Time Pressure Read online

  “I always said you grow terrific reefer,” Snaker murmured.

  “I guess so! The whole day’s shot to shit, and we’re late starting supper.”

  “Fuck supper, and fuck the day. Let’s bring Rachel over to the Hill and introduce her around; there’ll be plenty of food there.”

  “Vegetarian food. Thanks.”

  “Ruby’s making chili today.”

  “Oh. That’s different. Still, man, isn’t that rushing things? Is she ready to take on your whole crazy crew? I think we ought to fill her in a bit, give her a few books to read—”

  Rachel turned and interrupted us. “I’m eager to meet Snaker’s family. Can you leave now?”

  I blinked. “Sure. Let me get my guitar.”

  CHAPTER 9

  BLUE MEANIE HAULED the three of us east from Parsons’ Cove, lurching like a drunk, engine coughing up blood and transmission shrieking, as though the aged truck knew that ahead, on the unpaved Wellington Road, axle-shattering potholes lay in wait for it, grinning.

  The journey itself might have been adventure enough for anyone used to methods of travel more civilized than, say, buckboard—but Rachel had no time to appreciate it (or, more likely, be terrified by it), because Snaker and I talked nonstop the whole trip, trying to prepare her for the Sunrise Hill Gang. It would have been difficult enough to “explain” the Sunrise crowd to a normal human being of my own place and time—but Rachel didn’t even know what a hippie was, let alone a die-hard hippie. She seemed barely familiar with the Viet Nam war. We needed every minute of the ten-minute drive to brief her.

  “How many are in your family?” Rachel asked.

  Snaker frowned and caressed the steering wheel with his thumbs. “I knew this wasn’t going to be easy. Uh, at the moment there are six or seven of us around, what you might call the hard core—as soon as winter comes down, a lot of folks find pressing spiritual or other reasons to be somewhere warmer. But as to how many of us there are altogether…well, I’m not sure anyone’s ever counted, and I’m not sure an accurate count is possible.”

  Rachel said nothing.

  “Last summer we had as many as thirty, and I guess it averages about fifteen or so. If it helps any, there are a dozen or so names on the land deed. But half of those folks have gone, with no plans to come back.”

  “They decided to go for an actual deed, eh?” I said.

  “When they saw the size of the stack of paperwork for a land trust, yeah,” Snaker said.

  Rachel looked politely puzzled.

  “You see,” Snaker tried to explain, “some of the Gang don’t hold with the concept of owning land—”

  Now Rachel looked baffled. Well, it baffled me too.

  “—but they finally got it through their heads that if they don’t own the land, somebody else will.”

  She dropped the matter. “Tell me about the six or seven now present.”

  Snaker looked relieved to be back on solid ground. “Well, there’s Ruby, of course—you might want to grab a handhold here—”

  All at once he wasn’t on solid ground. We had come to the Haskell Hollow. It is an amusing little road configuration. Around a blind left curve, without any warning, the road suddenly drops almost vertically for five hundred meters, yanks sharp right, rises almost vertically for another five hundred meters, and swings hard right again. Snaker took it at his usual eighty kph.

  “—and you’ll really like her; she’s a painter and fucking good; she has brown hair and unbelievable eyes; she thinks she’s too fat but she’s full of shit—”

  The proper way to run the Hollow was to start accelerating hard about two thirds of the way down the cliff. The man who lived at the bottom made a fair dollar renting out his tractor to tourists and other virgins who chickened out and, in the hairpin turn at the bottom, lost the momentum necessary to make the upgrade. Of course, the transit was trickier on poorly ploughed snow. Blue Meanie roared in berserker fury and went for it. Rachel could have been forgiven for dampening her (my) pants at any time during the episode—but she took her cue from Snaker and me, grabbed handholds but stayed calm.

  “—and she’s the best cook in the place, by a damnsight. Then there’s Malachi: he and Ruby used to be together once; now he lives with Sally from the Valley—”

  He yanked the wheel round with both hands (the Meanie predated power steering) and popped the clutch about fifty meters from the bottom. We skidded into proper orientation for the upcoming turn-and-climb, and he had correctly solved the equation of friction and time and distance: the wheels grabbed, hard, just as we were reaching the nadir. (Snaker maintained that since that was the place where motorists tended to throw up, it should be called the Ralph Nadir.) Every component of the truck capable of making noise did so to the best of its ability; Snaker raised his voice.

