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

by Spider Robinson

  Nameless is underage, Zoey shot back.

  Darlin’, one of the tragic truths of parenthood is, when they think they’re old enough, they’re right. All you can do is help.

  Dammit, I thought I’d get to have her all to myself for at least a little while—

  A warm smile, and a telepathic headshake. You can’t. And you always will. Look:

  He waved his hand, and as though a filter had clicked in we could all suddenly see the new bond between Solace and Nameless in visual metaphor, a shimmying snake of energy between Zoey’s belly and the back of Tommy’s head. (Walls had ceased to exist for us.) Let’s try and calibrate that energy, and say that it was the equivalent of wall-current: powerful enough to drive a stereo loud enough to implode your eardrums, or produce enough light to burn your retinas, or blow you clear across the room.

  In those terms, there was another connection, between Nameless and Zoey, that had the same relative size and capacity as the Main Wire coming out of a nuclear power plant.

  To my mild surprise and deep joy, there was one nearly as strong and deep between Nameless and me.

  Of course, Zoey marveled. We’ve been building that for months.

  You’ve been building that since about the fourth month you were in your mother’s womb, Callahan sent.

  Zoey and I contemplated the bond between our daughter and Solace for a long time. Maybe a second.

  Well, she decided, I guess you’re never too young to fall in love. Welcome to the family, Solace.

  I never expected that the first young man my daughter brought home would be an old woman, I said, but what the hell? At least their viruses are incompatible. Welcome to the family, Solace.

  Snakes of energy now ran from Zoey’s head and mine to Tommy’s, and Solace flowed into us through them.

  And as the diversion lost its distracting power and we returned the focus of our collective attention to the thing we /were building/had been building/would always be building between us/, snakes of energy began to connect us all, like tongues of fire. Nameless and Solace had showed us how. Or perhaps the fire had always been there, and they and Callahan had merely taught us how to see it.

  Zoey went into contraction again, then—but although it was one of the most powerful so far, she retreated a shorter distance from sentience than before, and was less lonely there, and returned sooner. Relief flowed through all of us, a conviction that we could do this.

  ***

  Nor was Solace the only other-than-human we welcomed into our hearts and minds that night.

  Mickey Finn, for instance, humanized though he had surely become over the last fifteen years of living among us, was at bottom a Filari, an honest-to-God alien being—far more different from any of us than Solace, who had after all been given shape and form by humans. And Finn had not been present for either of our previous telepathic experiences, either, having been absent the first time and deeply comatose the second. (So deeply, it took an atom bomb to wake him up.) He was different, and some of the differences were profound. He was milennia old, a retired assassin of races. His birth name was Txffu Mpwfs. I’m not even going to try and explain what Filarii used for sex, because you wouldn’t believe it…even if you know about the species of terrestrial octopus where the male stuffs an exploding cigar of sperm up the female’s nose. Let’s just say that he and Mary had reached accomodation in such matters by a combination of great empathy and tolerance, like John Smiley and his wife. Nor can I shed any coherent light on the nature of that…thing Finn has in his chest, which no human can bear to look upon, in any terms that will convey anything to you. He came of a race which had chosen extinction rather than thwart the will of other sentients with violence. He was different.

  He was our friend; we loved him, and he us.

  Callahan and Mary, for another example, were different. Alone of all of us, they had portions of themselves and their memories blocked off from the rest of us, were somehow paradoxically able to be wide open and yet have secrets. It wasn’t so much as if they had shields up…more as though whenever you wandered into certain areas you found yourself back where you started, facing the other way. We’d noticed this the last two times we’d been telepathic with Callahan; and forgotten it afterwards both times. We understood why this was, and why it had to be—and absolutely agreed with it. There were things he and his daughter both knew that we must not know, to avoid miscegemation and temporal paradox. (And probably to avoid other things, too. For instance, I wouldn’t be surprised if they knew the death-dates of every one of us, and that is information that I for one would rather not have.) Nevertheless, while we conceded their need to keep secrets, the simple ability to do so while in a telepathic state seemed so weird as to almost qualify them both as inhuman.

  They were our father and our patroness; we loved them, and they us.

  Nikola Tesla had no such heathen abilities, but he definitely was different. This is a man who will tell you himself—who told his biographer—that the most profound emotional relationship of his first seventy-odd years was with a pigeon. (A female pigeon.) A man who once created his own earthquake, in lower Manhattan, and then stopped it with a sledge-hammer. A man who once thought J.P. Morgan would be as happy as he was to abolish money. The first person ever to turn down a Nobel Prize—and its accompanying $20,000, which he badly needed at the time—because they wanted him to share it with Thomas Edison, who had cheated and slandered him. (There was also a problem in 1917 when the American Institute of Electrical Engineers wished to award him its most prestigious honor: unfortunately, they had called it the Edison Medal. He was finally persuaded to accept it, but the awards dinner got under way 20 minutes late, because Tesla failed to appear. They finally found him on the steps of the NY Public Library, in full evening dress, in a trance, arms outstretched like Francis of Assisi, literally covered with pigeons…) To be sure, he had benefited greatly from his time with Lady Sally McGee and her artists—but being given access to a second century of life and all the resources of space and time to play with as a result had not really done a whole lot to normalize him.

