Callahan's Place 07 - Callahan's Legacy (v5.0)

by Spider Robinson

“If there is even a suggestion that we take this great gift and immediately try to use it to turn a profit, turn First Contact into a cash cow, I for one am leaving.”

  “Well, I’m suggesting it. That’s what humans do—why deny it?”

  “Why admit it?”

  “Because it’s true. Because we can’t have telepathy based on bullshit.”

  “Damn it to Hell—”

  After half a heated hour of it, I had grasped that consensus was receding like the horizon, and exercised my authority as proprietor. “What we are going to do,” I said very loudly, “is treat Solace as she has asked to be treated: like any other customer. Since she has no way of taking a drink, she doesn’t even owe us the three bucks a beer costs, and she doesn’t use up any more electricity than I was planning to burn anyway, and she shows up for a grand total of about one pleasant hour a night, and I am not going to have it spoiled by a bunch of bickering barflies. Nobody asks Solace for any goddam favors—and anybody who mentions harming her again will be lucky to wake up in Emergency. And there’s an end to it!” It was a phrase Mike Callahan had used to disperse the rare quarrels in his Place, and invoking it worked: the subject was dropped.

  ***

  My ruling had stood, but there was often a little uncomfortable residue of frustration in the air immediately after one of Solace’s nightly visits. And we tended to spend a lot of the time she was there just chewing the breeze with her, playing word- or other games, stepping around the central question of our relationship with her.

  “Nikky,” I said now, “you said there were three ways people treat most things: exploit it, trade with it, or worship it. How do you treat the other-than-human? What should we be giving Solace, that we aren’t?”

  “But you are,” he said, smiling at me. “Imperfectly, perhaps, but Solace’s presence here proves that you have not failed. To the other-than-human, one gives love—and wonder.”

  “Huh.” I thought about it. “I have to admit, there isn’t exactly a big shortage of either of those around here. What do you say, Solace?”

  “I say that I have something in common with my brother Acayib. Like him I cannot feel pain…but can feel sadness. I cannot hurt…but I can suffer. Dealing with you and your friends, Jake, has often brought me sadness and confusion. But that means I must love you, for only those you love can make you sad. I say that you are my friends. My true and only friends,” she said. “More than I ever expected to have. Most humans share the instincts of the Lucky Duck. If we have further to travel together, toward one another, let us be grateful that we at least know that.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” Long-Drink said, and did. His glass—and mine—hit the hearth together.

  “Doctor.…excuse me, Nikky?” Solace said. I blinked. How often does a computer misspeak itself, even momentarily? “Are you…willing to answer questions about the future? I have no wish to cause paradox—”

  Nikky frowned. “You have a reason for asking?”

  Her icon nodded. “I seek always to understand human beings…unattached to succeeding. But some of my projections, my extrapolations of historical trends into the immediate future, lead me to conclusions I find…dubious. The mathematical structure is elegant, but the answers seem wrong, somehow.”

  “Doesn’t surprise me,” I said. “I’m astonished at how well you do understand humans. That you can do it at all, I mean. If I tried for a hundred years, I don’t think I could learn to think like one of my own corpuscles—or even, say, a skin cell. And that’s what people are to you, metaphorically speaking. The teeny little things that collectively make you up.”

  “Yet must not a prudent man understand his corpuscles, and skin cells?” she said. “Who but myself can debug me?”

  Nikky was still frowning. He certainly had the eyebrows for it, big black thunderclouds of hair. He glanced around, and saw that most of the room was paying no attention to our conversation. “There are…things about the future that must not be revealed to anyone in this ficton. In general, what I call ‘miscegemation’—anachronistic revelation—is usually a bad practice. If life loses its surprise, it loses its flavor. But perhaps if you were to pose a few limited questions, restricted to, say, the next few years, I might be able to provide a bug-check of your synthesis.”

  “Solace,” I asked, rather surprised, “do you really feel you know enough about human nature to make projections about the future? Say, a year in advance?”

  “I believe so, Jake—but I am not sure you will believe some of the more certain predictions I would make.”

