Callahan's Lady

by Spider Robinson

  “Good Christ,” she exploded, “do you mean to tell me that we took an addict, desperately struggling to control a massive habit, and—”

  Rose reached F, a clear tone with a perfect vibrato.

  “—and dropped him into a large bag of the stuff, yes, Lady.”

  “Saints add preservatives to us! We must fix this at once, Sherry—he could bloody kill himself. Look at his face!”

  The friend I spoke of with poison ivy: some of us who loved him held him down and tied his hands behind him for a day. He told us afterward that if we had not, he might have ripped it out by the root. He said the only other thing restraining him had been the conviction that if he did, it would keep on itching, and there would be nowhere to scratch…

  Lady Sally nudged me. “Let’s clear the room as quietly and discreetly as we can, shall we? If anyone gives you an argument, tell them it is my order. I’ll not have a man’s affliction gawked at in my House. Even one as spectacular as that.”

  We both went about the Bower, whispering in people’s ears. Mei-Ling already had Keith ready to travel. In a short time the grotto held only the two of us, Rose, Colt, and the sleeping Mary, whose weight could not be shifted without summoning extra help anyway, and the doors were locked.

  Rose was just reaching her third crescendo. Colt, it seemed, had beaten her to it by a full minute, but had not let it slow him down. When she finally went limp, he paused for a moment, his weight suspended on his arms, his breathing fast but steady, eyes shut. Then he sighed slightly and disengaged, looked vaguely around.

  “Get her to the other side of the room, Sherry,” Lady Sally rapped out.

  I obeyed, taking Rose by both ankles; she made no protest, and stayed where I left her, blinking at the ceiling.

  Colt focussed on Lady Sally’s voice, got to his feet and approached her. His stride was catlike and bouncy. He glistened with sweat and other things. His chest rose and fell in great surges. He seemed to sense that there would be some preliminary difficulty in target-acquisition: he growled deep in his throat, and his fingers flexed menacingly. He was a stud bull in heat, out of control, and Lady Sally was an old woman, smaller and lighter than Mei-Ling, unarmed—

  —who stood up on tiptoe and smacked him right across the chops.

  It was a ladylike slap, not a punch, but it spun his head around like a roundhouse right. He stood for a moment, blinking, as the report echoed in the Bower.

  “Don’t point that thing at me, young man,” she said clearly.

  He burst into tears.

  And wilted, in all senses of the word. Lady Sally moved in and held him while he cried, the way a compassionate teacher might hug a crying child, making consoling sounds. As she was patting the back of his head, she waved me over and into the hug. Between us we got him seated, and rocked and stroked and soothed him. And when his breathing had returned to normal, and we had let him go, and there had been silence for long enough that he was sure no one else was going to break it, he sighed and explained.

  He used a lot of words I don’t know. And he rambled quite a bit; he was not a socially sophisticated man, he didn’t know how to talk about himself very well. This is the gist:

  He was a neurophysiologist with a background in genetics. His research specialty was nerve regeneration, and why human nerves almost never regenerate. There are many different highly specialized kinds of nerve tissue. Male sexual nerve tissue is one of the most distinctly different kinds, useful to study. (This much is obvious even to a layman like me: how many other human nerves are designed to fire so emphatically and then become useless for an extended period? Or, for that matter, to lie dormant for the first dozen years of life?) And because a local hospital had recently found it profitable to cut a big slice of…that is, to aggressively enter the sex-change market, Colt found himself with access to great quantities of the stuff, as fresh as he wanted it, at reasonable cost.

  Still, his field was arcane, his overhead high and his grant proposals distasteful to most funding agencies; he might never have gotten anywhere at all if he had not hit the lottery for half a million tax-free dollars.

  The resulting fateful combination of quirky field of study and unreasonably high funding produced a breakthrough.

