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

CALLAHAN'S LEGACY

Spider Robinson

www.spiderrobinson.com

Copyright © 1996 by Spider Robinson

Cover design by Passageway Pictures, Inc.

Books by Spider Robinson

Callahan’s Place
books:

      
Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon

      
Time Travelers Strictly Cash

      
Callahan’s Secret

      
Off The Wall at Callahan’s

Lady Sally’s House
books:

      
Callahan’s Lady

      
Lady Slings the Booze

Mary’s Place
books:

      
The Callahan Touch

      
Callahan’s Legacy

      
Callahan’s Key

      
Callahan’s Con

Stardance
books:

      
Stardance (with Jeanne Robinson)

      
Starseed (with Jeanne Robinson)

      
Starmind (with Jeanne Robinson)

Deathkiller
books:

      
Time Pressure, Mindkiller (published together as Deathkiller)

      
Lifehouse

Very
books:

      
Very Bad Deaths

      
Very Hard Choices

Other books:

      
Variable Star (Robert A. Heinlein and Spider Robinson)

      
God Is An Iron and Other Stories (collection)

      
The Free Lunch

      
By Any Other Name (collection)

      
User Friendly (collection)

      
Night of Power

      
Melancholy Elephants (collection)

      
The Best of All Possible Worlds (anthology)

      
Antinomy (collection)

      
Telempath

This one's for Mary, John,
 

Jeanne, Megan, and Patrick,

and for Jim

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book couldn't have been begun
without the assistance of my ingenious brother-in-law, John Moore—who brought to my attention, and documented for me at great length, an existing force which would be considered irresistibly destructive even by people who have been within meters of an exploding nuclear weapon;

This book couldn't have been completed
without the assistance of Montréal fan Steve Herman—who, when I met him at ConCept '95, provided the key suggestion (actually, the way he phrased it was perilously close to being an order) that made everything else fall into place at long last; additional crucial advice, support, pity, and/or medication during the book's interminable genesis were supplied by the Cultural Services Branch of the British Columbia Ministry of Small Business, Tourism and Culture, and by Don DeBrandt, Dr. Oliver Robinow, Guy Immega, Bob Atkinson, and just about all the caffeine-inflamed members of the British Columbia Science Fiction Association's Alternative-FRED Society;

This book couldn't have been contemplated
without the support and assistance of my wife, Jeanne, and daughter, Terri (it constitutes Jeanne's 20th wedding anniversary present—here you go, spice! But yours was better…);

This book wouldn't have been as good
without the help of my friends Walter and Jill of White Dwarf Books/Dead Write Mysteries: the one-stop shop for Vancouver's serious word junkies; or without Patrick Regan, habitué of Usenet's alt.callahan's, who unwittingly posted the Pat and Mike jokes just when I needed them; and finally

This book would not have reached your hands
without the sagacity, skill, and professionalism of my agent, Eleanor Wood; my editor, Jim Frenkel; and the puissant sales samurai of my esteemed publisher, Shogun Tom Doherty-sama.

—
Vancouver, B.C.

28 November 1995

CALLAHAN'S LEGACY

Spider Robinson

www.spiderrobinson.com

1

TOO HOT TO HOOT

The immortal storyteller Alfred Bester once said that the way to tell a story is to begin with an disaster and then build to a climax.
 
I’d like to—believe me, I’d like to—but this particular story happened just the other way round.
                                       

It was a good climax, at least.

Well, okay, maybe that’s a silly statement.
 
Perhaps you feel that there is no such thing as a
bad
climax; that some are better than others, is all.
 
I could argue the point, but I won’t.
 
Let’s just agree with Woody Allen that “The worst one I ever had was right on the money,” stipulate that they’re all at least okay, and try to quantify the matter a bit.
 

On a scale of ten, then, rating “the least enjoyable orgasm I’ve ever had” as a One, and “reaching the culmination of hours of foreplay with the sexiest partner imaginable after years of celibacy” as a Ten, the climax I’m speaking of now was probably about a Nine-Five.

This despite the fact that every one of the ingredients I’ve named for a Ten were present.
 
The foreplay had been so extensive and inventive (
Groucho, leering:
“…and the afterplay wasn’t so bad either…”) that the sun was coming up by the time I was going in the other direction; my partner was the sexiest woman on the planet, my darling Zoey Berkowitz; and she was my first real lover (as opposed to mere sexer) in more years than I cared to think about.
 
True, we had already been lovers for several months, by then…but the honeymoon was by no means over.
 
(In fact, it still isn’t.
 
The way I see it, our relationship is really just a single continuous ongoing act of lovemaking, a dance so complex and subtle that we often disengage bodies completely for hours at a time.)
 
My father used to say, “Familiarity breeds, content,” and that’s always been my experience.
 

No, what brought the meter down as low as Nine-Five was merely a matter of mechanics.
 
