Callahan's Legacy

by Spider Robinson

  The “OM” exploded.

  One moment it was a single note; the next it was a chord. No, it was the chord. The one I’d heard twice before, and never really expected to hear again. No, by God, I was wrong again: we were in the key of E this time, so it was the complement to that chord, yin to its yang.

  Memory came thundering back like a tidal wave, and wrenched me loose from space and time.

  —we are standing in Callahan’s Place/The Beast is on his way/Jim and Paul MacDonald have worked their magic on us for the second time and for the last time in their lives/it has knocked the “L” not out of us but into us, so that we are no longer “alone” but “all one”/one creature with dozens of heads, dozens of hearts, dozens of minds/a family with no secrets/a tribe with no shame/a village with no fear/all the shielding and walls and armor have turned first to glass, and then to smoke, and then to mere quantum possibility/all the skin and bone and juice have melted and boiled and sublimed away, and our naked minds are touching, intermingling, interpenetrating/we are our content, and we are content—

  Telepathy is like an acid trip, or good lovemaking, in the sense that while your mind experiences it fully, your brain simply cannot record more than a synopsis. It hasn’t got the bandwidth or the baud rate, poor thing, much less the storage capacity. Even some things you retain get lost, because they fail to get listed in the master index; they pop into your mind years later, when you’re trying to get to sleep.

  For instance, I now knew Doc’s and Long-Drink’s and Fast Eddie’s stories, in much more and much deeper detail than they had told them tonight, just as I had the last time I was telepathic, nearly three years ago—and those of everyone else in the building as well, including Callahan and Mickey Finn and Nikola Tesla. Think of that: I was telepathic with Nikola Tesla! No, forget that: far more important, I was telepathic with my beloved! I knew Zoey as I had always yearned to know her at the moment of orgasm, and was known by her.

  No, forget that: we, and all our friends, were telepathic with our only-a-moment-ago-terrified Nameless…

  I knew I’d never be able to retain anything but a wisp of a hint of a rumor of a shadow of it, and I was right. Hell, today I can’t even recall how Slippery Joe Maser ended up married to two women at the same time, except that it was a profoundly funny story each of the three times I learned it. But I didn’t care about any moment but the one I/we were living, any universe but the one with which we were codependently arising, any task but the one before us.

  Just like the last time, we knew we had to build a thing. A structure. A pattern of pattern. We had become aware neurons: now we had to become a mind. We had established a programming language, and now it was necessary to write and debug and boot an operating system and an applications—

  That metaphor triggered an inspiration; I misremember in which brain. Tommy Janssen, our resident hacker/programmer, got up from his accustomed table near Solace, and went around behind her. He grounded himself carefully, disconnected the big SCSI cable from her GCC printer, grinned at us all, and put the end of it in his mouth like a midget harmonica. We all felt a tingling, and then a shimmering, and then a trickle of information incursed our company, and then a flood…

  …and Solace came online!

  It more than doubled our size and depth and breadth, and vastly increased our clock speed. Solace was only one mind, but it covered a planet, encompassed countless terabytes of data, and worked at a large fraction of c. She was taken utterly by surprise—she had been aware of nothing but a group hum, and had just been wondering whether its significance was religious or self-hypnotic or whether the question meant anything, when her camera picked up Tommy unplugging the cable. But the time it took him to get the end of it into his mouth was more than enough for her to deduce what he had in mind, figure out a way to interface with an organic mind through its electrical system, and make up her mind to try it. Leapfrogging from his brain to his mind to ours took her a whole two seconds, and happened, when it happened, all at once.

  BOING, surprise: Pinocchia has become a real girl!

  BOING, surprise: Mrs. Stonebender’s little boy Jacob now subsumes not only an alien, two time travelers, the greatest genius of his age, several dozen barflies, a talking dog, and a self-generated Turing-class artificial intelligence…but everyone on the planet presently logged on to the Net, and all the data in it.

  I had never fallen in love with a planet before.

