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  NAKED CAME A STRANGER

  Rounding the corner of his house cautiously, Wally saw a naked man in his alleyway He was surrounded by a roughly circular patch of scorched grass.

  The naked man saw Wally, sprang at him and grabbed the lapels of his coat. “What year is it?” he snapped.

  Unused to naked men taking him by the lapels in his own yard, Wally answered automatically, and very quickly, “1995, it’s 1995, I swear to God!”

  The stranger released Wally and, for just a moment, began to panic utterly, just totally lose it…then pull himself back from the edge. “Crot!” he snarled. “Total snowcrash! Blood for this, my chop!” The date clearly displeased him greatly.

  On Wally the light began to dawn. This was the moment he had been waiting for since the age of six—here—now!

  “Look, cousin,” Wally said, “it’s cool out here. Come on inside. Get some hot coffee in you—you drink coffee? We got real good coffee—”

  The naked man looked up at him and instantly, visibly, became devious. “Sure, yes, hot caffy would be optimal. I can…uh…I can explain all this—”

  Wally watched the stranger carefully on the way into the house. They hung the right into the study and the naked man froze in his tracks, staring horrorstruck at a painting on the wall. A Jack Gaughan Analog cover. “Oh crash,” he moaned. “It’s worse than I thought! You’re science fiction fans, aren’t you?”

  Wally took a deep breath and drew himself up. “Sir, I’m afraid it is worse even than that. My wife and I are Secret Masters Of Fandom.”

  The stranger fainted dead away.

  BOOKS BY SPIDER ROBINSON

  Telempath

  Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon

  Stardance (with Jeanne Robinson)

  Antinomy

  The Best of All Possible Worlds

  Time Travelers Strictly Cash

  Mindkiller

  Melancholy Elephants

  Night of Power

  Callahan’s Secret

  Callahan and Company (omnibus)

  Time Pressure

  Callahan’s Lady

  Copyright Violation

  True Minds

  Starseed (with Jeanne Robinson)

  Kill the Editor

  Lady Slings the Booze

  The Callahan Touch

  Starmind (with Jeanne Robinson)

  Callahan’s Legacy

  Deathkiller

  Lifehouse

  LIFEHOUSE

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1997 by Spider Robinson

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  PO Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  ISBN: 0-671-87777-1

  Cover art by David Lee Anderson

  First printing, April 1997

  Second printing, February 1998

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Printed in the United States of America

  For

  the two Evelyns

  …may we meet again in The Mind…

  We come spinning out of nothingness,

  Scattering stars like dust.

  Look at these worlds spinning out of nothingness:

  This is within your power.

  Out beyond ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing,

  There is a field.

  I’ll meet you there…

  —Rumi,

  a thousand years ago in Lebanon

  If the Eternal Return is not allowed by modern physics,

  and if the Heat Death can also be avoided,

  then eternal progress is possible.

  —Prof. Frank Tipler,

  PHYSICS OF IMMORTALITY, 1993

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  A Walk in the Park

  Chapter 2

  Silent light, Holy light

  Chapter 3

  What’d I Say

  Chapter 4

  Strike One

  Chapter 5

  Cute Meat

  Chapter 6

  Grok and Roll

  Chapter 7

  Woolgathering on the Lam

  Chapter 8

  The Fans Hit the Shit Back

  Chapter 9

  Peeking Ahead

  Chapter 10

  The Biter Bit

  Chapter 11

  The Immortal Storm

  Chapter 12

  The Lifehouse

  Chapter 13

  The Shithouse

  Chapter 14

  “…Danny Boy, this is a showdown…”

  Chapter 15

  Call or fold

  Chapter 16

  Dead Dog

  Prologue

  The Tar Baby’s alarm caught them making love, or the whole emergency might never have happened.

  It might seem odd that they let something as frivolous as sex distract them even momentarily from their responsibilities. They were as dedicated, motivated and committed to their work as any guardians in history, as responsible as it was possible to be. And they had, after all, been married to each other for over nine centuries at that point.

  But then, theirs was—even for their kind—one of the Great Marriages. They had mutually agreed on their five hundredth anniversary that in their opinion, things were just getting really good, and as their millennial approached, both still felt the same. And perhaps even we mortals can dimly understand that any hobby which endures over such a span of time must have within it certain elements of obsession. They had long since taken into their lovemaking, as into their marriage itself, the spirit of the Biblical injunction, “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might,” and they were good at finding things to do.

  The precise timing of the alarm, moreover, was more than diabolical: it was Murphian. For several hours they had been constructing a complex and beautiful choreography of ecstasy together, a four-dimensional structure of pleasure and joy extending through space and time. A DNA double-helix would actually be a fairly accurate three-dimensional model of it. It was itself part of a larger, more complicated structure that had been under creation for nearly a week, a sort of interwoven pattern of patterns of pleasure and joy, of which this particular movement was meant to be the capstone. The tocsin sounded in both their skulls just as, in the words of Jake Thackray, “They were getting to a very important bit…” and for two whole seconds, both honestly mistook it for a hyperbole of their imaginations. By the time they understood it was real, a necessity at once emotional, biological and artistic urged them to ignore it—just for a moment.

