Callahan's Place 07 - Callahan's Legacy (v5.0) (16 page)

He broke off; Mary was shaking her head sadly.
 
“Nice try.
 
I’m afraid it’s only possible to Translate to
fictons in which you do not already exist
.
 
Not even once…or I’d just hop back then/there and boost the data while the Lizard’s busy fighting me and Mick.”

“How about this?” Buck offered.
 
“Assume the Lizard
is
on his way, ray-guns bristling, following your trail at Finn-Drive speed.
 
Figure out where that puts him right
now
, then Transit to just a little ways past that point, and sneak up on him from—oh!”

“Aw hell,” Fast Eddie said, seeing it too.
 
“De scaly son of a bitch hasn’t got a behind to sneak up on.”
 
He shook his head.
 
“Jesus, t’ree tits and no behind.”
 

“Sounds like my ex-wife,” Chuck Samms said,
 

Long-Drink McGonnigle cleared his throat, a sound like a garbage disposal seizing up.
 
“You people all seem to be missing the
point
, here,” he said, looking pained.
 
“We may have all the time in the world, and we’ve for sure got hours and hours.
 
There’s no red lights on the board.
 
And our patroness and our old buddy have just walked in here for the first time, after what sounds like an extremely bad night, and they’ve been here for twenty minutes now and nobody’s offered either of ’em a goddam
drink
.
 
Are we barbarians?”

That took us aback.
 
Could a little thing like potential interstellar war with cyborg lizards cause us to forget our manners?
 
I raised an inquiring eyebrow at Mary, and she exploded.

“God damn it,
everybody’s
missing the point!”

Shocked silence.

“What’s the matter, Mary?” Tom Hauptman asked gently.

“Don’t you get it, Reverend?” she said, too loud and getting louder.
 
“We
failed
.
 
If the goddam Lizard is on the way then we’ll deal with him—but meanwhile the Filarii are as dead as the Hittites.
 
No more chances.
 
All gone bye-bye.
 
I do not feel like a fucking drink, all right?
 
Billions of sentients.
 
Wise, kind, imaginative, expressive people—
Mick’s
people, and my fucking in-laws—
extinct!
”

My ears were ringing.
 
And burning.
 
I had loved this woman—still did—and she was in agony and there was nothing I could do for her except offer to pour her an Irish coffee.

Zoey.
 
Zoey had a natural gift for comforting me whenever I sorrowed.
 
I had seen her comfort others.
 
I caught her eyes—

“What makes you so sure?” Zoey asked loudly.

***

Mary turned to glare at her, and I wished for death.
 
“Logic,” she snapped.

Zoey put her fists on her hips.
 
“Well, us pregnant broads don’t know from logic—you’re gonna have to explain it to me.”

Mary lost a little of her frown.
 
“Look, isn’t it obvious, Zoey?
 
The Lizard caught us rifling its Master’s database.
 
Clearly it’s still loyal to The Beast, dead or not—and believe me, ‘loyal’ is a feeble word for the kind of compulsion I’m talking about.
 
Mick’s the only Scout ever known to have broken the geas, and he says the effort almost killed him.
 
Most of the people here
saw
it, ask them if—Say—”
 
She broke off and turned to Mick.
 
“Could that be it, do you think, love?
 
Could you have burned out some important bits that night, and
that’s
why the Lizard was so much stronger?”

“Insufficient data,” he said.
 
“But an interesting hypothesis—”

“Finish the logic,” Zoey interrupted.
 
“The Lizard is a zombie, and it’s programmed to protect The Beast’s data.”

“Right,” Mary agreed.

“So why would it destroy some of The Beast’s data?”

Mary blinked.
 
“It knows we tried to steal specific files.
 
Examination will show it which files, and that we didn’t have time to succeed.
 
It will know that we were trying to reconstitute Finn’s own people—that we’re strongly motivated, in other words.
 
Surely it can empathize, at least a little, beneath its conditioning.
 
It’s reasonable to assume that we will go get a big stick and come back to try again, and we might win next time.
 
The integrity of its Master’s data
must
be protected, even if it means destroying some.”

“Even though it knows its Master will never have any use for the data again?”

“Especially then,” Finn said.
 
“The nature of the compulsion is such that in the absence of specific orders, one must do what one knows the Master would want.
 
A being as fundamentally selfish and angry as The Beast would, beyond question, want his servants to ensure that for as long as possible after his death, the universe should be denied the use of anything he had ever owned.”

“Excuse me a second,” Buck said.
 
“Are you absolutely sure this Lizard knows the Big Bopper is dead?”

Finn started to answer…then restarted: “The Beast’s long absence, and my appearance as a free agent, give it strong evidence from which to infer the fact…but you are correct, it may not
know
it.”

Zoey reached out and gave Buck a little pat on the arm.
 

“Even so,” Mary said in rising exasperation, “in the absence of orders, it has to follow classic doctrine: destroy assets rather than let the enemy have them.
 
Maybe Master will be annoyed when he gets back—but he’ll
certainly
be annoyed if you’ve allowed someone to take what’s his.
 
What’s the point of talking about it?
 
The Filarii are toast, I tell you—”

“Mickey?” Zoey interrupted.

“Yes, Zoey?”

“Pretend you’re in the Lizard’s place.
 
You never regained your freedom.
 
You’re still a loyal Cockroacher, and your boss hasn’t been heard from in, what, three years, and you catch somebody rifling his hard disk.
 
No, two somebodies—two tough, confident somebodies—and you kick their ass, send ’em running for their lives.
 