  “—he’s big and black-haired and half-bald; carpenter and electrician; weird as a fish’s underwear—he’ll be the one with the eyes—”

  The rear end threatened to go. Literally standing up on the throttle now, Snaker slammed his ass down on the seat and back up again, and Blue Meanie shrieked and settled down to the climb.

  “—Sally’s got long straight yellow hair, gray eyes; moves kinda slow and doesn’t say much but she’s in there; then there’s Tommy, Malachi’s older sister; doesn’t look a bit like him, curly red hair, wiry and fiery, tiny woman but tougher’n pump-leather; she’s far out. Lucas, he’s sort of the resident spiritual masochist, salivates at the mention of the word ‘discipline’; but he’s one of the decentest people I ever met, brown hair and reddish beard; real handsome.”

  We’d begun the climb at perhaps 120 kph. We covered the last fifty meters to the summit at a speed that the speedometer claimed was zero, slowing even further for the curve. Then we were back on level road, entering the fishing village of Smithton.

  “Then or course there’s the Nazz. One of the craziest and most delightful cats I ever met in my life, a man who has clearly taken too much acid and is the better for it; a stone madman; you never know what he’ll do next except that he’ll be smiling while he does it and you’ll be smiling when he’s done. Curly black hair and beard, both completely out of control. He’s named after an old Lord Buckley rap about Jesus—the Nazz-arene, dig it?—and it suits him.”

  That is how long it took us to completely traverse Smithton. At the posted speed limit of 30 kph. Then Snaker accelerated sharply and took the right onto the Mountain Road in a spray of gravel. The slope is nowhere near as sharp as the back leg of the Haskell Hollow, but it goes on forever, and in snow season better vehicles than the Meanie have had to give up halfway, slide back down backwards and take a second run at it. Snaker went for it.

  “Rachel,” I asked, “is any of this getting through?”

  “Some. Most of it, I think.”

  “I’m surprised. He’s been speaking Hippie.”

  “Somehow when Snaker uses idiom or colloquialism, I take his meaning more often than not.”

  “Far out,” he said apologetically. “Sorry Rachel, I wasn’t thinking.” He grinned. “When I first moved in with Ruby, my first day at the Hill, Malachi dropped by in the afternoon just after we’d finished making love, to talk something over with her. Damned if I know what it was. A few minutes before I’d been certain that Ruby and I were, like, totally telepathic for life—and then she and Malachi started talking, and I did not understand a single thing they said. They were using what sounded like English words, but I couldn’t even grasp the general shape of the conversation, much less follow it. And remember, I was already fluent in Hippie…city Hippie, anyway. Uh, I’ll ask people to try and stick to Standard English—shit—” He had lost the battle to keep the Meanie out of first gear.

  “No, Snaker. Immersion is the best way to master a dialect. If I need an explanation, I’ll ask for one.”

  “Don’t be afraid to ask for one with others around,” I said. “As an exchange student, you won’t be expected to speak Hippie.”


  She nodded. “Can you give me a primer?”

  So we did our best to outfit her with basic vocabulary. Dig, into, trip, groove, cool, out of sight, righteous, stoned, spaced out, holding a stash, copping, manifesting, agreement, yoga, freak out, and of course, the ubiquitous far out (an acceptable comment in any situation whatsoever). Since all of these terms had multiple (often contradictory) meanings, depending on context, tone of voice, and the daily Dow-Jones average, I could not be certain we were accomplishing anything, but she kept nodding. Blue Meanie kept swapping uphill momentum for engine noise, which didn’t make it any easier.

