Time Pressure Page 10

  He went to Rachel and took her hands. “So long as you’re with Snaker O’Malley,” he said in a fake Irish brogue, “no harm can come to you.”

  “But it’ll sure God bark outside your door a bit,” I said, still grinning. “Well, what do you say, Snake? Fix the tire now, or come back with help?”

  He looked sheepish. “Well, see, it doesn’t even matter that we don’t have a jack—”

  “God’s teeth.” I could guess what was coming.

  “—on account of we don’t have a spare either.”

  “Shitfire.” I thought it over. “Rachel, our options have narrowed. We either walk a few miles in the snow tonight, or we crash here. Pardon me: ‘crash’ meaning ‘sleep’ in Hippie, not the literal meaning. Do you have a preference?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Let me know if you decide you need to split.”

  An odd thing happened. This was not the first time I had absently used a Hippie term she could not be expected to know—but it was the first time she seemed to get angry about it. Her eyes flashed. Then, in an instant, she cut loose of it. “‘Split’ means ‘to leave’?”

  “Sorry. Yeah. If you want to split, slip me a wink when no one’s looking and I’ll extricate us. You savvy ‘wink’?”

  She winked. I fought the impulse to grin. Can you imagine Mister Spock tipping you a wink? “Good.”

  We set off downhill along the twisting path. It was not shoveled, of course, but there were enough prior footprints to let us negotiate it with minimal difficulty. Before long we came to the Gingerbread House. I was not surprised that it wrung an actual smile out of Rachel.

  Picture the Gingerbread House that Hansel and Gretel found. Now alter it slightly to reflect the fact that it is constructed—brilliantly if eccentrically—out of the remnants of a hundred-year-old chicken coop plus whatever came to hand. Malachi ceremonially destroyed his T-square and plumb bob before beginning construction. There isn’t a right angle in the structure. Every single board had to be measured and handcut. There are nutball cupolas and diamond-shaped windows and a round door. No two shingles are the same size and shape. The first time I saw the G.H. I thought of Bilbo Baggins.

  But no one was inside at the moment, so we kept following the path downhill and took the first left. Now the path was really downhill. Rachel, in unfamiliar boots, kept her footing expertly despite the large roots that lurked beneath the snow. It didn’t seem likely that the skills of woodscraft could still exist in her ficton; I decided that she was just naturally graceful.

  We came to the bottom, to the stream. It’s not a big stream. At full run, as now, you could have crossed it in three long strides and got wet to the knees; in summer it sometimes disappeared for days at a time, leaving small dwindling pools full of frantic fish. But it had pervasive magic about it. Its murmuring chuckle permeated everything, pleasing the ear in some subconscious way, conveying a kind of low-level ozone high.

  A footbridge spanned the stream and the path continued downstream to our right. But we stopped on the nearside and faced left, to give Rachel—and ourselves—a chance to dig the waterfall. Snaker lit a pre-rolled cigarette, and smoked it like it was a sacrament, blowing smoke to the four winds Indian-style.

  It was not a Niagara-type straight-drop waterfall, but a gradual cascade. A stepped escarpment of shattered rock turned the stream into a hundred little waterfalls by which it dropped maybe twenty meters in the space of five. White water for three mice in a boat. At the bottom it regrouped and rushed off downstream to the sea. It wasn’t really much noisier than the rest of the stream, just more treble-y. It was prettier than hell, primevally delightful.

  Like the Fundy Shore, that waterfall was the kind of place that could ground you spiritually, lend perspective, bring your rushing thoughts to a temporary halt and allow you to take stock. I breathed deeply through my nose, absently walking in place to keep my feet warm, and reflected that my friend the science-fiction-writing hippie and I were bringing a time traveler to Sunrise Hill for dinner. The three of us were sitting on what might very well be the deadliest secret that had ever existed, and we were about to introduce her, after fifteen minutes’ briefing, to the nosiest customers to be found anywhere in the Annapolis Valley. I had not thought this through.

  It would be irony even beneath God’s usual standards if it turned out that all of reality, every last human hope and aspiration, were to be destroyed by the passion of a bunch of die-hard hippies for truth.

