Callahan's Con

by Spider Robinson

  And be smarter dead than in life?

  Or would you rather be a dork?

  But if you’ve got some manners and class

  And you ain’t a pain in the ass

  And you’ve an itch to pitch you a glass

  In an amazing state of grace

  You could be swinging at The Place!

  —and after that, Eddie and I did one of our usual sets of whatever piano and guitar tunes entered our heads, and by the time we were ready for a break, Willard had finished barbecuing, and about then the evening crowd started to arrive, and what with one thing and another, the Place managed—in spite of the brief shocking infestation of the Bureaucrat From Hell—to return to what we like to consider normal, at least for the rest of that night.

  Zoey came plodding home in the small hours. She looked like an unusually lovely zombie and moved like Lawrence three-quarters of the way to Aqaba. Bass players work hard. Especially on Duval Street.

  Some of the plodding, of course, was due to the fact that she was towing her ax behind her. Minga is a big brute of a standup bass, which produces a sound so powerful Zoey’s never bothered to electrify her, but even in the wheeled case I built for her she just barely qualifies as portable. Erin keeps offering to just teleport the thing home for her mother after gigs, and I suspect one of these days Zoey’s going to take her up on it. Art ain’t easy.

  By then everyone but me had gone home, and the compound residents—Eddie, Doc and Mei-Ling, Tom Hauptmann, Long-Drink, Tommy Janssen, Pixel, Alf, Lex and even, thank God, Harry—had all gone to bed in their various cottages. I still had a few closing-up chores to do behind the bar, but nothing that wouldn’t keep until tomorrow. I stopped whatever I was doing, came around the bar, and joined my beloved in the last fifty yards of her March to the Sack.

  “Hi,” I said.

  Pause, several slow strides long. “Mmrm,” she agreed finally.

  “Glad it went well, Spice.” Her face was slack with fatigue, but I could tell it had been a very good gig: the corners of her mouth turned up perceptibly.

  She nodded once. Long pause. “Gate.”

  “Yeah, Omar’s fixing it. It got split down the middle. I told him to leave a scar.”

  Pause. Then one eyebrow twitched. “Big Beef.”

  “Right.”

  She grunted approval. We were already in our cottage by then. She let go of Minga’s case handle in the middle of the living room and, freed of her weight, seemed to almost float into the bedroom. Where she waited, patient as a horse being unsaddled, while I undressed her. It is, I find, a vastly interesting experience to undress the most beautiful and desirable woman in the world, and to know with equal certainty both that she feels exactly the same about you, and that if you attempt the slightest sexual liberty now, she will kill you with a single blow. There ought to be a word for frustration that doesn’t make it sound like a bad thing. I stopped chatting to devote my full attention to the task.

  As soon as I was done, Zoey toppled over into bed like a felled tree—a fascinating thing to watch, from start to a couple of moments after the finish, when the ripples died down. I heard her eyelids slam shut, and she made a small purring sound deep in her throat. But my wife is a polite person; before surrendering to unconsciousness, she turned her face toward me and murmured, “’thing ’kay, Spice?”

  Tough choice to make. I knew she was physically and mentally exhausted, knew she had earned her rest, knew there was nothing useful she could possibly do about anything until she woke up anyway.

  I also knew, to a fair degree of certainty, what she would say tomorrow if I let her go to sleep without telling her. The question was, was I hero enough to accept that penance, in order to give my beloved a good night’s rest.

  Well, maybe I would have been…but I hesitated too long making my choice. One of her eyelids flicked, as if it were thinking about opening, and she repeated, “’thing ’kay?”

  I suppressed a sigh. As casually as I knew how, I said, “A little hassle came up, but nothing you need worry about now. Erin and I have it covered.”

  She made a half-inch sketch of a nod. There was a long pause, and just as I’d decided she was under and I was home free, her eyelid twitched again, and she mumbled, “Wha’ hassle?”

  This time my sigh emerged. “Well—” Further amphigory would only be counterproductive. I wish they made a tasty bullet. “—this afternoon a state education inspector showed up. She says she’s going to put Erin in foster care because we’re unfit parents. No big deal. Go to sleep.”

  For about ten seconds I thought I had pulled it off. Then one of her eyes opened wide. “Name.”