  Two thirds of the way up the north slope of the Mountain, we came to the Wellington Road. Snaker took the turn from half-plowed uphill pavement to level but unplowed dirt road with gusto, throwing Rachel hard against me. As Blue Meanie began to roar in triumph and gather speed, he coaxed the wretched thing into second gear and accelerated sharply; the wheels bit just in time to keep us out of the substantial drainage ditch on my side of the road. “As for the physical plant,” he said mildly in the sudden comparative quiet, “we’ve got three and a half houses on either end of a big parcel of land, about a hundred acres altogether.” He took it up to 70 klicks (about 45 mph) and held it there. He raised his voice again. “We’ll come to the Holler first, stop and see if anybody wants a ride to dinner. Then we’ll go on to Sunrise Hill, to the Big House, and you can meet Ruby.”

  “I look forward to meeting her,” Rachel called back.

  The engine noise was less now, but the unpaved road was a washboard rollercoaster and the truck a giant maraca. The net effect was noisier than the desperate uphill run had been, except for the relatively calm intervals when we were on an ice-slick and flying free. Every so often a pothole the size of a desk tried to shatter the driveshaft and axles, or failing that, our spines. “Sorry if this makes you nervous, Rachel,” Snaker said, “but you can’t drive this road slow in winter, or you get stuck.”

  “That would be bad,” she agreed, straight-faced. “Is there anything else I should know, to be a proper guest? Local customs or manners?”

  I was impressed by her control and courage. This kind of transportation had to be a nightmare for her, and all her attention seemed to be on the coming social challenge.

  Snaker looked at me. “Sam, what do you think the Gang would consider excessively weird behavior in a guest?”

  I thought about some of the people I’d seen come and go at the Hill. “Gunfire. Personal violence. Arson.”

  “There you go. Rachel, we’re all pretty weird ourselves, by contemporary standards. It’s made us kind of tolerant.”

  “Of outsiders,” I added.

  He nodded reluctantly. “Yeah. Among ourselves we sometimes get kind of conservative. But visitors are welcome to do pretty much as they please. As long as they respect our right to be weird, we’ll respect theirs.”

  I couldn’t let that pass. “Aw, come on, Snake. Tolerate, yes, but respect?”

  Snaker started to answer, then closed his mouth. Rachel looked back and forth at the two of us, settled on me.

  So I said, “The Sunrise Hill Gang have this thing about honesty and truth, Rachel. As defined by them. To be fair, they don’t lay it on strangers too much—but what it comes down to is, the longer you hang around them, the friendlier you get with them, the more they feel they have the right to…well, to get into your thing.” I paused. How to explain that concept? To anyone, much less a time traveler? “To ask you extremely personal questions, and criticize your answers. To question your behaviour and beliefs. Sometimes they can get pretty aggressive about it.” I looked over at Snaker again, met his eyes. “I’ll concede that their intentions are good—but I find them hard to take sometimes. Malachi in particular has a gift for figuring out just what topics of conversation will make you most uncomfortable, and then dwelling on them, in the friendliest, most infuriating manner imaginable. He so obviously genuinely sincerely wants to help you—whether you want help or not—that you can’t even manage to dislike him for it. And that makes me want to punch him. Especially when the rest of the group gets the scent of blood and joins in.”

  I glanced at Snaker to see if he wanted to rebut. He frowned. “I’ve seen him straighten a lot of people, Sam. I’m not saying I find him easy to take, myself. There’s a lot of stash between us because of Ruby. But I have to admit he’s good with hang-ups. He’s got the instinct of a good shrink. Uh, sorry, Rachel, a good psychiatrist. You savvy ‘psychiatrist’?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “But he doesn’t have the training of a good psychiatrist,” I insisted, “or any kind of license to lead group-therapy practice on non-volunteers. Why I’m bringing this up, Rachel, is to warn you to be careful around Malachi. You’ve got a lot to hide, and evasive answers make his ears grow points. The man has industrial-strength intuition.”

  Snaker frowned even deeper. “I can’t disagree. Malachi demands a pretty high truth level around him. If he gives you trouble, Rachel, I’ll handle him.”

  “Does it bother you to conceal truth from your family, Snaker?” she asked.

  “No,” he answered at once. “I place high value on truth myself—but there are higher goods that can take precedence sometimes. That’s where I part company with most of the rest of the Gang.”

  “What takes precedence over the truth?” she asked.

  “Duty, sometimes. And compassion always wins if there’s a tie. Also preservation of self or loved ones, I guess. I’d lie to save Ruby if I had to.”