  Fuck it. If that is the final punchline, I told myself, then let’s get to it. “Let’s go. It’s getting late.”

  Snaker looked around and nodded. Back up in the real world the sun had not quite set, but down here in the Holler it was already getting dark. “Right on,” he agreed.

  And we tried to explain to Rachel what “right on” meant as we walked downstream to the Tree House.

  CHAPTER 10

  I DESPAIR OF describing the Tree House. You have nothing to compare it to. The Gingerbread House was an eccentric enough structure, but the Tree House made it look like a Levitt tract home.

  It was never designed; it simply occurred. Over a period of three years or so, five or ten talented and twisted minds had, with no plan and little consultation, simply done whatever stoned them, as materials or tools or willing labour became available, or as their individual spirits moved them. If a contribution by one of them foiled another’s plan, he looked upon it as a bonsai challenge and rethought his concept. Three of these minds belonged to expert carpenters, one of them world class. Another co-creator couldn’t have driven a nail if it had automatic transmission. The taste of all of them differed widely but not sharply. As near as I can see, the only thing they all had in common was that each carefully considered the effect his efforts would have on the tree.

  A man Snaker’s height could have just managed to walk underneath the house upright with a top hat on his head, though there were substantial areas where he could have safely used a trampoline. (Of course the main floor was not level. What fun would that have been to build?) Above the more-or-less first floor the house bisected. Two asymmetrical structures wound up into different parts of the mighty rock maple tree: a substantial section of two additional stories, and a slimmer but taller one that had a tiny fourth-floor meditation chamber. One could travel between the two third-floors by stepping up onto a window ledge and swinging across on a rope. There were strategically placed hand- and footholds on the intervening tree trunk in case of screw-ups, and the drop to the roof below was not severe.

  The tree itself was magnificent. It continued on up another fifteen or twenty meters above the highest point of the House, its two mighty arms in the attitude of a man caught yawning. There was not another tree that size in the Holler, and I’ll never understand why the loggers passed it over decades ago. Just possibly they had a sense of poetry in them somewhere.

  A tree has always seemed to me a sensible place to keep a house. You don’t think so? Consider: in the winter you have plenty of sunshine, in summer plenty of shade. You have partial protection from rain and snow. There is never any standing water in the basement. When it’s summer and the windows are open, birds wander in and out, cleaning the kitchen floor. In winter, it takes one holy hell of a snowdrift to block your door. And you can haul up the gangplank if you want…

  I watched Rachel as we approached the Tree House. It’s always interesting to catch people’s first reactions to it. She had not commented on the Gingerbread House; perhaps “odd” and “quaint” and “funky” were not concepts that traveled well across the centuries. But I was willing to bet that any denizen of any human culture would find the Tree House striking.

  I was not disappointed. Her jaw did not actually drop, of course. She stopped walking and her nostrils flared. She raised first her right eyebrow, then her left, and stared at the place for a long twenty seconds. Snaker and I left her alone with it. Finally she smiled. It was the broadest, happiest smile I had seen yet on her face.

>   She turned to us, her eyes shining. “Thank you, my First Friends. This is a good place.”

  We smiled at her, and then at each other, and then at her again. Snaker took a last puff on his smoke and put it out. We moved on.

  When we were close, Tommy’s voice rose faintly above the rushing streamsound. She was singing that John Prine song about blowing up your TV. As we passed between pilings and under the House, it emitted a man. Well, part of one. The cellar door dropped open suddenly and I was looking right into the merry eyes of the Nazz, no less unmistakable for being upside down, from a distance of perhaps twenty centimeters. He was grinning hugely. (In future, unless I say otherwise, assume Nazz is always grinning hugely.)

  “Visual interface,” he told me joyously.

  I couldn’t argue.