  He was the father of the Twentieth Century; we loved him and he loved us.

  The Lucky Duck was human, but a mutant strain—not only Irish, but half pooka and half Fir Darrig—with paranormal powers and an extremely odd upbringing; brief interludes of normality were the only freaky things that ever happened to him.

  Nor was Ralph Von Wau Wau truly a human being, though he could imitate one well enough to be a successful writer. He had, for instance, never felt anything more than brief lust or lasting fondness for a female, nor any emotional interest in any of his many offspring; it just wasn’t in him. He had dietary and other habits I will not describe. In fact, his most completely human attributes were a conviction that humans are hilarious, and an abiding dislike of behavioral scientists.

  He was a merry son of a bitch; we love him and he loved us.

  Through all this loving, we came to fully understand something we would have said we already knew, if asked an hour before: that the crucial thing that conveys personhood is not anything so parochial as humanity, but sentience itself. We began, for the first time, to truly understand the decision the Filarii had made so long ago. They had believed that sentience has a duty to avoid causing pain, and when it came to the crunch they had opted to preserve the ethical structure they had built, rather than the flesh they had inherited. If a principle isn’t worth dying for, it isn’t a principle, it’s an attitude.

  Tom Hauptman, former minister, had been studying other religions in the years since he defrocked himself. As we all worked together at the thing we were building, he shared an extended quote with us (Tom has near-eidetic memory) from a Zen abbot named Tenshin Reb Anderson:

  Look at the blue sky. It’s nice to look at, but it’s so hard to understand. It’s so big and it goes on forever. How are you going to get it? It’s hard to understand all sentient beings, too, but it’s not difficult to sit upright and be aware o
f them…

  This is like trusting what. What—trust it. Put aside your doubts and trust it. Trust what. Don’t trust it, a thing you can think of. Trust what you can’t think of. Trust the vastness of space. Trust every single living being. Trust cause and effect: vast, inconceivably complex and wondrous cause and effect. This faith has unlimited possibilities. Think about not moving. Think about giving up all action. And remember, giving up all action does not mean stopping action. That would be another action. “Giving up” means giving up the attempt to do things by yourself, and embracing the way of doing things with everyone.

  Trust Buddha’s mind. Trusting Buddha’s mind means trusting all sentient beings. This is fearless love. You can give it all up and then you can love every single thing…

  Yes—all beings! All beings are sharing the way at this moment. Never graspable, totally available. There is no other thing outside of this. My question is, do we trust it? Looking at myself, the only thing I can find that holds me back from completely trusting the practice in which all sentient beings are now engaged is lack of courage; lack of courage to affirm all of life, which is the same as the lack of courage to affirm death. Without being able to affirm death, I cannot affirm life. This is the courage that comes with insight, so I could say that what holds me back is lack of insight.

  I’m not a Buddhist myself—Irish whiskey works just fine for me—but those words resonated. Perhaps we had all been suffering, just a touch, from carpal tunnel vision.

  ***

  As we reached that insight, the thing we were building among us came to completion.

  ***

  It was the same thing we had built the last time: a telepathic amplifier, that would allow mind-to-mind communication with a nontelepath.

  Describe it? Don’t be silly. About the only meaningful things I can say about it are that its range was about a trillion miles, and that everything material was transparent to it.

  We could have reawakened George Bush’s dormant belief in God, if we’d been practical jokers; we could have read all the mail in the world, if we’d been nosey; we could have given Ray Charles sight if we’d had the time; we could have satisfied the baffled curiosity of every cat alive, or apologized to the dolphins, or told all those mosquitos to knock it the hell off. We were busy…

  I was at Zoey’s side, had drifted back there without noticing the moment we’d all gone telepathic. You’d think telepathy would make it less necessary to physically touch, but it’s just the other way around: makes it more necessary. Several of us, for instance, were making love, and there wasn’t anyone who wasn’t touching someone. We grew together, reached consensus, made our plans, said goodbye to our lives, Solace warned that we were out of time, Zoey finished a contraction and caught her breath, and we employed our new tool.

  ***

  Solace aimed it.

  Tesla tuned it.

  Mary cranked the gain wide open.

  Finn focused it, with great care.

  Tom Hauptman composed the message.

  Nameless put it into wordlessness.

  I, to my shock, was selected as spokesbeing.

  Callahan triggered it.

  Everybody powered it.

  ***

  The last time we had done this, the message we had used our telepathic bullhorn to transmit was a threat. We had given The Beast ten seconds to state his business or die. The threat had been a bluff…and it had not worked. Only brute force had saved the day, and that option was closed to us this time.

  So we changed strategy.

  The message I/we sent was, as I’ve said, wordless, an emotional gestalt on a level so basic that we hoped it would be intelligible to any sentient life-form. As Theodore Sturgeon said, if it isn’t simple, it isn’t basic, and we had no time or room for anything but the basics. At the same time it was layered with so many nuances that several verbal constructs convey different aspects of it. Here are some of them:

  TIME OUT!

  EASY…

  TRUCE!

  PARLEY…

  KING’S X!

