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

by Spider Robinson

  ***

  “SHADDAP,” I bellowed, and the hubbub chopped off at once. “Thank you. Everybody stay back!” Everyone obeyed, except Doc Webster, who cannot be kept from a patient in need.

  Since I could see they were both alive—it was nice, with my pregnant Zoey in the room, to have a legitimate reason for closely observing the rise and fall of Mary’s splendid breasts under that mylar—the most pressing question seemed to be, is anyone or anything in hot pursuit? And the only way to get an answer was to try and restore one or both of them to consciousness. Waking a seven-foot-tall Cray who weighs over six hundred pounds and has been known to annihilate whole stars would seem the more challenging of the two on the face of it—but I knew a trick for waking Finn, one that I had seen Mary use in extremis, and I decided to try him first. I walked over to where he and Mary lay, surrounded by a ring of sawdust ash that looked eerily like a photo negative of the chalk outline the cops draw around corpses.

  I bent over to put my mouth near Finn’s ear. “Wake up, Finn,” I said loudly. “Mary needs you!”

  No response. So much for that trick…

  Well, maybe it needed to be in her voice. The hell with it. I stepped over Finn and joined Doc Webster at Mary’s side. I placed the back of my hand against Mary’s forehead. Skin temperature. We could both see a pulse at her temple. The Doc pried open an eyelid; nobody home. “MARY! WAKE UP,” I shouted experimentally, but was unsurprised when it didn’t work. Neither did a slap.

  I was starting to get a bit frantic. I had once met a Cockroach—one Cockroach, an outcast, with only its own personal resources to draw on—and I had needed an atom bomb and the intercession of both Mike Callahan and Mickey Finn to live through the experience. For all I knew, the entire Cockroach race, or their equivalent of Marines, was about to come through the ceiling of my bar at any moment. And this time around I had a pregnant mate to protect. Not to mention the second of the three great loves in my life—my best friend’s only daughter—and her husband, also a friend. I got up from my crouch and headed for the bar.

  It was my vague stupid intention to get the shotgun I keep behind that bar (a shotgun is better than a billy-club: you put a round of buckshot in the ceiling and you won’t need to break anybody’s head)—but halfway to the bar I started thinking clearly again. I might as well try and shoot an incoming comet. It shouldn’t be a total loss, once I was behind the bar I dialed myself an Irish coffee. “Noah,” I called out, “you wouldn’t happen to have any more nukes in inventory, by any chance?” It had been Noah Gonzalez who had supplied the bomb the last time around, a home-made terrorist job; he’d been working for the Bomb Squad then.

  “Sorry, Jake,” Noah said. “Fresh out.”

  “Pity. You were my best hope. Anybody else here have any nuclear arms lying around the house? Nikky?” No response. “Not even you, Duck? It’s so implausible I’d expect it to be true.”

  “You should have asked me last week,” he said, sarcastic to the end. I think.

  “Damn. Well then, in that case there’s only one man in this room who can save us.” I reached under the bar, and took out…my cordless phone. I punched the “on” button, and flung the phone across the room.

  Its recipient picked it out of the air like Willie Mays trapping a triple, and gaped at me uncomprehendingly.

  “Call Mike!” I cried. “Tell him we need him, now!”

  His wrinkled monkey forehead relaxed. “Sure ting, Boss,” Fast Eddie said, and began poking that phone in the ribs.

  ***

  The last time we’d all seen Mike Callahan—several months earlier, when Mary’s Place had been open no more than a week—he had entrusted Eddie, just before he left to go back to his home in the future, with a folded piece of paper which held an emergency phone number for him. “As far as the phone company’s concerned,” Mike had said, “That number doesn’t exist and never will. I can’t promise I’ll hear it if it rings, and I can’t promise I’ll come if I do—but I will say that if I hear it, I’ll do my best for you.” I’d seen Eddie memorize that number and then chew up and swallow the piece of paper. Thank God he hadn’t forgotten it.