  “In every cell,” he told us, “there is a set of programming instructions that says, in effect, ‘make copies of yourself, until the following environmental conditions are achieved, and then stop.’ If something deletes or modifies that last clause, ‘and then stop,’ you get a cancer. If something modifies the second clause, the conditions under which to stop growing…well, you might get a giant, or a dwarf, or an Elephant Man.

  “Or, if you did it under controlled conditions, and got your reprogramming instructions just right, you might, you just might…be able to regenerate a severed spinal column. Or give sight to a blind person. Well, I found a way to modify that clause. But of course, it wasn’t those kinds of tissue I was working with.”

  He was a shy bachelor, the kind whose low sexual self-esteem had become self-reinforcing. Even as a teenager in the throes of first passion, he had never been capable of a second engagement until at least the next morning, and several lovers had taken the trouble to tell him how unusual this supposedly was. (It is not.)

  So when he stood in his laboratory one day and gazed upon enough male orgasmic nerve matter for six men, which he had coaxed to grow from the abandoned luggage of a single former gentleman, “—the first thing that occurred to me was how little of it there was, how little such stuff masses in relation to its importance. It came to me that this represented the equipment of a superman, and that it was small enough to tuck away even in…well, it just seemed like the natural next step to see if my gene-altering agent worked on tissue in situ as well as it did in the Petri dish, so to speak. By injecting a comparable dosage into myself. There being no likelihood of other volunteers. To calibrate the effect, I cut the strength by half, figuring I’d settle for the strength of three.”

  But it turned out the stuff worked twice as well on fresh tissue, living naturally in a live body rather than a culture medium, more receptive to the molecular command, “Copy yourself.” His thick organ was now snugly packed with the freshly grown penile nerve bundles of an entire basketball team plus their coach.

  For all his talent (or luck), Colt was a rather unimaginative man; it took him a surprising length of time to get it through his head that this represented a disaster.

  “Why, you perfect chump!” Lady Sally said.

  “I can’t argue,” he said miserably. “Horniness, you see, is in large part a function of those nerves wanting to fire. Some of that is in response to hydraulic pressure in the seminal vesicles, and some to simple intellectual yearning, but an equally large part is the fact that each of those nerve clusters just wants to fire at regular intervals. So now I have to go through at least half a dozen women a night just so I won’t be too horny to keep my mind on my work next day. And I still have to do a lot of labwork one-handed. Thank God I work alone.”

  I noticed for the first time how highly developed his right bicep was, compared to the left. Even more so than all right-handed men, I mean.

  “Good God,” the Lady breathed. “You didn’t solve the male dilemma: you sextupled it.”

  “Do you want to know the worst?” he cried. “I didn’t even solve the problem I originally set out to! I have a chemical compound which will encourage nerve tissue to duplicate itself—but only male sexual nerve. It doesn’t work on any other type, and I can’t seem to learn why not. My lifework is useless. Who but a fool would let me use it on him?”

  “Jeez, I don’t know,” I said. “There are a whole lot of fools.”

  He nodded. “That’s why I can’t publish.”

  “But there are unfortunates for whom your elixir would be a godsend—” Lady Sally began.

  “But at what social cost?” He shook his head. “There’s always a chance that someday I may succeed in adapting my compound for other ki
nds of tissue; that’s why I haven’t cut my throat yet. But until then I dare not publish.” He stopped, shook his head again, more violently. “But I’m forgetting. The secret is out now, isn’t it?”

  There was so much pain on his face that I searched for something to distract him. “Why six different girls a night?” I asked. “I mean why six different places? Why sextuple the inconvenience and expense?”

  He hung his head. “Because I didn’t want anyone to know. Because I was afraid if I didn’t keep myself under rigid control, if I let myself go, I might…do what I just did.” He swallowed. “Because I was half afraid I might kill some poor girl. Because I was ashamed. Embarrassed. Didn’t want to be gawked at and pointed to and chuckled over.” He swallowed again. “The way I’m going to be now.”

  “Not if I can help it,” Lady Sally said stoutly.

  He stared up at her. “Right. Thanks.”

  “See here, young man,” she said, “are you enjoying your life?”