Are you going to take it on your own authority to destroy some of your Master’s data, just in case they’ve maybe got a big stick somewhere they forgot to bring along the first time?”

Finn was looking stricken.
 
“No.”

“Never in hell,” Zoey agreed.

“Sure you would,” Mary blurted.
 
“Because that’s exactly what I intend to do: have Nikky whomp us up a big stick and go back again and avenge the—”

“Why would it take that irrevocable step on a maybe?” Mary asked.
 
“When it could simply rig a deadfall so the data would self-destruct if the Lizard
were
attacked by overwhelming force?”

Mary made several sounds, but none of them made up so much as a word.
 
Consonants, mostly.

Finn sighed.
 
“It is more logical, Mary.”

She subsided.

“Look how overjoyed they are at this wonderful news,” Zoey said.

Dead silence in the room.
 

“Darling,” I said, “Mick and Mary have just come out of a firefight.
 
Wherever you’re going with this, couldn’t we all have a drink first and—”

“Jake, my love,” she said, “shut up.”

“Works for me,” I said hastily.
 
My Zoey’s eyes do not flash that way often, but when they do it’s time to strap yourself to the mast.

She turned back to Mary.
 
“I say that the Filarii are still in those databanks.
 
So does logic.
 
And you know I’m right, both of you.
 
And you’re both looking at me with identical looks of goofy dismay, rather than joy.
 
Are you beginning to get a glimmering of why the Lizard kicked your ass?”

Now Mary’s eyes were flashing too.
 
I felt sweat running down my spine.
 
She stood up straight, stuck out her chin, and growled, “Just what the hell are you trying to say?”

Zoey looked her square in the eye,
 
“You wanted to lose.”

***

Mickey Finn stepped between them.
 
Were those forearms just beginning to register a trace of a glow?
 
“You must not speak to my wife that way,” he told Zoey.

Zoey grinned at him.
 
“What made you think I meant ‘you’
singular
, stringbean?”

He turned to stone.
 
At least, that’s what his shoulder felt like when I tapped on it.
 
I hadn’t even known I was in motion.
 
My legs seemed to be trembling, and my voice sounded odd in my ears.
 
Perhaps my own forearms were glowing.
 
“Mick,” I said, “look at me.”

He turned to face me.
 

“You and I go back a long way…but you must not speak to my fiancée that way.”

He stared.
 

How did all those bees get in here?
 
The buzzing was distracting.
 
“Not in my house.
 
Not anywhere.
 
And especially not while she’s carrying our child.
 
Or else you and I are going to dance.”

Of course it was insane.
 
This man whipped every civilization he ever met, but one.
 
But I meant every word.

“He’s right, Mickey,” Mike Callahan said.
 
“You were out of line.”

“Fuckin’ A,” Fast Eddie said, and there was a rumble of agreement from others.
 

Finn’s face got that unhinged look he got when he was confused.
 
“But she insulted Mary…and myself…”

I started to answer, but Zoey overrode me.
 
“Overstated the truth for shock value, maybe.
 
I’ll say it again, as gently as I can: both of you, deep down inside, suffer from unresolved major conflicts regarding your mission, and your mutual failure to come to terms with these antinomies severely compromised your motivation.
 
That’s why you lost.”

“
Conflicts?
” Mary bellowed.
 
“What fucking conflicts?”

Zoey threw up her hands.
 
“I rest my case.”

Light slowly began to dawn.
 
I remembered again the thought I’d had a little while earlier, when Mickey Finn was recounting his background for what was to me the
n
th time.
 
The sudden realization that in all those retellings, there was one thing Finn had consistently ommitted to mention, and that somehow none of us had ever thought to ask him about.
 
How could we have failed for so long to ask so obvious a question?

Perhaps because Finn had always seemed to us the embodiment of loneliness, of magnificent isolation.

“Mickey,” I said, “tell me something.
 
Back when this whole thing started, when the Cockroaches first captured the Filarii…were you a bachelor?”

One of the few facial expressions humans and Filarii share is the wince.
 
I know because the same expression appeared simultaneously on both Mick and Mary…

***

The room rumbled as the implications of the question struck home.
 

And well it might.
 
This was the place where people cared about each other’s pain—and now it was stunningly apparent that we had fumbled a big one, big time.
 
Confronted with a man who had lost an entire race, we had refrained—for a decade and a half!—from inquiring more closely into the personal dimensions of his loss.
 
In retrospect, our failure was inexplicable, horrifying, shaming.
 
Snoopy-question rule be damned; that had always applied mostly to newcomers.
 
This man was supposed to be our
friend
…

And now we knew from his face what his answer must be.

“No,” he said.
 
“I was not.”

***

Even Callahan looked startled.
 

And as for Mary, she looked so downcast, so suddenly deflated, that when an Irish coffee appeared over my shoulder I took it and brought it to her at once, realizing only on the way back that it had been Zoey who’d made it and given it to me.
 
She had another one waiting for me.
 
Our eyes met and held; then I took a deep drink and turned back to Mick.

“Tell us about your family, Mickey,” I said as gently as I could.

“I was mated,” he said.
 

I nodded.
 
The invisible machines of Murphy.
 
“And Filarii mate…”

“In pairs, like humans,” he said miserably.
 
“For life, like swans.”

I nodded again.
 
“Children?”

“Two,” he agreed.
 
“Filarii couples rarely have more than two.
 
It is a decision that was made long ago, when we learned how to not die.”