybe you're a city person, and think that this was like forgetting to water the houseplants; no big deal. City people can afford to space out on things. The technical term for a country person who is absent-minded and lives alone is "corpse." If I could space out on my maples, I could space out on my fires.
Okay, the first step to solving any problem was defining the problem and its extent. Were there any other inconsistencies in my behaviour that might shed light on this pair of lapses?
How the hell would I know? How would I go about testing for them? How do you debug your head?
Forgetting Mucus, now that was irresponsible. But forgetting the maple sap, that was dumb. All that flapjack juice gone to waste—not to mention how hard it was going to be to extract taps that had been so long in the living wood.
What did the two screw-ups have in common?
Only location—and Rachel.
My stomach started to tighten up. I left the garden, turned left and headed up the trail.
How was it that I had taken so long to remember my unfinished dulcimer? I'd been looking forward to finishing it, that night I had gone out into the blizzard . . . and then I hadn't given it another thought until the Solstice Jam wedged it into my head again. Or had I? I couldn't be sure.
It was much cooler up here in the trees than it had been down by the chopping block; I was glad I had fetched the shirt. Cold sweat glued it to me. If you are like most people, the scariest, most starkly horrifying thing you can imagine is probably some exotic kind of harm to your body. My ultimate nightmare is damage to the integrity of my mind. As Buckley said, "The frame doesn't matter, if the brain is bent." I stopped suddenly and urinated to one side of the trail, copiously and with great force. My hands shook as I rezipped my jeans. I noticed that I was breathing high in my chest; tried to force it lower, breathe deeper; failed.
I remembered the mood of inexplicable optimism that had accompanied me up this trail the last time. This was the backwards of it. I knew perfectly well that I was going to my doom. I know now why I kept going—but I didn't, then, and it was killing me. Feeling foolish, I picked up two stones, one softball-size, one tennis ball. I knew they would not help me. I needed garlic. A cross. Wolfbane. Automatic weapons and a ninja sidekick. But I did not throw the stones away.
Why, I asked myself, didn't you think all this through when you were within arm's reach of a perfectly good shotgun?
I think, I answered, because someone has been stirring my brains. Someone I trusted . . .
The sense of foreboding increased as I climbed. Twice I stopped to try and control my breath and pulse. Each time nervous energy forced me on again before I could. I was going to see something I didn't like. Might as well get it over with.
But still I stopped when the Place of Maples was just around the last bend ahead. It wasn't too late to reconsider. I wasn't committed yet. I could turn around and go home. If Mucus had survived this long, he'd live through Summer. Perhaps the deer had drunk the sap. . . .
I actually turned and took two steps downhill. But it didn't help any; nothing eased. Sometimes the only way to avoid pain is to get past it. I spun on my heel and continued uphill.
There was a tool on my belt that I used half a dozen times a day, that hung there so permanently I was not truly aware of it anymore; just about every adult male on the Mountain wore one at his hip. Five inches of Sheffield steel with a handle on one end, it was technically known as a "knife," and it dawned on me at this last possible instant that the tool could be adapted for use as a weapon. Why, between it and my two rocks, I was a walking arsenal. . . .
Please, I said to whoever it is I'm talking to when I say things like that, let there be nothing to see around that bend. Let me find only Mucus the Moose and plastic pails of sour sap and a squashed looking place where a birch tree used to stand until it was pulverized by a blue Egg.
I rounded the last bend.
Things certainly had changed. It took a few seconds to sort things out.
The first thing that impressed itself on my attention, of course, was the new Egg.
Double bubble, toil and trouble . . .