  This, in their defense, they did not do. Their responsibility was too much a part of who they were. Orgasm may be the source of all meaning—but it needs a universe in which to mean. The instant they realized the alarm was not a shared hallucination they stopped doing what they were doing (or more precisely, stopped paying attention to the fact that they were doing it), queried the Tar Baby, downloaded a detailed report of the situation, and studied it, fully prepared to leap out of bed and hit the ground running if the emergency seemed to warrant it.

  It did not. Indeed, it seemed to be practically over. Only one sophont appeared to be involved—and not a sophisticated one. It carried only a single (pathetic) weapon, and no data transmission gear of any kind. The Tar Baby reported no difficulty at all in investing it, and was even now reprogramming it. There was another higher lifeform of some kind present, about fifty meters away from the Egg, but it did not displa
y sentience signatures and thus could not be a significant threat. To top it all off, the whole nonevent was taking place less than two thousand meters away, a distance they could cover in seconds.

  Yes, doctrine did mandate a suspenders-and-belt physical visit to the site to obtain eyeball confirmation of all data. But doctrine did not (quite) say that it absolutely had to be done this instant…not unless there were complicating factors present. They both double-checked, and there were not. They very nearly triple-checked. They concluded, first separately and then in rapport, that a delay of as much as fifteen minutes in the on-site follow-up inspection could not reasonably pose a serious or even a significant risk. They ran their logic past the Tar Baby, which concurred. It agreed to notify them at once if the situation were to degenerate, and to preserve all data.

  This whole process had taken perhaps three seconds, a total of five seconds since the alarm had gone off. The weeklong work of art was still salvageable. Sighing happily, they returned to their erotic choreography, and in under ten minutes brought it to a conclusion satisfactory in every sense of the word, the brief hiatus actually improving it trivially, both as sensation and as art. They spent an additional five minutes on breath recovery and afterglow, and were just about to get up, less than fifteen minutes after the Tar Baby’s first call—when suddenly it called again.

  And this time it shrieked.

  They came that close to being vigilant enough. Less than fifteen minutes late on a pointless backup. Less than one minute too late.

  Unfortunately, they were not playing horseshoes.

  And so the whole universe very nearly ceased to ever have existed…

  Chapter 1

  A Walk in the Park

  June Bellamy was walking in the woods, listening to FM on dedicated headphones and thinking deep thoughts about mortality and love—or perhaps about love and mortality—the first time she came close to annihilating upwards of twenty billion people.

  It was definitely the mook’s fault, not June’s—the whole thing. That is quite clear. All she wanted to do, at the start, was to grieve, and she had gone out of her way to do so privately. Nonetheless she was—thanks to the mook, and the headphones—the one who ended up personally endangering some twenty billion lives. Repeatedly. Whereas he was out of the story almost at once, never had more than a moment’s worry over it, and would not even remember that for nearly a century.

  It is almost enough to make one suspect God of a sense of irony.

  It was a splendid Fall afternoon in Vancouver. June was thirty-three years old and in excellent health. The woods she walked through were part of the former University Endowment Lands now called Pacific Spirit Regional Park, adjoining the sprawling campus of the University of British Columbia: about the only land on the Vancouver peninsula that had never been settled by white people or developed, and at least in theory never would be. The trail she had chosen had good drainage; despite the fact that it had rained for twelve of the past fourteen days—excessive even for Vancouver—leaves that had been lying in sunshine today crunched under her walking shoes. There was just enough crispness in the air to encourage activity, and the trapped ozone of several thunderstorms to add alertness. Traffic and houses and bustling human activity were no more than a kilometer or so away in any direction—but no trace of them reached here, into the forest sanctum. There were surely other hikers in the woods—but not many, and few June was likely to meet. It was a wonderful place in which to be conflicted.

  The only death she knew to be on her personal horizon was the impending death of her mother, in San Francisco, of colon cancer. She thought it more than enough reason to be conflicted.

  She had just that day returned from what she knew would be her last visit with her mother. She had known since the first phone call from her father, the previous week, that Laura Bellamy had at best a matter of days left. The cancer had come out of nowhere and gutted her without warning or mercy: by the time she was symptomatic she was, as June’s father put it on the phone, a dead woman walking.

  And by the time June had arrived at her hospital bedside she was clearly done walking. She had looked shrunken and—the pun made June tremble the instant it occurred to her, because she could never ever share it with anyone—and cured, like leather: she had looked like someone who ought to have that many wires and tubes coming out of her. She was fifty-four, and looked ninety. June knew exactly the phrase her lover/partner Paul would have used to describe his almost-mother-in-law’s condition if he’d been there: “circling the drain.” She’d looked like a crude, ill-thought-out parody of Laura Bellamy, one that was not intended to be sustained for long.

