But me and some of the boys at Callahan's Place suspect it's more like the beginning.
The Wonderful Conspiracy
I used to think that almost anything could happen at Callahan's Place. It wasn't long before I realized the truth: that anything can happen at Callahan's Place... and not long after that it was made clear to me that anything can happen at Callahan's.
But I confess I was still surprised the night I learned that A*N*Y*T*H*I*N*G can happen at Callahan's Place—and that, sooner or later, it probably will.
It was New Year's Eve, a natural time for introspection I guess. The Place was virtually empty, for the first time in a long while. Now that might strike you as downright implausible, but it's just another one of the inexplicable eccentricities of Callahan's that stop startling you after you've been hanging out there awhile. You see, the kind of folks that come in there regularly, if they've got families, tend to spend New Year's Eve with 'em at home.
It's that kind of crowd.
There are, of course, a handful who don't have families, and aren't willing to settle for the surrogate of a date, so Callahan stays open—but I'm sure he runs a net loss. This particular New Year's Eve, the entire congregation consisted of him, me, Fast Eddie, the Doc, and Long-Drink McGonnigle.
Funny. You take men who already consider themselves deep and true friends: they've been drinking together regularly for many years, have experienced some memorable moments in each other's company, have given each other an awful lot. And yet somehow, on a night when there's just a few of them, there because they have no better place to be, such men can find an even deeper level of sharing; can, perhaps, truly become brothers. At such times they relax the shoulders of their souls, and turn their collective attention to those profound questions that can overawe a man alone. They bring out their utterly true selves. We shared a rich plane of awareness that night, Callahan behind the bar and the rest of us sitting together in front of it, lost in the glow of that special kind of intimacy that drink and good company bring, looking back over the year gone by and talking of nothing in general and everything in particular. What we were doing, we were telling dumb puns.
It started when Callahan taped over the cash box a hand-lettered sign that read, "the buck stops here."
"Oh boy," rumbled the Doc, "I can see there'll be no quarter given tonight."—which is a pun because he chucked his glass into the fireplace as he said it, which meant the cigar box at the end of the bar held at least two quarters that he wouldn't be given tonight.
Long-Drink got up and walked to the chalk line, and I assumed he wanted to give Doc's stinker the honor of a formal throw. I should have known he was setting us up. He toed the mark, announced, "To the poor corpuscle," drained his glass, and waited.
The Doc had reflexively drained the fresh glass Callahan had already supplied unasked—Doc will drink to anything, sight unseen—but he paused with his arm in mid throw. "Wait a minute," he said. "Why the hell should I drink to 'the poor corpuscle'?"
"He labors in vein," Long-Drink said simply.
"Ah yes," I said without missing a beat, "but he vessels vhile he vorks."
"Plasma soul," exclaimed Callahan.
The Doc's eyes got round and his jaw hung down. "By God," he said at last, "I've never been outpunned by you rummies yet, and I'm not about to go down on medical puns. As a doctor I happen to know for certain there's only one other blood pun—I got it straight from the Auricle of Delphi."
There was an extended pause, and I was saying to myself, yep, as usual, no one can top the Doc—when all of a sudden Fast Eddie spoke up. Now you have to understand that while he's a genius at the piano, lightning wit has never been Eddie's strong suit; I don't think I'd ever heard him attempt a pun in the presence of so many masters.
But he opened his mouth and said with the nearest thing to a straight face he owns, "Well I dunno about youse guys, but anemia drink."
And even then he was not done, because while the Doc spluttered and the rest of us roared, Callahan quietly went into the gag that—unknown to us—Eddie had worked out with him before the rest of us arrived. Instead of Eddie's usual shot, the barkeep mixed him a drink, and served it with a wooden chopstick jutting out of the glass.
"What the hell kind of a drink is that?" Doc Webster demanded grumpily. And Eddie delivered it magnificently.
"A hickory dacquiri, Doc."
And the laughter of a mere three of us nearly blew out the windows.
The Doc was a good sport about it. In fact, he laughed so hard at himself that he lost three shirt buttons. But you could tell he was severely shaken: he paid for the next round. I felt as though I'd just seen a bulldozer do a tap dance myself. The world is full of surprises, I told myself.
Callahan put it even more succinctly. "It's a miracle," he whooped, setting up fresh glasses. "A genuine damn miracle."
Long-Drink snorted. "Miracles are a dime a dozen in this joint."
"You know, Drink," I said suddenly, "you said a mouthful."
"Hah?"
"Miracles. That's Mike's stock-in-trade. This is the place where nothing is impossible."
"Horse feathers," Callahan said.
"No, I'm serious, Mike. I can think of half a dozen things that've happened in here in the past year that I wouldn't have believed for a minute if they'd happened anywhere else."