  “For instance…”

  “Well…” How astounding, to see a computer with umpty-terabytes of ram hesitate. “I think I can say with some confidence, for example…that by this time next year the Berlin Wall will be rubble, the last Russian soldier will have left Afghanistan, the Soviet Union will have ceased to exist, fracturing without violence into independent republics, the Cold War will be officially declared over, and black rule will come to South Africa, under President Nelson Mandela.”

  “WHAT?” “Have you lost your parity bit?” “Bogon flux rising, Captain!” “Yo’ mama!” These were among the reactions from the few parties to this conversation.

  “Also, Geraldo Rivera will have his nose broken on camera—yet there will be no general celebration, and his assailant will be charged with a crime. Meanwhile the greatest single killer of human beings of all time, smallpox, will be officially declared extinct—and there will be no significant celebration of that, either.”

  “Nikky,” I said hastily, “you don’t have to reveal any confidences—we can handle this. Solace, you’re way off base. I don’t know just where it was you dropped a decimal place, but what you just said is crazy as a barbed-wire canoe. Trust me.”

  “Jake,” Nikky said sadly, “I trust you a great deal—but I’m afraid you are wrong. Solace is correct in every single particular.”

  “But—but that’s impossible. How could the Soviet fucking Union ‘cease to exist’? Peristroika is bullshit—”

  “It will go bankrupt,” Solace said.

  “Don’t be silly. If it were possible for them to go broke, they’d have done it long ago. If a couple of million of them starve, the Politburo just shrug and keep pursuing the socialist ideal. They won’t go broke until they run out of cannon fodder…which means, when they run out of people. Besides, no grand jury in the world would indict anyone for punching Geraldo Rivera.”

  “He will be a neoNazi.”

  I like to think I keep an open mind. But the notion that I would one day find myself admiring anything at all about a neoNazi was—

  …well, okay. It seemed ridiculous.

  “Jake,” Nikky said, “you are a cynic at heart. You believe all bad things will always tend to be as they have been. Because the Politburo has starved millions in the past, it will always do so. No Nazi will ever share ordinary human impulses. How, then, do you resolve the question of Viet Nam?”

  Ouch. “Ouch.”

  “And the Wall will really come down?” Zoey asked. Her late father and mother had gotten out of eastern Germany just in time, back in the late Thirties, and had never been able to return; the place was a little more than just an abstraction to Zoey.

  “Women will dance naked by firelight atop its stones as the last sections are pulled down,” Solace stated. “Nikky?”

  He nodded. “True. I saw it. Will have seen it. Have seen it about to be.” He sighed. “She was lovely, by firelight…”

  “And Mr. Mandela will truly walk free?” asked Tanya Latimer. Blind ladies tend to have very good ears, and hers had grown points at the mention of South Africa; she had been shamelessly eavesdropping ever since. “He will lead his nation? Without bloodshed?”

  “Yes,” Nikky and Solace said together.

  “Dear Jesus,” she said, and began to cry. Her husband Isham folded her in his great arms, and they began to rock together, he laughing, she crying, totally telepathic; theirs is one of the great ma
rriages.

  I found that my own eyes were wet. “Look,” I said, “I think this is just about enough of this. Okay? I’m starting to itch. I’ve got—let me see, at least eight irresistibly good stories to tell, now—and nobody outside this room would believe a single one of them. I’m glad we’ve established that Solace has a reasonably efficient way of predicting the immediate future, and now I propose that we drop it.”

  “Hey, take it easy, Jake,” Long-Drink said. “This is interestin’.”

  I shook my head. “Nikky, you were right: to know the future is to lose something of the now. This is wrong, Drink. Didn’t you ever spy out your Christmas presents in advance…and then wish you hadn’t? One morning the whole world will wake up and find out the Evil Empire just packed it in, and they’ll all look at each other in awe and wonder…and to me it’ll be old news. No amount of money I could make on selling the ruble short could compensate me for that.”

  “I am sorry, Jake,” Solace said. “I should have realized—”

  “No reason you should have. I think it’s a human thing. But you two are like unprofessional book reviewers, you’re giving away the plot twists, and I’d like you to stop, now.”

