Callahan's Key

by Spider Robinson

She stopped giggling. “Would it be so terrible if I ruled the world, Daddy?” she asked soberly.

  My turn to giggle. “You know, it’s hard to see how it could help but be an improvement.”

  “That’s what I thought,” she agreed, still serious. “Someday, maybe. Now tell me why you’re scared for me.”

  I hesitated. A lifetime of cultural conditioning told me emphatically that a parent should never share fears for a child with the child. I mean, how’s the kid supposed to react to learning that even the omniscient omnipotent grown-ups are scared?

  But Erin knew I was neither of those things. And she was not a naive babe.

  Dammit, that was the problem. A parent’s job is supposed to be to preserve his kid, for as long as possible, in blissful ignorance of the human predicament. But for me and Erin, that had never been a possibility.

  “Honey,” I said, “it’s real hard for any kid to grow up to adulthood with any kind of emotional stability. But for most of them, there are at least some guidelines, some rules of thumb, some handed-down wisdom. But you are unique. I have no idea how to raise you, to give you what you’re going to need…and there isn’t any authority on earth I can consult. You’re going to have emotional problems nobody else has ever had.”

  “Like what?”

  “How the hell do I know?” I thought about it—or rather, reviewed old thoughts I had not shared with myself until now. “Here’s one of my guesses, though. The average kid, he’s at least five or six years old before he notices that all the grown-ups are treating him like an idiot. You’re going to have your intelligence insulted for years longer than most kids have to deal with. It’ll be almost two decades before society grants you any civil rights or professional opportunities. That’s bound to have an effect.”

  “Yeah. But I’m expecting it. I think I can handle it.”

  “Another one: most kids never do quite get it through their heads just how little and weak and clumsy and fragile they are—until they aren’t anymore. You’ve always known. And you’re still going to have to wait months and months to get strong enough and coordinated enough to do things you’ve been wanting to do for more than a year. That’s got to be frustrating…and scary.”

  “You got that right.”

  Suddenly I was amazed at myself. “Jesus—we should have had this conversation months ago. Why didn’t we?”

  My daughter cleared her throat. A mile or so went by, and still she made no answer.

  “Oh,” I said, and then, “Oh!” I felt my shoulders slump. “I’ve been full of shit for a long time, haven’t I?”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  “I’m sorry, Pumpkin.”

  I felt her little hand on my right arm. “Don’t worry about it, Daddy. You were entitled. You had a lot to work out. And I was part of that.” I started to argue. “I was,” she insisted.

  “Well, I’m sorry anyway,” I said, taking my left hand off the wheel and putting it on hers. “I could have been a better dad.”

  “And you will be,” she said. “But I could have been a better kid, too—and I never will be.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, scandalized. “How?”

  She pulled her hand loose from mine. “Oh Daddy, come on! Other parents get to teach their baby everything. They get to smile when the kid does something endearingly dopey, or says something charmingly wrong. They get to feel like every little thing in their child’s head is something they put there. They get to bill and coo over this cute little helpless doll, and tell it soothing lies that make them feel better, and play infantile games with it, for years and years. You and Mommy got screwed. You don’t get to have any of that. Instead of a baby, you got an uncoordinated midget that shits her pants sometimes. I’ve been beating both of you at chess and Scrabble since I was a couple of weeks old. It’s gotta suck.”

  I thought about it. “Maybe it should. You’re right: it seems like it ought to. But I’ve honestly never given it a thought.”

  “Is it because I’m not your biological daughter, do you think?”

  “Definitely not,” I said.

  Her silence expressed her skepticism.

  “No, really. Maybe it’s because I’ve always known you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I wasn’t sure myself, and struggled to put it into words. “I did play infantile games with you—when you were in your mother’s belly—even before she started to show, I mean. When she and I got together, you were more of a zygote than a fetus. About the time you were growing your first brain cells and starting to knit them together, I was out there, a few inches away, blowing Bronx cheers on Zoey’s stomach at you and telling you dopey jokes. Probably the first things that ever tickled you were some of my sperm”

  She giggled, and put her hand back on my arm.