"That's sure true enough," the Doc said thoughtfully. "Little green men... two time-travelers... Adolph Hitler…"
"That's not exactly what I mean, Doc," I interrupted. "Those things're highly improbable, but if they could happen here, they could happen anywhere. What I mean is that, barring Raksha, every one of those jokers that walked in cryin' walked out smilin'—and even he could have, if he'd been willing to pay the freight. By me, that's a miracle."
"I don't getcha," said Eddie, wrinkling up his face. Even more, I mean.
"Take that business of Jim and Paul MacDonald. Near as I can see, they represent the basic miracle of Callahan's Place, the greatest lesson this joint has taught us."
"What's dat?"
"That there's nothing in the human heart or mind, no place no matter how twisted or secret, that can't be endured—if you have someone to share it with. That's what this place is all about: helping people to open up whatever cabinets in their heads hold their most dangerous secrets, and let 'em out. If you've got a hurt and I've got a hurt and we share 'em, some-crazy-how or other we each end up with less than half a hurt apiece." I took a sip of Bushmill's. "That's what Callahan's Place has to offer—and as far as I know, there's no place like it in all the world."
"I know one place kinda like it," Long-Drink said suddenly.
"What? Where?"
"Oh, I don't know that you'd spot the resemblance right off—I sure didn't. But did any o' you guys ever hear of The Farm?"
"I was raised on one," the Doc said.
"We know—in the barn," Long-Drink said drily. "I ain't talking' about a farm. I mean The Farm—place down in Tennessee. Better'n eight hundred people livin' on a couple o' thousand acres. One of 'em's my daughter Anne, an' I went down to visit her last month."
"One of them communes?" the Doc asked skeptically.
"Not like I ever heard of," Long-Drink told him. "They ain't got no house brand o' religion, for one thing—Anne still goes to Mass on Sundays. For another thing, them folks work. They feed themselves, an' they build their own houses, an' they take care of business. The heaviest drug I saw down there was pot, and they wasn't using that for recreation—said it was a sacrament."
"Tennessee," I said, and whistled. "They must get a hard time from the locals."
"Not on your tintype. The locals love 'em. I spoke with the Lewis County sheriff, and he said if everybody was as decent and truthful and hard-working as The Farm folk, he'd be out of a job. I tell you, I went down there loaded for bear, ready to argue Annie into givin' up her foolishness and comin' on home. Instead I almost forgot to leave."
"So what's all that got to d
o with this joint?" Callahan asked.
"Well, it's like Jake was sayin' about sharing, Mike. Them folks share everything they got, an' the only rule I noticed was that a body that was hurtin' some way was everybody's number one priority. They..." He paused, looked thoughtful. "They care about each other. Eight hundred people, and they care about each other— and the—whole damn world too. That kind of thing's been out of style since Flower Power wilted."
"Aw nuts," the Doc exclaimed. "Another one of them fool nut cults is what it sounds like to me. They never last."
"I dunno," Long Drink disagreed. "They been goin' for about five years now, and they just started setting up colonies, like. 'Satellite Farms' they call 'em, better'n half a dozen, all over the country." He paused, looking thoughtful. "What got me, though, was how little attention they paid to their physical growth. That just seemed to happen by itself, while they put their real attention on the Main Game: gettin' straight with each other, so's they could live together. Seems to me like the whole world oughta be doin' that. Seems like if you be a better person, you have you a better life. Seemed to me like The Farm was Callahan's Place for hippies."
"You're crazy," the Doc burst out. "Sure, there's a thousand ham-headed gurus creepin' out from under every burning bush these days. The old-time religion went into the drink, so they're scratching for a new one like hungry hens, goin' in for mysticism and the occult and astrology and the late God only knows what-all. But I'm damned if I see the resemblance between a Jesus-freak revival meeting and this here bar."
"Doc, Doc," I said softly, "Slow down a bit. Yes, they're mass-producing religions like popcorn these days, and some of them are as plain silly as the sixteen-year-old perfect goombah with his divine Maserati and his sacred ulcer. But that don't make 'em all crazy. The point is that all them conmen must be filling some kind of powerful need, or they'd be working some more profitable grift. And I think I agree with Long-Drink: the need they're filling is the same one that brings folks to Callahan's Place."
"Hmmph," the Doc snorted. "And what need is that, pray tell?"
"It's pretty easy to see. For the last century or two we turned our attention to the physical world, to mastering the material plane at the expense of anything else. A lot of that, I'm compelled to believe, had to do with Raksha and his kind, but the tendency was there to exploit. And so we've got a world in which physical miracles are commonplace—and nobody's happy. We got what it takes to feed the whole three billion of us—and half of us are starving. You can show a dozen guys murderin' each other on TV but you can't ever show two people making love. A naked blade is reckoned to be less obscene than a naked woman. Ain't it about time we started trying to get a handle on love, from any and all directions?