  “Excuse me,” he said. One arm emerged from the house, carrying a long peavey. He reached down with it and opened the hatch of the root cellar by our feet. Then most of his torso emerged from the House; he made a long stretch and came up with a bag of turnips on the end of the peavey. He removed half a dozen or so, tossing them back over his head, up and into the house. “Gotta soak overnight.” He dropped the sack back down into the root cellar, tipped the lid shut, sealed the anticritter latch, and hauled himself partway back up so that he was at eye level with me again. “Pictorial, really. Evolved versus learned, right? Self-evident. Groks itself! Completely new operating system.” The house reabsorbed him, with a sound exactly like the one Farfel the dog used to make at the end of the word “cha-a-w—clate” in the Nestlé’s commercials.

  Snaker and I looked at Rachel. She looked at us. We resumed walking. The Nazz reappeared briefly behind us, said, “Hello, pretty lady,” and was gone again before we could turn.

  There are several ways into the Tree House, but we took the elevator. It’s a simple open-air affair. You haul yourself up on a good block-and-tackle. We got on, I put my hands to the rope, and feeling faintly silly as always, joined Snaker in the ritual shout that politeness demanded.

  “Umgawa!”

  And we hauled away, as the shout echoed through the Holler.

  Okay, it’s dopey. When in Rome, you shoot off Roman candles. To an inhabitant of the Tree House, that shout means, “A fellow hippie is here.” Rachel made no comment.

  We stepped off onto the porch, whacked snow from our pants, scraped and kicked it from our boots, untied our laces and entered through the keyhole-shaped door. Snaker and I each took an armload of wood in with us from the stack on the porch, and Rachel followed our example. Just inside the door we stepped out of our boots. There was welcome warmth, good smells of maple syrup and woodsmoke and reefer, the sound of crackling fires.

  From the cheaply carpeted living room I could see Tommy working in the kitchen. She was cleaning the sap taps. There are eight set into the living wood of the kitchen wall, hoses running in parallel to a boiling pot on the stove. At the end of a day’s run it’s a good idea to wash out the hoses.

  She turned and saw us through the kitchen doorway. “Howdy,” she called. “Far out—good to see you, Sam. Be right there.”

  We added our firewood to the box by the living room stove, standing a few of the more snow-soaked sticks on end in front of the battered old Franklin to dry. Rachel examined the room. It was furnished in Rural Hippie. Kerosene lamps. Candles. Psychedelic posters. Several mandalas. Macramé. Plants. An enormous and functional brass narghile with four mouthpieces. Cushions. Cable-drum tables. A superb old rocking chair painted paisley. Zen epigrams printed on the walls here and there. An arresting painting of Ruby’s, a portrait of Malachi. A wrinkled print of Stephen Gaskin leading Monday Night Class at the Family Dog. A hand-sewn sampler depicting a field of daisies and bluebells surmounted by the legend: flowers eat shit. Along one wall a shelf was lined with paperbacks that all concerned cosmic consciousness and how to achieve or sustain it.

  Tommy came in, wiping her hands on her shirt. “Hi,” she said to Snaker and me, and then a separate, friendly “Hi,” to Rachel. “What’s happening, guys?” she went on. “Was that one of them damn hunters again? We thought maybe y’all got shot for a moose.”

  (The Sunrise Hill Gang don’t seem to have the custom of introductions. A newcomer is welcome to introduce herself, or not, as suits her. If she chooses to wait a bit, perhaps pick a name that’s not being used already, that’s her business.)

  “Naw,” Snaker said. “It was Blue Meanie throwing a shoe.”

  “Far out,” she said, grimacing sympathetically. “Looks like it was a good landing; you walked away. Is it in the ditch?”

  “Happened just as we were slamming the doors, thank you Buddha.”

  “Wow. That’s far out.” Her eyes sparkled. “What a trip.”

  “Tire’s a total, no spare, so I guess we hike to dinner.”

  She shrugged, a gesture that thrust her chin out and flounced her red curls. “Far out. I don’t know if I’m into dinner—”

  “Ruby’s making chili.”

  “Hey, Nazz! Quit doodlin’ and get your coat. Ruby’s making chili tonight!”

  The Nazz’s bushy head appeared around the kitchen doorway. “Out of state,” he called. “Just a third.” When Nazz uses clichés they come out all wrong. He doesn’t do it to be cute, it’s just a mental short circuit.

  Tommy was already half-dressed for outdoors. “Did you bring your guitar, Sam?”