Just like the one that Rachel had arrived in, huge and blue, except that it wasn't glowing and emitting loud noise and threatening to disintegrate—fair enough; it wasn't trying to digest the total energy of the total conversion of the total mass of a large tree—and it was translucent, almost transparent. It didn't have a beautiful naked woman inside it. Rather a disappointment all told. What it did have inside it was a bunch of things I did not recognize even vaguely but which I took to be machines or tools of some kind, though I could not have said why. I cannot describe them even roughly, nor name the material of which they were fashioned, nor the method of their fashioning; they certainly weren't machined or cast or carved. They filled the person-sized Egg over two thirds full. I disliked them on sight, whatever they were.
The shape of the landscape around the Egg was wrong. How?
There were trees missing. A dozen or more. But they had not been completely pulverized like the one Rachel had destroyed. I could see stumps and trimmings, and shortly I spotted where the trunks had been stacked, a ways off in the woods. With them was a damned big old-fashioned bow saw. Like a tall capital D, the straight line being the sawblade—the kind of saw that takes either a man on both ends or a hero on one. Someone had deliberately, and at great expense of effort, cleared the area.
Why use such a backbreaking tool? Oh, of course. A chainsaw or an axe might have been heard, downhill, by the chump whose land this nominally was. I might have come to investigate.
So what if I had? It was becoming increasingly apparent that Rachel had the ability to erase specific memories at will, without leaving a detectable gap. To do so could not be more difficult than felling several mature trees with a two-man handsaw, could it? So why not borrow my Stihl chainsaw, mow down as many trees as needed in a matter of minutes, and edit the memory from my personal tape?
For that matter, why had the saw blade not rusted out here?
What else was wrong with this picture?
No sap pails hanging forgotten from taps, after all. Pails and taps collected and stacked over by the fireplace. Big boiling bucket lidded. Probably full of salvaged sap, waiting to be reduced.
Huh. Shape of land wrong over there. A pile of turned earth. Jesus, a large excavation! A fucking hole in the ground. Easily distinguished from my ass, in this light.
Steady, boy, don't get giddy. Get a grip on—
What the fuck is that?
I dropped flat to the ground and covered my head with my arms. I waited. Wind ruffled my hair. In the distance a crow did a Joan Rivers impression. A blackfly tried to bite my ear. I thought about what I thought I had seen, and lifted my head and peeked. It still looked a lot like a weapon—but a dopey one, so it probably wasn't.
What it looked like was a mortar, or a starter's cannon, as modified by the prop department of a typical sci fi movie. It was not pointing at me or even especially near the trail, and it had not, as I'd hallucinated, swiveled instantly to track me, and now that I calmed down enough to look I saw that it could not, that its odd armature did not allow it enough traverse.
A satellite-tracking antenna—
I got up, feeling stupid. Crows laughed at me. I looked at the transparent blue spheroid full of high-tech artifacts, and down at the rocks in my hands, and suddenly I was angry. I tossed the rocks blindly back over my shoulders, hard; one hit a tree with a gratifying home-run thunk and the other started a small avalanche in a pile of alder slash. I walked slowly toward the blue Egg, feeling the anger build. If I couldn't find an access hatch or a zipper or a seam, I'd chew my way into the damned thing. . . .
It was my own damned fault, I knew. I had done exactly what all my favorite science fiction writers preached against. I had made unwarranted assumptions.
Because Rachel had arrived naked, and said that she must come naked or not at all through the membrane of time, I had assumed that whatever method of time travel her people had developed would work only on organic matter, would only transmit a living thing or something which, like the crown, was part of a living thing's bioelectrical field—
—whereas it was just as reasonable to suppose that the system could handle either organic or inorganic matter equally well, as long as they weren't both in the same load.
There was no telling whether this Egg was the second, or the twenty-second, no way to be sure just how advanced and dug-in the alien invasion of my ficton presently was, how big a beachhead my colossal stupidity had let them establish. Was Rachel still the only time traveler around these parts?
Or had I met dozens of her friends and colleagues . . . and forgotten?
Angry makes you bigger, and heartsick makes you smaller, and both at once was as bad as I'd ever felt. Yet I knew it would be even worse if they went away and left me with scared shitless. I wanted to kill a lion with my teeth, and then beat myself to death with the bones.
