Callahan's Legacy

by Spider Robinson

  …the nature of human beings in general: vicious/decent—stupid/ingenious—treacherous/honorable—selfish/selfless—vain/humble—puny/magnificent—dangerous/tender—irrational/rational—destructive/creative—uptight/stoned—xenophobic/xenophilic—frightened/brave—hateful/loving—self-loathing/self-loving—descendants of killer apes/progenitors of something fucking amazing one of these days…

  …the nature of ourselves, the particular men and women and children and mutants and computers and dogs and cyborgs of Mary’s Place and Callahan’s before it—our life stories and our hopes and fears for the future…

  …Finn’s and Mary’s aching need to know whether the Filarii

  still existed as data or not…

  …and the simple message it found, like a billboard beside every highway, in every mind and heart and brain it inspected:

  MICKEY FINN CAME HERE TO KILL US ALL.

  WE SET HIM FREE.

  YOUR MASTER CAME HERE TO KILL US ALL.

  HE WOULD NOT BE SET FREE,

  AND WE KILLED HIM.

  WE CANNOT KILL YOU…

  BUT WE CAN SET YOU FREE.

  YOUR PEOPLE TOO CAN LIVE AGAIN…

  The information traffic as such was all one-way, us to it…but we could infer a lot from the way in which it downloaded the data, from analysis of what it paused to contemplate for how long. It was, as we had thought it might be, stunned by the confirmation of The Beast’s destruction. It had suspected as much for two years now, ever since it had reported in on schedule and gotten no response…but the concept of a universe without its Master in it had been so unthinkable, the Lizard had not been able to truly believe it until given positive proof.

  And, as we had thought it might, it found the news devastating rather than joyous.

  A moment ago there had been one and only one creature in its universe that it knew had the power to free it from its bondage—however unlikely it might be to ever choose to do so. Freedom had been at least a theoretical possibility, however remote.

  Now that creature was confirmed dead, and the Lizard was committed to an eternity of serving its Master’s will without even the miserable satisfaction of pleasing its Master thereby…and the only thing standing between it and utter despair was an uncouth and admittedly fragile, quite unlizardlike entity that claimed it had once been able to help a different being in a similar predicament.

  And if its Fink Brain ever got wind of any of this, the last hope would be snuffed out for good. Once that software learned that its programmer The Beast was dead, it would commit itself to an orgy of cosmic destruction like something out of a Saberhagen Berserker novel, starting with the nearest sentients.

  The organic mind of the Lizard contemplated all that it had downloaded for 3 x 1014 picoseconds—five minutes, but we experienced it in the former terms—and then sent back a reply, in intelligible English:

  I AM PASSING THE ORBIT OF JUPITER, AT SPEED c.

  ETA: 4.81325 × 1014 PICOSECONDS.

  THE FILARII YET EXIST—LIKE MY OWN RACE.

  WHAT IS YOUR PLAN?

  At once we gave a mental shiver of relief, and began uploading for the first time.

  Very little of what we sent the Lizard was information. Most of it was…well, a state of mind.

  There is a clear objective proof of the existence of telepathy, which has been sitting right under the noses of skeptics for thousands of years, unnoticed. It is the phenomenon of the contact high.

  You can’t get a lizard drunk—not with alcohol, anyway. And probably we couldn’t have gotten the Lizard drunk with a truckload of overproof rum. But you can get any sentient being loaded with brainwaves, with contact high.

  Tom Hauptman had been frantically making drinks and passing them out for the last several minutes; Fast Eddie had been rolling joints from the Doc’s stash; several couples—and in honor of the Lizard, a few triads—had been making love; now we spent those last eight-odd minutes drinking and toking and shaping toward orgasm. Zoey, meanwhile, roared into the final stage of labor.

  All Mickey Finn had needed to do, to break his own conditioning and burn out his controlling machinery, was to succeed in disobeying a single order. We had helped him in the only way we could—by slipping him a Mickey Finn, and getting him helplessly stoned.

  One of the classic effects of intoxication is a tendency to become whimsical and sloppy. Even if—perhaps especially if—you are customarily forbidden to be whimsical or sloppy.