  I hoped Mike happened to be near the phone…

  I saw Fast Eddie start to speak, then pause to wait out an answering machine’s outgoing message. It couldn’t have been more than a few words; shortly Eddie was saying, “Mike, it’s me. It’s a little afta midnight on Novemba twenny-toid—no, twenny-fought, now, nineteen eighty-eight. Getcher ass ovah heah: Mary and Finn are out cold, and we dunno who got ’em or when dey catch up, see? Repeat: dis is Eddie Costigan, twenny-four No—”

  —earsplitting sound, intolerable brightness, bare inches away—

  Mike Callahan stood next to me, behind my bar, already scanning the room for his daughter.

  ***

  Something appeared on the bar top before him. I simply cannot describe it. My eyes hurt trying to see it. Callahan snatched it up in one big hand, and vaulted over the bar.

  I finished my Irish coffee in two great draughts.

  He was naked, just as he’d been when he arrived the last time. Had we caught him with his pants down twice, or did people routinely go naked in the future? I made a mental note to ask him sometime.

  The Doc had made room for him, and he was doing something to the side of Mary’s head, with his indescribable widget.

  Mary opened her dear eyes and blinked several times. “Hi, Pop. Jake! Hello, dear. Sorry to drop in like this.”

  I wanted to say something witty in reply, but I knew what the first words I said to her had better be. “Mary, I’d like you to meet my fiancée Zoey Berkowitz, and a shortstop to be named later—our baby. Zoey, Nameless, this is Mary Callahan-Finn.”

  Mary looked where I pointed, and her eyes widened. “At the last instant, when I was picking my arrival point, I grokked a pregnant woman in the room, and aimed to miss—but I didn’t know it was Jake’s baby. You’re a lucky woman, Zoey. Sorry if I startled you, crashing in like this.”

  “That’s alright, ‘dear,’” Zoey said. “Whenever I’m nine and a half months pregnant, the size of a parade float, I’m always hoping one of my lover’s old lovers will drop by, in silver lounging pajamas. Welcome aboard. Think of…well, I was going to say ‘think of this as your place,’ but by golly, it is. He named it after you, did you know?”

  The ancient Chinese ideogram for “trouble” is supposed to be “two women under one roof.” I don’t know if it’s true, but if not it’s like that popular myth about the Inuit having dozens of words for different kinds of snow: a higher truth, beyond mere fact. Maybe I would get lucky, and the world would be destroyed by fire in the next few minutes.

  Callahan interrupted. “Protocol later. What’s the situation, Mary? Report!”

  “Situation grave but not yet critical, sir,” she said. “The Cockroaches still don’t know humanity exists, and no attack is immiment here.” Her face twisted. “Oh, but Pop—our mission failed! We screwed up somehow: they’re all gone, by now, they must be! All those dead people, killed—and I don’t even know what we did wrong—”

  “Easy now, baby,” he said soothingly, “Maybe we can still fix it. First let’s make sure it’s safe for us to try. Tell me everything that happened—tell everybody; maybe one of us’ll think of something.”

  Oh, that made us proud!

  She rubbed her eyes. “Nikky, is that you? What the hell are you doing here?”

  Tesla bowed. “Greetings, dear lady. Drinking.”

  “Huh. Well, I’m glad you’re here. You don’t happen to have your death-ray on you?”

  He flickered. It was as if someone spliced film: one instant he was standing there, and the next he was standing there holding an artifact with both hands. You didn’t need to be told it was a death-ray. “At your service, ma’am.”

  She blinked. “Cripes, I wish we’d had the sense to bring you along with us. Stick around: we may just need you in a few hours.”

  “Let’s
get Mick powered up,” Callahan said.

  ***

  Callahan did the same indescribable things to Finn’s head with his…utensil that he had done to Mary’s, and it was just as effective. Finn’s eyes opened, tracked, and scanned his surroundings.

  “Are you all right?” he asked Mary.

  “I’m okay, darling,” she said. “How are you?”

  His eyes closed momentarily, and reopened. “Offensive system crippled, nineteen percent functional and degrading. Defensive system badly damaged, stable at forty-five percent. Motive and perceptual systems damaged, seventy-two percent each. Life-support system slightly damaged, ninety-four percent and healing. Cognition systems nominal. I am ‘all right,’ but will need extensive repair before I can resume battle.”