  “And then just before you were born, while Mom was in the middle of birthing you, we got telepathically connected. All of us, of course, but especially you and me. Remember?”

  “Sort of,” she said.

  “You weren’t even ‘Erin’ yet. You were ‘Nameless.’ That’s what we’d been calling you for months.”

  Her grip on my forearm tightened. “I do remember,” she said.

  “There was a lot of other stuff going on. We were all trying to save the world. Mom was in labor. You were busy getting born. But while all that was happening, on another level you and I were in rapport for…oh, a long time. Five minutes…a million years…one of those.”

  “Yes,” she said dreamily.

  “It was nice.”

  “You had space monsters coming in the roof, and you were so happy to be with me you didn’t care.”

  “That’s right.”

  “It was nice,” she said again.

  “And then, five minutes or a million years later, Tommy Janssen had a brainstorm and stuck a SCSI cable in his mouth, and Solace joined us all in the telepathic hookup. And a little while after that…well, everything changed, and you weren’t a normal baby anymore.”

  Solace, the self-generated consciousness of the Internet, had sacrificed herself that night, died fighting to save the human race—most of whom did not suspect her existence, and would have hated and feared her if they had. And just about her last dying action had been to upload as much as she could of her own immense store of knowledge and intelligence into the tiny unformed skull of my daughter, and leave her a tutor-avatar: “Grampa Murray,” an AI kernel smart enough to accelerate and oversee Erin’s intellectual development, and small enough to run on a single enhanced Mac II.

  “But you see,” I continued, “all that normal-childhood stuff you were talking about that I won’t get to have with you—I had all that with you. For five minutes, or a million years. At a level deeper than any other parent will probably ever dream of. Like I said, I’ve always known you. I even know what it was like to have all that data come flooding into your head at once, because I was there in your skull with you at the time, and I could see that it wasn’t scaring you or hurting you.”

  “Yeah, you were,” she said.

  “I got to watch you grow up, like any dad. It just happened quicker, that’s all. And also, to a lesser extent, I got to watch you grow up over the next few months—even if we weren’t telepathic anymore by then. It took you at least a couple of weeks for your brain to process and structure all the information it got in that first big flash—and two or three months for you to start getting your motor control down. You were as endearingly clumsy and dopey as any daddy could have wished for: you just didn’t keep it up long enough for it to get to be a pain in the ass.” I broke off for a moment, as some road situation or other briefly claimed my attention. “And I’m going to get to keep on watching you grow up—and it’s gonna be really cool.”

  “You think?”

  I nodded firmly. “Definitely. Erin, the one lie every parent needs to believe, desperately, is that his or her particular child is somehow, in some way, unique and special. Most of them are whistling in the dark.�
��

  “Yeah, so?”

  I turned and grinned at her. “So I’m the first father in the history of the world who knows for a fact that it’s true. You’re going to surprise me every single day of your life, and I plan to enjoy every minute of it. Face it, kid: unlike most babies, you ain’t boring. I’m the luckiest dad that ever lived.”

  “Oh.” She dimpled, and we smiled at each other until I had to put my eyes back on the highway.

  I checked my gauges, checked my mirrors. A thought struck me, and I chuckled. “For instance,” I said, “back when you were in Mom’s womb, and I used to try and imagine what it was going to be like, being a dad…”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, I didn’t picture us having conversations like this until you were at least ten or eleven. You know, talking about real stuff. Father-daughter stuff.” I chuckled again. “I figured then I’d be telling you stories about what you were like when you were a year old. Only you’re probably going to remember.”

  There was a short silence. Then she said, “Daddy? Do you suppose when you’re with that me—the eleven-year-old me—you’ll really remember this me?”

  “Oh, for sure. And I’ll miss you.”

  “You think so?”

  “Definitely. But it’s okay…I’ll have you right here: in my head, always. And the two-year-old you, and the three—all of them.”