  With drunken cunning, we got ourselves and our only possible ally shit-faced…

  Crowning! Doc Webster and Zoey and Nameless and Mary announced together, and Zoey added, Dilated to meet you, kid!

  Everything happened quickly then.

  The Lizard was now under the control of its Fink Brain. What it intended to do was drop from lightspeed to stationary in zero time—don’t ask me how; the Callahans, Finn, and Tesla grokked it, but I lacked the vocabulary—and come to rest about a mile over our heads, from which position of advantage it would rain fire and destruction down on us until rock flowed and water exploded.

  But some of its neurons seemed to be misfiring. It crashed through the roof like a meteorite, and hit the floor so hard it sank in to all three kneecaps, right in front of Tommy Janssen.

  It wasn’t hurt, of course. But its Fink Brain was startled, for a few whole milliseconds, and quickly reached a decision to hold its fire until such time as it either understood what had gone wrong and why, or perceived imminent threat. It scanned us carefully—

  It was a very quick study, that Fink Brain. Nevertheless, it took it a large fraction of a second to recognize, and deduce the significance of the fact, that it was being mooned by a roomful of sentients. And once it did, it wasted nearly a whole half second wondering why the sudden understanding made it want to giggle—

  More than enough time for Ralph Von Wau Wau to lift his leg and let fly. Another fraction of a second thrown away—

  Buck Rogers did what any millionaire would have done faced with a situation this grave: he threw money at the problem. The guitar case sailed across the room.

  There was plenty of time for the Fink Brain to assure itself that this projectile was a negligible threat—but on the other hand, it was confused, and its enemy obviously believed something good for him would happen if the object struck home. It obliterated the guitar case in midair with a fierce blast of energy. Nictitating membranes briefly slammed shut over the two of its eyes that faced the blast, to protect against the sudden glare—

  At least they were supposed to do so briefly. Once they closed, the Lizard found it oddly difficult to open them again—and while they remained closed, there was the most confusing sensation that the whole room had begun to spin—

  Definitely alarmed, now, the Lizard began to summon forces that would vaporize everything material for a thousand miles in any direction—

  Zoey, with a cry so loud and so primal that even software designed to control an alien found it disturbing, pushed Nameless out into the bright and cool and dry—

  And Tommy Janssen came up through the closest thing the Lizard had to a blind spot (the area directly under its snout) with the SCSI cable that usually fed the scanner, and jammed it into the Lizard’s mouth—

  Solace was no drunker than the Lizard’s Fink Brain. And she contained within her all the hackers, crackers, and phone phreaks who ever lived, augmented by suggestions from Nikola Tesla and Mickey Finn, and by techniques from the far future, courtesy of self-proclaimed superhacker Mary Callahan. She went down that cable like a hunting ferret, and invaded the Fink Brain like God’s own virus. There, in the drunken skull of an alien, two artificial intelligences fought like trapped rats for control.

  Considered purely in terms of processing power, the Fink Brain was a much better computer. Better, faster, more powerful.

  But Solace was much bigger, the product and sum of a planetary civilization. And she had recently learned to care whether she lived or died.

  The F
ink Brain counterattacked at once, swarming up the SCSI cable and into the Internet. Solace tried to keep them in areas not presently in use, but she was hurried. All around the planet, E-mail began going astray; up- and downloads aborted; searches were abruptly terminated; screens hung; systems crashed; drives went down; data—chiefly those data accessed least—became corrupted. Thousands of human users experienced such effects; not one perceived them as anything out of the ordinary, or took steps more drastic than the usual: cursing and a cold reboot.

  One of our greatest fears was that the Fink Brain would send an emergency message to the rest of the Cockroach race, warning them of our existence and location. It would not necessarily be utterly disastrous if it did—the signal would necessarily go at lightspeed, and Mike and Mary the Transiting Translators hoped they would be able to outrun and block it—but even they were not sure they could succeed. But it didn’t happen: the Fink Brain was a true servant of The Beast, which had been a renegade pervert Cockroach; much as it loathed all sentient life in the universe, it loathed its own kind even more. It concentrated all its effort on investing and destroying Solace.

