Spider Robinson - The Mind 3 - Lifehouse

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Robinson, Spider - The Mind 3 - Lifehouse

[Version History]

LIFEHOUSE

by SPIDER ROBINSON

ISBN: 0-671-87777-1

For

the two Evelyns

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Robinson, Spider - The Mind 3 - Lifehouse

. . . 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

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Robinson, Spider - The Mind 3 - Lifehouse
physics,
and if the Heat Death can also be avoided,
then eternal progress is possible.
 —Prof. Frank Tipler,
PHYSICS OF IMMORTALITY, 1993
 
Table of 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 
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Robinson, Spider - The Mind 3 - Lifehouse
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
 
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Robinson, Spider - The Mind 3 - Lifehouse

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,

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Robinson, Spider - The Mind 3 - Lifehouse

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

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Robinson, Spider - The Mind 3 - Lifehouse

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 display sentience signatures and thus could

not be a significant threat. To top it all off, the

whole nonevent was taking place less than two

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Robinson, Spider - The Mind 3 - Lifehouse

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

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Robinson, Spider - The Mind 3 - Lifehouse

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

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Robinson, Spider - The Mind 3 - Lifehouse

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

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