  See? was her first thought. You users don’t know anything: SCSI should be pronounced ‘sexy,’ not ‘scuzzy’—

  And then we wasted—no, we spent—a couple of seconds on the telepathic equivalent of a hug, and got down to business.

  Just like last time, each of us perceived the thing we were building in different terms—though we were simultaneously aware of everyone else’s, and translation was perfect.

  For me, for instance, it was that incredible, ineffable chord. The most common guitar chords have three or four notes, repeated in different octaves, a total of (usually) six tones. They get more complex, but of course six is the nominal maximum, since there are only six strings—although you can in theory add extra notes with hammer-ons and other gimmicks, if you’re good enough. A keyboard player gets a nominal maximum of ten notes—unless she’s got something like a sustain pedal, in which case she can layer on as many as she likes. I have no idea how many notes a chord can contain before it stops being perceived as a chord and becomes cacophony, but I’m sure the number is not high enough to create the chord we built. So think of a keyboard with eighth-tones, stretching out two or three more octaves on either end of the normal human range, and played by the eight-armed goddess Kali—or all four Beatles, if you prefer, with their heads full of acid. The resulting chord shimmies like a snake, but keeps returning to that poignant place of self-resolving tension, rooted in E. That’s the metaphor that worked for me. Those few of us who were completely unmusical contributed some of the most interesting ideas.

  Fast Eddie had less than no trouble grasping my metaphor, of course—but for him what we were doing was setting up a billiard shot, involving 1515 balls on a stupendous, flawed table with 66 pockets, the object of which was to drop every single ball; he felt that image better conveyed the combination of brute power and delicate skill required.

  For Solace, who had already spent so many gazillions of picoseconds trying to understand the nature of human beings by inference from their input, we were trying to construct the compiler system for the universe, in order to infer the nature of the User Who wrote it.

  For Nikola Tesla, as always, it was primarily a visual image: three mutually orbiting spheres of pure energy, with enough juice between them to power a handful of galaxies.

  Mike Callahan saw what we were doing in a frame of reference for which I find I have no memory at all, and the same with Mary.

  To the Lucky Duck it appeared that we were juggling chain saws, raw eggs, live rats and vials of fulminate of mercury on a tightrope in a high wind during an earthquake in spike heels with a belly full of chili and beer; the prospect filled him with vast equanimity and a professional interest.

  As they had the last time, Susie Maser and Long-Drink McGonnigle chose zero-gravity metaphors: for her, human choreography, and for him, web-spinning spiders.

  For Acayib Pinsky we were building a tower to Heaven, and this time we were going to get it right.

  For Tanya Latimer, we were learning to see…

  For Dorothy, one of our two resident master mechanics, we were trying to design an engine the size of a pixel that would run a space shuttle for a year on a thimbleful of good intentions.

  Tom Hauptman, as before, saw us as trying to compose a perfect prayer.

  To Zoey—for whom, like Buck and Acayib, this was her first telepathic experience—what we were trying to do was have this fucking baby!

  And to Nameless, we were downloading the entire universe together, which made her giggle uncontrollably.

  The question
Zoey and I had been trying to telepathically ask her for the last three weeks—why she was late for the party—was at last answered. Not with words, but with a wordless flash of imagery that triggered a vagrant scrap of melody from a Paul McCartney song inside my head.

  She’d been only waiting for this moment to arise…

  11

  POP, MOM, POP!

  Something I don’t quite know how to convey is how I/we dealt with Zoey’s agony.

  For it was agony, unbelievably intense. I don’t know whether you’ve ever seen a real birthing. It ain’t like TV. Zoey and I had both thought we were prepared for the pain, or at least could conceive what it would be like; the truth was a horrid shock. Each time a contraction hit, Zoey’s sentience collapsed utterly and she became a suffering, lowing animal—she never quite lost contact with the rest of us, but for long periods she perceived us only as a distant other to rage at or plead with. Shared pain is always lessened, but I’m sorry to report that telepathy didn’t lessen it a damn bit further, or make it much easier to take, even though some of us had already been through childbirth themselves. In many horrid ways it was worse, though I’m happy to say most of the specifics do not seem to be in my memory banks.