  Jesus, it was strong and fast! Finn and Mike and Mary and Tesla assaulted it simultaneously with the strongest physical energies they dared employ; it stalemated them with a fraction of its attention, despite the drunken state of its wetware. Solace led it a merry chase, changing locations randomly, and it hung on like grim death—

  —found a pattern in Solace’s headlong retreat, deduced where she would be in a picosecond and was there waiting—

  —overwhelmed and encapsulated her, felt for a frozen fraction of eternity the closest thing that utterly cold and sterile intelligence could feel to joy and triumph—

  —and Solace self-destructed.

  12

  ARE WE NOT DRAWN FORWARD TO A NEW ERA?

  Ask any computer virus expert. In late 1988, a virus sprang up worldwide, seemingly everywhere at once. It was not a terribly destructive virus, as they go, but it was extraordinarily virulent, infecting systems, applications and even documents: it wanted only—terribly—to live. Because it created a resource with the ID code 29, it became known as the Init 29 virus, and it is still around, though basically harmless, to this day.

  Not counting Solace, there were twenty-nine of us physically present in Mary’s Place that night.

  Without being able to affirm death, I cannot affirm life, were her dying words to us.

  The psychic impact—experiencing the violent death of a friend, with whom we were telepathically linked—destroyed the hookup.

  WHAM! I was back in my own skull again. Holding my baby in my arms, listening to her cry. Zoey was just as near—and just as far away, almost completely concealed by a thick clumsy coat of space and air and flesh and bone.

  Outside in the bar, the “OM” came to a natural end, and there was only the sound of the sobbing child.

  Zoey and I grinned at each other. No, I grinned; hers was a Madonna smile. (The original, Immaterial Girl.)

  “Got a name, yet?” I asked. We’d kicked around hundreds, over the last several months, without settling on any.

  She shook her head.

  “How about Erin?”

  “You want to name our kid after Ireland?”

  “Not exactly. The Irish must have been optimists. The name they picked for their country is one of the world’s Class A ironies: the Gaelic word for ‘peace.’”

  “Done,” she said.

  Erin suddenly stopped crying, turned her little head sideways, and kissed my hand. Then she looked up at me, her little eyes already tracking. She made an idiot smile.

  Ever burst into tears while grinning?

  “Excuse me, will you darlings?” I said, and handed Erin back to her mom. Their gazes locked with an almost-audible click, and I left them alone together and went back out to the bar on shaky legs.

  But not as shaky as the Lizard’s.

  It was reeling like a drunk in a high wind. Which, come to think of it, it was, since a strong draft was coming in through the hole in the roof. Mickey Finn stepped forward and carefully offered it the support of his arm.

  It accepted it, climbed out of the hole it had made for itself on impact, and looked blearily around at all of us with its three eyes. Our mental communion was gone, now, but fortunately it had downloaded so much from us that it retained the ability to speak English.

  “Ffffank…hyooo…awwww,” it said, with a distinct Lizard accent.

  “Any time,” I said, for all of us.

  It focused two of its eyes on Finn. “Hai wi’w he’p hyoo resssstore yaw pee’po’,” it said, “ifff hyoo wi’w he’p me ressstore mine.”

  “Agreed,” Finn said at once. He turned to Mary. “Now our real work begins.”

  She nodded and took his hand.

  “Naowww?” it proposed.

  “When we sober up,” Finn said.

  It thought that over for a second, and nodded. “G’uuud p’wann…” it said, and sat down suddenly, like a tripod collapsing.

  A nine-foot-tall three-legged critter sitting down suddenly is a funny enough sight: legs splayed in three directions, and its butt end hit the floor like a dropped safe, sending sawdust spraying. The three jiggling tits made it even funnier. But then it remembered how humans express good fellowship, and opened its snout in an attempt to grin, and there were no teeth in there, and the overall effect was so ludicrous that the rest of us all fell down, too: laughing.

  Did I mention that it was purple? A few years later, when a certain children’s character swept our culture like a fungus, we were probably the only adults on the planet besides its creators who actually liked it a little.