  “You’ll get it,” she promised him.

  “What went wrong?” he asked.

  She shook her head slowly. “I don’t know, Mick. Between us, we should have taken him easy.”

  He sat up slowly and awkwardly, and met my eyes, and I flinched.

  I had not seen that expression on his face in over twenty years. He had worn it the night I met him, the night he walked into Callahan’s Place and announced that he was going to destroy the human race and felt just rotten about it. I’ve only seen one human face with that much anguish and despair on it, that I can recall: an old photo I saw once of a Sonderkommando at Birkenau, one of the trustee prisoners who helped expedite the slaughter of their own kind, in return for pitiful privileges, even though they knew for certain that eventually they would be murdered themselves.

  “Hello, Jake,” he said, and stood up.

  “Hi, Mickey—good to see you again,” I said. “Welcome to Mary’s Place.”

  There was a short cacaphony, as nearly everyone in the joint called out some equivalent greeting. “Hello, my friends,” Finn responded.

  “Amenities later, Mick,” Callahan said briskly. “Let’s get this show on the road. Jake, you and Tom start passing out Irish coffee. Mary, Mick, make your report. Start at the beginning, so everyone can catch up—some folks here don’t know about Mick and his situation.”

  ***

  Mick went first.

  “My people are called the Filarii,” he said. Over the years, the big cyborg has trained his voice to sound reasonably human, but he wasn’t thinking of details like tone or inflection now, and so he sounded kind of like the “male” version of the Directory Information robot. “We had been civilized for nearly six thousand years, and were spread across five star systems, when we were discovered by another race. Neither you nor I could pronounce their name for themselves; we called them The Ruthless Ones, but most of you here call them the Cockroaches, because of their striking resemblance to an enlarged version of that terrestrial lifeform.

  “One of their far-roving slave scouts encountered us, some centuries ago. We detected it, invited it to our homeworld, and began exchanging information. It soon became apparent, from what it revealed and what it withheld, that its Masters, the Cockroaches, were warlike, and would attack us as soon as the scout reported our existence. We considered the problem and evolved two possible solutions. The first was to annihilate them, the second to educate them. In retrospect, perhaps we erred. Loving Life, and loving Sentience, we took the riskier course, and failed, and were removed from the Universe.

  “The Ruthless Ones did not destroy us—quite. They were too frugal for that. They…compressed us. They destroyed our physical selves, and reduced our minds and bodies to their minimum descriptions, to frozen patterns of data in their databanks, so that they might recreate us for study or slave labor or torture if the desire ever arose. The Filarii became suspended in time, existing only in potential.

  “Save for me. I alone was kept corporeal, and extensively modified. My will was taken from me. I was made into a slave scout like the one that had doomed my race, and assigned to perform that function for one of the Cockroaches myself—the one you named The Beast. Mightier than any one of them, yet utterly obedient, I ranged ahead of their mindless expansion, identifying nuisance races—that is, sentients—and destroying them on command. I…excelled at the task.” His voice was flat, machine-like, yet the pain came through clearly. “Then, after centuries of genocide, I was lucky enough to stumble across Sol, and Terra, and Callahan’s Place.”

  I had heard this story retold many times, and furthermore was busy passing out Irish coffees—yet all at once, in this nth retelling, I heard something I had missed before. Or rather, failed to hear it, for the nth time. I opened my mouth…and shut it again.

  “Thanks to you and your friends, Michael,” Finn went on, “I was able at last to throw off my programming, and regain my freedom. And when my Master came after me, you—you fragile, mortal creatures—formed a telepathic group mind, and together destroyed The Beast for me, while I lay paralyzed by fear.”

  “No, Mick,” Mary said. “By programming. There’s a difference.”

  “Agreed. In any event, my Master was destroyed, and I was set completely free. And shortly before that, I had met Mary, and she taught me to love again. I had thought the ability burned out of me forever by my Master’s programming, but she proved me wrong. She showed me that the ability to love cannot be destroyed—can, at worst, be buried deeply, and that which is buried can be dug up again. She taught me that I had the right to love, by loving me. She healed me of much of the pain that comes from centuries of mass murder.