"I don't know how come this Farm doesn't collapse like all the other communes. I don't know how come a government with the best propaganda machine ever built failed to sell a war to a country, for the first time in history. I don't know how come three or four guys managed to pull down a corrupt thug of a president. I don't even understand how come all the things this here bar stands for haven't been drowned under a sea of the drunks and brawlers and hookers and hoodlums every other bar gets, why the only people that seem to come here are the ones that need to, that ought to, that have to. That's the real miracle of this joint, you know, not our telepaths and little green men!
"I can't explain any of this stuff, Doc, but couldn't it be that there's some kind of new force loose on the world, like a collective-unconscious response to Raksha and the Krundai, a new kind of energy that's trying to put us all back on the right track before it's too late? Couldn't it be that, now we've climbed out on a material-plane limb and started sawing at it, some mysterious force is trying to teach us how to fly? Whether it's our own stupidity or Krundai manipulation, we've stumbled across things that make a cobalt bomb look harmless: the human race is an idiot child in an arsenal. Couldn't it possibly be that under all these pressures, we're beginning to grow up?"
"Dat's what I loined from Rachel," Fast Eddie spoke up suddenly, startling me—I was so wrapped up in my own eloquence, I'd even forgotten my customary drawl and folksy speech-patterns.
"What do you mean, Eddie?" Callahan asked.
"Everybody's got roots in de past," Eddie explained. "But dey's got roots in de future too."
There was an awed silence. "I'll be damned," Callahan said after awhile. "That's twice in one night you've surprised me, Eddie. I never thought there was anything but music in that head o' yours. Guess even I can learn something in this joint." He shook his head and poured himself another shot.
Long-Drink tried to lighten the mood some. "I'll teach you something, Mike. What do you get when you put milk of magnesia in a glass of vodka?"
The Doc made a face. "Everybody knows that one: a Phillips screwdriver. The hell with that stuff: I want to hear more about this 'collective-unconscious' jazz."
Long-Drink grinned. "Sounds like this place to a T."
"Can it, I said. That 'mysterious force' stuff you were talkin' about, Jake—did you mean that literally?"
I thought about it. "You mean like a gang of sixth-column missionaries, Doc? A bunch of guys working undercover like Raksha an' his friends, only in reverse? No, I don't really think that's the way of it... wup's!"
Reaching for my glass without looking, I knocked it skittering across the bar, and leaped to grab it before it could fall into Callahan's lap. I froze for a moment, leaning half-over the bar—but I've always rather prided myself in being quick on the uptake.
"... on the other hand," I continued calmly, "maybe that's exactly right. Who knows?"
And Callahan—who was still sitting as I had seen him, his legs folded under him in the full lotus, suspended a good three feet off the floor—winked, poured my glass brimful of Bushmill's, and grinned.
"Not me," he lied, and puffed on his cigar.
"Hey youse guys," cried Eddie, eyes on the clock above us, "Happy New Year!"
About the Author
photo by Greg McKinnon
Spider Robinson was born in the Bronx, NY, in 1948, the year Robert A. Heinlein married Virginia Gerstenfeld—and in 2006 he became the only author ever to collaborate with Mr. Heinlein on a novel, VARIABLE STAR. Since 1973 he has published over thirty-five books, and won three Hugos, a Nebula, the John W. Campbell Award, and numerous other international honours.
He moved to Canada in 1974, and became a Canadian citizen in 2004. His Callahan’s Place stories inspired the creation of the long running Usenet newsgroup alt.callahans and other cybernetworks. From 1995-2004 he published an op-ed column (“The Crazy Years,” later called “Future Tense”) in Canada’s national newspaper, The Globe and Mail. In 2006 he became the first Writer In Residence at Vancouver’s H.R. MacMillan Space Centre, and in 2010 he was named sixth Writer In Residence at the Vancouver Public Library. He has written songs with David Crosby and Todd Butler, and recorded original music with Amos Garrett and Michael Creber. His award-winning podcast Spider On The Web has appeared regularly since 2007, and he has been Toastmaster at two World Science Fiction Conventions.
He was married for 35 glorious years to Jeanne Robinson, a dancer, writer and Buddhist priest with whom he co-authored the Hugo- and Nebula-winning THE STARDANCE TRILOGY. In 2004, they were both separately invited by First Lady Laura Bush to appear at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C. Since Jeanne’s death in May 2010, Spider has lived alone on an island in Howe Sound, British Columbia. He suspects his granddaughter Marisa Alegria da Silva might just be the long-awaited Maitreya Buddha, who will bring enlightenment to all sentient beings.
For further information visit www.spiderrobinson.com
Table of Contents
Title Page
Books by Spider Robinson
Introduction by Ben Bova
Foreword
The Guy With The Eyes
The Time-Traveler
The Centipede's Dilemma
Two Heads Are Better Than
One
The Law Of Conservation Of Pain
Just Dessert
"A Voice is Heard In Ramah…"
Unnatural Causes
The Wonderful Conspiracy
About the Author
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