The Egg had no hatch or seam I could discern. Up close, the things inside were still just . . . things inside, quite unidentifiable. Parts seemed fixed, others seemed to wave in a way that made me wonder if the Egg could be full of some viscous liquid. I touched its surface with both my hands. Though the day was quite warm, the big spheroid was distinctly, strikingly cold to the touch. Yet there was no condensation, no exhaust heat.
I was beyond surprise or curiosity. I was going to bust this fucking egg open. Should have held onto the rocks; maybe my knife would—
I started to remove my hands from the surface of the Egg, felt something happen, clutched instinctively . . . and found that I was holding a gold headband. It had apparently been synthesized by the chilly surface of the Egg and gently pressed into my hands. It was warm.
I whistled an intricate little scrap of melody from Chick Corea's My Spanish Heart, and examined the thing carefully.
It was not exactly like Rachel's headband. It lacked the three retractable locking-pins that anchored hers into her skull, although there were knurled discontinuities like knotholes in their places. It was thinner in two dimensions, and the microengraving on it was an order of magnitude less complex. The gold seemed less pure. It looked like the Taiwanese knockoff copy.
I decided that nothing could possibly hurt me more than I hurt already, and that nothing could happen to me that I didn't deserve, and that I didn't even care if I was wrong. Strike three. I put the headband on my head and was Ruby—
—am Ruby fucking Sam feeling the unfamiliar dick up inside me and liking it (always thought I would) but feeling the touch of Snaker's nearby eyes more vividly than the touch of Sam's hands here on my tits (fingertips on right tit heavily callused) seeing Snaker's unseen staring face more clearly than Sam's wide-eyed here before me (Sam's mouth is beautiful) hearing the catch in Snaker's breathing beside me more clearly than Sam's happy growl (God, Sam's a good fuck) what joy to help my lover make love to his friend, I hope this isn't a big mistake but I'll worry about it later, unnnnh-yes, like that, like that, like that, I like that, just like that, YEAH-YEAH-YEAH-YEAH-YEAH!—
I ripped the headband from my head; clumps of hair came away with it. I was on my side, in fetal position. My whole body trembled, my calves threatened to cramp, my vagina pulsed rhythmically, my teeth were novocaine-numb—
Oh . . . my . . . God . . .
I looked down at the gold oval in my hands. I wanted to throw it as far from me as I could. Farther than I could. I wanted it in the heart of the sun, or passing the orbit of Neptune at System escape velocity—
Did anyone ever leave the theater during the rape scene? Did anyone ever voluntarily stop fucking in the middle of an orgasm? Even if they wanted to?
I watched my hands come close, put the headband back on—
No sense trying to reproduce more of it. I reentered Ruby's head at the exact instant I had left it, between the fifth and sixth yeahs of her orgasm. It was like teleporting into the heart of an explosion. I hung on for dear life, trying to keep from being destroyed utterly by the primal fire of Shiva, and all the while the little sliver of myself that is never asleep or drunk or stoned or unconscious was taking notes.
—Tiresias was right. It is better for them—
—Bizarre: you can't "come in in the middle"—there is no middle. In the instant of jacking in, anywhere in the sequence, you know who you are and where you are and what's going on—just the way the originator of those memories did, at the time. What-Has-Gone-Before is implicit in the Now—
—This is not right; I shouldn't be here in my friend's head, certainly not during such a private—
—Damn, she's right: I am a pretty good fuck. Wow, I can feel me coming; I always wondered if they could—
—oh, really?
(This last because Ruby had just thought, but my Snaker's better . . .)
—So many layers to this; I expected maybe a top layer of consciousness and then a layer of subconscious murmuring. But this is like a dozen-layer cake with consciousness icing, like a crowd gathered round a computer programmer all shouting instructions at once—
—God damn, it goes on so long for them! So long, and all over . . .