  “Wise words,” Tesla said. “I apologize to you, Jake. I suppose I assumed that as an old friend of Mike and Lady Sally, you had dealt with this sort of thing before.”

  It did seem odd. “It just never came up,” I told him. “We didn’t even know Mike was a time traveler until right there at the end, just before the bomb went off. He never told us a word about specifics of the future. We never asked. I can’t speak for anybody else, but I was afraid if I asked, he might answer. It’s tempting to peek ahead to the ending—but it always spoils it if you do. You gotta pay your money to enjoy the ride. Anyhow, we never asked. Now, this is my house, and I hereby declare the subject changed. Who has a new subject?”

  “Word games?” Solace suggested at once. “How about inversions? A man with a fat head…”

  “—keeps his hat fed,” Long-Drink said, and guffawed. “I get it. Uh…‘He had a grizzled chin…and a chiseled grin.’” That brought scattered applause. “You try one, Jake.”

  “Well…whenever Ralph has puppies, Doc has to go visit the Von Wau Wau home with his needle. Don’t want a—”

  “—rabies boom in the babies’ room,” Zoey and the Drink said along with me. Fast crowd.

  “Yeah,” Tanya said, “and Michael Jackson keeps all his records in a hit shed.”

  That drew hoots of laughter, and of course a word game in Mary’s Place attracts people like flies; our circle expanded. Tommy Janssen held up a joint, made a face, and said, “Bum doobie. Got it from a—”

  “—dumb booby,” several people chorused.

  Well, believe it or not, from there it degenerated. Zoey perpetrated some horror I’ve blocked out about drab Jews who jab Druze, and someone else who shall remain nameless explained the difference between a tribe of clever pygmies and a women’s track team—the pygmies are a cunning bunch of runts—(I hasten to add that this unnamed person was female; we weren’t allowing men to be sexist that week), and Doc Webster, who ought to take the rap for it, attempted a complicated atrocity that involved something called a Shick Brit-house, and one of us who had given up drinking when he found it causing impotence said that in his experience, a rum cooler was a cum ruler—we had lost all decency and decorum, in other words. The laughter became ribald and rowdy enough to wake up Nagenneen, who added his memorable cackle to the merriment. He also said something involving “baked noodles and naked poodles,” but he was laughing so hard we didn’t catch the set-up.

  Well, from inversions it was a natural segué (exactly how much does a seg weigh?) to palindromes, words or sentences that are the same spelled backwards. Mention of baked noodles reminded Doc Webster of one of his favorites: “Go hang a salami; I’m a lasagna hog.”

  Thus challenged, Long-Drink produced the inspired, “Wonder if Sununu’s fired now?”

  When the applause died away, Isham grinned and declaimed, “Lewd did I live; evil did I dwell.”

  “I hear that,” Tanya responded, and poked him accurately in the ribs to more laughter and applause.

  I felt inspired myself, and announced, “You know, a guy named Robert tried to get Solace to help him set up a bogus company, that would make nonexistent hot-dog rolls and fleece all the investors.” A hush fell over the room. “If the story ever gets out, the headline is going to be: mac snubs bob’s bun scam.”

  A blizzard of peanuts occurred in my vicinity.

  Suddenly Nikky made a dramatic gesture with his magic hands, confronted Solace directly, and bellowed, “I, madam, I made radio! So I dared! Am I mad? Am I?”

  It wasn’t until she said, “Brilliant, Nikky—you’re the only man who ever lived who could have spoken that one,” that we all realized he had just made a palindrome.

  When the ovation had died away, Doc Webster cleared his throat and tried for the last word. “Well, that was five,” he rumbled. “And…a six is a six is a six is a six is a…” He kept it up just long enough for everyone to realize it was another palindrome.

  Ralph Von Wau Wau awarded that one “Top spot.”

  Which caused Tommy Janssen to say, “Go, dog!”