  “Sure, but still, wouldn’t it be neat if we could travel in time like Uncle Mike? Then I could visit you when I’m eleven and you’re in your fifties—and you could pick me up and cuddle me again. And wouldn’t you like to have a father-daughter conversation with the eleven-year-old me, now?”

  “I don’t know,” I said dubiously. “That does sound like fun—but, honey, time travel isn’t for human beings, like you and me. I wouldn’t mess with it, even if I could. Just for a start, it’s dangerous as hell. If you time-hopped to when you’re eleven, there’d be two of you, two Erins, in the same ficton. Temporal paradox. That’s supposed to be real bad medicine.”

  “What would happen?” she asked.

  Why is the sky blue, Daddy? No matter how educated you are, your kid can find a question to make you feel like an ignoramus. “I don’t really know?” I admitted. “Mike was always a little vague about that. But what I think might happen is exactly what Uncle Nikky is afraid of: the end of the universe.”

  “Oh.”

  “Or maybe worse. It’s okay for Mike and Lady Sally and Mary to mess with that stuff: they’re a thousand years more advanced than we are. And Finn seems to handle it okay—but he’s an alien being, from a race that always sounded a lot saner and smarter than mine, and besides he’s Mary’s husband. But contemporary human beings? No, hon. You notice even Uncle Nikky doesn’t fool with it—and he’s been the smartest and boldest man alive for over a century now.”

  “I guess,” she said, and suddenly yawned hugely. “Listening to Mommy sleep got me tired, Daddy. I’m going to go climb in with her.”

  “Okay, honey—need help?”

  “I got it,” she assured me, and unstrapped herself and went aft. Bedclothes rustled, and Zoey murmured momentarily in her sleep. Shortly Erin’s own breathing sounds became as rhythmic as her mother’s, and then fell into sync with them.

  I drove on. For a while, I listened in to the ongoing chatter on the CB—a word game was in progress—but I couldn’t seem to focus on it and switched off without contributing anything. I thought about putting on my Walkman and listening to music, but couldn’t think of a cassette I felt like hearing. I was wide awake, not hungry or thirsty, not especially stiff or sore, the caravan was moving fine and all was well.

  After a while I noticed I was gripping the wheel so hard my fingers hurt, and admitted to myself that I was terrified out of my mind for my daughter. Easily twenty times as scared as I’d been willing to cop to while talking with her just now. And absolutely helpless to do anything about it except hang on and keep playing it by ear, hoping for the best. I started to tremble and sweat, saw the road ahead of me start to blur.

  And the moment I did I heard Mike Callahan’s voice. In my head, not in my ears; I knew the difference by now. It conveyed his personality, his presence, better than sound alone could have done, or even smell.

  “She’ll be fine, Jake,” he told me.

  And then he was gone again.

  After a while I said, “Thank you, Mike,” aloud to an empty cabin. And drove on, leading my family and flock through the darkness to an unknown destination.

  A few miles later I put the CB volume back up again. Long-Drink was just saying, “…and an unpopular politician becomes devoted and debriefed,” and Maureen Hooker answered, “Whereupon his secretary gets delayed.”

  “Not to mention dismayed, detailed, debunked, and bauched,” I said, and the channel briefly overloaded as twenty people all groaned at once. “And a tone-deaf musician will soon be decomposed and disconcerted…”

  And the miles went merrily by.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Cat Who Walks

  Through Windshields

  “I was recently on a tour of Latin America, and the only regret I have was that I didn’t study Latin harder in school so I could converse with those people.”

  —J. Danforth Quayle

  WHAT WITH EVERYBODY

  and his brother peeling off from the caravan from time to time, to visit a relative or see some sacred site or other—and almost invariably screwing up their rendezvous back with us—we did not make terrific time.