—I've Got To Stop This—
She is hyperaware of Snaker and she isn't a bit jealous, his ecstasy is prolonging her orgasm, how can that be? It's like he's here in her head; he isn't really, but there's a little mental model of him that's very close to the real thing, and there's a third eye she never takes off of it. She constantly checks it (I Really Ought To Stop This Now) against the real Snaker and uses prediction errors as feedback to refine the model; one day she'll have a little Snaker in her head indistinguishable from the real one. Is that telepathy?—
—No! This is telepathy. What she is doing with Snaker is an inadequate substitute for telepathy, is what people do because they cannot be telepathic. In solitary confinement, you make up stories about those whose shouts and moans come distantly from neighboring cells. . . .
Jesus Christ, isn't she ever going to stop coming?—
—!I AM GOING TO STOP THIS RIGHT NOW!—
I was still lying on my side. There was dirt in my beard, and pine needles. An ant was portaging a piece of maple leaf a few millimeters from my eyes, in the pale shadow of the big Egg. The gold crown was clenched in my left fist. It was quite warm.
I was in shock. The little monitor sliver of me that took notes decided maybe humor would help.
Cushlamachree. Congratulations, Meade. You may just be the first living man in the history of the world to actually fuck himself.
I began to laugh, and in moments was laughing so hard I genuinely thought I might choke.
But you sure as hell aren't going to be the last—
No, humor wasn't all that helpful. The laughter trailed off. I got wearily to my feet. I realized that I now badly needed to kill at least two people and maybe dozens . . . and that an invulnerable invincible enemy was, exactly as surely as Hell, going to prevent me. I began to cry, like an infant, in frustration and outrage. With bleak logic I computed that the very best I could hope for was to be permitted to kill one of my targets.
Myself.
Might as well find out. The suspense was killing me. I put the gold headband down most carefully on the forest floor, and dried my sweaty palms on my pants, and took my woods knife from its sheath, and the Nazz took it away from me.
I screamed.
"I'm sorry, Sam," he said. "I thought I could stop you in time."
There was a terrific bruise coming up in the middle of his forehead, a small cut in the center of it trickling blood; soon there would be a whacking great lump. I remembered tossing a rock over my shoulder and hearing it strike a tree. Now it came to me that there had been no tree close behind me at that time. Tunnel vision.
Okay, open it out. How many are we? ("You don't want to count the elevator boy?") Just the two of us. Okay, iris back in on Nazz. He's different. How? Start thinking, Sam!
A forehead wound was a major alteration in a man as hairy as Nazz, his forehead being the majority of his visible face, and for once, he wasn't grinning. But there was something else. Something subtler, but more profound. This was Nazz, all right—but Nazz was a different man now. How, and how did I know?
Jesus—his eyes! His eyes!
For as long as I had known him, for as long as any of us had known him, Nazz had been mad. His behavior was manic and his thoughts were like tumbling kittens: one minute he'd come up with some genuine insight, like that visual-interface notion for computers, and the next minute he'd be apologizing to a chair for farting on it. But mostly it was the eyes that were the tip-off. No one meeting him ever had to wait the five seconds it would take for him to say something totally off the wall to realize that they were dealing with an acid casualty. Equally important, a benign one. Just one look at those sparkling gray eyes and you knew two things: this man was stone crazy, and he was perfectly harmless.
Neither was true anymore. Somehow, the Nazz had gone sane. And in so doing had reverted to what he had been before he went insane. Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised by what that was.
He was a soldier.
A good one. I recognized it in the eyes first. The alert, balanced stance, the absence of his usual goofy grin, and the way he had effortlessly taken my knife away before I even knew he was there, all were only confirmation. I knew the look; my father was an admiral. Nazz was wearing his Army camouflage jacket—hell, all Hippies wore those, but now it wasn't a costume anymore, now I could see that he had not bought it at an Army-Navy store to make mockery of it, now it was his uniform again. He wore a web belt that held a GI canteen, ammo pouches, a coil of rope, a commando knife, and a woods knife like mine. Every few seconds he glanced quickly from side to side, like a cop, or a fugitive.