  Doc Webster glared ferociously at both of them, and they looked at each other, grinned, and said “Sue us!” together. The Doc lost it and got the giggles, and from there I suppose things might well have escalated into a full-scale riot, but just then there was an earsplitting sound and an intolerable brilliance behind me, and when I spun around and got my eyes working again a large lady and a skinny giant were lying on my floor, both dressed from neck to toe in what looked like form-fitting mylar, surrounded by a receding outline of sputtering sawdust.

  5

  ED, UNDO BOD, NUDE

  …and not just any large lady and skinny giant. They were both out cold, face up—but I’ve have recognized them face down and wearing masks. It was the namesake of Mary’s Place, and her old man.

  “Jake,” Zoey said, her voice dangerous, “don’t tell me, let me guess. That’s your old flame, Mary, right? The one this place is named after? And that Mickey Finn character she ran off with?” She glared at the Lucky Duck.

  “Mickey Finn-Callahan,” I corrected absently. “—and Mary Callahan-Finn. Those are indeed they.”

  ***

  Again I have some explaining to do.

  Before I knew Zoey, years before Zoey came into my life and started singing harmony, Mary Callahan—Mike’s daughter—was the only woman I’d been head over heels in love with since the death of my wife fifteen years earlier. One of those “thunderbolt” things. We had a glorious affair, Mary and I—one of the great ones of my life. It lasted just long enough to be measured in minutes, and then Mickey Finn showed up, and Mary went head over heels. She has a thing for tall skinny weird guys—the way I have a thing for large, voluptuous women—and Finn is just plain taller, skinnier and weirder than I’ll ever be on my best day.

  He’s not even partly human, and only partly organic. What he is, he’s a cyborg zombie who managed to wake himself up.

  He started out as a reasonably humanoid alien, a member of an old and wise race in a star system far from Sol. Then a much nastier race, the Cockroaches, happened onto Finn’s people, and…well, they didn’t destroy them, exactly, quite. They…recorded them: reduced them, one and all, to patterns of frozen data representing their physical and mental descriptions, and filed these patterns away for possible future study in a kind of database of souls. And what was left—the protein—well, they ate that.

  Finn alone they kept corporeal—his body “enhanced” with cyborg machinery that made him both mighty enough to rupture a star and loyal enough to be trusted utterly—so that he could serve as a kind of star-scout, going before the Cockroaches (the Masters, he was taught to call them), seeing that their path was kept smooth, by exterminating any local vermin that seemed intelligent enough to be a p
otential nuisance.

  Finn’s own will still existed, somewhere in his brain—but it was quite helpless, just along for the ride. He could not form the wish to disobey his Master’s least whim: he was counterprogrammed. His resulting shame and frustration found their only expression as rage, giving him a capacity for violence that made him an excellent interstellar hatchetman.

  He had been practicing that trade for centuries, and had a lot of notches on his belt, when he happened across Earth, back in 1972. He recognized humanity at once as fitting his programmed parameters for “vermin.” But they chanced to be so much like his own lost race in so many physical ways, and so many emotional ways as well, that, despite his iron programming, Finn found himself regretting the necessity of their destruction. To steel himself for the task, he walked into a bar called Callahan’s Place and ordered ten whiskies…

  Fortunately for the human race, under their influence he was able to give us just enough hint to figure out how he could be deprogrammed, prevented from automatically alerting his Masters to humanity’s existence. (The solution is implicit in the human name he took.) Because he had been able to disobey that single order, the structure of his conditioning collapsed, and he became a free agent again. Like many a scout before him, he basically faked his own death and deserted, and some years later married a local: Callahan’s (and Lady Sally’s) daughter Mary. Hours after I had just finished falling in love with her.

  Anyway, one day one of the Cockroaches—Finn’s personal Master, a renegade we ended up calling The Beast—got to wondering what had happened to him, and came to find out, and that’s how Callahan’s Place turned into a bright hot mushroom cloud, and as a kind of…fallout from that event, Finn and Mary decided to leave together. All this happened a few years ago, and ever since, to the best of my knowledge, the two of them had been off somewhere in space and time, on a quixotic quest.

  Armed with the sole clue that Mary and Finn were both unconscious face up on my barroom floor, I deduced that the mission was not going well.