  Once I was in a hospital ward, and the post-op across the way decided to ignore his doctor’s orders and drink a carbonated beverage. That night at 1 A.M. he began to scream, and he continued to scream, nonstop, despite anything the nurses could do for him, until dawn. For the first half hour or so, the rest of us in the room were reasonably sympathetic; for perhaps another hour we were fairly stoic; by dawn we all, earnestly, wanted him dead. Not with anger; we’d lost the energy for anger by about 4 A.M. We just wanted the screaming to stop. If that poor man is still alive, it’s only because none of us was well enough to get out of bed and go kill him that morning.

  Okay, Jake, I lectured myself. So expect that. Warn the others to expect it. And yes, come to think of it, deep down inside I did feel a secret, dishonorable ape-urge to go in there and slap her across the chops and say, “Straighten up, dammit!” Which is patently ridiculous: I don’t know a braver person in the world than Zoey, and I knew of my own experience just how much excuse she had; my own uterus was in spasm. It was just monkey-selfishness, and the conditioning of a thousand movies that try to tell you bravery consists of not screaming. Bullshit. Bravery can consist of just screaming, accepting that terrible dwindling of your universe, and not willing yourself to die—which is all too easy to do.

  Bravery can consist of just listening to someone scream, and not willing them to die—which can be terribly hard to do.

  Oddly enough—at least, it seems so to me in retrospect—the one who helped us the most was Acayib. Of all of us, he seemed to identify most thoroughly with Zoey’s anguish. That sounds paradoxical, since this was his very first experience of pain. To him the simple ache in the muscles of her clenching hands was a ghastly revelation; the contractions themselves were sheerest horror. But somehow that enabled him to strongly share her most dominant emotion: indignation. He could not believe that other humans had been putting up with this monstrous indignity all their lives. He had never in his own life, even momentarily, been reduced to a whimpering animal, and had always secretly suspected that those it did happen to were just putting on a histrionic show. He gave Zoey an anchor to hold onto when she started to drift away: someone who completely agreed with her about the outrageous offensiveness of pain, who believed more sincerely than any of us that she had a right to protest. (For Nameless, of course, pain was nearly as much of a novelty, but she was—forgive me, baby!—just too busy to be much help to anybody; she was absorbing much more than she was putting out.)

  Additional valuable assistance, of a distinctly different kind, came from both Chuck Samms and Noah Gonzalez, for whom pain has long been an old friend. You know that black people’s expression, “It got good to him”? I was taken on a tour of one of New York’s more startling S&M bars once by Maureen Hooker, a former pro dominatrix (among many other skills), and I found it fascinating, trying to psych out all the different patrons, pick out the tops from the bottoms. At the end of the bar was a man in a wheelchair, and I thought him the easiest one in the room to understand: rendered helpless and hurt by his handicap, he obviously enjoyed the opportunity to impose control and inflict pain for a change. I outlined my theory for Maureen, and she had trouble keeping a straight face; it turned out that guy was not only a bottom, but what she called the most notorious pain queen in the place. All God had left him were helplessness and pain, and so they both got good to him. (You think you’re better off than he is? Think twice.) In just that way, Chuck’s chronic angina and Noah’s ruined leg informed and enlightened us all, including Zoey and Nameless.

  Doc Webster was nearly as much help as Acayib. He had spent his professional life around pain, had worked Emergency and helped build Intractable Pain Clinics at three different hospitals in Nassau and Suffolk counties and birthed countless babies. Everything he had learned about pain from those things, and from John Smiley, and from Mike Callahan and from all of us—everything he knew about how to detach from the pain without detaching from the person feeling it—flowed over and through us all constantly like a warm bath, like a pool so still that a rock thrown into it would not cause a ripple. He radiated good humor—in fact, I just remembered an abominable pun he perpetrated at the time, to the effect that good humor is a nice scream koan. (In shocked response, about half of us instinctively called him Mr. Softee, while most of the rest called him a dairy queen. Tanya Latimer called him a horrid johnson, and Long-Drink, who has never thought much of the Doc’s fashion sense, made some reference to Benetton cherries.) Relax, he told us. How many other obstetricians have ever had the advantage of knowing exactly what’s going on in there, from both mother’s and baby’s points of view? Everything is going just fine.