A lot of guys who came back from the Viet Namese jungle—the ones who survived—got heavily into acid. And some of them moved north, to a country where nobody called them "babykillers . . ."
When two men meet they often—I'm tempted to say, nearly always—make an instant assessment. Even if they don't expect the question to arise in a million years, they can't help quietly wondering: if it came to it, could I take him? (Interesting that the same word, "take," means to beat a man or fuck a woman or steal property . . .) Their two opinions as to the answer will subtly affect all their future dealings.
Nazz was one of the few men concerning whom it had never occurred to me to ask that question before. I did now—
I was candy.
"Holy shit," I greeted him.
"Yeah," he agreed, "I guess that's what it is."
I was full of many things, especially questions. Too many to sort. I let them pick their own order. "That head hurt much?"
"Yah. I never saw you move that fast before, Sam,"
"Something about an alien invasion that pumps you up, I guess."
He let that pass. "How'd you know I was behind you?"
"Then you aren't reading my mind now?"
He shook his head. "It doesn't work that way." He grimaced. "Unless you were reading mine. I'd swear I never made a sound."
"You didn't. I just figured rocks weren't going to help me any, so I just threw 'em away."
He couldn't completely suppress a flash of Nazz-like smile. "No shit?" He shook his head. "That's a relief. Between you dropping flat all of a sudden, and then getting up and surprising me again, I thought maybe I'd lost it."
"Junglecraft? No, you haven't. How'd she get to you, Nazz?"
"Get to me? I got to her."
"Why?"
"Well, once I figured out what Rachel was—"
"How?"
"It was self-evident, Sam. All you had to do was look at her to know she was a stranger in a strange land, and that exchange student story of yours didn't make it. So I looked closer—and it was pretty easy to see that the body she was wearing wasn't the one she was born in."
I hadn't guessed that. "How do you figure?" Jesus, even his diction had changed.
"Sam, Sam. Not a wrinkle on her from head to foot, not smile-lines or frown-lines or stretch-marks or scars of vaccinations or anything. Nobody is that featureless except babies. Well, that made it obvious. Where do they grow brand-new, adult bodies, and change them like clothes? The future. How could people that smart miss such a glaring giveaway? Because they're telepaths—they don't use facial expressions."
Hell. I should have figured that out. I even had clues Nazz hadn't had. If Rachel could take a golden crown through time with her, why not head- or body-hair? Because she hadn't grown any yet . . .
A trained jungle-fighter with a mind like this was about unbeatable.
No. Very difficult to beat. Rachel was unbeatable. I had managed to surprise Nazz. I was convinced that Rachel would have known I was going to throw those rocks before I did.
Well, maybe I could find some way to surprise him again. There's no telling what dumb luck can do for you.
I nodded. "Smart, man. Mind if I sit down?"
He sat, without using his hands. I joined him more slowly and stiffly. Jesus, he was in shape.
It seemed appropriate to quote Dick Buckley. "Straighten me, Nazz . . . 'cause I'm ready."
"What do you want to know, Sam?"
Which questions to ask first. "Who is Rachel, and what is she doing here?"
" 'They,' "
"Huh?"
"You mean, 'who are Rachel, and what are they doing here?"
"Repeat: you faded."
"Rachel is four people. You didn't know?"
"Can they all carry a tune?"
"Beg pardon?"
"Sorry, I'm getting giddy. I was just thinking how nice it would be to sing Mamas and Papas songs by myself. Or Buffalo Bills stuff. You were saying, Rachel is four people—"
"Yah. Uh, technically they're personality-fragments, I guess you'd say. Abridged clones, not originals."