  She touched his near arm. “Does it bother you to lie to Ruby?”

  He began to answer, then exhaled through his nose and started again. “Yes. But I can handle it. I really do understand the stakes, Rachel: the continued existence of reality. Like I said, I’d lie to save Ruby—even lie to Ruby herself.”

  It was beginning to dawn on me that I had screwed up. “I’m sorry, Snake.”

  “For what, man?”

  “I’ve put you in a difficult position by sharing Rachel’s secret with you. And it turns out it wasn’t even necessary.”

  “So how could you know that? You were protecting yourself the best way you knew against a reasonable presumption of danger. I’d have done the same in your shoes. Besides, can you imagine how stupid I’d feel if there was a time traveler on the Mountain and I didn’t know it? Don’t answer, I know that doesn’t make sense.” He grinned. “But I’m glad you told me.”

  What could I do but grin back?

  “Yonder comes the Holler,” he told Rachel, downshifting.

  I glanced at her, realized how beautiful she was…and a sudden thought occurred to me. “Whistling Jesus—I nearly forgot. Rachel: stop growing your hair!” I don’t know if she’d forgotten; she just nodded. Her hair, an uncombed sprawl of chestnut curls, was now short for a Hippie, but long for a straight person; it covered all of her golden headband except the span across her forehead. Brows and lashes were appropriate.

  The road ahead sloped down gradually, ran over a culvert, and swung left to disappear behind the trees. Just past the culvert and before the curve, Snaker snapped the wheel to the left and locked the brakes. The Meanie spun off the road to the left, rotating as it went, and came to rest, nose out, precisely in the truck-sized carpark that had been shoveled out for it, its rear wheels nestled right up against the log barrier. He put the engine out of its misery and we got out. I watched, and Rachel’s legs were steady. Perhaps her time had even more hair-raising modes of transit. But I felt she had simply decided to trust Snaker before getting into the truck, and then thought no more about it.

  “It’s very peaceful here,” she said, looking around her. There was nothing much to see except a mailbox with no name on it and a lot of snowcapped maple and birch trees and a rough path winding away downhill among them.

  “It’s very peaceful anywhere that truck is not running,” I said.

  She shook her head. “I mean more than ambient sound-level,” she said. “It is peace
ful here.”

  Snaker smiled broadly. “I know what you mean,” he said. “It got to me too, my first time here. Tranquility. Wait’ll you see the Tree House.”

  And at that there was a loud explosion as Blue Meanie’s left front tire blew up, followed by a diminishing cascade of metallic groans as the noble old truck went down on one knee.

  No, Rachel’s bravery was neither ignorance nor faith in Snaker. He and I both jumped a foot in the air, and he certainly went white as a ghost and I probably did likewise as the implications sank in…and then we saw each other’s expressions, and fell down laughing in the snow. But I was watching her when the tire let go, and here is what I saw. The instant the report sounded behind her she was in motion—but almost as the motion registered on my eyes it changed. One microsecond, she was crouching and spinning with unbelievable speed; the next, she had aborted the crouch and was simply turning toward the sound at normal human speed. The change came, I was sure, before she had turned far enough to have the truck in her visual field. She had to have deduced what the bang must be, and then come down off Red Alert, in a shaved instant. In her place, I’d probably have panicked; it seemed to me that someone who had grown up expecting to live centuries barring accidents would be very afraid of sudden loud noises.

  But I didn’t think much about this at the time. I was busy rolling in the snow and howling with laughter. It did not occur to me to wonder how she had deduced the source of the noise.

  “‘Tranquility,’” Snaker whooped. “Oh, my stars!”

  “‘Such peace,’” I agreed, flinging handfuls of snow in his direction.

  An inquiring hoot came distantly up through the woods. Still giggling, Snaker and I helped each other to our feet and brushed snow from ourselves, and Snaker hooted back reassuringly.

  The North Mountain Hoot is a rising falsetto “Wuh!” that carries a kilometer or two in the woods, and you can pack a surprising amount of information into its intonation and pitch. The hail meant “Hello,” and “Are you all right?” and “Do you need help?”, and Snaker’s answer meant “Everything’s cool,” and “I’ll be right there,” and “I’m bringing company.”