  As we went through Savannah, I was powerfully tempted myself: Albany, Georgia, the birthplace of Raymond Charles Robinson, aka Ray Charles, would only have been a three-hundred-mile detour to the west. Zoey was as tempted as I was. But Erin pointed out that Brother Ray wasn’t there anymore, and we drove on. (Just as Erin’s taste buds had not yet matured enough for her to find spicy food enjoyable, her musical taste had not yet evolved to R&B.)

  We really ought to have stopped somewhere in southern Georgia for the night. But once we left that state and crossed into Florida, the only border we would have left to cross was the one between the U.S. and the Conch Republic. Somehow that gave us all an extra charge of adrenalin, even though we knew it would still be a couple of days before we got to Key West. That was another consideration: two of the most anticipated highlights of the whole journey were coming up, the only two side trips everybody wanted to make, and it turned out we were all eager to get to ’em. After a brief CB conference, we agreed to press on. In the words of songwriter Tom Rush, “we crossed the Florida line movin’ Special Airmail,” just as the sun was going down…and then there was a small kerfluffle.

  The idea was for us all to pull off I-95 well north of Jacksonville, take a small road east to the sea, and circle the wagons for the night at either one of two state park campgrounds, Amelia Island or Little Talbot Island, depending on which seemed best capable of accommodating an invasion by two dozen busloads of weirdos. The turnoff we wanted shows up clearly on the map, and I’m sure it’s really there and adequately marked—but I never saw it, and neither did any other driver or navigator in the caravan. It wasn’t the lousy light, either. We were all distracted.

  Just at that interchange, where we should have headed east toward Yulee, a lost tributary of A1A (miles from the rest of it) heads west…toward a town called “Callahan”…

  By the time we all finished discussing that over the CB, we came to the belated realization that we had blown right past our exit. The two choices were, try to U-turn and go back north again, or continue on and trust to luck. Being a pessimist, I favored the first alternative, and said so. But there was broad and strong resistance to the idea of turning around and retracing even a few miles. That same sense of urgency that had pushed us into crossing over into Florida in the first place was still operating, I guess.

  Which doesn’t make much sense. Of the two treats that lay ahead of us, one had no deadline factor, and we were now comfortably early for the seco
nd one. Nonetheless I felt it myself: the impulse to keep moving south.

  Still, I hesitated. Darkness was falling fast, and Jacksonville seemed like a lousy place to look for a motel owner with a free spirit and a young heart. Too crowded, too built up and civilized. It would be a shame to come so close and get us all busted for vehicular vagrancy by the local heat. (Who were not plugged into the highway-cop teletype.) It could cost us the second of our anticipated treats—the one I personally looked forward to most eagerly, and the only point on our itinerary that came with a deadline.

  “Jake?” It was Jim Omar, four buses back.

  “Yeah, Jim?”

  “You know how sometimes a gambler knows, just knows, that he’s hot?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Press on.”

  This didn’t sound like ultrarational Omar to me. “Are you sure?”

  “I’ve got a good feeling,” he said.

  “Me ’oo, Da’y,” Erin’s muffled voice said from behind me.

  I glanced over my shoulder. “Well, of course you do, sweetheart: you’ve got Mommy’s tit in your mouth.”

  She and Zoey exchanged an enigmatic glance. “They’re such babies,” she said to her mother, who nodded and told her, “Believe it or not, dear, there’ll come a day when you’ll thank God for that.” I was facing forward again by then, but I could hear Erin looking dubious. “Keep going, Daddy,” she said to me, and went back to her dinner.

  “Yo, Stringbean,” said another voice on the CB.

  “Yeah, Ernie?” The Lucky Duck had no bus, had brought nothing whatsoever with him from Long Island, was driving an orange VW Beetle with more miles on it than the Verve Records catalog. The Duck has never owned anything much, or seen any reason to: all his life, anytime he needed something, it seemed to come along.

  “How often do I give you advice?” he asked me.

  I thought about it. “Can’t say you ever have.”

  “Drive on,” he said. “I smell good luck.”

  “That’s good enough for me,” I said. “Jacksonville, here we come.”