  He groped for words. “Are you insane? Haven’t you heard me? Not only am I infuriated by a professional challenge that will not yield to anything in my arsenal, and exhausted from chasing this damned thing around Brooklyn in search of ten minutes’ peace, and shamed by my inability to control myself, and tormented by a chafing problem you wouldn’t believe,” his voice had risen in volume and pitch; he was roaring now: “on top of everything else I’m hemorrhaging money so fast the God damned lottery money is going to be gone soon!”

  Try the math yourself. Six women a night, average expenditure, say, eighty-five dollars a piece, in Carter-era dollars. (Outcall girls come high by the hour, bringing up the average.) Plus cabfare and Intensive Care Lotion: call it fifty bucks a night additional. Times seven. Times fifty-two. An annual budget of just over two hundred and seven grand—just for sex. Assume he’d spent only half of his winnings on his research. Even if he held living expenses to a bare minimum, and spent nothing further on his work, he was going to be broke in about a year.

  Or dead of heart failure. Of one kind or another.

  “Then it seems to me, dear boy,” Lady Sally said cheerfully, “that it is time for a change, wouldn’t you agree?”

  He drew in a deep breath—and I had to admire him. Instead of biting her head off, he held that breath a long time, and when it let it out he said only, “Madam, I am open to suggestions.”

  She drew herself up formally—difficult to do while seated, but no challenge for Lady Sally—and said, “You do well to address me by my title, sir. For I propose to offer you a shot at a part-time job.”

  “But it’s not safe, I tell you,” he cried. “You just saw that: I nearly assaulted you! I just can’t control this thing!”

  “Look at it,” she rapped.

  He did so. It had gone to about half-mast when Lady Sally had slapped him, but it was back to its former glory again now.

  “You’re in the presence of two highly trained courtesans,” she said. “Are you raping either of us at the moment? Have you ever thus far raped anyone?”

  “No, not yet, but—”

  “Did you cripple anyone with that tonight? Darling, popular myth to the contrary, it is not possible to kill a woman with a penis alone. Not even an implacable one. Well, I suppose in theory one could starve, but—”

  “Still—” Colt began.

  “What you’ve got there is not the gold-mine some teenaged boys would think it was, darling. A piston can do what you do, longer on less fuel. That’s not why I’m willing to take you on: I am not running a circus. It is because of the ethical behavior you seem to have exhibited throughout your folly. It suggests to me that you care about people—a quality I find much more impressive in a potential employee than breaking-strength.”

  He averted his eyes.

  She reached out a graceful, lightly wrinkled hand and touched his cheek. “Son, listen to me. Every man finds it difficult, often impossible, to control one of those things. Ask a prison guard what it’s like to try and control half a dozen. I think you’ve done a remarkable job of controlling yours, all things considered.”

  He began to cry softly.

  “Until we, for the proverbial best of reasons, goaded you into letting go,” Lady Sally went on.

  “That was my fault,” I put in. “I’m sorry, Colt—honest to God, I just thought—”

  “It was a joint decision,” she corrected, “under my direct supervision.” She turned back to Colt. “This leaves me obligated to you, and I would like to make amends, if I can.” He dabbed at his eyes, and looked up at her redly. “The choice is entirely yours, but if it influences your decision in any way, I have seen you in action, and I believe you to be trainable: given time, and willingness to study on your part, I think I could make an artist out of you. If we have to use up an artist or two every day making you safe to turn loose on the customers…well, we’re still ahead of the game mathematically, and I’m sure there’d be no shortage of volunteers.”

  He studied his hands, I think, and frowned. “But I don’t want this secret to become common knowledge—”

  “So we simply keep you out of the Bower.”

  He stared at her.