  LET’S TALK…

  WHITE FLAG!

  DO NOT FEAR…

  HOLD YOUR FIRE!

  BE COOL…

  HEAR US OUT!

  WE CAN HELP YOU…

  WHAT’S ALL THIS BROUHAHA?

  YOU CAN BE FREE IF YOU CHOOSE…

  EVERYTHING IS PERFECTLY ALRIGHT!

  The message itself conveyed the message, Here we are, of course…and more important and more stressed than any of the above semantic content, there was a pervasive, enfolding subtext I can only verbalize as SHHHHHHHHHHH! or possibly PSSSSSSSSTTTT! which we hoped would, in combination with the precision of our aim, be self-explanatory. This multilayered statement went out in a single stupendous burst that lasted only a fraction of a second and then chopped off.

  We waited.

  With bated breath, and baited brains, and beta software.

  We had pinned all our hopes on a gamble. We had bet the farm that the similarities between Mickey Finn and the Lizard were greater than the differences. With all reality in the pot, we were counting on nothing more substantial than our guesses about the psychology and wiring specs of an unknown alien being, cyborged by another, different alien. Serenely happy, living life to the fullest, we waited to see if we’d guessed right.

  After five endless seconds, the first response came back—

  It had no ordered semantic content as such, at first. The Lizard was not so much allowing itself to “think out loud” as to be out loud. In the instant it had perceived our probe, it had figured out how to construct a wall against it, and had erected that wall the instant we broke off contact. Now it…well, didn’t lower the wall, but held a mirror up and peeked cautiously over the top. Which allowed us to “glimpse” it in return. What came through was:

  old/cold/grim/merciless/bitter/

  angry/frustrated/ashamed/vicious/

  weary/dutiful/despairing/terrified/

  resigned/helpless/determined/wary

  all of them with a flavor so alien that I’d have felt more kinship with a terrestrial lizard.

  We could not conceal our joy and relief.

  We would have liked to conceal it, for fear of spooking the Lizard, but at the level of truth we were maintaining, diplomacy was impossible. What we were receiving might not seem terribly encouraging—but the crucial thing was that it was unmistakably and unquestionably coming from an organic brain.

  Like its former colleague, Mickey Finn, the Lizard had been cyborged by The Beast, zombified and enslaved by inorganic installations from its head to all three feet. Like Finn’s, about a quarter of its brain was now made of silicon or gallium arsenide. Like Finn’s, that part of the Lizard’s brain—call it the Fink Brain—had total overriding control of its body and will. And—thank God—just like Finn’s, the organic part of the Lizard was allowed to think whatever the hell it pleased…whenever the inorganic Fink part didn’t have a more pressing use for its neurons.

  We had succeeded in making contact only with the organic part.

  And while it was clearly wary, it had so far opted not to pass the news on to its mechanical master. Our gamble was working—

  —so far—

  It waited, and thought, for another eternal five seconds, and then sent a reply. Like ours, it was simple yet layered. The parts of it that can be shoe-horned into human English words went something like this:

  OH YEAH?

  BACK OFF…

  SAYS WHO?

  WATCH IT…

  HELP HOW?

  I DOUBT IT!

  HOW DO I KNOW I CAN TRUST YOU?

  but again, quite a lot of the meaning was in the subtext.

  It was whispering…

  ***

  In retrospect, I think we might just have failed right there, if the Lizard had been more like us. Part of what saved us was its peculiar triadic nature.

  First, because Nikola Tesla had such a profound lifelong attachment t
o the number three, such a humanly counterintuitive understanding of threeness. And second because, as Mary had pointed out, the three-eyed Lizard did not have a blind-spot, had in its experience no analogs for such biped binocular concepts as “sneak up on,” “behind your back,” “blindside,” or “backstab”—and hence was just a little less paranoid than a human would have been.

  Only a little—it was, after all, an assassin: zombie slave of a pervert monster—but enough to bring us a surly reply instead of a reflex attack we could not have survived.

  Even better, it kept all this hidden from its Fink Brain, perhaps intuitively accepting, for the moment, the (us/it/that) triad we had offered.

  Best of all, its reply contained direct questions.

  ***

  In response, we gave it everything.

  There was no other way to do it. We risked scaring it, or overwhelming it—but we had to persuade it that we spoke the truth, and the only way to do that was to offer total disclosure: to present more, and more internally consistent, data than any lie could possibly contain.

  We did not send it any information, did not upload a single bit except the message:

  See for yourself…

  And then we simply gave it total access, unlimited privilege, and allowed it to download anything we had, without hindrance. In human metaphorical terms, we pulled down our pants and spread our legs and invited it to explore. We opened our minds and hearts and brains absolutely to it, and waited…

  Imagine a lizard crawling around in your shorts. Now raise that to the millionth power, and you’ve got a glimmer of what it’s like to have a Lizard crawling around in your head.

  Ah, but think how horrible it must be for the Lizard! And try to be a gracious host…

  It sampled everything, from Chuck Samms’ infantile memories of breast-feeding to Nikola Tesla’s beta version of the Unified Field Theory to Nameless’s still-forming first impressions of reality. It learned everything we knew: