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

by Spider Robinson

  Finn was looking stricken. “No.”

  “Never in hell,” Zoey agreed.

  “Sure you would,” Mary blurted. “Because that’s exactly what I intend to do: have Nikky whomp us up a big stick and go back again and avenge the—”

  “Why would it take that irrevocable step on a maybe?” Mary asked. “When it could simply rig a deadfall so the data would self-destruct if the Lizard were attacked by overwhelming force?”

  Mary made several sounds, but none of them made up so much as a word. Consonants, mostly.

  Finn sighed. “It is more logical, Mary.”

  She subsided.

  “Look how overjoyed they are at this wonderful news,” Zoey said.

  Dead silence in the room.

  “Darling,” I said, “Mick and Mary have just come out of a firefight. Wherever you’re going with this, couldn’t we all have a drink first and—”

  “Jake, my love,” she said, “shut up.”

  “Works for me,” I said hastily. My Zoey’s eyes do not flash that way often, but when they do it’s time to strap yourself to the mast.

  She turned back to Mary. “I say that the Filarii are still in those databanks. So does logic. And you know I’m right, both of you. And you’re both looking at me with identical looks of goofy dismay, rather than joy. Are you beginning to get a glimmering of why the Lizard kicked your ass?”

  Now Mary’s eyes were flashing too. I felt sweat running down my spine. She stood up straight, stuck out her chin, and growled, “Just what the hell are you trying to say?”

  Zoey looked her square in the eye, “You wanted to lose.”

  ***

  Mickey Finn stepped between them. Were those forearms just beginning to register a trace of a glow? “You must not speak to my wife that way,” he told Zoey.

  Zoey grinned at him. “What made you think I meant ‘you’ singular, stringbean?”

  He turned to stone. At least, that’s what his shoulder felt like when I tapped on it. I hadn’t even known I was in motion. My legs seemed to be trembling, and my voice sounded odd in my ears. Perhaps my own forearms were glowing. “Mick,” I said, “look at me.”

  He turned to face me.

  “You and I go back a long way…but you must not speak to my fiancée that way.”

  He stared.

  How did all those bees get in here? The buzzing was distracting. “Not in my house. Not anywhere. And especially not while she’s carrying our child. Or else you and I are going to dance.”

  Of course it was insane. This man whipped every civilization he ever met, but one. But I meant every word.

  “He’s right, Mickey,” Mike Callahan said. “You were out of line.”

  “Fuckin’ A,” Fast Eddie said, and there was a rumble of agreement from others.

  Finn’s face got that unhinged look he got when he was confused. “But she insulted Mary…and myself…”

  I started to answer, but Zoey overrode me. “Overstated the truth for shock value, maybe. I’ll say it again, as gently as I can: both of you, deep down inside, suffer from unresolved major conflicts regarding your mission, and your mutual failure to come to terms with these antinomies severely compromised your motivation. That’s why you lost.”

  “Conflicts?” Mary bellowed. “What fucking conflicts?”

  Zoey threw up her hands. “I rest my case.”

  Light slowly began to dawn. I remembered again the thought I’d had a little while earlier, when Mickey Finn was recounting his background for what was to me the nth time. The sudden realization that in all those retellings, there was one thing Finn had consistently ommitted to mention, and that somehow none of us had ever thought to ask him about. How could we have failed for so long to ask so obvious a question?

  Perhaps because Finn had always seemed to us the embodiment of loneliness, of magnificent isolation.

  “Mickey,” I said, “tell me something. Back when this whole thing started, when the Cockroaches first captured the Filarii…were you a bachelor?”

  One of the few facial expressions humans and Filarii share is the wince. I know because the same expression appeared simultaneously on both Mick and Mary…

  ***

  The room rumbled as the implications of the question struck home.

  And well it might. This was the place where people cared about each other’s pain—and now it was stunningly apparent that we had fumbled a big one, big time. Confronted with a man who had lost an entire race, we had refrained—for a decade and a half!—from inquiring more closely into the personal dimensions of his loss. In retrospect, our failure was inexplicable, horrifying, shaming. Snoopy-question rule be damned; that had always applied mostly to newcomers. This man was supposed to be our friend…

  And now we knew from his face what his answer must be.

  “No,” he said. “I was not.”

  ***

  Even Callahan looked startled.

  And as for Mary, she looked so downcast, so suddenly deflated, that when an Irish coffee appeared over my shoulder I took it and brought it to her at once, realizing only on the way back that it had been Zoey who’d made it and given it to me. She had another one waiting for me. Our eyes met and held; then I took a deep drink and turned back to Mick.

  “Tell us about your family, Mickey,” I said as gently as I could.

  “I was mated,” he said.

  I nodded. The invisible machines of Murphy. “And Filarii mate…”

  “In pairs, like humans,” he said miserably. “For life, like swans.”

  I nodded again. “Children?”

  “Two,” he agreed. “Filarii couples rarely have more than two. It is a decision that was made long ago, when we learned how to not die.”

  I kept nodding. “Ages?”

  “Thirty-seven Terran years, and—” He hesitated. “And eight months.”

  Oh boy. “And Filarii childhood lasts…”

  “At least five hundred years.”

  I could not seem to stop nodding. “Uh huh. And since you folks had learned how to not die, there must have been lots and lots of living ancestors and in-laws around.”

  “Many generations,” he said.

  “Mary, you knew all this stuff, of course.”

  She looked sullen. “It came up once, yeah.” She looked around the room. “Well, God damn it, I figured we’d deal with it if and when it came up.”

  “Deal with it how? When?”

  She finished her coffee, set the mug down very carefully on the table beside her, sat up straight in her chair, held up a finger as if to say, wait, now, and burst explosively into tears.

  I was not the only one who tried to close for a hug. At least half a dozen others were as quick off the mark. But Mickey Finn beat us all so badly that I wouldn’t be surprised if he Transited the distance; as I started to move he was on his knees before her, his great arms wrapped round her, holding her tight as she rocked and roared and soaked his shoulder.

  God, she cried like an earthquake, like an avalanche, like a dam giving way, like an infant with a megaphone, in great rhythmic shuddering shouts of hoo waw, hoo waw that went on and on without diminishing in intensity. I had only seen Mary cry once before—when she believed she had, with the best of intentions, doomed the human race. This was worse. When someone cries like that, you want to do something—anything—to make it stop. But you have to ride it out, even if it seems to take forever. The infection has to drain.

  She did slack off, finally, from sheer exhaustion. “Oh God, it’s… even worse… than you know,” she said, clutching Finn to her and talking over his shoulder to the rest of us. “Mick understated it. The Filarii are…very conservative…by our standards.” She paused for a moment to get more breath back. “He was giving me a language lesson, once. Smartassing around, I asked him what the Filarii word for ‘divorce’ was. He said they didn’t have one. So I asked how you say ‘adultery’ in Filarii, and guess what? They don’t have a word for that either. The concept of infi
delity is alien to them. They marry or they don’t, and if they do, they do it all the way. The only time a Filari remarries is if her mate dies, and that doesn’t happen often. Once in a very long while, they form unions of more than two, he told me once—but never before the children are grown, and never ever in odd numbers. Stability for the family, you see. You get it? There would be no precedent for our situation even if I were a Filarii. And I’m a fucking alien life-form…”

  “So what did Mick tell you would happen if you managed to resurrect the Filarii?” I asked.

  He stiffened in her arms.

  “He didn’t say,” she said. “He never volunteered, so I never asked. Like I said, I planned to deal with it when it came up.”

  A murmur ran around the room

  “Jesus Christ, Mary,” I said, “it has fucking come up, okay?”

  “He’s right, darlin’,” her father said. “It’s on the plate now: only thing to do is take another bite. It’s even worse once it gets cold.”

  “Aw, shit,” she said, and pulled back from her husband far enough to meet his gaze. Somebody handed her some tissues and she wiped her face without taking her eyes from his. She cleared her throat noisily and swallowed. “Mick…if we’d succeeded…what would have happened to you and me?”

  His face had never lost that Sonderkommando expression I mentioned earlier—but now he looked like a Sonderkommando who had just recognized his own family on the shower line.

  “I do not know!” he cried. “There is no basis on which to form a guess. As you said, there is no precedent. It would be up to the Eldest to decide…and the Eldest are slow to make new law.”

  “In other words,” I said, “not only would the situation be awkward, untenable and horribly painful —for you and Mick and his family—but it would drag on just as long as possible.”

  “Correct,” he said. “Oh, Mary, I should never have married you—it was not fair to you!”

  “Why did you?” Long-Drink asked.

  “Because it simply never occurred to me that my people could be reborn…until Mary suggested it. On our honeymoon.”

  “Me and my big mouth,” she said, and began crying again.

  “I was long accustomed to thinking of them as lost forever,” Finn said miserably. “I knew, intellectually, that they still existed in potential…but for centuries, that was such a cruelly small morsel of hope that I could not bear to keep it in my mind. As long as The Beast lived, there was no hope, and I expected that he would outlive me. By the time I knew better…I was already in love with Mary.” He got to his feet suddenly, threw back his great head and brayed at the ceiling, “But what was I to do? Leave my people in stasis? Wait for Mary to die of old age—and live meanwhile with the chance that something might kill me before her, and doom the Filarii forever? My honor required me to act, whatever the consequences.”

  Mary sat there, tears leaking down her face. “Me too, Mick. I knew you’d never think of it unless I brought it up…and I knew you had a family, knew I was in trouble even as I was opening my mouth…but like you say, what was I supposed to do? Let billions of sentient beings sleep forever, so I could keep playing house with the Last of the Mohicans?”

  There was a long and heavy silence, broken only by the sound of Mary snuffling and the crackling of the flames in the hearth.

  This was our specialty. This is what we were good at, what had brought us all together in the first place: the solving of problems. Or at least the sharing of them. People came into Callahan’s Place—and then Mary’s Place—with a hangup too big for them to carry, and then we all rallied round and either solved the hangup, or found some way to help them live with it. Here were two of our best friends…and their problem seemed so large, so far outside any of my experience, that I was clueless. From the length and thickness of the silence, it seemed that nobody else had any ideas either.