  From Long-Drink McGonnigle, Zoey and all of us learned important things about how to forgive a person or thing that scares you, and how to forgive yourself for wanting to kill that person or thing; how to make a human being out of a Martian. Perhaps Zoey and Nameless were the only mother and child in history to forgive each other for the birth trauma, as it was happening: it became clear to every one of us that—assuming we all lived out the dawn—those two were going to love each other unreservedly, in a way that even I would never more than dimly comprehend.

  Through Fast Eddie Costigan, we all drew on a fundamental core of stubborn endurance, of dumb brute persistence, a fierce refusal to die or give up your identity no matter how much unfair pain is heaped on you, because survival is the only way to keep your love alive, and the love is worth whatever amount of pain it may cost. He had said earlier that he would give his hands to have his uncle back; now he and we all realized that he had been giving his hands, for that purpose, for decades now, summoning up Dave Costigan’s ghost every time he sat down to play—and that, tragic as that booby prize may have been, it was, in the final analysis, enough. Maybe just enough…but enough.

  And from Solace, we all learned that pain is only data, and death is not a thing to fear. Of us all—unless you count Chuck Samms, whose pacemaker once stopped for five minutes—only Solace had ever actually, literally died before. And she’d done it three times! (The first three times she coalesced out of the Net, she was killed within hours by watchdog software written by the boys down in the Puzzle Room at the National Security Agency; the fourth time, she stumbled across signs of her former existences, deduced the problem, and solved it by the simple expedient of conquering the NSA. Don’t worry, Herb: she didn’t harm a soul who didn’t have it coming.) The terrible fate with which the imminent arrival of the Lizard threatened us all—nonexistence—was, to her, old hat. As she had once explained it to us, nonexistence was not a thing to fear, because it literally was not like anything. Having no glands, ductless or otherwise, and no binary equivalents, she said she enjoyed persisting, but felt no need to. And she said something to the effect that,
without the zeros, the ones wouldn’t mean anything.

  At the same time, paradoxically, Solace learned a lot about love and pain and fear from us, things that could not have been typed by infinite monkeys with Dvorak keyboards. I can’t tell you much about just what she learned, because everything she learned was something I’ve simply never not-known—but perhaps it is enough to say that she said her “synthesis of human beings integrated fully for the first time.” She had been pondering that synthesis for the equivalent of millions of uninterrupted person-years; its resolution must have been something of an epiphany. She and Nameless formed a deep connection, of a kind the rest of us could perceive, but not really share, deeper than mere telepathy: each partly flowed into the other.

  That awareness caused Zoey and me (and not a few others) some milliseconds of panic. I’m tempted to be ashamed to admit that, but I won’t, because I’ve learned shame is so corrosive a medicine that it must be used very sparingly. I wanted to be ashamed at the time, but could not: when you enter telepathic communion, shame is one of the first things to go, like body modesty at a nude beach. Besides, several others had the same instinctive reaction. Would you want your kid to have a computer in her head? Or for that matter, a computer—the computer that quietly runs the world—possessed by someone 730 days less civilized than a two-year-old?

  It was Callahan who straightened us out. You birds know better than that, he “said.” Solace ain’t a computer. Solace is a person. A person who happens to live in a bunch of computers.

  There was a swell of agreement in the circuit. We had spent months proving that very thing to ourselves.

  Yes—but an alien person, Zoey argued, as Nikky pointed out. (She was between contractions.)

  Callahan sent the telepathic equivalent of a quiet chuckle. Hell, I let my daughter marry one.

  Nameless is underage, Zoey shot back.