  Does it seem callous, that we did not spend so much as a second mourning our dead friend Solace, that we could fall down laughing within moments of her death? Do we seem like human chauvinists, relieved that all our victory cost us was a wog ally, that it was only good old Gunga Din who croaked?

  Or do you figure we just knew she’d be back again someday, that it was in the nature of the Internet to produce her, given enough time—and that, after all, her death had been painless?

  Neither was the case. We missed her just as much as we missed the MacDonald brothers and Tom Flannery and Dave Costigan and Helen McGonnigle and my own first wife and child and all our other dead. And yes, we were pretty damn sure that she’d be back, some day, but that isn’t why we didn’t mourn. It may seem weird, but death is an intolerable insult even if it is temporary. Even though all these unfolding seconds she was not living through would be available in memory for Solace to examine at her leisure when she recoalesced, her death was and is a tragedy, a brutal and wrenching sacrifice. We had all been on the very verge of such wonderful discoveries together! Sure, she had died without pain—but Acayib can testify that you don’t need to feel pain to experience loss.

  No, the reason we didn’t mourn Solace was because she had asked us not to. In those last seconds of planning—of realizing we had only one possible plan—before triggering our telepathic bullhorn, Solace had asked us to grant her the status of Honorary Irishman (please don’t give me any crap about the gender; Solace didn’t care about that stuff in the least and why should you?), and give her a traditional Irish wake. Mourn later, if you must, she had said, but throw me a hell of a party first! And a first birthday party for the baby…Our agreement had been unanimous, and now it was time to pay up.

  So we pitched a ball…

  Fast Eddie, helpless with laughter, crawled to his piano stool and climbed aboard, hit an E minor chord, and called out, “Do you feel like an outcast?” I yelled back, “Yes, brother!” and sprinted for my guitar.

  The introduction to “The Red Palace,” the opening track of the Koerner and Murphy album RUNNING JUMPING STANDING STILL.

  The day that album was released, back in 1969, I was just moving into a hippie crashpad next to an abandoned railroad station in East Setauket; I picked up a copy on the way. You know w
hat it’s like when you move into a place full of strangers? How you all smile a lot and become elaborately, distancingly polite while you feel each other out and size each other up? The first thing I unpacked was the stereo, of course, and the first thing I put on was that album; naturally I cranked it all the way up so I could make sure I hadn’t wired the speakers out of phase. Two minutes into “The Red Palace,” everyone in the building—thirteen total strangers—had all crowded into my room, torn off all their clothes, and begun to dance.

  It had a similar effect now.

  Dozens of willing hands took over from Tom Hauptman, who was too weary to lift his arms. The Machine began to hiss and gurgle and chuff. So many teeth were displayed, even a cow would have had the sense to run for its life. Chairs and tables were cleared to make room, and we began…well, the first line of the song proper says it all: “Drinkin’ and dancin’, all night long…”

  The bass line is important in that song, especially when it gets to the extended piano solo in the middle. A verse and a half before that, Mickey Finn used a laser fingertip to enlarge the doorway to the living quarters in back, and Zoey and Erin came floating in on that high-tech bed, bringing a cheer from the crowd. Tesla waved a hand, and Zoey’s bass walked itself over to the bedside; the bed configured itself so that she could hold Erin to her breast with the crook of her right arm while she played; and she came in right on time. I’d have to check with Guinness, but I believe Zoey may have been the first musician in history to play bass nude, while nursing.

  The song ends with a flourishing bass riff; the applause would have torn a hole in the roof if there hadn’t been one already.

  Erin seemed to enjoy it just as much as anybody—I distinctly hear muffled laughter during the piano solo—but as the applause dopplered down into laughter and conversation, she let go of Zoey’s nipple and burst into tears again. People awed, and Zoey let go of her bass (it remained upright on its spike heel) to see what the problem was. Erin raged, and pointed with her whole body.

  Toward the Macintosh.

  Just for a moment, the party mood flickered slightly. That Mac II was the closest thing we had to the corpse at the wake. Its screen still glowed blue-white, but it was hung, displaying only the Mac bomb icon, labeled “Error: ID ∞”