  “Ludnyola Czrjghnczl. Accent on the rjgh.”

  The eye powered up, swiveled to track me. “Oh my God. A relative of—”

  I hastily nodded, to spare her throat. She’d been breathing barroom air all night. “You guessed it.”

  Both eyes were open now, though the second wasn’t tracking yet. “Was she carrying a briefcase?”

  “Afraid so.”

  She was sitting bolt upright in bed. I hadn’t seen her move. “Job title.”

  “Senior Field Inspector, Florida Department of Ed.”

  Her second eye caught up with the first and locked on to me. “The homeschooling scam came apart?”

  I nodded, and she groaned. “Oh, shit.”

  A man has to know when he’s in over his head. What kind of coward would wake his teenager in the middle of the night to help him deal with an emergency? This kind. I fiddled with my watch, and Erin materialized next to us, and after that, a whole lot of words got said, but I can’t think of a reason to burden you with any of them.

  It wasn’t that bad. It could have gone much worse. It was no more than half an hour after dawn when I managed to get the last of us—me—to sleep. But the upshot was, all three of us started the next day feeling unusually tired…and of course it turned out to be a worse day than the one before.

  Not that it started out that way.

  I was able to sleep in a little, for one thing. I run the kind of bar where it’s not strictly necessary for me to be there when it opens. Everybody knows where everything is, and just about any of them is competent to step in and serve a newcomer if need be. (It must be hell to serve alcohol to people you don’t trust with your life.)

  When I finally emerged, showered and nearly human, from my home into the morning light, Long-Drink McGonnigle was behind the bar, and the dozen or so people in front of it all seemed content with his stewardship. A glance at the sun told me it was early afternoon on a nice day, if that last clause isn’t redundant in Key West. Two steps later, I stopped in my tracks, paralyzed by a dilemma that might have killed a lesser man.

  Two paths lay before me. The right-hand path led to the pool—where Zoey sprawled in a chaise longue, sunbathing. (Not tanning. Thanks to the Callahans, none of us is capable of it. Our bodies don’t believe in ionizing radiation, any more than they believe in bullets. Perhaps this is regrettable—but since it kept us from being toasted by an exploding atom bomb once, I’ve never quite managed to regret it.) My Zoey has the most beautiful body I’ve ever seen—have I mentioned this?—as generously lush as my own is parsimoniously scrawny, the kind of body Rubens or Titian would have leapt to paint, the kind they call BBW on Usenet, and when it glistens with perspiration…Well, it glistens, that’s all.

  But the left-hand path led to coffee.

  I might be standing there now, my nose still pulling me in two different directions, if I hadn’t noticed the small bucket of coffee my darling had placed on the flagstone beside her recliner.

  “Can I have some of your coffee, Spice?”

  She raised her sunglasses. “If it’s worth your life to you.”

  “Thanks.” Cuban Peaberry, it was, somewhere between a medium and a dark roast. To forestall my assassination, I took a seat down at the end of the recliner and began rubbing her feet. Young men, forget Dr. Ruth and heed the advice of a middle-ag
ed fart: Rub her tootsies. This is the only Jungle Love Technique you will ever need; done properly it will melt a Valkyrie.

  “Have some more coffee,” Zoey murmured shortly. And a little later, “All right, you win; I will tell you of our troop movements.” Then nothing but purring for a while.

  After I judged enough time had gone by, I said, “Has Erin filled you in?”

  “Yes. It ought to be manageable. She’s working on it now.”

  As if we’d invoked her, Erin came out of the house just then. From a distance, in shorts and halter and bare feet, she looked pretty enough to make a bishop dance the dirty boogie. Closer up, though, the frown spoiled the effect a little. Nobody can frown like a new teenager.

  When she reached us she dropped like a sack of laundry into the chaise longue next to Zoey’s and said, “I think we’re screwed.”

  “I’m just rubbing her feet,” I said.

  “Good morning to you, too,” her mother said, ignoring me.

  “Good morning,” Erin conceded.

  “That’s better. How screwed?”

  “The law says just what I thought it did: We can get me evaluated by quote any Florida-certified teacher unquote.”

  “But…?”