I let that go by. "Who's the leader?" Of the club that's made for you and me—
"Jacques. The others call him Fader. It's like an inside joke. What he really is, is—" He broke off, hesitated for several seconds. "I guess you'd have to say he's . . . the Saviour. The Founder. The one who brought the New Age. The Deathkiller."
Oh really?
"His born name is Jacques LeBlanc. A Swiss neuroanatomist—his original incarnation was, I mean. He started everything. A couple of klicks from here, as a matter of fact, a decade from now."
"Run that by me again."
"He's going to be a neighbor of yours. The first Jacques LeBlanc, the forerunner of the one that's one-fourth of Rachel, is going to move into the old DeMarco Place, just up the road from here, in a few years. That's where it's going to happen, Sam—isn't that far out? Right here in Nova Scotia, your neighbour-to-be is going to have the conceptual breakthroughs that let him discover mindwipe, and then mindwrite, and finally true telepathy. That's why Rachel picked this area for an LZ: this is where the conquest of the world will begin. Amazing, huh?"
And I'd helped.
"Gee, Nazz, that's just keen. Who are the other three Rachels?"
"The other three parts of her, you mean. Well, there's Madeleine, the Co-Founder, she's Jacques' lady—"
"There had to be a woman in there somewhere—or a gay man."
"Because of how good she is in bed, you mean? Not really. Original gender-of-birth hasn't got much to do with it. Then there's Joe—he's sort of Maddy's brother, but not quite—and Joe's lady Karen. If any one of them is responsible for Rachel being such a good lay, it's Karen. She used to be a high-ticket hooker."
"Joe is Madeleine's brother, but not quite." If I kept on playing straight man, sooner or later this had to start making sense.
Or maybe not.
"Well, actually it's Norman who was Maddy's brother—but then he thought Jacques had killed Maddy, so he took off after Jacques and tried to kill him. Jacques had to screw up his head so drastically that there wasn't a Norman anymore, and the personality in that skull became Joe. By the time they got that all straightened out, and he got his memories back, he was happier being Joe than he ever had been being Norman, so he stayed Joe."
"Jacques hadn't killed his sister after all?"
"No. Just kidnapped her. It might have been smart to kill her, she was on the verge of blowing the whistle on the whole conspiracy. But he loved her. So he took a big chance. He made her his first confidante, his partner, the first person to be invited into the conspiracy. Uh, 'first' sequentially, of course, not chronologically."
"Of course. Who is the first, chronologically? You?"
"Why, I really don't know for sure, Sam. For all I know, my namesake from Bethlehem could have been in it."
I was absorbing about one word in ten of his. Mostly I just wanted to keep him talking while I tried to think of some foolproof way to kill him without weapons, skills, or the advantage of surprise. Or failing that, a way to suicide—since he apparently wasn't going to let me.
"I mean, they must be into the Bible," he went on. "That's where Rachel got her name from. '. . . Rachel, who mourned for her lost children, and would not be comforted, for they were no more.' Typical Joe sense of humor. This Rachel hurts for her lost ancestors, not her children. Does a lot more about it than mourns, too."
This was getting us nowhere. "What are you doing here, Nazz?"
"The Egg here—" He reached out and touched it gently, caressingly, "—arrived a week ago. Ever since, I've been trying to get it safely into the ground, and guarding it in the meantime."
"Guarding it? Here? Against what, the deer?"
"You know how it is with woods trails. Deerjackers, hikers, lovers, berry-pickers, kids playing, horse people out riding, you never know who's gonna come by when. They all tend to follow existing trails. But mostly I've been keeping watch for you, Sam."
"For me?"
"Rachel told me to expect you. Uh . . . this is the second time you've been up here in the last few days."
Aw, shit. Really?
I had no recollection of having been here since the night Rachel arrived.
"How did Rachel know I'd be coming?"