  I caught Callahan’s eye. “You want to jump in here, Mike?” I murmured.

  He patted absently at his bare chest. Finding no pocket there, he held out his hand, and a cigar dropped into it. “Well…” he began, patting his chest again for matches.

  My heart sank. I had never seen Mike Callahan stall for time before. It suddenly struck me that there might be reasons why he, of all people in the room, felt ill-qualified to meddle in his daughter’s marriage.

  Tommy Janssen lit the cigar for him. “Allow me,” he said. Then, ignoring Mike’s look of surprise, he turned to face Mick and Mary.

  “Mick,” he said, “you’re between a rock and a hard place, and you have my sympathy. But you’re going to stay right there for at least as long as it takes you to quit ducking the question.”

  Finn looked angry. “What do you mean, ‘ducking the question’?”

  Tommy stood his ground. “If anybody here has the right to talk to you like this, it’s me. You and I both met this gang of idiots for the first time on the very same night. Fifteen years ago, remember? You watched them heal me of my pain, and you decided maybe the human race was worth a little sacrifice to save. If you want to know the truth, you helped me as much as anyone here.”

  “I? How?”

  “Well, it just seemed to me that if you could break your conditioning, after centuries of failure, then maybe I could manage to kick a two-year heroin addiction. And whenever it got hard, when my jones came down on me, I’d look across the bar and see you drinking and talking and trying to figure us all out, and I’d think, ‘Hey, sonny, you think you’re lonely and alienated?’ and I’d feel a little better. That’s why I feel a need to gratefully, affectionately, kick you in the ass until you get up out of the hole you’re in. I repeat, it’s time you answered the question.”

  “What question?”

  “The one your wife asked you a minute ago, you chump. She asked, ‘What would have happened to us?’ and you answered the question ‘What would the Filarii Eldest say?’ Two different questions, Mick.”

  “But how can I—”

  “Assume the worst case. Assume that the Eldest had wrinkled their foreheads in thought for fifty years or so, and finally ruled that the correct and moral thing for you to do was to dump Mary and resume your original life. Assume that’s what your mate and children would have wanted, too. In that event, what would you have chosen?”

  Mary bent her head, as if for the ax.

  Mick looked stubborn. “The question is hypothetical—”

  “First of all, no it isn’t; Zoey explained why you might get a chance to try again, and her logic sounds good to me. My question is exactly why you lost the fight the first time: if you’d won, you’d have had to answer it, and neither of you was ready to face that. And even if the question is hypothetical now, it still needs answering. Look at your wife, Mick! Whatever happens, your marriage is on hold until you answer my question. Maybe you Filarii can live with unresolved questions that large…but Mary is a human woman, and she needs to know where she stands. I’ll ask you one more time: what would you have chosen? What will you choose, if fate gives you another chance?”

  Mickey Finn looked down at his wife. Then he looked slowly and carefully around the room, at the rest of us. His great shoulders settled. “If I have learned anything from you, my only friends,” he said, “it is that the most important thing is to follow your heart. Even honor must yield to the heart’s true need. Though it cost me my race and my family, I could never have left my Mary.”

  “But Mick,” she cried, “what about your mate? Your kids?”

  “I would have grieved long for them. But if they stood before me now, there is nothing I could do for them. The man they loved, the man they needed, died, over a millenium ago. I am no longer he—have not been for centuries, and can never be again. Every other member of my race could be returned to the instant they were destroyed…but I alone never stopped living, growing, changing. I alone have diverged.” Uncharacteristically, he smiled. “Else I could never have married you in the first place.”

  With a wordless shout, she s
prang up from her chair into his arms, and did her level best to hug him into lung collapse. And a cheer went up that rocked the rafters.

  ***

  It grew to a standing ovation, a raucous one, with people shouting and laughing and slapping each other on the back, a hail of empty glasses and mugs vectoring in on the fireplace, lights flashing rhythmically, fists pounding on the—

  —lights flashing rhythmically?

  The ovation began to die away. Every damn light in the joint was flashing rhythmically, including the pilot lights on the Coffee Machine, and Solace’s monitor screen. As the cheering faded to silence, we could hear the repeated little chime of the Mac II restarting, over and over. Something was causing the house power to cycle off and on.

  After one more bong iteration, the phenomenon ceased with the power on, and Solace’s stylized Smiling Mac face stabilized onscreen. (There are computers around that boot “instantly,” but ours is the only Mac that will.) “Important announcement,” she said.

  Suddenly it made sense. If you’re trying to attract the attention of a roomful of cheering people, and you’re an AI limited by the volume-capacity of Macintosh speakers, the logical thing to do is incurse LILCO’s computer system and turn the lights on and off.

  “I subsume all the astronomical observations being made by the human race,” Solace said. “I have been scanning the data carefully, and I have detected the being you call the Lizard, heading this way.”

  7

  PARTY TRAP

  The loudest sound in the room was Solace’s fan. I could hear myself think. It sounded like a distant little car revving in neutral.