  “Well, to put it in technical terms, Ludnyola has the whammy on us. She didn’t just pull some strings, she winched some cables. The deck is not just cold, she’s dipped it in liquid nitrogen. I won’t tell you the details of how she rigged it, because I’d get too mad. But the ultimate carriage-return is, there’s now one and only one person in the state of Florida authorized to evaluate me.”

  Zoey and I groaned together. How odd that our groans of genuine dismay sounded precisely like the moans of pleasure Zoey had been making as I rubbed her feet.

  “You guessed it,” Erin confirmed. “Accent on the rjgh—as in, ‘What a dorjgkh!’”

  Zoey and I exchanged a glance. “Screwed,” I said, and she nodded.

  “Well…,” Erin said, and trailed off.

  After a while, her mother said, “You won’t be well for long, if you don’t finish the sentence.”

  “Well, we may have one thing going for us. I’m afraid to trust it, though.”

  Why does evolution require humans approaching puberty to become exasperating? My theory is, so their parents will go away and let them get some experimenting done. The only defense is to refuse to be exasperated. (Or, of course, to go away.) After another while, Zoey said gently, “I might better advise you if I had some sense of what it is.”

  “What what is?”

  “The one thing we may have going for us that you’re afraid to trust.”

  “Oh yeah—sorry. It sounds paradoxical, but the only edge we may have is that Ludnyola is a real bureaucrat.”

  Zoey and I were beginning to be tired of exchanging glances, so we stopped. “This is good?”

  “In a twisted way. It could have been much worse: she could have been like half the other people in civil service.”

  “Who are—?”

  “Who are chair-warming buck-passing trough-slurping fakes, pretending to be bureaucrats because that’s an acceptable excuse for not being a human being. As far as I can tell from study of her record and interrogation of her computer, Ludnyola is the genuine article: a machine with a pulse.”

  “Yeah, so?” I grasped the distinction, and from my limited acquaintance with the field inspector, agreed with Erin’s analysis…but I still didn’t see how this helped our cause. I suspected caffeine deficiency, and signaled Long-Drink to send a Saint Bernard.

  Zoey seemed to get it, though. “Is that true, Jake?” she asked.

  “Yeah, she’s Mr. Spock without the charm, all right. So what. Why is this good for the Jews?”

  “Don’t you grok, Daddy? From everything I’ve been able to learn about her, she’s a cyborg. And cyborgs always follow their programming. They have to.”

  “Sure. And she’s programmed like a Saberhagen Berserker…or an Ebola virus molecule.”

  “She’s not an assassin, Daddy; she’s a bureaucrat. They live and die by rules. By the rules. If we are very lucky, if she’s as genuine and as hardcore as we think she is, it just won’t be possible for her to break the rules, any more than an Asimov robot could punch somebody.”

  Alf arrived with the drinks cart; I thanked him, gave him a quick scratch around the base of the horns (who doesn’t enjoy that, eh?), and traded Zoey’s empty for the new coffee. It was Tanzanian Peaberry, roasted by Bean Around The World up in British Columbia, the mere scent of which always kick-starts my cortex. Sure enough, after only one sip—okay, gulp—I saw with crystal clarity that I was still confused.

  Zoey saw it too. “Jake, take it from the top.”

  “Okay. Ludnyola wants to take our kid away and put her in hell. Using the goddam rules.” More coffee. It was literally priceless then. No Tanzanian coffee was sold anywhere in the world that year, because all the Tanzanians who were supposed to harvest the coffee either were butchered or starved to death. The only way to get any was to have a teleport who loved you in your family.

  “What is her thesis?” Zoey prompted.

  “We’re shitty parents.”

  “And her proof of this is that we—”

  Light finally dawned. “Ah.”

  “—that you did a shitty job of educating me,” Erin supplied. “And you didn’t.”

  “We didn’t do a damn thing!” I felt obliged to point out, though I was already beginning to see what she meant.

  “Exactly. You stayed out of my way. How many universities have that much sense? It was a terrific education.”

  “—and we can prove it,” Zoey said.

  “Exactly,” Erin agreed. “If she has any doubts after ten minutes of conversation, let her give me the Mensa test! Or any other test she’s capable of comprehending herself—I’ve got more IQ points on her than she weighs, Daddy.”