"That moose gadget of yours. You thought of coming back up here for it last week, for the dozenth time—and Rachel stopped you, took the memory of that thought out of your head. But she knew it'd recur, and she had pressing business elsewhere. She couldn't erase the moose altogether, the memory was rooted pretty deep and there would've been holes big enough for you to notice. Besides, your most recent memories of it were integral to your memory of Rachel's own arrival here. She didn't want to leave any suspicious holes in that sequence.
"But she knew that the Solstice Thing coming up would keep putting the moose back in your mind. So she told me to keep an eye and ear out for you."
"Wouldn't it have been simpler to ferry Mucus down to the house and plant a false memory that I'd retrieved him myself?"
He shook his head. "Doesn't work that way. I don't think anyone could put a convincing false memory into a man's head except himself. The mind knows its own handwriting."
So I had to be allowed to keep climbing up the damned Mountain, loop and replay—like Sisyphus. Like a robot with a faulty action program. Like a bird blindly banging its head against the window, trying to escape . . .
My voice sounded odd to me. "What happened the last time I got this far, Nazz? We fought, didn't we?"
"Yes, Sam."
"And I lost, and you cut out some of my memory. Jesus, you did a good job. There isn't the slightest sense of déjà vu."
"Not me, Sam. I'm not even really a novice at this stuff. Hell, I'm just barely a postulant. All I could do was put you on hold and call in Rachel—she did the surgery."
" 'Put me on hold'?"
"Yeah, it's not hard. The crown generates a phased induction field that hyperstimulates your septum. Your pleasure center, just over your hypothalamus. You sort of supersaturate with pleasure, and your mind goes away. Like, samadhi. Nirvana."
"Mother of God." I was trembling. No, shivering. " 'Death by Ecstasy'—"
He nodded. "That Niven story, yeah, it's a lot like that."
"Oh Christ." That story had figured prominently in some of my worst nightmares. A man's brain is wired up to a wall socket. Enslaved by ecstasy, he starves to death with a broad grin—because the cord isn't long enough to reach the kitchen without pulling out the plug. . . .
"It could be worse, Sam."
It echoed through the forest, stilled wildlife. "HOW?"
He waited until the echoes had faded. Then he said softly, "You could get the identical effect by supersaturating the pain center."
I sat and thought for a while. He seemed willing to let me. Nothing productive came to me. Just bitterness and regret and fury and profound terror.
"I'm really surprised that you joined the Pod People, Nazz. I'd have sworn that you'd be the last person on Earth vulnerable to a mental assault. Why haven't you tried to convert me?"
"I gave it my best shot last time. Didn't work."
I held up the golden crown I still had in my hand. "Not after what this thing showed me. Is this what you're going to . . . 'put me on hold' with?"
"Not that one, no. The Egg made it for you, for one thing, it wouldn't interface with my mind properly. Calibrated all wrong. And that'll be a Read-Only crown you've got there, a passive playback-module. It hasn't got tasp circuits. But the Egg knows I'm authorized for a Command Crown—"
He was wearing an ordinary cloth headband; he took it off and set it down on the ground, shaking his head to tousle his hair. He turned away from me, reached both hands palm first toward the Egg, closed his eyes momentarily—
I jammed my crown down over his hairy head.
It was worth a try—hell, I had no other move—and the results were gratifying. He screamed.
Maybe it was that my crown was "calibrated wrong" to "interface with his mind properly." Maybe it was being unexpectedly dropped into the midst of a woman's orgasm. Perhaps he misinterpreted that first surging rush, thought I had somehow acquired a Command Crown by mistake, and panicked.
Most likely it was a combination of all of those. For whatever reasons, there were two or three entire seconds there during which he was no longer a highly skilled killer commando who could wipe up the forest with me without working up a sweat, but a grinning, gaping space-case rather like the Nazz I had always known and liked—
—and before those two or three seconds had elapsed, I hit him with the heel of my fist, like pounding on a table, impacting solidly below his ear, whanging his head off the Egg so hard that the thing rang like a gong.