  “And so, with my mind back and my heart back, and my former Master dead, my duty was clear. It fell to me to restore my people to the Universe, to pour them back into the stream of Time, that they might live again.”

  ***

  “But—” Acayib began, shaking his head dizzily. “But how the hell could you do that?”

  “By reversing the procedure used to remove them,” Finn said. “Phase One, steal the data that represent the Filarii, from the databanks of The Beast, along with the software necessary to decompress that data. Phase Two, pick out a suitable planet, grow a sufficient number of bodies of the right descriptions from DNA records, and ‘play back’ their personalities from RNA records. I grant you Phase Two is a nontrivial problem, but—”

  “But how—” Buck burst out, and then caught himself. “Excuse me,” he went on dizzily, “For just a moment there I started pretending that all this is really happening, and I wondered how you could revive your people without the rest of the Cockroaches stopping you.”

  “My Master was a rogue,” Finn explained. “A pervert, by the standards of his race, forever ostracized from Cockroach society. And my home star system lay within his fief. The Filarii are contained within his personal databanks, and no other Cockroach would think of taking or even examining those—as the property of a pervert, they are contaminated, taboo.”

  Buck nodded agreeably. “Sure. Fine. By all means. Carry on.”

  “What kind of pervert?” Acayib asked.

  Finn shrugged. “I simply cannot convey it. There is no analog within human experience. Nothing a human can do would make it as intrinsically disgusting as was my Master to his fellows.”

  “To us, too,” I said. “We called it The Beast, and it reminded us a lot of a shark, but in a way that makes me want to apologize to the next shark I meet. I don’t know what other, normal Cockroaches are like, but I know that one was wrong.”

  “Okay, Mr. Finn, so your people were just sitting there in storage, and the other Cockroaches weren’t going to interfere. What went wrong?” Buck asked.

  Mary looked at Finn, and Finn looked at Mary.

  “I was not The Beast’s only slave,” he said. “There is another.”

  Rooba rooba rooba: everyone spoke at once. Then, with comical suddenness, everyone shut the hell up again.

  Another Finn out there? An unfriendly Finn?

  Finn was capable of causing suns to go nova…

  An unfriendly Finn who was tougher than Finn and Mary put together?

  We were all thinking the
same thought. What if it tracked them here? Finn must have read our expressions, for he held up both his hands and said quickly, “Do not be afraid. It cannot have tracked us.”

  The outside door banged open, letting in enough breeze into the foyer to start the swinging doors swinging.

  ***

  No one screamed. No one even jumped a foot in the air, as far as I can recall. Most of us had been drinking with the Lucky Duck for several months, and had been pretty hard to faze even before we met him. But I think it’s safe to say that everyone’s attention focused on that doorway.

  And we certainly didn’t freeze in terror, either. Nearly everybody seemed to be in motion—calm, unhurried but purposeful motion. Fast Eddie, for instance, scratched his ankle and the back of his neck in the same flowing motion, and ended up with his blackjack in one hand and a knife in the other, both ready for throwing. Ralph Von Wau Wau circled around and took a position beside the doorway, ears flattened, grinning (and this time he was drooling). Long-Drink McGonnigle was taking a Glock 9mm from his night watchman’s uniform jacket. Buck Rogers produced a handgun of his own, looked to me like a Dan Wesson. Several people were experimentally tapping their palms with beer bottles, mugs, sugar shakers and other blunt instruments; others were taking up chairs. I found that I was standing between Zoey and the door, and had my shotgun in hand, was easing the safety off. All these preparations were of course ludicrous, but we were doing our best. Aborigines defiantly waving our spears at the Terminator.

  Only four of us that I could see were absolutely still. Mike Callahan and his daughter stood motionless, facing the doorway. Finn had lifted his arms, and the forearms were starting to glow faintly. And over by the fireplace, Nikola Tesla, glowering ferociously, clutched his death ray.

  And the swinging doors opened, and our visitor entered, and the barometric pressure in the room dropped suddenly, as everyone gasped at once. Including the newcomer.