Callahan's Place 07 - Callahan's Legacy (v5.0) (30 page)

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 all us—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.

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.