  I wanted to agree with them and cheer up, I just couldn’t seem to work it up. “And you think if we just prove to her that she’s wrong, she’ll go away?”

  She sighed. “Well, like I said, I’m afraid to trust it. But if she’s a genuine bureaucrat—”

  “I don’t know,” I said, finishing my coffee. “I think you may be underestimating the ability of even the most robotic bureaucrat to interpret the rules. Remember, she’s related by blood to Beelzebub.”

  “That’s the question,” Erin agreed. “How important is family to a robot? Cousin Jorjhk, back on Long Island, was as corrupt, venal, and nepotistic as any other public official on Long Island: one glance at his record will tell you that. But Ludnyola here comes across as…well, as a laser beam. Straighter than any straight arrow. I think she got into this because she believed what her relatives told her, and what she saw yesterday didn’t help: she thinks we’re all some kind of cult of anarchists and hippies.”

  “We’re not?” I said, and Zoey pinched me. Never mind where. By the poolside, okay?

  “She’ll never understand us much better than that; she’s not equipped. But we don’t need her to. If I’m reading her right, the only thing she cares about is whether my education has been neglected. We can demonstrate that it has not, no matter how she may stack the deck. That may be enough to deactivate her—whatever she may privately wish she could do to us.”

  “I follow the logic,” I agreed, and looked for words to explain my doubt. “Back in the late sixties, I lived in Boston for a while. There was a drug cop there like you’re talking about, Sergeant Holtz. Like Inspector Teal in the Saint stories, he lived by the rules, and as long as he didn’t catch you violating any laws, you were safe from him. This made him unique among drug cops, then or ever. Well, this one pot wholesaler who thought he was as slick as the Saint—come to think of it, his name was Simon—used to yank Holtz’s chain all the time. Simon was slick enough to get away with it, too, was never on the same block as probable cause. But he was unwise enough to rent a third-floor walkup…and one night Sergeant Holtz arrest
ed him for coming home.

  “He’d turned up the fact that Simon was one-eighth Mohawk—it probably wasn’t hard, the guy used to brag about it—and then he’d done a little research. Turned out there was a very old law still on the books in Boston, then—might still be, for all I know—that made it illegal for an Indian to go above the first floor in any public dwelling. Sergeant Holtz explained matters to a judge who was just as much of a stickler for rules as he was, and Simon would have done time if he hadn’t jumped bail.”

  “Okay, I get your point,” Erin said. “But Simon really was a drug dealer, Pop. I’m really not an uneducated kid.”

  “Agreed. The trick will be to overcome Ludnyola’s presumption that you are one. Whether we can depends on how thick her blinders are. And I’d have to say in the short time I shared with the Field Inspector, her mind seemed as made up as a bed the second week of boot camp.”

  “Oh, big deal,” Erin said. “I don’t see what everybody’s worried about, anyway. No matter what, she’s not taking me away from you guys.”

  I didn’t say anything. Neither did Zoey. When neither of us had said anything for several seconds, Erin repeated, “She’s not,” with rising pitch and volume.

  “Of course not,” her mother said gently. “But think it through, honey. If she comes after us, she has the whole machinery of the state behind her.”

  “So? We can whip ’em all!”

  “Sure,” I said. “But not without causing talk.”

  “Oh. Shit.”

  “If a state cop whips me upside the head with a baton, and I don’t seem to mind, he and all the other policeman will become very curious to know why not. Sooner or later they’ll learn me and my family are bulletproof, too, and then we’ll be talking to a lot of humorless people from Langley, and life will be much less fun. Those guys would have uses for bulletproof people—ugly ones. One way or another, it’d be the end of The Place; I doubt they’d leave us alone to drink in the sun.” I reached for an empty mug and started to pour myself a beer.

  “I’m not going underground at my age,” Zoey said. “I took that class.”

  “Wait a minute!” Erin said. “So are you saying if we can’t head her off, I’m supposed to go with that nimrod? To some foster home?” The pitch of her voice began rising on the second word, and by the last it was close to supersonic. I opened my mouth to reply, genuinely curious to hear what I would say, but I never got to, because just then the man monster walked in.