  But she had also looked—this was the part June could not get out of her mind, as she walked through the forest—fearless. June’s mother had, to the best of her recollection, always had the usual human allotment of fears, doubts, and uncertainties. Now she had none. It was clear in her sunken, shining eyes. June had wanted mightily to ask her about that, to discuss it with her. But it had proven almost completely impossible.

  That had been the very worst part of the whole depressing experience. Everyone in the room, including the Alzheimer’s patient in the next bed, had known perfectly well that Laura Bellamy was terminal. But June’s father, Frank, suffered from—clutched like a drowner—the illusion that his wife did not suspect anything of the sort. The notion that even a doctor who was trying to could have concealed such news from Laura Bellamy was ridiculous, but Frank was in deep denial—and, as always, needed his wife’s help with it. He needed to believe he was protecting her from something, even if it was only knowledge of her doom. He had met June in the hospital lobby and explained solemnly that they must be very very careful not to let Laura suspect the Awful Truth. By the time June had realized he was serious, it was too late to protest; they were on their way in the door of her mother’s room.

  Where she found, to her horror, that Laura Bellamy would rather have died than admit in her husband’s presence that she knew she was dying. Unlike most men of his generation, Frank Bellamy had not often needed his wife to simulate ignorance or stupidity; she was willing to indulge him, this once.

  And therefore June, who had abandoned her partner in the middle of an important project and traveled thirteen hundred kilometers for the specific purpose of having her Last Conversation with her mother, who had rehearsed it in her mind for several tight-lipped dry-eyed days because she knew this was her one and only window, had been unable to have it…had been forced to smile and chatter cheery inanities about how everything was back home in Canada these days and even help, herself, to shore up the grotesque illusion that her mother was soon going to recover and resume her interrupted life.

  Horror.

  They’d held a wordless conversation with their eyes, of course, while the rest of their faces spoke hollow lines for Franks benefit. But eye contact lacks bandwidth; the communication had been ambiguous, fragmentary, profoundly unsatisfactory for June.

  Once—once—she had succeeded in inventing an errand that would require her father to leave the room for five minutes. And then she had gone and dithered away three of them, finishing up the useless surface conversational thread they’d been chewing when he left, too nervous to begin. Finally she’d said, “Mom—we have to talk.”

  “Yes, dear,” her mother had said at once. “But if we take it out of the box now, there’s no way we can have it all tucked back in again in two minutes…and that’s when he’ll be back.”

  She’d made the words come out calmly. “There probably isn’t going to be another chance. I’ve gotta get back to Canada, and I can’t risk coming back.”

  “Yes, there will.”

  “Phone? He can’t stay here twenty-four hours a day—”

  Her mother had smiled at that. They had never had the clichéd mother-daughter phone relationship; Laura Bellamy felt that talking on the telephone was unsatisfactory, and that talking long-distance was like hemorrhaging: something to be done in brief bur
sts if absolutely necessary. “They won’t let you have a cell phone around all this medical gear, and I’m afraid I’m just too lazy to hobble down the hall these days. Don’t worry, dear: we’ll talk.”

  “When? How?” Her voice had risen in pitch, and she was furious with herself for losing control. She was not here to add her own emotional burdens to her mother’s obviously overfull agenda.

  But her mother’s serenity had only increased. “Do you know, I don’t have the faintest idea? And I don’t know how I know. But I’m quite certain—so don’t worry, June. All the things we need to say to each other will be said…in time.”

  June’s eyes had narrowed suspiciously. “What, are you going religious on me, Ma? Now?”

  Laura had smiled. “I don’t think so. I’m still just as fundamentally ignorant as I ever was, about all the important things. I have no Answers; I’ve had no revelations. But somehow…” Her face had changed subtly, in a way June could not classify. “Somehow, I’m not…not quite as clueless as I was. Just…just trust me. All right? We will get it all said, one day—and we’ll probably find out that we already knew most of it. And meanwhile, it’s all going to be alright.”

  And with theatrical timing, her father had reentered the room just then.

  The next hour or so of their discourse had been transmitted by eye contact, with its terrible signal-to-noise ratio (was that a punctuation mark? or just a blink?), and hampered by the need to keep a plausible surface conversation going with an inarticulate man. Shortly June had found herself unable to decide whom she resented more: her father, who had the nerve to find his beloved wife’s brutal dying too much to bear, or her mother, who, faced with a choice between her daughter’s needs and her husband’s, had the nerve to make the only choice she possibly could. And of course, awareness of her own irrational selfish resentment had made June despise herself, so she had resented them both for that, too.

  And then, as visiting hours were drawing to a close, her mother had said, “You know, I read a book once, I forget who wrote it, but he said the most beautiful thing. He said—let me see if I can get this right—he said, ‘There is really only one sense. It is the sense of touch. All of the other senses are merely other ways of touching.’”