  “Left her in the truck.”

  “I’ll help you carry it if Snaker’ll take my flute. You look real cute with your hair short like that, hon—I think I might try that myself.”

  When two women meet, they size each other up. It’s not necessarily a competitive thing. They just take each other’s measure. Men do it too, but they do it differently, and I’m not sure how it’s different. Women seem to take a little longer. They don’t rely as much on sight, but I don’t know what they use in its place.

  “It will look very good on you,” Rachel said, and I knew they were going to be friends.

  Which was nice, because Tommy weirded out a lot of women, particularly ones as emphatically feminine as Rachel. Even with her long and curly red hair, Tommy could easily have passed for a teenaged boy; her flat-chested hipless body, her manner and many of her mannerisms were masculine. She blended right in with a construction crew. She was by no means a lesbian. She was the only true neuter human I’ve ever known. She had absolutely no sex drive whatsoever, and by that point in her life, her mid-thirties, she had long since given up pretending—or minding. She told me about it the night I made my pass. No physiological dysfunction, no horrid childhood trauma—she simply wasn’t interested. She was quite capable of orgasm—an experience she likened to a sneeze, both in intensity and desirability. She was baffled and amused by the importance everyone placed on it, convinced that it was enormously overpriced at best.

  This placed a certain basic gulf between her and many other women—not to mention many men. City-folk in particular, sex-charged to the point of frenzy by media hype, frequently resented her. But Rachel seemed to take to her instantly, and Tommy, once she was sure it was genuine, responded.

  (I was slowly getting it through my head that Rachel was not what I thought of as “city-people,” that in spite of the logic of a million science fiction stories, the future was not necessarily going to urbanize to the point of inhumanity. Whatever it was like when she came from, they were still flexible and tolerant—which city folk, in my experience, were not. Including myself when I first came up here.)

  The Nazz came bustling into the room, beaming and brandishing computer paper. Lord Buckley once said of his namesake, the carpenter-kitty from Bethlehem:

  Nazz had them pretty eyes. He wanted everybody to

  see out his eyes so they could see how pretty it was.

  and it suited this Nazz as well. He sweetened the climate where he was at. He waved two sheets of computer paper at us. “It just now came to me,” he said. “Check ’em out.” He handed me one. “Find a
letter that was sent to Hewlett-Packard on February 18.”

  I looked at the sheet. It was a printed list of about fifty computer files, displaying title, type of file, date of creation, last modification and size in bytes, arranged alphabetically by title. I ran my eye down the list: there were ten files with “Hewlett-Packard” or “HP” in their title, six of those were letters, the second from the bottom was dated “18 Feb.”

  “Right here,” I said, pointing.

  “Four point nine seconds,” Nazz announced happily, looking up from a stopwatch. “Gravy. Here. Find it again.” He handed me the second sheet.

  I blinked at it. It was hand-drawn. The same approximate number of files were represented—by arrays of little pictures in groups, with meticulously printed labels beneath each. Little three-ring binders indicated reports; little tear-sheets were article extracts; the little envelopes were obviously letters. My eye went to them at once. Beneath the pictures were names; “HP 18F” leaped up at me. “There,” I said.

  “One point eight. Sixty-three percent faster. Far fuckin’ up.”

  “Visual interface,” Snaker said wonderingly. “Pictorial, really.”

  “Hard on,” Nazz agreed. “See, the ability of the brain to interpret text is learned behavior, no older than the pyramids. But the brain has been interpreting pictures from in front. Much older circuitry, much faster traffic-flow, much more information-density. It’s why movies kill books. Your face and breasts are extremely beautiful.”

  This last, obviously, was to Rachel. She was not at all taken aback. “Your hands and mind are extremely beautiful,” she said.

  They smiled at each other. Two more friends.

  “Let’s go eat,” I said. I was starving.

  “Remind me to call Palo Alto when we get to the Hill.” Nazz said. “Couple of guys I want to mention this to. Less intimidating than a bunch of text in the damn ugly computer font; it’s friendlier. Need a whole new language, though, and one of those new eight-bit chips—”