  “Listen to me, boy. There are perhaps half a dozen houses in this country that have a performer of your caliber on staff, no puns intended, freaks of nature rather than augmented specimens like yourself, and they are reasonably famous—in a small, discreet circle. If a female client comes here and finds an artist who is still capable after two or three rounds, she’s not going to find it all that astonishing—it’s more or less what she was expecting from a place with a reputation like mine. She’ll be pleased, certainly, she’ll tell her best girlfriend…but she won’t drop a line to Scientific American, or to whatever professional journal you neuromancers use. And she doesn’t have to know that after she goes home, you’re going to see two or three more clients. You’d have to get used to popularity—but not, I think, wide notoriety.”

  “But—”

  “All my artists are on straight salary plus tips.” She named the apprentice-scale and beginning artist’s salaries, and his eyes widened. “Plus room and board on the third floor, plus medical and pension benefits; it’s all in the contract.”

  “Lady Sally actually has us on contract,” I agreed. “Perhaps the only actual prostitution contract in the world, quite explicit and of course quite unenforceable in any court. Except the court of opinion of the rest of us artists. There have been remarkably few contract disputes.”

  “Three shifts a day; you work each one twice a week in any order that you can coordinate with Personnel; two months vacation with pay, to be arranged the same way. If you want or need to work extra shifts, we can discuss it. I think I should have to insist that my resident physician monitor your health carefully on a daily basis. Your free time is your own, barring the occasional refresher course or seminar, and if you want to spend it doing experiments I suppose we could find a corner of this drafty old barn to accommodate you: I’ll tolerate anything that doesn’t have a tendency to explode. As to the work itself: you will never be required to do anything you find objectionable, and you keep any tips. Have I left anything out? Well, lots of things, but those are the basics. Is the idea worth discussing?”

  “Say ‘yes’,” I suggested. “You’re being offered the opportunity of a lifetime.”

  He hesitated for a long time, studying her face and mine.

  “Do you really think I’m trainable?” he asked shyly.

  “You can keep on plugging away until you get it,” she pointed out, and a shared three-way belly laugh is a very nice way to join any company, isn’t it?

  BOOK THREE

  THE PARANOID

  CHAPTER 6

  FOR THE ASKING

  It’s amazing how many of the remarkable stories that could be told about Lady Sally’s House have to do with secrets.

  Oh, any bordello hears secrets, by definition: if our culture were not so sick that natural healthy urges are deadly
secrets, there would be little need for bordellos. Father Newman suggested once, only half kidding, that we artists—that all prostitutes—function rather like priests for people who feel more natural confessing their sins while naked. (He also pointed out the conveniences of doing so while the sins are still fresh in one’s mind: one of the several reasons the good Father likes to hang out in Lady Sally’s Parlor himself.) Like any brothel, Lady Sally’s House has probably triggered more confessions than St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

  Two things distinguish us from St. Pat’s: the different nature of the absolution we offer, and the fact that every single prayer voiced in Lady Sally’s House can be proven to have been heard on high, by an All-Hearing Ear. The ear, that is, of Mary, who sits in the Snoop Room on the third floor monitoring the dozens of bugs, for the protection of artists and clients alike. (Do you have any idea how much thirty seconds can mean to a paramedic in a heart case?) Her rig has a fast-scan mode that can deliver her a slice of every conversation in the House within five seconds: to me it’s just gabble at that speed, but Mary swears she can follow everything at once, and she’s never lost a bet.

  As is true at St. Pat’s—and not, I think, true of any brothel but ours—no secret ever leaves the House. One of the most inflexible House rules is that we may gossip about clients only with fellow artists, privately. Even then we’re not supposed to identify them by even House name. Mary talks to the rest of us about what she hears only when she thinks it’s needful.

  What seems to make Lady Sally’s House unique is that we get secrets so weird that half the time there’s no point in gossiping, because no one would believe you. Like the werebeagle, and the talking dog, and Colt the Six-Shooting Stud, and the woman client who had three…well, you get the idea. A place as special as Sally’s just naturally tends to draw bizarre and wonderful people. Luckily, the Lady’s magic is white magic: the oddballs she attracts are almost invariably benign. (The rest get what she calls “an invitation to the world.”)