Zoey has never been a small woman, not since the sixth grade, anyway, and she was nine and a half months months pregnant at the time all this happened, in the late Fall of 1988.

Indeed, if I could travel in time like Mike Callahan, and went far enough back into hominid history, I think I could prove my theory that pregnancy is responsible for the evolution of Man As Engineer.
 
(This might help explain why there are so few female engineers.)
 
A man who has successfully managed the trick with a mate in the latter stages of pregnancy possesses most of the insights necessary to build a house—and a strong motivation in that direction, as well.
 
If inventing math were as much fun, we’d probably own the Galaxy by now.

But I digress…

As I was saying, Zoey and I had solved the Riddle of the Sphinx together one more time, just as enough dawnglow was sneaking past the edges of the curtains to let us see what we already knew, and neither of us was paying attention to any damn imaginary scoring judges—we were both well content, if a little fatigued.
 
By the time we had our breath back, the day was well and truly begun: birds had begun warbling somewhere outside, and traffic was building up to the usual weekday-morning homicidal frenzy out on Route 25A (
why
are they all in such a hurry to get to a place they hate and do things they don’t care about?), a combination of sounds that always puts me right to sleep.
 
That’s probably just where I’d have gone if Zoey hadn’t poked me in a tender spot and murmured drowsily, “…’cha
snickering
about?”

I hadn’t realized I was.
 
In fact, I wasn’t.
 
“I’m not,” I said.
 
“I’m chuckling.”

She shook her head.
 
“Unh-unh.
 
I like Snickers better’n Chuckles.”

I considered a couple of puns having to do with the physical characteristics and components of the candy named, but left them unspoken.
 
Sexual puns are funnier
before
you come.
 
“Chortling, then,” I said.
 
“Definitely not a snicker.”

Zoey grimaced, her eyes still glued shut.
 
“But
why
?
 
Are you.”
 

“Oh, it’s just this silly mental picture I get after we make love,” I admitted.
 
“I keep seeing little Nameless floating in there, startled awake by this rhythmic earthquake…then staring in fascination as all these millions of confused, exhausted, disappointed little wigglers show up, looking everywhere for an egg.
 
I’ll bet they tickle.
 
The little tyke must get a chuckle out of it.”

“Or a chortle,” she agreed, chortling sleepily.
 
“I will too—f’now on.
 
Thanks.
 
Neat image.”
 

She yawned hugely then, so of course I did too, and we did the little bits of physical backing and filling necessary to move from Cuddling to Snuggling, and we’d probably both have been comfortably asleep together in only another minute or two.
 
But we had forgotten about the Invisible Machines of Murphy.

The universe is full of them, and many of them seem to be simple pressure-switches.
 
For instance, there’s one underneath most toilet seats: your weight coming down on the seat somehow causes the phone to ring.
 
(Unless you’ve brought the phone in with you: in that case the switch cues a Jehovah’s Witness to knock on your door.)
 
There’s another one built into most TV remote controls, wired into the channel-select button: if you try to browse, it somehow alerts every station on the the air to go to commercial.
 
The most maddening thing about these switches is that, being of Murphy, they’re unreliable: you can’t be sure whether or just when they will function, except that it will usually turn out in retrospect to have been at the most annoying possible moment.
 
So the tiny pair of switches under my eyelids, sensing that I was just about to drop off to sleep, picked now to send out the signal that causes my alarm clock to ring.
 
Excuse me—I mean, to:

BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!!!!!

For the past two weeks that damned thing had been going off at just this ungodly hour—set by mine own hand and with Zoey’s foreknowledge and consent—and every single time it came as a rude and ghastly surprise.
 
Neither of us could get used to it.
 
I had been a professional musician for a quarter of a century until I gave it up to tend bar; Zoey still was one—or had been right up until carrying both a baby and a bass guitar got to be too much for her; it had been decades since either of us had willingly gotten up at dawn.
 
Dawn was what you occasionally stayed up as late as.
 
Sunlight gave you the skin cancer, everybody knew that.
 
Civilians
got up at dawn, for heaven’s sake.

Well, so do nine-and-a-half-month-pregnant women.
 
And their partners.
 
No matter what their normal sleep-cycle is.

***

Being more than nine months pregnant may mean nothing at all.
 
Not even when you get up to nine and a half months, and the kid hasn’t even dropped yet.
 
Maybe you just guessed wrong on the conception date.
 
We don’t want you to worry, Ms. Berkowitz.
 
But maybe, just maybe something is wrong in there.
 
Maybe little Nameless doesn’t
want
to come out and play, ready or not.
 
If so, it is a bad decision, however one might sympathize—because once Nameless
is
ready, he or she will begin to do what all fully formed babies do best: excrete.
 
And, polluting the womb, will die.
 
And possibly take you along for company.
 
The chances of this are indeterminate…but it might be wisest if you just checked into the hospital now, Ms. Berkowitz, and allowed us to induce labor with a pitocin drip…